Crisis in the prisons

Peter Ackroyd

During one recent summer there were approximately fifteen hundred inmates in Liverpool prison, a Victorian building which had been designed originally for one thousand men. There were only twenty officers on duty on a long, hot night; and then the banging started. The prisoners thumped on the walls, the doors, the bars. The whole prison reverberated to this concerted demonstration against the sheer numbers, the heat, the smell, the proximity. The landing shook under the officers' feet, and the noise didn't stop.

Roy Jenkins, when he was Home Secretary in 1975, declared that a prison population of 42,000 would place the whole system in a state of crisis — that, in other words, it would cease to work. But Home Secretaries tend to be more transient than Prisoners or prison staff. Last year the Prison population had reached 42,155 and there are no signs of it diminishing. For every prisoner in custody before the war, there are now three. No new prisons were built in this country between 1918 and 1958. Of the fifty six closed prisons, only thirteen have been built since 1914. It is as if we were still trying to fight our domestic battles on horseback. Liverpool prison was constructed in 1851 to house 1016 inmates; it now has a population of approximately seventeen hundred prisoners. Birmingham Prison was built for 603 prisoners; it now holds 1100. These statistics don't vary from region to region. For the majority of prisoners in this country, conditions are actually worse than those which the Victorians intended to create ; and this situation is deteriorating all the time.

Everyone deplores it; nothing is done about it. It's a familiar story. In the local Prisons of this country — where men will go who have been convicted but not sentenced, and where most short-term offenders will serve their time — the inmates will be locked in, or 'banged up', between twenty and twenty three hours each day. Everyone deplores it; nothing is done about it. Two or three men will inhabit a cell which was designed for one — there's no room to stand, SO they will lie down. The walls are grimy; the radio blares out. Any prisoner, given a certain amount of luck, will get one hour's exercise in the yard; with even more luck, he will have a bath once a week. For sanitation, two or three of them will use the pot In their cell.

And what kind of people, apart from the Petty offenders and the drunks and the tramps, p might one expect to find enduring these conditions? You might find in the Young prisoners' wing of a local prison, as I have done, a boy of fifteen who is here because there is still no suitable place for him in borstal. You might find, as I have done, a boy of seventeen who has been convicted of taking and driving away a car; he will spend three weeks here, before being taken to court and fined. He has, in the meantime, shared his cell with a much harder and more articulate young man who has already been convicted on five other occasions. What is the more destructive force — the boy's minor offence, or the inner workings of his society which he is observing in action for the first time? And what do these boys do when they come here, I asked a cheerful assistant governor. 'They cry a lot.' The same phrase, trite but apt, appears regularly in the conversations of prison staff: 'We're taking a steam hammer to crack a nut'. 'If you had told me fifteen years ago,' the governor of Liverpool prison explained, 'that we would be living under this kind of regime, I wouldn't have believed you'.

The prisons of this country are society's ultimate sanction — they are the things villains are running away from in television melodramas — and yet they are hardly visible. Someone has escaped; there is a riot somewhere; confused reports emerge in the. press: A young prisoner who became depressed when he was moved to Dartmoor hanged himself in his cell nine days later. Mr Marshall was found suspended from the bars of his cell window with a noose of bedding round his neck. Before his transfer on November 29, he petitioned the Home Secretary against the move. He asked not to be sent to 'this cold, damp, dismal place where it is almost impossible for my parents to visit me'. The Home Office yesterday declined to give any details about Mr Marshall's prison history or his petition.

The Guardian, 15 December 1978 The page is turned.

For the first seventeen years of my life I lived within a hundred yards of Wormwood Scrubs, a large and complex prison, and yet I hardly noticed it. I don't even remember anyone mentioning it. People take the mystery and impenetrability of prison for granted. They are, in more than one sense, the vanishing point of our society.

And yet, as the Hull riots of 1976 and this month's trial of certain officers have proved, such invisibility can no longer be taken for granted. Prisons are seen as solid and conventional institutions, in sepia rather than in colour, and yet they change in the same way as our society changes—albeit at a slower pace, and the transformation in English life since the Sixties is now beginning to hit the prison system, with potentially explosive results. Financial resources are being strangled at precisely the moment when the prison population is becoming more recalcitrant. The men now 'going inside' tend to be younger and more violent; they are also more sophisticated, questioning the wholenature of authority and punishment. In Wakefield prison, a 'dispersal prison' designed for lifers and highly dangerous 'Category A' prisoners, there are 150 inmates under the age of 25. Such men tend to be angry and watchful; they have very little left to lose. It should be rememberad that even a highly secure prison like Wakefield can only be administered on the sufferance of the prisoners themselves. And at night, in most English prisons, the proportion of prisoners to officers is seventy to one. Hull, an apparently tolerant and peaceful prison, exploded within two hours — with damage estimated at £750,000.

Under these conditions, prison officers themselves will naturally tend to become more anxious and aggressive. It is now alleged that, in Hull prison, these anxieties and resentments took the form of systematic brutality. But it may be significant that I have heard very few criticisms from prisoners about the older officers in the prison service; most complaints concern the behaviour of the younger staff. These young officers are part of the silent revolution in the prison system, as it becomes both more technocratic and more impersonal. The Chief Inspector of Prisons puts this in its bureaucratic context in his report on the disturbances at Hull: 'the last five years have seen in dispersal prisons the withdrawal of the prison officer from a central role involving both custody and treatment to the more peripheral role of observer'. 'Management control' is the key. Everything is to be done with the maximum of efficiency and the minimum of fuss. Cameras scan the grounds of Wakefield, and the officers carry walkie-talkies; in Coldingley prison, the cells are locked and unlocked from a central control room. Prisoners are rapidly becoming the objects of observation rather than the subjects of communication. Entering certain prisons now is like entering a nuclear reactor.

It is not yet clear whether public knowledge has caught up with the actual facts of the case, and 'opinion' still tends to meander into trite and sterile debates about the relative merits of being 'hard' or 'soft' on prisoners. Dark, Victorian engravings of tread-mills, of silent men in their cages, of chained men bowed in prayer, fuelled public fantasies of guilt and punishment. And the myths are still easier to assimilate: the popular press splutters about prisoners' privileges, just as the more 'concerned' as our writers and dramatists depict a world invaded by violence and corruption — the dark underside of a massively unjust and surreptitiously brutal culture. The reality, as far as I can gauge it, is more tedious and less importunate. The florid days of 'the barons', the tough criminals who would organise protection rackets, appear, for example, to be drawing to a close. The easy, conspiratorial relationships between 'old lags' and the 'screws' has been slowly but steadily eroded; the solidarity between prisoners themselves is disappearing. The impersonality and distrust which have permeated other aspects of national life have now invaded the prisons as well.

Certain things, however do not change. One assistant governor told me that he was accidentally locked inside a cell, and he panicked. The only way to deal with the trauma and depression of punishment is to live it from day to day, not looking ahead: waking up, slopping out, work, food, locking up, sleep. Some prisoners are bewildered; others are in despair. But for the majority of inmates the prevailing mood is one of boredom, the atmosphere one of monotonous routine. 'People die a little in here'. In the small exercise yard of a local prison, a group of Rule 43 prisoners — those men who have segregated themselves voluntarily from the rest of the prison population — trudged around in a circle. One of them, a young man convicted of a peculiarly odious sexual crime, walked at a slight angle away from the circle; he walked alone, with a slightly affected, strutting step. 'He seems very sure of himself.' I said. 'No. He's just terrified'.

The dehumanising processes of prison life work at every level, and it is difficult to know just how much that young man may have to endure. Prisons will remain secret societies, the subject of gossip rather than of fact, sources of myth rather than of information. Ex-prisoners have told me that most prison officers are corrupt, that they will smuggle drugs and money into the prison for certain inmates. All ranks of staff deny this. I have heard prison officers described as 'animals', .with detailed cases of physical and even sexual assault. And yet officers always insist that their relations with prisoners are excellent, and that prisons can only exist on the basis of 'mutual trust'. I have been informed by prisoners of medical incompetence and malpractice; the senior doctor at Wormwood Scrubs told me that his unit had fewer post-operative complications than in an outside hospital. It is impossible for an outsider to resolve these disparities, only to acknowledge them. Racked on the wheel of boredom and monotonous routine, both staff and inmates easily become the victims of pettiness and rumour; specific offences and generalised allegations intensify and feed off each other.

Such endemic secrecy and restriction pose peculiar psychological problems for both prisoners and staff. The mass of petty regulations, the censorship of prisoners' letters, and the apparently endless number of reports and assessments, breed an atmosphere of mutual distrust. The process, on a personal level, is known as 'winding up', a form of psychological coercion practiced on both sides, the insidious struggle for mastery in a small and enclosed space.

The most potent weapon in the continuing, unacknowledged warfare between prisoners and staff is that of parole; it is, theoretically, a benign device whereby any prisoner, serving a sentence of over eighteen months, can on the basis of good reports end his term of imprisonment early and return, supervised, to the community. In practice, parole breeds frustration, anxiety, envy and distrust. Many of the senior prison staff dislike the whole process of parole because it re-introduces the principle of arbitrariness within the judicial system — a prisoner will never be told, for example, why parole is in his case 'not advisable at this stage'. Prisoners repeated the phrase to me like the last line of a joke. Indeed the only members of the prison service who are enthusiastic about the notion of parole are those officers who superintend the prisoners on a daily basis; for them, as one explained to me, 'it's a good instrument of manipulation'. Parole is actually used as a form of behavioural control; abusive or eccentric behaviour will immediately affect any man's chance of early release. 'How else and by what better means,' one prisoner wrote to me, 'can you make a man behave than by making him an offer of probable parole which he cannot refuse?' The potential for unjust assessment and for discrimination is clearly great; but in a closed society, these psychological brutalities seem to spring up unwittingly, as though the alchemy of prison turns even the most well intentioned social experiment into an agent of frustration and despair. The same smell pervades all prisons; it is not a specific or even obnoxious smell, but rather the odour of depressions, the combined exhalation of those who have failed. That smell has now become part of the prison itself. The institution has become implicated in the past and future of its inmates; it might even be said that it bears some of their guilt.

It cannot be claimed that these places, the ultimate sanction of our penal system, have been a success: The proper end of human punishment is not the satisfaction of justice but the prevention of crime. Paley. Moral Philosophy.

But the crime rate rises rapidly, apparently irreversibly. Approximately 50 per cent of inmates are, after their release, convicted again within two years. The recidivism rate is of the order of 70 per cent. Prisons help to promote delinquency because of the forced association of first offenders with persistent criminals; they may even help to promote organised crime. Prisons have created a vast army of institutionalised offenders.

The staff and officers of the prison service are clearly not to be blamed for these developments. Most of them are aware of the situation and are greatly troubled by it; they are being asked to enforce a policy of containment and rehabilitation which they know to be largely ineffective — and often unnecessary. 'There are,' one senior officer explained to me, 'only about 100 people in this prison who actually need to be locked up'. This is, on the face of it, a startling proposition. Fourteen hundred people are being given the wrong treatment, as though we were amputating the limbs of men who were suffering from rheumatism. And this is not, after all, the position of a penal reformer — it springs from an officer's direct observation of the men now coming into prison, of their past record and probable destiny. Society has created prisons, but it has not allowed them to succeed; it has filled them to the point where they can hold no more; and it has largely done so with the incompetent, the immature and the unstable.

Prisons can, in this sense, be very lonely places. There are a great many alcoholics and drug addicts. There are many very disturbed inmates, who should be in mental hospitals rather than in prisons; one cell was plastered with pictures of a prisoner's family: baptisms, christenings, Christmas groups around the tree. The man had been sentenced to life imprisonment for raping his own children. Men lie in the psychiatric ward, with the blankets pulled over their heads. There are also a large number of institutionalised people here, prison fodder. It is important to understand the human truth of being 'institutionalised'. One exinmate is now 42, and has spent 27 years in prison for a succession of petty offences. He spent his early years in an orphanage. 'I asked myself what life was all about, and I didn't know. Nobody knew'. A series of small thefts put him into borstal and then prison; the closed and regimented life was something he had known from infancy and, since the outside world had offered him very little, 'inside' was at least tolerable. But the more frequently he went inside, the less easy it became for him to cope with an external community which was — and for most prisoners still remains— suspicious and unforgiving. When I talked to him, he had been out for four months — the longest period in his life. He hadn't found an employer who wanted him; because many of his petty frauds had to do with social security, his statutory benefits were continually questioned and delayed. For him, prison now affords a large measure of protection — and also a form of self-protection. He has now resigned himself to going back, and dying inside. He tells me, quite chirpily, that there are lots of 'cons' like him. I have seen them myself, walking around exercise yards, sitting on cell beds, standing to attention when the officers come in, smiling rather sheepishly. 'A lot of them' the governor said, 'just get lost'. When you hear talk about a 'crisis of confidence' within the prison system, then, it means something quite specific: once the staff have their prisoners safely contained, the one and apparently only requirement of 'public opinion', they are not at all sure what they are supposed to do with them. Next week, I will explore their available options and their inevitable failure.