They can’t even run a prison service

Capitalism is a hard and cruel master with no interest in people who can’t cope or who behave badly towards their fellow workers. Until recently, unless you worked or lived in a prison or had an incarcerated family member, you may not have been aware of how the prison service has been staggering along at risk of malfunction, if not total breakdown, at any moment.

The government’s use of early release of prisoners on two occasions since July has now brought the issue into sharp relief for us all, with their admission that the prison system is on the verge of collapse.

Prisons should be a deterrent that removes violent or predatory individuals from the rest of the population. But they should also be places where the incarcerated can be diverted away from criminal behaviour and given hope and opportunity, for example learning new skills that will enable them to become gainful workers and members of society.

Reoffenders

That is far from what currently exists. According to David Gauke, former Conservative justice secretary appointed by the current government to lead their sentencing review, nearly 90 per cent of prisoners are reoffenders.

Prison cannot be taken in isolation from other aspects of the criminal justice system such as sentencing policy or how the court system is functioning. Neither can prison be detached from the causes of offending. Many factors have interacted to create the current situation: they all deserve examination (see Box, page 14).

Overcrowding and low staffing ratios plus inexperience of staff mean that thousands of prisoners are forced to share a cell designed for one person and often prisoners are locked up for more than 22 hours a day.

Thirty-four years after the Manchester Strangeways Prison riot in 1990, the 2024 Inspection report on the riot described the prison as rat-infested and overcrowded. A nineteenth century prison warden would recognise the working day of prison staff in 2025.

Officers working in several different prisons told the Guardian they felt management did not take seriously the abuse they suffered from inmates. They were frequently told to “grow up” and “deal with it”. This suggests that the number of assaults on staff may be even greater than reported in official figures.

How has this come about?

Many factors have contributed to the deplorable state of the prison service – but the driving force behind the capacity pressures is the increased length of sentences. In October 2024 the government announced a review into sentencing, saying that the average custodial sentence length “now stands at nearly 21 months, up from about 13 months 20 years ago” and that it “has undoubtedly had a profound impact.”

This increased length of sentencing coincided with the first Blair government’s “Tough on Crime” period and continued throughout the 2010 to 2015 Coalition government. The Starmer government has now had to launch a review of sentencing hoping to end the prison crisis and ensure no government is forced into emergency release of prisoners again.

However, the “sentence inflation” sanctioned by politicians of all parties since the mid-1990s is not the whole story. Reversing this trend will not of itself resolve the crisis in the prisons.

A second huge contributing factor was the government attack on the probation service – which plays a key role in rehabilitating offenders. Unison, the union representing probation staff, has described how before 2014, the probation service was high performing and award-winning, rooted in local communities. The service was run by 35 independent probation trusts, each with its own chief probation officer.

Disastrous

In 2014, the government pushed through Chris Grayling’s disastrous “Transforming Rehabilitation” reforms. This split probation in two: centralised high-risk work in the Ministry of Justice, the rest privatised. As predicted, those reforms were a complete disaster and resulted in the government having to bail out the failing private companies.

Although the service was re-unified in 2021, it remains centralised in the civil service. Unison feels strongly that this continues to damage the ability of probation to work with local partners, and probation staff continue to suffer unmanageable workloads because of the staffing cuts which are the legacy of the private companies. Also, between 2010 and 2020, probation staff salaries rose by only 1 per cent.

Between 2010 and 2013 the number of front-line prison staff was cut by 30 per cent. These were deep and fast cuts with a significant loss of experience in controlling and working with offenders.

Drugs

A third factor is the ready availability of illegal drugs in prisons. In 2015 the then Chief Inspector of Prisons told the Guardian that this was having a “devastating impact” across the 130 penal establishments in England and Wales. This situation was, and continues to be, exacerbated by the arrival of synthetic drugs that were initially undetectable by drug tests.

Organised crime jumped on the opportunity to exploit the literally captive market of prisoners living in squalor, fear and boredom. Paramedics and ambulances are called to attend to inmates who have fits, blackouts or other adverse reactions to drugs, putting additional strain on these services’ ability to serve the local community.

‘Many factors have contributed to the deplorable state of the prison service – but the driving force behind the capacity pressures is the increased length of sentences…’

On occasions, local health trusts have withdrawn their staff from a prison because drug use was so widespread that health workers suffered from second-hand smoke fumes. Prison staff are also affected – leading to high rates of sick leave. In turn that adds to the huge increase in periods where inmates are locked in their cells, and workshops and classes go unused. This all encourages the vicious cycle of boredom and drug abuse to continue.

A fourth factor is the proliferation of gangs within prisons – localised “post code gangs”, organised crime gangs and also Muslim gangs. All three types of gangs are involved in violence, drug trafficking and attempts to take control from staff.

There are concerns that Muslim gangs in some prisons may be recruiting inmates to Islamist terrorism. Ian Acheson, who conducted a review of Islamist extremism within prisons for the Ministry of Justice, has said there is strong evidence that people convert as a pragmatic response to who controls power and space in prisons.

There are also concerns that Islamist extremists could succeed in carrying out a Jihadi murder in a prison. Alarmingly these concerns are well founded. In 2019 at HMP Whitemoor two prisoners attempted to murder a prison officer while shouting “Allahu Akbar”, and in 2020 at HMP Belmarsh, convicted Islamist terrorists attacked two prison officers.

What can be done?

Progressive thinking about workers who commit crimes and end up in prison won’t come from capitalist governments. It comes from unionised officers in the prisons, from the probation services, and from prisoner-oriented agencies and trusts. They are the ones who help prisoners to become productive when they leave prison, rather than reoffending.

‘Crime is a problem for the working class, which cannot be delegated to politicians, well intended or otherwise…’

They have forced the government into announcing a sentencing review, which is a start, but it must be accompanied by significant improvements in staff pay, in training and in conditions of service. The crucial Probation Services must be repaired. Without these changes the unremitting disaster that is the prison service will continue.

The safety of prisoners and prison staff must be paramount – this should not need saying, but it clearly does. The staff union, the Prison Officers’ Association (POA), is calling for all officers to be issued with PAVA incapacitant spray.

They argue that if prisoners are made aware that officers have this spray it will reduce the number of assaults and the number of injuries that can occur when physical force is used as a last resort to restrain prisoners. The POA are also calling for staff to be issued with stab utility vests.

Safety

The Prison Governors’ Association, representing managers, is equally clear about the safety risks arising from overcrowding and lack of capacity and the detrimental impact on rehabilitation.

The drug culture in prisons needs to be firmly tackled. For example the low resource tool of analysing the wastewater of all prisons for the presence of drugs is successfully used in Australia and the US. It provides an accurate record of the type and prevalence of drug use unit by unit.

Corrupt staff who endanger colleagues by bringing drugs into prisons could be tackled by a strict, time limited amnesty if they provide full disclosure and intelligence.

The government needs to listen to staff, their trade unions such as POA and Unison, and effective support agencies such as charity Tempus Novo on strategies which stop reoffending, help prisoners into work, and tackle gang culture. They have a 95 per cent success rate in getting ex-offenders into jobs.

It’s a truism that the victims of crime are more likely to be people from areas with high rates of crime. In other words, it’s a problem for the working class, which can’t be delegated to politicians, well intended or otherwise.

We need a whole society approach to address the causes of crime – such as addiction to drugs or gambling. That often leads to opportunistic theft such as shoplifting or burglary and is associated with being without a job or a home. High quality support programmes need to be available to offending addicts as part of non-custodial sentences.  

In short, the current chaos needs to be replaced with control, order and hope. It is only workers that can drive these changes – they won’t be gifted by governments which have no interest in the welfare of workers who have fallen on difficult times or who need support to become useful  members of society.

• Related Article: Prisons: the facts