TOILETS AND TRAINING
Sandra Barwick meets
Judge Tumim, the Chief Inspector of Prisons
EYE of newt, toe of frog; these, or at least a convergence of similar demonic essences, were bubbling on the roof of Strangeways chapel on Good Friday 13th, according to its Governor, Brendan O'Friel. Yet like many another tragedy, Britain's longest prison seige may still produce a triumph of the powers of good, in this case over a more pressing manifestation of evil, the prison system itself.
The riots have already produced a cli- mate for change: the recommendations of Lord Justice Woolf s inquiry into the riots may lead to fundamental changes in prison regimes. Judge Stephen Tumim, Chief Inspector of Prisons, whose involvement in the second, more general, stage of the Inquiry was announced last week, is hoping so. Next month Judge Tumim will deliver his annual report on prisons: he is also working on a report on suicide in prison, and a detailed examination of what in- mates actually do in 40 prisons. These, like the inquiry's findings, will be published this year.
'I'd hope to see it all used to build a system for prisons for the end of the century,' says Judge Tumim. 'Jeremy Bentham gave a great deal of thought to it in the late 18th century and since then I don't think we've paid much attention to the problem. It was humanised, we've made it more tolerable — slightly — since 1850, but there has been no radical look at what it is all about and why we send people to prison.'
This is only one of the many startling truths about British prisons; another is that not until 1981 was an inspectorate of Prisons appointed independent from the Home Office and its complacency. Judge Tumim is only the third holder of his post and the first judge. Since taking office he has produced a robust series of reports on indicidual prisons and an overall picture of the system painted from a dark palette with very few highlights. 'It does seem to me,' he says 'that I've Only got to make a report these days and there's a riot.' An early report on Risley Remand Centre predicted a riot unless steps were taken. They weren't taken: one followed. His report on Strangeways, on the other hand, which came out weeks before the riot, emphasised an imporve- ment in conditions in its summary. Read in full, it spells out the detail of the hours of idle lock-ups, the lack of lavatories and showers, the critical shortage of clean underpants (connected to the lack of lava- tories, since some prisoners shit in their pants rather than the cummunal pot and throw the package from their windows) and the strange failure of the prison canteen to sell deodorants: a longing for fresh air of the roofs becomes more forci- ble with every page. Smells were indeed what first struck Judge Tumim when he left his work in London's Country Courts three years ago and began to inspect prisons. "Like most judges I knew relatively little about them. In the first prisons I visited, I asked why they were so smelly and I was told: pots.' One judge Tumim's favourite authors is Tobias Smollett: a mixture of humour and common sense — not to mention an 18th-century earthiness — may be useful to those engaged in reform. The judge real- ised that without lavatories nothing was possible.
`Slopping out is humiliating for the inmates and for the staff, it's degrading for everyone, and a waste of public money,' he says. (The inspectorate's aims, officially defined, are 'Propriety, Humanity and Value for Money.') 'I thought it needed sorting out even if I seemed like a terrible old lavatorial bore. Until you put some decent sanitation into prisons it seems to me you can't have any other basic stan- dards.'
`The reason the Home Office hadn't got anywhere before was they weren't being imaginative. We produced a report with six different types of answers to sanitation, only one of which they'd thought about before.
One idea which never occurred to the Home Office included putting stainless steel lavatories and washbowls directly into cells as a temporary measure during the rebuilding programme.
The Government has, he says, accepted 90 per cent of his sanitary suggestions, but the 10 per cent refused — a date for ending of slopping out — seems vital. Judge Tumim does not mind what date is agreed so long as it is before the century ends.
Yet at present prison still concentrates, like a bad Victorian nanny, on the bowels and mouths of its inmates, in brief intervals between locking them away. 'Prisoners tend to have breakfast at 8, lunch as early as 11.30, and then they're locked up until 2.15 doing nothing at all and the day ends at 4.15, and all this is for the convenience of the staff, so they can get time off,' says Judge Tumim, summing up frankly.
Once prisoners were treated as civilised enough to use lavatories, and their day opened up, the question would arise of what should be done with their time. `When we ask if their time is for punish- ment or rehabilitation, I think we are asking the wrong questions,' says Judge Tumim. 'Of course there is a handful of terribly dangerous prisoners who would be a menace if they were let out: security and humane containment is very important for those.'
'But a vaste wodge, four out of five, are in for non-violent crimes, and those people you could do something about. I want to get away from punishment. I think it is an inadequate goal, and it clearly doesn't work. Over 50 per cent of prisoners com- mit the same offence within two years of discharge. And rehabilitation is an odd word when most of them were never habile. Vast numbers have never done a day's work in their lives. Rehabilitation is the wrong word and the wrong attitude. I'd like to see my main objective as training. I look to the whole of prison as a pre-release course: City and Guilds, computer train- ing.'
'I don't want to seem wet,' says the bow-tied Judge Tumim, a member of the Garrick, graduate of Worcester College, Oxford, looking across his half-moon spectacles towards a picture of some malevolent looking youths, painted by a prisoner of 19 who spent two years inside for a Post Office robbery. 'Quite a lot of them are ghastly yobs. It's jolly difficult getting them to do anything. Some of them are not used to sitting down to eat a meal, even. The idea they will sit down with a book is pie in the sky. But I think training is the only answer.'
Toilets and training: it seems a modest enough aim, but if this triumph of good, is to come before the end of the century Mr O'Friel, a believer in the power of prayer, had perhaps better point his intercessions towards the Home Office.
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