24 NOVEMBER 1967, Page 19

In the nick

GILES PLAYFAIR

Five years ago, Mr Michael Wolff was invited by the then editor of the Sunday Telegraph to make an intensive study of the penal system in England and Wales, though the subject of penology was, at the time, new to him. He might, I feel, have found himself faced with a task no more difficult, and potentially a great deal more interesting, if he had been asked under similar circumstances to investigate the intelligence services. Mr Wolff, who has now published his findings in book form, says that he was willingly granted facilities to visit in- stitutions and collect the information he required. This is not surprising. The obsess sional secrecy that used to characterise the administration of prisons under central gov- ernment has to some extent been overcome.

But there can be no pretending that the penal system is freely open to inspection by the press. A journalist, like any other member of the public, is forbidden entry into custodial institutions unless he first of all obtains a warrant of authority from the Home Office. Though nowadays this may be readily granted, it is ordinarily only granted subject to certain restrictive conditions: notably a prohibition against speaking to any inmate without the governor's permission. Moreover, visits inevit- ably have to be pre-arranged. Consequently,

a journalist in Mr Wolff's position cannot hope to produce much better than a formal account of the penal system—an account of the system as it exists in the minds of the Home Office authorities. He has made a thorough job of this, and his book is a useful work of reference, apart from one or two blemishes.

But though Mr. Wolff is not uncritical of what he was enabled to see and hear—in fact, in a brief conclusion to his book, he describes the whole system as obsolescent—he manifestly did not see and hear enough to make a sig- nificant contribution to our understanding of how the penal system works in practice: to what extent constructively and to what extent destructively. It may be that his initial lack of background knowledge was a handicap to him. But the fact is that the reformative pre- tensions of the penal system are persistently belied by the published experiences of ex- prisoners. If we are ever to arrive at the truth, then there must be greater opportunity allowed for independent investigation than Mr Wolff evidently enjoyed.