English prisons are not only bursting at the seams after years of under-investment, some are also dangerously understaffed with prisoners living in “inhumane” conditions, the chief inspector of prisons told the Financial Times.
Charlie Taylor’s roving role inspecting the 123 jails in England and Wales has revealed a system that is failing to keep criminals safely under lock and key and to ensure that when they re-emerge, they do not reoffend.
“You have overcrowded prisons and not enough staff to run them,” Taylor said in an interview, noting that some of the worst institutions were gripped in a vicious cycle of departing staff and rising violence.
The prisons crisis has been worsening for years but burst into the news over the past week after a report that judges had been ordered to defer sentencing of convicted criminals because jails were full.
Justice secretary Alex Chalk on Monday announced emergency measures designed to alleviate capacity pressures, including allowing low-level offenders to avoid jail and releasing some prisoners 18 days early.
Official data showed the prison population has reached an all-time high of 88,225 people — just 557 short of the estate’s operational capacity and nearly double what it was 30 years ago.
Taylor said the strains on the system meant many prisons were failing to provide offenders with “purposeful” activity that would aid rehabilitation. Prison workshops were often empty, gardens overgrown and libraries shut.
“It is always the difficulty with prisons — you get into this negative spiral where if you have high levels of violence then staff will very often leave . . . That means the prison doesn’t feel in control, that means prisoners don’t feel safe, that means staff don’t feel safe,” he said at the inspectorate’s headquarters at Canary Wharf.
Taylor was first appointed to lead His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons in 2020. He was reappointed this year. In the course of his work, Taylor has found prisoners being locked in their cells for long periods, in the worst instances 23 hours a day. This left them bored and more prone to using drugs, which in turn fuelled more violence.
It is a picture that is widespread, with four prisons having received urgent notifications from Taylor’s inspectorate in the past year to alert the justice ministry to their dire state. Conditions at between 10 and 15 more prisons were “teetering” in the same direction, said Taylor.
The Ministry of Justice attributes the overcrowding to high numbers of people behind bars on remand since court cases backed up during the pandemic and barristers went on strike. Longer sentences for some offences have also contributed, it said.
“The Government is carrying out the biggest prison-building campaign since the Victorian era to create 20,000 new places, making sure we always have the places we need,” the ministry added.
Taylor welcomed the new measures Chalk announced this week, which also included stepping up efforts to repatriate some of the 10,000 foreigners in British jails.
“Anything that makes prisons able to function better is welcome,” Taylor said.
But he was bleak about the scale of the challenge. Many prisons are already stretched far beyond the capacity they were built for.
Pentonville in London was built for 500 inmates but now has more than 1,000. Wandsworth, from which a former British soldier awaiting trial on terrorism charges allegedly escaped last month, has about 1,600 prisoners. It was built for 1,000, said Taylor.
Bristol, one of the four jails to have received urgent notifications from Taylor, had not improved since its last warning four years ago, he noted. Many men were locked in cramped, squalid cells for 22 hours a day “with nothing meaningful to do,” Taylor’s report said.
Six inmates had died by suicide within the past 10 months. A prisoner had also recently been charged with murdering his cellmate.
“The prison is incredibly overcrowded with a lot of cells doubled up,” said Taylor. He described prisoners using shared buckets as toilets, which they then had to slop out.
Bristol shares a problem with many prisons: retaining staff. The issue is exacerbated by recruitment rules, Taylor said. Prison governors are not allowed to hire their own staff for roles that involve interacting with prisoners. Officers are supplied centrally by the prison service.
This has led to absurd situations, according to Taylor. In one case a governor rejected an applicant as unsuitable for a job on the prison gates. The same person was later supplied to the prison in the more demanding role of an officer.
While conditions at women’s prisons were generally better, even there “self-harming is at an all-time high,” Taylor said.
Mark Fairhurst, head of the Prison Officers’ Association, said the crisis was the worst he had known in 30 years of service.
He blamed successive Conservative governments for starving the system of sufficient funding over the past 13 years, and said high turnover meant prison officers had fewer years of experience today than in the past.
“We are just a human warehouse at the moment,” said Fairhurst.
Taylor attributed some of the issues to how slowly the system had opened up after inmates were isolated during the Covid-19 pandemic: “Prisons are very good at locking down. Opening up has been taking much longer than expected.”
There were also bright spots, he said, mentioning prisons that had been lucky to have inspired governors.
But these were sufficiently few and far between that when the chief inspector met recently with a group of inmates who described their experience inside as positive, he briefly wondered if they were for real.
“I thought the guards might have dressed themselves up as prisoners,” he said.