Breaking in to prison

Breaking in to prison

By David Ramsbotham

A royal commission would let some light into the closed shop of Britain's Prison Service

In 1777, John Howard John Howard, then high sheriff of Bedfordshire and responsible for the inspection of Bedford prison, was so appalled by the disgraceful conditions that he found there, and elsewhere, that he published a startling book entitled The state of the prisons in England and Wales. It contained the now famous statement that "the care of a prison is too important to be left wholly to a jailer". Today I shall be tabling a motion for debate in the House of Lords calling for a royal commission into the state of our prisons in 2008 saying, in effect, that the care of our prison system is too important to be left wholly to the Ministry of Justice and the Prison Service.

Of course neither overcrowding nor shortage of resources, the two scourges of the prison system, is the fault or responsibility of the Prison Service. Of course there are some marvellous people doing wonderful work in our prisons and there have been improvements in many aspects of treatment of and conditions for prisoners in recent years. In addition no one could accuse either the Home Office or the Ministry of Justice of being idle because, in addition to deluging parliament with a torrent of criminal justice legislation, it has bombarded the Prison Service with initiative after initiative, report after report and change upon change. But, because none of this has had any clear strategic direction, it has all amounted to failure when set against the reconviction rate, which has risen from 55% – which was bad enough – in 1997 to 67% for adult males today.

The state of our prisons is not just a sudden accident. I shall remind the House that the rot set in in 1877 when local prisons, housing unsentenced and short sentenced prisoners, paid for by local taxes, were nationalised with convict prisons, paid for nationally, housing longer term prisoners, under a Prison Commission. The needs of each group are different and their merger has led to compromise in the use of resources, denying each group of what is possible.

Even more relevant though, in supporting a case for a royal commission, was the abolition of the Prison Commission in 1962, following which prisons were put into a Prisons Department in the Home Office, under a senior civil servant. Now, whatever prisons are, they are not parts of a Whitehall ministry. Civil servants serve ministers; they do not run large, people orientated organisations. From that moment on, the only time that outsiders have been allowed to comment on the working of the Prisons Department and Prison Service has been when they have been brought in to write reports following disasters – a remark that was made to me in my first week as chief inspector.

In the debate I shall be cataloguing all the aspects of the state of our prisons that need attention, relating how they have been identified in these reports, but subsequently ignored. Lord Mountbatten after the Brixton escape in 1963, Mr Justice May in establishing the independent inspection of prisons but not the Prison Service in 1979, Lord Woolf in his report on the riots in Strangeways in 1990, Sir James Lygo in his report on the management of the Prison Service in 1991 and Sir John Woodcock and Sir John Learmont in their reports on the escapes from Whitemoor and Parkhurst in 1995 all could have been listened to with advantage. What is more, the only White Paper on prisons, Custody, Care and Justice, published with the agreement of all political parties in 1991, remains unactioned to this day.

Since then there have been two internal inquiries that have recommended the continuance with status quo that is patently not working and two reports by Lord Carter of Coles that have resulted in the creation of a National Offender Management Service that has been ridiculed since its undiscussed appearance, and the proposed building of Titan prisons, each holding 2,500 people, which has been greeted with similar scorn.

All is clearly not well, and, in my opinion, will not become better until some light and air is let into the closed shop of the Ministry of Justice and the Prison Service. Royal commissions are a well tried, but less frequently used way of doing this. They are made up of experts who take evidence in public and publish reports. I believe that such an exercise can only help both the ministry and the service resolve the problems that they appear to be unable to do, because they are too close to daily events to be able to take a dispassionate and informed look. Therefore the purpose of my exercise is constructive and not destructive. All that it requires is an acceptance of facts and a willingness to listen. I suspect that the public would not have them do otherwise.