The situation is worse than I thought it was,” Keir Starmer said of the state of English and Welsh prisons soon after becoming Prime Minister. “I’m pretty shocked that it’s been allowed to get into that situation. It’s reckless to allow them to get to that place.”
Within days of his remarks, Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, announced thousands of prisoners would be eligible for early release – after serving 40 per cent of their sentences, rather than half – come September. “From an inspectorate of prisons point of view, anything that reduces the number of people in prisons has to be a good thing,” Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, told me. “But, we are frequently critical of the preparation that’s done for release of prisoners.”
Early release is nothing new. Rishi Sunak’s government began releasing some offenders 18 days early in October 2023 to try to ease overcrowding. This was later upped to 70 days, in May 2024. Taylor raised concerns at the time, particularly about how a “high-risk” prisoner had his release brought forward despite “having a history of stalking, domestic abuse and being subject to a restraining order”.
There is “always a risk” with early-release schemes, Taylor acknowledged, even when – as under Labour’s plans – sex offenders, terrorists, domestic abusers and those with sentences of more than four years are excluded. Whether a prisoner is eligible for early release, he said, is determined only by the offence for which they were sentenced. “It may be that you’ve got a whole string of other offences [that aren’t taken into account]… The prison service’s designation of high risk of harm applies to quite a large proportion of prisoners. And it isn’t necessarily the very violent. It isn’t necessarily the people who are doing very long sentences. There are lots of prisoners who do very short sentences who are also considered to be high risk of harm as well.”
Taylor isn’t concerned only for the safety of the public: “We know that prisoners don’t always have accommodation to go to.” He recalled a case he encountered at Chelmsford: “[An inmate] went out on the Monday – day one of the inspection – and he said, ‘I’ll be back.’ And by the Wednesday… he was back, because he was released homeless, with nowhere to go to, missed his probation appointment and was then recalled to custody.” If the right preparation work isn’t done, “we’ll just see loads of those people come back again”.
Whatever the risks of early release, there are few alternatives. “You either have to turn the taps off, or you have to pull the plug out of the bath. And turning the taps off isn’t an option. You can’t ask the police to stop arresting people. You can’t ask the courts to stop sending people to prison… Ultimately, you have to find a way to empty the bath.”
No one doubts how urgent the problem is. Official figures from 19 July show there are a little over 1,500 spare places across the prison estate in England and Wales. But it’s not just about overall numbers; you need places in the right parts of the country, and in the right prisons, Taylor said. “Some of those spaces may be in women’s prisons or in youth prisons.” In the second week of July (when overall spare capacity stood at around 1,400), Mahmood told parliament there were just 700 spaces in the male prison estate. At 300, “we reach critical capacity”, she said, when prisoners must be held in police cells.
Taylor wouldn’t be drawn on the record of successive Tory governments (though he does believe the new prison minister, James Timpson, understands the challenges and will be able to “hit the ground running”). The chief inspector did say, however, that the inspectorate has consistently “been raising concerns about the state of prisons, not just in terms of overcrowding, but also in terms of the lack of purposeful activity and in terms of the amount of drugs – often as a result of the lack of purposeful activity – that are getting into prison.”
For Taylor, overcrowding and a lack of meaningful activity are inextricably linked. Overcrowding is the biggest issue, particularly in the “Victorian, crumbling local prisons, where most remanded prisoners are kept”. There, he told me, men are locked up for 22, even 23 hours a day, two sharing a cell intended for one, with an unscreened toilet in the corner. “You’re living out your life in front of your cellmate, whoever that might be, and whatever your relationship with that person might be.” Pentonville prison in north London, for example, was designed for fewer than 600 prisoners; it currently holds 1,100. The result is that inmates are “not able to get access to things like education, to training, to skills. We’ve got more prisoners, but we’re not building more education facilities, so they just haven’t got enough to do during the day. And when that happens, the temptation is for drugs to come in. And so in effect, problem number one is population pressures; problem number two is a lack of purposeful activity.”
Of 37 adult male prisons inspected in 2022-23, just one was rated good for purposeful activity: pursuits that promote citizenship or develop life skills. Prisons have a public protection duty to keep people locked up, away from the public, Taylor argued, but they also have a public protection duty to ensure offenders are less likely to reoffend when they are released. “And if they’re locked in their cells all day with nothing to do, taking drugs to alleviate the boredom, developing drug habits they didn’t even have when they went in; if they’re not filling in the many gaps that many prisoners have got in terms of their learning… their ability even to do the basics like reading… there’s a huge amount of public money which is being wasted.” (It costs on average £50,000 to keep someone locked up for a year.)
As a former headteacher who specialised in helping children with severe emotional and behavioural difficulties, Taylor is passionate about education. He has advised the Department for Education on behaviour and led a 2015 review into the youth justice system. When we met, Taylor had recently branded Feltham Young Offender Institution the most violent prison in England and Wales. Although there has been a “huge reduction” in the number of children in prison, there remains a gap between “the capabilities, the skills and the training of staff, and the needs of the children” – a gap that is “filled by violence, by disorder, by a lack of a sense that people feel properly looked after”. While the numbers are small – around 400 children and young people are currently imprisoned – “we need to do better in terms of what we provide for those children”.
Taylor repeatedly returns to the issue of drugs during our conversation. To improve prisons we must not only reduce the quantity of drugs getting in, but also increase access to drug treatment, he said. An inspection of HMP Hindley identified a “tsunami of illegal drugs”, with more than half of inmates testing positive for use. Even the substance-free-living wing was rife with drugs.
“There are a lot of people who are caught in this cycle of crime, drug use, mental health difficulties and homelessness, and prison,” Taylor told me. He recounted meeting one inmate, a homeless drug user, at HMP Bedford. Taylor’s team had judged the prison a “pretty awful place”, but for this inmate it was a “sanctuary”. “He would go in there, he would get fed, he would get clothed… He got opiate substitution therapy, so he wasn’t having to buy drugs off dealers. And he wasn’t able to commit crimes.” That anybody considered Bedford a place of sanctuary, Taylor said, “just shows the bleakness of people’s lives”.
He doesn’t apportion blame for the state of the country’s jails. He told me many prison governors feel frustrated that they don’t have more power over their institutions. The best governors, he said, don’t mind being held accountable, but they do mind being held accountable for problems they have no control over. He gives the example of recruitment. The most junior prison officers, operational support grade (OSG), are recruited directly by prisons. But prison officers – a higher grade – are recruited by the prison service. “What we’ve seen is people who are turned down by prisons for OSG jobs because they don’t think they’re up to the job turn up at the prison six months later as an officer!”
Poor recruitment affects safety. “What you find in places like Wandsworth is incredibly inexperienced people being managed by people who are barely more experienced… and therefore who simply don’t know how to do the basics. At Wandsworth they couldn’t count prisoners – which you would think after the escape [of Daniel Khalife in September 2023] would have been one of the most important things to do. They couldn’t account for where their prisoners were during the day.”
There are no easy solutions. The UK prison population has soared thanks to longer sentences, a rapid increase in the proportion of the prison population who are on remand, and a similar increase in the proportion recalled to custody. “I think the remand population is kind of endemic now,” Taylor said. “We’ve got some very big backlogs… [and] you can’t create new judges overnight; you can’t create new courts.” In the longer term, he argued, sentence lengths, which have risen sharply over the past two decades, should be looked at. Labour pledged to do so in its manifesto, although this would not necessarily lead to them being reduced. “What’s the right sentence for someone who commits a horrible murder or kills a child?” These are hard questions. “But ultimately, we need to have a conversation as a society about what we think is the right thing to do. How do you get the balance between retribution and the possibility for people to go on and to some extent lead a successful life after they have committed a serious offence?”
“Enormous challenges” face this Labour government, Taylor admitted. Initially, it must “get over the hump of the population pressures” – then the hard work will really begin. “From my point of view, the biggest challenge is about what prisoners do during the day… It requires a complete reorientation of the prison service towards thinking about education, rehabilitation, drug treatment.” These are “not nice-to-haves”, but rather “absolutely essential parts of people’s journeys”. There is a clear benefit to society, too, in producing people who are able to work hard, pay taxes and be good citizens.
[See also: Britain’s prisons are at breaking point]
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This article appears in the 25 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2024