It has been a busy weekend at Britain’s newest prison. The Monday morning meeting is taking officers some time to get through the serious incident report. A number of inmates are clearly unhappy and unwell – two have cut their upper arms, one has cut his upper leg, another prisoner says he has taken 40 paracetamol tablets because he was feeling depressed, someone else has made cuts to his wrist and swallowed an excess of tablets, another has swallowed batteries, and someone has been discovered shortly after tying a ligature around his neck.
“He wasn’t sure why he had done this. He was just in a low mood,” the reporting officer explains. In the early hours of Monday another prisoner has cut his wrists and told staff he has taken an excess of paracetamol tablets.
None of the 20 staff members sitting around the boardroom table are particularly disturbed by the list of events. Battery swallowing is something they see every week or so. “Triple A mostly,” an officer says after the meeting. Prisoners do it to express unhappiness, he adds; usually they have to be taken to hospital to be checked out, and it causes prison staff considerable disruption.
Oakwood opened three and a half years ago near Wolverhampton as Britain’s largest prison, a vast 1,600-person facility, stretching across 9 hectares (22 acres), run by G4S, the endlessly scandal-hit global security firm, which takes pride in claiming that this is also the country’s cheapest prison, costing about £12,000 a prisoner a year (much less than the average for a category C prison of about £20,000). If Wandsworth represents a defunct old prison model, Oakwood is meant to showcase the future.
The prison’s head of healthcare estimates that 90% of inmates have some kind of mental health problem, ranging from low-level depression to serious disorders, about a third of them with a registered drug or alcohol addiction. With so many prisoners, many of them unwell, locked up in four blocks, it’s not surprising that the catalogue of serious incidents stretches on.
Some of the inmates have been feeling angry and frustrated, the duty officer notes. One prisoner attempted to smash the television in his cell, another man kicked his food tray at staff and showered them with baked beans, a third broke the observation panel in the door of his cell after being told he couldn’t come out. Later he threatened to kill the first member of staff to come in, and went on to attack a prison officer, who was taken to hospital with severe cuts and bruises to his face. Another prisoner was later knocked to the floor by a punch to the head from a fellow inmate.
A letter testing positive for the new synthetic drug black mamba has been intercepted. A screwdriver wrapped in clingfilm has been found hidden in a cell toilet, and a wig, baseball cap and a red onesie were discovered in another cell. (The prison director inquires what a onesie is; colleagues laugh and tell him he doesn’t need to know). Elsewhere a small mobile phone and charger have been found. A pool ball has gone missing; a prisoner said he flushed it down the toilet to disrupt the pool players. An inmate complaining of heart pains reveals he has been smoking mamba all afternoon.
Sean Oliver, deputy director of this category C prison, remarks mildly that this was a “busier weekend than normal. Assaults on staff are rare.” He isn’t very troubled by the quantity of apparent overdoses. “They will say they have taken 24 pills, but the toxicology report may not confirm that. They do it because it causes a nuisance for us,” he says.
Despite this startling list of events, most staff feel upbeat about how the prison is running. Under the heading HMP Oakwood’s Vision, the prison’s website declares: “We aspire to be regarded as ‘The leading prison in the world’” by 2017. In terms of UK prison policy, much depends on the new prison management fulfilling that aspiration.
When the jail opened in 2012, the government celebrated it as the model of future prisons – large, modern and cheap to run. Oakwood was the trailblazer, and quickly work began on even bigger institutions, such as HMP Berwyn in Wrexham, which will accommodate 2,000 when it opens next year.
But within months, Oakwood became known as the worst-run prison in Britain, its reputation scarred by a series of failures. Inexperienced staff lost control of one wing of the prison for several hours, and enormous damage was caused to that section of the building, cell doors broken after being rammed with parts of the smashed pool table. Prisoners managed to scale the sides of the smooth, airport hangar-like buildings, mounting a protest on the roof, filmed from helicopters by television crews. A prison inspection report noted that it was easier to get drugs in the prison than soap. Inmates began to refer to it as “Jokewood” and complained that staff were employed with no relevant prison experience, straight from shelf-stacking jobs at local supermarkets. The opening of Oakwood became a case study of how not to launch a prison.
Things have improved, but the pressure remains on Oakwood to prove that supersized jails represent the future for the British justice system, at a time when the prison secretary, Michael Gove, is contemplating shutting down the country’s Victorian prisons and building nine new prisons. Prison reform campaigners are sceptical about the benefits of “warehousing” large numbers of prisoners together, and point to evidence showing that smaller prisons perform better in terms of safety and reducing reoffending.
Meanwhile, this year G4S’s reputation as a private provider of custodial services has been badly hit again, by the BBC Panorama programme’s undercover filming of abuse of children at the Medway secure training centre, prompting Labour’s shadow justice minister, Andy Slaughter, to demand that all G4S prisons and detention centres be put into special measures.
Oakwood’s new director, John McLaughlin, was happy in December to throw open the gates of the prison to the Guardian, exposing it for the first time to outside eyes, confident that it is working well, and proud of some of the innovations introduced – prisoner-run mentoring schemes, prisoner-staffed resettlement programmes, family units and a prison council. Over three days of supervised access, most prisoners say they are happy with the accommodation. Every prisoner has his own cell, with a toilet, shower, underfloor heating, and landline telephone (although this could change later this year, if, as planned, the prison is allocated another 400 inmates, at which point some will have to start sharing cells). But there are many complaints about poor healthcare, and fears about bullying and the violent consequences of prisoners getting into drug-related debt with other inmates.
Senior G4S staff are buoyant about the prison. Jerry Petherick, G4S’s managing director for custodial and detention services with responsibility for the five adult prisons run by G4S, lays a lot of emphasis on how cheap it is. “I’m confident on a like-for-like basis it is remarkably cheap and cheaper than any other prison,” he says. We’re more accustomed to hearing cut-price delivery celebrated in supermarket advertising than in the context of provision of public services, but Petherick takes unexpected delight in offering rock-bottom prices. “I have no doubt that we are providing the most cost-effective place in the country.”
The ability to provide a cheap service derives in part from operating in new buildings, updated Victorian hub and spur designs, with clear lines of sight, so fewer staff members are needed to ensure safety. Oakwood operates at a ratio of one prison officer to 30 inmates. Each wing has an electronic kiosk, allowing prisoners to book their own visits, make medical appointments, buy food and an approved list of products from Argos, freeing staff (who would otherwise be doing this for them) to do other things.
Although their starting salary of £21,000 is a little higher than colleagues in the public sector, wages don’t progress as fast, so that overall prison officers are paid less by G4S than state employees; they accrue lower pensions, and get a flat rate for their work – with no overtime, no Sunday pay, no enhanced Christmas Day wages. “Staffing levels overall are probably leaner,” Petherick says. There is a “tautness about the whole managerial delivery”.
Among inmates there is weary cynicism about the principles that drive G4S prison management. Throughout the vast estate, as prisoners make their way from their cells to education, they whisper complaints. G4S staff are relaxed about this, noting simply: “Prisoners moan. You would if you were locked up.” Because these conversations are brief, it’s hard to gauge the seriousness of grievances.
“Three weeks ago I was threatened with a pair of scissors in the workplace; the person who threatened me is still living three doors down. They are more interested in running the place as a business. I’m at a loss; I tried to take my own life with a prison-issue razor blade,” one prisoner says, pulling up his sleeve to show a small scar on his wrist. “They seem to be money oriented, not focused on people’s welfare. They say they are short-staffed.”
“They talk to you like something on the bottom of your shoe,” another man says. (It is a condition of the visit that none of the prisoners are to be named.)
“The main thing I have noticed is the lack of experience of staff. They have no desire to have any relationship with the prisoners, it’s just ‘bang them up’; in the evenings they lock you up, slam the door and don’t say anything,” another complains.
There is an inherent awkwardness about visiting prisons, accompanied by a G4S press officer and a prison guard; even if they agree to step away from conversations with prisoners, it is a peculiar dynamic. Occasionally inmates say something disobliging about the regime, before adding (with a long, pointed stare towards the prison guard): “But the staff have been brilliant. I just wanted to stress that. I can’t stress that enough.” Later, one inmate sends a letter saying he had felt uncomfortable about speaking during the visit, but wanted to say that there was “a lot of bullying; a lot of self-harm. Officers don’t care.”
A prisoner serving a life sentence for armed robbery, far from his home in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, is succinct about the government’s motive for moving inmates from old Victorian prisons to new supersized jails such as Oakwood. “You pull [Wormwood] Scrubs down, you can make it into flats worth millions. Let’s cut the bollocks. That’s why they are doing it. It is easier and cheaper to warehouse everyone in Wales.”
But most prisoners are relieved to be at Oakwood, simply because they have their own cells. “My heart sank when I was told I was coming here,” says a man in his 50s, on an indefinite sentence, under an imprisonment for public protection (IPP) scheme, who explains that he had been alarmed by the prison’s poor reputation. However, since arriving he has enjoyed the peace that comes with having his own room. “You don’t have to share with a complete and utter stranger. I’ve shared with racists and homophobes who express their opinions all the time,” he says. “Here you can get away.”
On a wing dedicated to healthy, active living, motivational slogans have been painted in copperplate lettering above the cell doors reminding occupants: “Take care of your body; it’s the only place you have to live” or “Manners maketh the man”.
The level of happiness depends a lot on which prison they have moved from. “This is better than the Isle of Sheppey, which is absolutely packed. It was like being squeezed into a broom cupboard,” one prisoner says. “People who complain – I want to know what hotel they came from before. At Bullingdon we were locked up for 22 hours – what does that prepare you for except for being on benefits, 22 hours a day, watching television?”
In a recent speech, Gove said the most important transformation needed was not in the prison buildings but “in the soul of its inmates”. Prisoners here attend “changing thinking” courses, where they attempt Edward de Bono-inspired puzzles, and gaze at reassuring posters pointing out: “There is nothing about a caterpillar that tells you it is going to be a butterfly.”
There is muted enthusiasm for the work and education available. The prison has a call centre contract, and around a dozen, risk-assessed prisoners (no sex offenders), selected for their ability to be chatty and polite, are doing cold calls for a company that doesn’t want to be named. They don’t introduce themselves as prisoners.
In the same block, inmates are taught painting and decorating skills and industrial cleaning. Others break up bits of old computers and DVD players for recycling, fitting together U-bends, applying stickers on radiator caps, and building bird tables, bug hotels and hedgehog boxes for sale. (No one is very sure why hedgehogs need boxes. “We don’t know. They just ask us to make them. It takes us two and a half weeks to get 120 done.”) There is a bright smell of sawdust in the woodwork room, a sharp contrast to the warm, sweaty, cigaretty smell that hangs in the air elsewhere; a smell that will in any case change when the cigarette ban comes in later this year (an event the prison director is dreading – he has cancelled leave for that period).
Outside in a yard surrounded by several layers of high fencing (the overlaid netting creates a mesmerising optical art display of changing patterns), a smaller group of people are on a training course organised by Network Rail, much sought-after by prisoners because of a company commitment to try to employ those who they have trained once they are released.
Trusted prisoners, trained as mentors, are given red armbands, like access-all-areas passes at a music festival, allowing them to walk between the different cell blocks. An elected group of prison councillors meets once a fortnight with the director, to discuss problems. This week they are wrestling with the difficult issue of how prisoners can order clothes for themselves now that clothing companies are discontinuing their printed catalogues and moving online. For the moment, only prisoners who have smuggled in mobile phones are able to access the internet.
In parts of the prison there is a friendly atmosphere. Prisoners are greeted by their first names (rather than surnames, which is normal practice in state-run prisons). Petherick even ventures that being a prison director is a “very parental role … Mum and Dad need to be seen out there”. I find this a bit much, and ask McLaughlin if that means he has 1,600 children. “I have,” he says, straight faced. “I know most of them and they know me. I’m a very visible director.”
But some staff members acknowledge that the size of the prison creates challenges, echoing the concerns of campaigners such as Frances Crook of the Howard League, who said: “Prisoners held in smaller prisons tend to be more engaged in the prison regime, enjoy better staff–prisoner relationships, and are safer than those held in large prisons.”
Kate Clay, Oakwood’s head of healthcare (which is contracted out to Worcestershire health and care NHS trust) says: “This is the biggest prison I have ever worked in; the sheer size of the establishment, getting from one end to another in an emergency, it takes quite a long time.”
The outgoing chaplain, David Weller, is the only unreservedly critical voice. “I don’t think big is beautiful,” he says. “My biggest concern is the size of the prison facilities. I go through 17 gates between parking my car and getting to my desk; it takes 10 minutes.”
He worries about the rapid turnover of the staff. “Conditions are not good. Overtime is not paid at an enhanced rate. If you work over your hours, you don’t get any time back. Young, inexperienced staff are often left to man the wings. If you are running a prison for profit, your biggest expense is staff. If a staff member is not happy, and doesn’t feel supported, it is easy to leave. The consistent picture is of staff leaving.”
There has been substantial turnover; of the 427 staff employed when the prison opened, only 256 are still here.
“The rate ebbs and flows. Four or five months ago we were seeing higher levels of attrition. In November we had seven leavers, out of a head count of 435 full-time staff,” McLaughlin says.
But he is open about areas where the prison needs to improve, and admits frustration that government funding cuts mean he can’t keep all prisoners in full-time work or education.
“The funding provision for education is for just over 350 places, not 730 as expected. We have had to go to part-time education. Some will go in the morning and some will go in the afternoon. It doesn’t take the brains of an archbishop to work out that you have a huge hole,” he says. McLaughlin had hoped to give prisoners 32 or 33 hours of “purposeful activity” a week, but is currently providing only 29.
Most of the problems the prison struggles with are the same key challenges the whole prison service is facing – an ageing prisoner population, the unstoppable flow of smuggled drugs and mobile phones, and a linked rise in violence.
More than 200 Oakwood residents are older than 50, and most live in a unit that looks at first glance more like a care home than a prison wing, with grey-haired, balding, hunched-shouldered men queueing silently for supper, served on blue plastic plates. The cells on the ground floor house seven people in wheelchairs, and another three on crutches; several people have had strokes in prison; at least two have mild dementia. A few cells are adapted to accommodate hoists, hospital beds, and specialist mattresses. The oldest prisoner here is 87, in prison for the first time, and, like many here, recently sentenced for historical sex offences.
Several prisoners, who are acting as carers for the frailer, older inmates, collect and serve them their supper (gammon and pineapple) first, before returning to collect their own. As he waits to help an older prisoner, too unwell to leave his cell, a man in his 50s on an indefinite sentence for sex offences, says: “It’s worse to be in prison in your 80s. His wife has died. His family don’t want to know him. He has dementia. He wants to die. When we get him out of his cell, he just sits and does his colouring book. Some have wives who can’t manage to visit, because they’re too frail.”
One prisoner with terminal cancer has been taken out over the weekend to die in a hospice, but he has asked to return to the prison, an environment where he feels more at home.
“Sometimes it feels like a very strange thing to be doing, locking up an 87-year-old. It can feel uncomfortable. They seem frail, but if they were in the community, they could pose a very high level of risk,” Petherick says. “They tend to lie in bed a lot of the time; the worry is that they become forgotten. It is a challenge.”
The prison has launched a weekly club for its older inmates (the Cordial Group) where members play Scrabble, draughts and chess. The battle with drugs, and related problems of debt and violence is harder for the prison to deal with.
In 2015 Oakwood staff intercepted 60 packages thrown over the wall, and confiscated drugs from prisoners on 423 occasions (staff have also seized 43 phones, 18 sim cards and 47 chargers). Everywhere in the prison there are signs warning of the dangers of black mamba, also known as spice, or other legal highs.
From outside prison, the idea that prisoners have easy access to drugs, and get into serious debt inside because of their drug habits, sounds extraordinary, but prison staff treat this as routine. The farm and gardening area, an innovative part of the jail, has been shut for months because so many drug packages were being flung over the wall.
Oakwood is also facing a rise in the number of drones bringing packages into the prison. It turns out to have been a mistake to build the exercise yards on the outside of the prison, next to the perimeter fence, and near to the motorway, making it very easy for drugs to be thrown over the wall to reach prisoners inside; the Wrexham prison, currently nearing completion, has been careful to avoid repeating the error.
“It doesn’t matter what defences we put up, there will always be another way to get drugs into the prison,” Petherick says at a meeting of G4S prison governors, attended by staff from five G4S-run institutions.
A colleague gives a presentation on the links between the supply of new synthetic cannabis into the prison and outbursts of violence. One graph showing how greater prison efficiency in confiscating drugs leads to more outbursts of violence among prisoners triggers an awkward pause.
“It is a conundrum; look at the spikes. When there has been a success in breaking up supply, fights soar. The drugs thrown over the top will have already been sold before they arrive. We generally get an assault when we retrieve the package,” a G4S security official says. The same trend is visible when mobile phones are seized. “If we are effective at interrupting the supply, limiting the access to mobile phones, then everyone is fighting for the same thing. Sometimes where we are effective, we are pushing up the incidence of violence.”
Prison officers in Oakwood are not armed with truncheons, as they often are in state-run jails, but wear body cameras attached to a strip on their right shoulder – an innovation that has proved very successful, both at de-escalation of violent incidents (“As soon as they see the camera recording they swear a few times, and they calm down,” a guard says) and when recording the effects of overdosing on black mamba. They often play back the recordings to prisoners, showing them their bad reactions to the drugs.
Black mamba doesn’t yet show up on any routine prison drug test, allowing inmates to take it without fear of punishment, but there is a lot of confusion about its effects. “We started off on the wrong foot, calling them legal highs, which gives the impression that they are mild. The fact that they don’t turn up on drug tests gives you the idea that you can be clean and still use them, but there have been serious outcomes from use. The drug speeds up the heart rate. Prisoners can get very aggressive, fist-clenched,” Clay, the head of healthcare, says. Several prisoners have had to be taken to hospital after taking the drug.
Michael Gove wants to build nine new prisons, and McLaughlin declares ebulliently that G4S should run all of them. “We are trailblazers. We are bloody good at what we do, better than the other private sector providers, and the public sector. Mr Gove would sleep more soundly in his bed if G4S was running the nine prisons,” Oakwood’s director says.
But Petherick is more cautious, pointing out that G4S risks huge potential (further) reputational damage when things go wrong in prisons, and lamenting that with costs driven down, there isn’t space for much of a profit, and no guarantee that they will make one at all.
“We are turning a profit, but not as much as we had intended – [and] we weren’t intending to make double-digit percentage margins. It is tough. Is it a model that is replicable? There’s a lot of risk in these contracts – reputational risk as well as financial risk. My bosses and our shareholders will have to be satisfied that there is sufficient return for the risk. The days of huge margins have gone for outsourcing contracts.”
You might expect a G4S director, at least privately, to relish the rapid rise in prison numbers, which is fuelling an expansion of the business in the UK, but he voices unexpected unease at the sharp rise in prison numbers, which have jumped from 41,800 in 1993 to over 86,000. “Is that necessary? No. I think it is inexplicable as to the need. I have seen sentences going up and up.”
He remembers a time as a young prison officer when he thought “blimey”, when confronted with people given a 12-year sentence. “Now we are at recommendations of 30 years plus. You have to be careful about taking hope away from an individual. That worries me. Do we need as many people doing 20- or 30-year tariffs? I question that on a human level,” he says.
He is also worried both by what he sees as a rise in the number of violent prisoners and the growth in the number of mentally ill people in prison. “I can’t provide the level of treatment that a severely mentally ill person needs. The staff aren’t trained to deal with that level of mental health.”
In his speech last week on reform, David Cameron said the state of the country’s prisons should “shame us all”. “In a typical week, there will be almost 600 incidents of self-harm; at least one suicide; and 350 assaults, including 90 on staff,” he said. The problems at Oakwood are mirrored around the country.
At lock-up, staff are troubled by another self-harming prisoner who has made what they describe as “a superficial cut to his neck”. “He is frightened because he has got into debt,” the unit manager says, as a result of buying drugs from a fellow prisoner. “The last time this happened, he got over the barriers, and started throwing pool balls at people. We don’t want that to happen again.”
Officers round the prisoners into their cells. “Behind your doors, lads, please. Behind your doors.” Angry shouting from disturbed inmates continues to echo through the building long after the doors are locked.
- This article was amended on 23 February. An earlier version referred to a new prison called HMP Wrexham. The new prison in Wrexham will be called HMP Berwyn. This has been corrected.
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