Our prisons are appeasing violent criminals

When I conducted a review of Islamist extremism in Britain’s prisons a decade ago, I emailed a senior HR person in HM Prison Service headquarters to ask how many senior leaders there had operational experience – that is, have they worked in an actual prison? Her reply has stayed with me: ‘By “operational”, do you mean war-fighting?’

This seemed to perfectly sum up the continuing disconnect between the Prison Service’s central London hermit kingdom and the staff on the frontline. I don’t know what happened to this person subsequently, but I suspect she was rapidly promoted. Incompetence always is.

I was put in mind of this darkly amusing episode when considering the latest spasm of violence in our high-security prisons. Last week, Southport killer Axel Rudakubana is alleged to have attacked a prison officer at HMP Belmarsh using a kettle full of boiling water, leading to him being hospitalised. What most ordinary people are rightly asking is why would such a dangerous, violent criminal ever be granted access to a kettle in the first place? Why are prison officers being placed at such needless risk?

Sources inside HMP Belmarsh have been telling me for some time that they have huge concerns about the way staff safety is being subverted by managers who are more concerned with appeasing prisoners. Indeed, it seems prioritising the rights of prisoners is a way for managers to earn promotion.

The effect of this is clearly felt on the staff. At Belmarsh, a survey of staff prior to a recent inspection showed that 36 per cent of them had ‘low’ or ’very low’ morale. The same percentage said they had met a manager to discuss their performance only once in the past 12 months, or ‘never’. If there is this lack of interest in the safety and welfare of frontline staff even within the prison itself, then it is very unlikely anyone further up the greasy pole at headquarters knows or cares what is going on.

In fairness, the last inspection report of HMP Belmarsh was quite positive. But this just raises another issue that bedevils public-service organisations – namely, that only what gets measured gets done.

In our disordered and feral penal system, failure to observe the recommendations of the HM Inspectorate of Prisons is close to apostasy. Careers rise and fall on inspection results and the zeal of prison managers to implement them. Necessarily, the inspectorate sets its ‘expectations’ of what it’s assessing based on what impacts prisoners, not staff. This is in part because the legislation that created HM Inspectorate is very old. But it is probably fair to say that the people working there are on the progressive side of the political spectrum. While this organisation has done a great deal to expose the appalling state of our jails, and it has a superb chief inspector in Charlie Taylor, I can’t help wondering if a scramble to meet prisoners’ rights, even at a cost of officer safety, is affected by this relationship.

Here is an example. I was asked to comment on proposed ‘expectations’ for inspections of separation units – units that I had recommended be used to isolate the most highly subversive extremists, to prevent them from radicalising fellow prisoners. I made good use of the red pen in my response and even suggested the whole section on security should be rewritten. I repeatedly produced edits that inserted the words ‘national security’ into the standards set. None of these suggestions survived (although some others did, in fairness, make the final cut).

The response I received was that the inspectorate had to focus purely on the conditions in the unit and other questions, such as national security, were beyond its remit. The new expectations looked to be a cut and paste from standards of inspection in the wider prison estate, and so they took a maximalist approach to the human rights of those separated.

I think these examples speak to the mindset in senior leaders and inspectors that has produced the current dangerous prison environment. As well last week’s alleged attack by Rudakubana, Hashem Abedi, one of the terrorists responsible for the Manchester Arena bombing, allegedly attacked prison staff last month, hospitalising three people, coming within millimetres of the first terrorist murder of a prison officer in Great Britain in living memory. He had apparently been able to fashion improvised weapons in the kitchen of the HMP Frankland prison and to have turned margarine into prison ‘napalm’.

Much of the recent discussion on prisons has focussed on overcrowding. And while this has clearly affected the safety of staff, it is worth pointing out none of our high-security prisons is overcrowded. Something else is going on here. In effect, we have adopted what amounts to a policy of appeasement of highly dangerous prisoners, often against the concerns of the people exposed to the risk.

The liberal belief that prisoners react well to being rewarded is one I still hold. But the reward must have two conditions. It must be as a result of observable and authentic compliance, and it must be subordinate to officer safety. In all of the recent violence in our high-security prisons, including a prisoner-on-prisoner homicide in HMP Whitemoor, it’s plain to me that these conditions are being subverted by prison managers.

A balance must be restored. There is a political as well as a moral price to pay for abandoning frontline staff to the predations of prisoners capable of maniacal violence. There is also the prospect of the bereaved parents and families of all those murdered by Abedi and Rudakubana being traumatised yet again by the state’s lamentable failure to control their dangerousness, even behind bars. Prison officers do not consent to be maimed and murdered at work by these wretched people, either. We can and we must do better for them all.

Ian Acheson is a former prison governor. He was also director of community safety at the Home Office.