It’s time to talk

One of my lasting memories of the HMP Wandsworth dialogues was that among the scores of prisoners we worked with over the year from 2005-6, we were never treated badly or threatened, even though no prison staff were present.

The prisoners were men we randomly invited to the dialogues when we met them on the ordinary prison wings and landings of the largest prison in the country. There were no security checks, no weeding out of undesirable people. We worked with drug addicts, robbers, thieves and murderers and they treated me, my co-facilitator and the volunteers who came into the prison with us with respect.

I always felt safe, despite being really quite defenceless among criminals who were seen by many as ‘scum’, and often treated in a way that made them feel like ‘scum’. Treat someone well, they usually respond well.

Yet when I recently spoke to a high ranking officer working on the infamous D-wing at HMP Pentonville, he said he certainly wouldn’t feel safe as a prisoner on this, the largest wing in the prison. I wondered how safe it felt for staff. I wondered if dialogue might help.

I was visiting on behalf of the Howard League Commission on English Prisons Today. We were allowed to see every part of the prison – except D-wing. A bit like officials telling us about the good work that goes on in prisons – but not telling us about the huge mass of prisoners that the work does not reach.

Criminologists have warned of an ‘epidemic of violence’ fuelled by our spiralling prison numbers. Violent crime is on the increase, as are suicides in prison, generally accepted as due to dire conditions caused by over-crowding and by a severely under-resourced service.

Now the number of people in prison in England and Wales has topped 82,000 for the first time in history. While the numbers increase, the humanity of the system inevitably decreases, as does the ability of establishments to manage humanising interventions such as dialogue.

How many more prison wings will go the way of Pentonville’s D-wing as a result?

A fair chance?

We all know that life isn’t fair but what everybody wants is a fair chance at life. While visiting a couple of prisons as a commissioner for the Howard League Commission on English Prisons Today, I was struck that the prisoners I spoke to all asked for just that: a fair chance.

They desperately wanted training and education that would give them a chance of getting work when they came out, so that they could steer clear of crime. At one large London prison, inmates spoke about their frustration in the prison as well as their worries on release.

They said they had to wait months to get on courses offering education and training, and that all too often they were moved to another prison before completing them. And then they were back to square one.

The Governor was also frustrated that the prison had so little to offer and had drawn up plans for extra capacity in that direction. A slight problem was that these plans also involved building capacity for an extra 600 prisoners. It’ll be needed if we fail to help prisoners re-train.

If we are not going to make proper provision for people whose lives more often than not have been blighted by failed family and schooling, we are setting ourselves up for ever high crime levels. The government seem happy to take that route: they are cutting 3% of the budget for prisons and generating new plans to build three monstrous ‘titan’ prisons to house the fall-out. How short-sighted and, at root, how inhumane.

Lack of resources for proper rehabilitation in prisons has been shown up by the High Court, in its recent ruling on indeterminate sentences for public protection (IPPs). Prisoners on IPPS must demonstrate to the Parole Board that they are fit for release but not enough money has been made available for proper rehabilitation courses.

The Appeal Court called this “an unhappy state of affairs” and judged that: “There has been a systemic failure on the part of the Secretary of State (Jack Straw) to put in place the resources necessary to implement the scheme of rehabilitation necessary.”

Will the Justice Department do anything in response? Fat chance.

The season of goodwill to all…

The use of imprisonment is already barbaric in this country. Planning to build new super-prisons called titans is a destructive and sadistic act, unethically perpetrated by politicians and bureaucrats who patently know better.

With over two-thirds of ex-prisoners committing further crimes in the two years after release, we all know prison doesn’t work. Dangerous people do have to be imprisoned, but the rest (the majority) can serve sentences in the community, in ways that address rather than reinforce criminality.

Criminologists nowadays accept that the prison environment is in itself criminogenic; that is, it causes people to become more criminal. This is hardly surprising. The focus of criminogenic behaviours is lack of empathy, alienation and failure to think before doing something – and it’s certainly not easy to hold onto thinking in prison.

Prison is a harsh place, with over-crowding leading to more lock-up in the cell and little activity. Prison makes people frustrated, stressed and despairing; powerless and desperate for privacy because of cell-sharing; often unsafe, cut off from the outside world and ostracised by its citizens.

No wonder people come out of prison screwed up. Bear in mind that we are doing this to some of the most vulnerable people in our communities; people who have been let down by their families, the welfare services, doctors and health units.

The government itself knows, states, that 72% or male and 70% of female sentenced prisoners have two or more mental disorders. It knows that mental health issues among prisoners are often linked to previous experiences of violence and sexual abuse. It knows that 30% of prisoners will be completely homeless on release.

Jack Straw, our Orwellian Justice Secretary, has known this since the government first released figures in 2002, when he was Home Secretary.

“The government will not be able to build its way out of the prison crisis” Straw said in July 2007 when interviewed by The Times. But then, in December, he allocated an extra £1.2bn to build three “titan” jails containing 2,500 inmates each. This is on top of £1.5bn already committed for prison expansion. Orwellian indeed.

Knowing what he knows, Straw and his colleagues are guilty of perpetrating a huge injustice on this country. Meanwhile, nobody in politics seems prepared to stick their head above the parapet and denounce this Emperor with No Clothes.
 

Crimble behind bars

Christmas is a miserable affair in prison. People become even more acutely aware of their separation from their families and, because few staff are happy to work over the holidays, you tend to get more ‘bang up’ in the cell than usual.  But prisoners do find ways to get a little enjoyment (I could mention the hooch but I won’t).

Incarcerated at Highpoint during the turn of the millennium, this is how I experienced New Year’s Eve:

At 7.30pm we are back locked behind the spurs, early again so that the screws can go off and enjoy themselves. People make last minute phone calls.

“You’ll be sure to see them every day,” says one woman as I pass. Our children, oh how we miss them, and how they must miss us. I look at the photos of the family stuck onto my cupboard, imagining what they are up to right now: maybe Rachel will be raving it up with her boyfriend in Cambridge and Gordon and Joel will be together at home. Grace sticks her head round the door.
“What are you doing? Come an’ join the party.”

Everyone is gathered on the central landings, all of us squeezed together behind the thick white bars of the spur gates. I have two sets to the back of me and three in front, familiar faces behind them all. Someone puts Radio One on loud, and here it comes, the final countdown: 5-4-3-2-1. We erupt, yelling, whistling, a-huggin’ and a-kissin’, scenes being repeated throughout the country. The music rings out. A large black woman smashes a cake tin repeatedly against a wall, the noise reverberating……..

Fifteen minutes later everything has died down. I chat awhile to Annette, a Yorkshire lass doing four years, and then I am back in my room and like most of the others thinking about those on the out, straining to pick up their thoughts on the ether.

“From the Inside” Aurum Press 2003

Prison inquiries

There seems to be a sudden rush to set up inquiries into prisons. First at the post was the Howard League, which has set up a Commission on English Prisons Today.

I happen to be one of the Commissioners, sitting with Oscar who also has experience of being a prisoner, amidst a gaggle of academics, including six Professors at the last count. Plus a Dame, a Baroness, a few media people and a businessman.

Perhaps the task for Oscar and I is to keep the humanity in focus amidst the academic debate. After all, this is about real people, like you and me, whatever their offence against society. People whose behaviour all too frequently results from being offended against by people they should have been able to trust.

We just get going and up pops Jonathan Aitken, another ex-con but in a slightly different league (millionaire, former cabinet minister) who found God in prison. He’s leading an inquiry for the Centre for Social Justice, run by former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, and he seems to think things can be done with no extra resources. The focus is on how volunteers could support prison literacy programmes and post-release mentoring. Coming from a Tory, one could suggest there’s nothing much new there.

Not to be outdone, the Conservatives announce the launch of their own separate official inquiry into the failing prison system which will examine overcrowding, and how more of the mentally ill and drug abusers can be kept out of prison. Sorry, but it can only be done if mental health and drug abuse issues and needs are properly resourced in the community.

No inquiry from Labour, the political carpet having been resolutely whisked from under them. But perhaps there should be an inquiry into their double-speak. Recently, the Minister for Justice, Jack Straw, said: “We recognise that prison is not a mere repository for those with mental health, educational, social, behavioural or drug problems, where no real attempt is made to rehabilitate or reintegrate offenders back into society.”

Jack, my condolences go to you this time: as it stands prison in this country is largely just that.

The obituary of the National Offender Management Service

Not many will cry for the demise of NOMS, the unwieldy National Offender Management Service which was supposed to merge and replace the Prison and Probation services.

Since 2004 it has spent £2.6 billion of taxpayers’ money, including £155 million on a failed computer system and more than £5 million on consultants in the last two years.

According to The Times newspaper (28 September), one Whitehall source said: “God knows where all the money has gone.” Into the pockets of over-paid consultants and computer geeks by the sound of it.

Big is not beautiful and you certainly don’t get out of an operational crisis by providing more management. The struggling criminal justice providers need less bureaucracy, not more; less central control and more community links.

But most of all we need a radical rethink about the way we manage crime. Prison is a failed experiment: three-quarters of people released from prison re-offend within two years. Probation also has a high rate of recidivism. In both cases, staff struggle to provide the help offenders need to stay away from crime partly because of a severe shortage of resources. They could have done with some of the money wasted on NOMS.

It’s generally accepted that the main problems behind most crimes are to do with someone’s personal and social situation, which has led to faulty ways of managing in the world. Going to prison isn’t going to make a positive impact on that; in fact, it will make it worse.

If we are going to make a real impact on reducing crime, we need to accept that the old ways aren’t working and that different interventions are urgently needed to make our communities safer and more cohesive.

The Howard League’s Commission on English Prisons Today is looking at these issues, and at effective alternatives to imprisonment, and we promise to be radical – exactly what I wanted to hear when we had our first official meeting in September. The Commission will report in 2009. Hopefully those responsible for the dire state of our prisons and the probation service will be prepared to listen.

Stuart – a life backwards

The screening on BBC2 of the TV film “Stuart – a life backwards” on 23 September 2007 at 9pm has a special resonance for The Dialogue Trust and for me in particular. More broadly, it should open some people’s eyes as to why lives become chaotic, criminal and out-of-control.

Having spoken to hundreds of prisoners, ex-prisoners and homeless people, I know first-hand that no-one chooses a life of crime, or a life on the streets. If you scratch just under the surface, you find that they all want the same things as we all do: a home, a job and a loving family.

There’s always a reason why these things have become unattainable and in almost every case, there is a remedy. I won’t spoil your viewing of the film (or your reading of the book on which it was based) by letting you know the reasons for Stuart’s plight. But every Stuart has their own story, often desperate and painful.

Our Patron Alexander Masters wrote his best selling book “Stuart – a life backwards”, and the subsequent screenplay, as a result of his involvement in the Campaign to free the Cambridge Two. I was one of them: imprisoned for allegedly allowing heroin dealing in the courtyard of a Cambridge day centre for the homeless. My prison experience led me to help found the Dialogue Trust.

Alexander’s unusual friendship with Stuart grew out of their joint work on the campaign. If Stuart had been treated differently in prison, he might have got the chance he needed to live a happier and more fulfilling life. That would have been a good result for him, his family and for society as a whole.

It is a tragedy that so many people like Stuart suffer so pointlessly at the hands of our under-resourced, ineffective and old-fashioned prison system.

Prison Officers’ strike

Prison officers around the country have finally had enough and gone on a 24-hour strike. It’s not surprising. Prisons have been getting more and more over-crowded. Numbers recently hit record levels, prison staff cannot do their jobs effectively, prisoners become increasingly desperate and the inevitable happens: violence ensues.

This is a crisis that has been a long time coming. But there were repeated warnings of it, right up to the Lord Chief Justice who described over-crowding as a cancer in our prisons.

What did the government do? Nothing of any real substance. Reassuring words and plans for more prison places in five years time don’t mean much to struggling staff and despairing prisoners.

To add insult to injury, word leaked out about plans to actually cut prison budgets, and remember that these budgets are already cut to the bone.

In fact, earlier this month Michael Spurr, the Head of Operations at NOMS (the National Offender Management Service), suggested that all prisoners be locked up every afternoon to make the £60 million savings he had been charged with. More lock-up means less rehabilitation work and therefore more chance of prisoners offending on release, and being incarcerated once again. Surely that’s a false saving.

In my experience, Michael Spurr is a sensible man. We were both lecturers at the Prison Service’s annual Perrie Lectures a couple of years back. I heard him stress the importance and benefits of rehabilitation, and how it was an essential component of prison life if we really wanted to reduce offending.

He won’t be happy about the cuts. I haven’t met anyone in the Prison Service who is – those on the coal face know it means a worse service, continuing failure to address crime and its cause, more damage to those locked up and damage also to prison staff who have to implement these short-sighted policies.

The Government is terrified of appearing to be ‘soft on crime’ and look where it’s led them (and us). Now the Tories are jacking up their tough stance, in response to taunts from the tabloids. Yet it is generally accepted by independent-minded criminologists that prison does not work, and that the experience actually does make people worse. This results in more crime.

Now the public is getting wise to this. A recent Guardian/ICM poll overturns the assumption that the public think tough prison sentences are the best way to tackle crime. The majority of those polled think the government should scrap its prison building programme and find other ways to punish criminals.

But we live in a cynical world. Not long ago The Dialogue Trust representatives met a senior politician who wanted to know how to make reducing the use of prison palatable to the public, because he knew it was the right policy. Needless to say, he has now been demoted.

Alan Johnson’s trials are not over yet

Freed BBC reporter Alan Johnson says no-one can really understand what it’s like to be released unless they have experienced incarceration themselves. As an ex-prisoner myself, I know that to be very true.  

The day after he got his freedom back, after 114 days in captivity in Gaza, Alan said being free was fantastic: “You want to do everything at the same time, to read books and newspapers, go to the movies, go to the beach and sit in the sun, and eat and talk.” 

What he doesn’t yet know is that the elation is, typically, quickly replaced by depression, whatever the ex-prisoner’s circumstances. That’s one reason why the risk of suicide is exceptionally great for a recently released prisoner. And it makes the reintegration process particularly tough for those facing problems like homelessness, joblessness, social exclusion and extreme poverty, a situation faced daily by prisoners on release in the UK.  

It’s easy to empathise with someone like Alan Johnson: a charming and dedicated man whose delightful, loving parents have graced our TV screens throughout their son’s ordeal. But empathy comes much harder for prisoners who have not had Alan’s good fortune; people who have longed for a safe and loving family while growing up. In order to cope with their deprivation and frustration, youngsters join the street gang (often a kind of substitute family) and end up involved in drugs and crime. 

Stories like Alan’s highlight the deepening inequalities in our society for which those at the bottom of the pile seem to take the brunt of the blame for the inevitable consequences. We all end up paying: prisons cost the country billions every year as does repeat offending. The money would be much better spent giving real opportunity to those who have been denied it due to circumstances completely beyond their control.

Disturbing prison statistics

We are not great fans of statistics, but these tell a disturbing story.

Firstly, reports indicate that prison suicides are running at two a week. Inevitably, the increase is put down by many to prison overcrowding – prison numbers in England and Wales have now hit 81,000 for the first time ever. Why? There’s been no significant increase or decrease in crime. The increase in prison numbers is due to more people being given prison sentences when convicted, and for longer.

Also more people are being recalled to prison for failing to comply with probation orders. Previously, they were given more chances because probation officers know that change comes slowly and incrementally for the people they work with. But government has given them new and more punitive orders to work under. Part of politicians’ competition to look ‘toughest on crime’.

Try this: we have more people on life sentences in this country than anywhere else in Europe, and more than France, Germany, Italy and Turkey combined. The number of men serving four years or more in prison increased by 86% from 1995 to 2005. One could go on and on but it makes for desperately annoying reading. Are we really more criminal in this country than elsewhere? We don’t think so!

At over £40,000 per year per head on average, the country’s increase in the use of custody is an expensive policy. So, is our money being well spent? Let’s hear what the Prime Minister’s own Strategy Unit said in its 2003 Carter report: “There is no convincing evidence that further increases in the use of custody would significantly reduce crime.”

That doesn’t sound like money well spent to me, and that’s without taking full account of the damage being done by imprisoning so many people. Apart from the fact that the prison regime will be greatly impoverished, leading to anger, bitterness and despair, there’s plenty of well-researched evidence that the prison environment is in itself a ‘criminogenic’ one, which means that it’s a cause of crime: it creates crime rather than reducing it.

In addition to the impact of this on society as a whole, there is the impact on prisoners’ families. The Home Office estimates that 17,700 children are separated from their mothers by imprisonment each year. Far more suffer from separation from their fathers: around 150,000 have a parent in prison. In March 2007 there were 9,311 young adults and 2,413 children in prison – that last figure has doubled in the last ten years. Children as young as 14 have committed suicide while incarcerated by us.

If prison doesn’t reduce crime, the main reason for imprisoning people (other than those who are a danger to society) must be retribution; in other words revenge.

We know, and the government knows, that the majority of the people who commit crimes have generally suffered the most deprivation and poor life chances. That’s why they do it. Perhaps society should grow up a little and realise that, by imprisoning some of the most vulnerable people in the community, we are fuelling the fires of crime as opposed to damping them down.

People in the field are fully aware there are better ways of dealing with offenders. Once again, government has failed to listen to the professionals, has used the country’s money ineffectively. And it’s not just the criminals who suffer for that. When they are released into the community without proper preparation, which is what now usually happens, we all pay the price.

Statistics from Bromley Briefings: Prison Factfile, May 2007, Prison Reform Trust, London.