Warehouses of despair

Not my words, but those of Andrea Albutt, President of the Prison Governors Association, speaking last week to MPs on the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Penal Affairs. It was a stark assessment by someone with over thirty years experience working in prisons.

Her speech was in part a history lesson, as she went through the various stages of ‘reform’ in the prison system since the formation of the Conservative – Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2010.

The incoming Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, she argued, had inherited a prison system that, while far from perfect, was reasonably stable. The prison competition strategy Clarke launched in 2011 was “the real start of the race to the bottom”, as unrealistic cuts were sought.

Clarke’s successor, Chris Grayling, introduced a benchmarking exercise that sought further to drive down costs. The result was a “demonstrable deterioration of outcomes, particularly safety”. At the same time, the disastrous decision to compete facilities management resulted in a dilapidated estate in which “large parts... were unfit for human habitation but remained in use”.

Grayling’s successor, Michael Gove, tried to apply the logic of academy schools to prisons, with predictable results. His successor, Liz Truss, published plans to reduce bureaucracy and empower prison governors. Yet “rather than feeling empowered, Governors were feeling under more scrutiny than ever”.

And so it continued, through a further six Justice Secretaries between 2017 and 2023 (David Lidington, David Gauke, Robert Buckland, Dominic Raab, Brandon Lewis, Dominic Raab again) ending with the current incumbent, Alex Chalk.

“Since 2010”, Andrea Albutt said, “11 Justice Secretaries (one holding the post twice) and 13 Ministers (one holding the post twice) have, through political buffeting and interference achieved nothing but decline in the function of prisons”.

It was a pretty devastating critique, and one that left the MPs and Peers present straining to offer a response adequate to the scale of the problem she identified.

The dreadful state of our prison system, as well as particular injustices like the dreadful Imprisonment for Public Protection sentence, are the result of decisions by successive governments and Justice Secretaries, and by those parliamentarians that passed disastrous legislation and failed to hold Ministers to account.

But politicians are also part of the solution. Only they can pass legislation and change policy for the better.

Building support, inside and outside parliament and the corridors of power, for a sustained change in policy direction, remains a vital task.