10

That Little Tent of Blue

Prison Riots

I never saw a man who looked

With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

Which prisoners call the sky

And at every drifting cloud that went

With sails of silver by.

Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)

Over the years I have had to visit most of the prisons in the UK penal system, many of which are unremittingly depressing and oppressive. We have managed to remain at the top of the European prison population poll – at the time of writing this, more than 83,000 inmates – and the government was even considering reintroducing Dickensian prison hulks to deal with the excess.

In most prisons human rights are a non-existent concept, and for most prisoners being inside is a dehumanising and degrading experience, with prison regimes in the main attempting to control and contain, rather than educate and rehabilitate. As a lawyer I am very familiar with the frustrations of cancelled and delayed visits, sometimes missing clients altogether due to unexpected transfers. The awkwardness of the prison authorities can make life very frustrating, but every cloud . . .

I once travelled all the way to Blundeston, a prison in the Suffolk outback, only to find that my client had been transferred to London that very morning. There was no way we could get back to see him and so, it being a beautiful summer day, my legal companion and I paid a surprise visit to an artistic community she’d heard of along the coast at Southwold. It turned out to be a naturist commune (gratifyingly supported by Adnams Ale), which required visitors to strip off. I managed everything but my socks.

Prisons stop at nothing in the interests of so-called security. The indignity of frisking and strip-searching at high-security facilities; the endless delays and lack of privacy. Bugging scandals come as no surprise; I’ve been trading notes at conferences with my clients for years, because prison interview rooms have long had ears (as the solicitor and Labour MP Sadiq Khan discovered in 2008). Prison visiting has always been a catalogue of aggravation. But if it’s like that for a QC, what must it be like for the prisoners and their families? Far worse.

In 1983 I became involved in a siege at Parkhurst High Security Prison on the Isle of Wight, and it was like a nightmare come true.

My connection was through a prisoner named John Bowden, a South Wales lad turned bad by drink and unemployment, who had come to London, where he sold newspapers on the street for the Socialist Workers’ Party. I had defended him at the Old Bailey in relation to a particularly grotesque and gruesome killing which gave rise to allegations that the victim had been dismembered and decapitated whilst still alive, having been rendered unconscious in a hot bath, and that part of the body had been stored in a refrigerator. Following the trial in 1982, Bowden was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommended minimum term of 25 years.

I had gone away for the weekend with my family to a hotel in Norfolk and had left no forwarding telephone number because I wanted a few days away undisturbed. After an enjoyable break I was about to drive back to London with a car load of children when the hotel receptionist ran out and said that somebody wanted me urgently on the telephone. Wondering how anyone could have found me, I went back to the hotel lobby and took the call. It was a Daily Mirror journalist, who told me that there was a major prison siege at Parkhurst, and that my client Bowden had the Assistant Governor in his office at knife-point and was threatening to kill him unless I went down to speak to him.

The Mirror had arranged a helicopter to take me immediately to the Isle of Wight, but I refused the offer as I didn’t want to get tied up with a newspaper. Instead I drove home as fast as I could, to find the house surrounded by journalists waiting to speak to me. I took the family in, settled them down and considered what I should do next, deciding that I wouldn’t rush into anything. I telephoned the prison to say that I was willing to help, but they declined my offer and said that there was no need, and under those circumstances there was no point in going if they were not willing to let me in. So I told the press to go away while I awaited any other official requests. In the middle of the night I was telephoned by somebody in the Home Office, asking if I would be prepared to go down. I agreed, explaining that I had been waiting for the past four hours or so.

To my amazement, they didn’t send round a fast car immediately, but said that a police car would pick me up at dawn, another five hours away. It did indeed come at the allotted time and rushed me through the deserted London streets at a rate that would have got us to the Isle of Wight in an hour. But then, even more to my astonishment, it swept into Waterloo Station, where the driver handed me a ticket for the milk train to Portsmouth.

Between the Home Secretary phoning and the police car arriving, the Daily Mirror had been on the phone regularly, but I had declined the use of their resources. However, they then told me that a young reporter was going to go to Parkhurst with me, because Bowden had asked to speak to someone from the Mirror as well. In addition, my solicitor, Michael Fisher, and my junior counsel at trial, Dora Belford, agreed to come.

We all arrived at the prison at about the same time on a rather cold morning, and again the press was waiting. We were ushered into a conference room with the prison psychiatrist, the Governor and many more, all of them trying to dissuade me from doing anything, on the basis that Bowden was a known psychopath who would carve me up in front of the press, and they could not guarantee my safety. I asked for a private line to Bowden because I felt that if I could speak to him, I could probably get through to him psychologically and discover what the real problem was, but the authorities refused. Eventually, as there was no progress and the Assistant Governor still had a knife at his throat, they agreed, though I suspected that the line they’d provided was being listened to.

In our first phone conversation, just as he had been at his trial, Bowden was perfectly reasonable, indicating – as in so many of these prison siege and riot cases – that the real problem was to do with conditions: solitary confinement, punishment blocks and so on, but mainly interference with mail and telephone calls, access to lawyers, and the fact that the prisoners were always being moved from one prison to another at a moment’s notice. He went on to say that in order to release the Assistant Governor, he wanted me – and me alone – to go to meet him, where he would make a statement that had to go on the front page of the Daily Mirror the next day, and he would then release his prisoner.

I asked him, ‘What guarantee do I have that you will keep your word?’ He replied that he would throw all of his weapons out of the office window on the ground floor as he saw me walking across the prison yard, and that in turn he would have to trust that I wasn’t coming with guns on me, or supported by hidden prison officers.

Funnily enough, I did trust him, and having sorted out this bizarre strategy, I then had the difficult task of trying to persuade the prison authorities that I didn’t want any kind of armed guard. I asked that all the sharp-shooters be taken off the roof, and wanted no prison officers whatsoever within sight of Bowden, along with a promise that they would not storm the wing where the office was – at which point they said that if they were to do what I asked, then whatever happened to me would be my own responsibility. I replied that as far as my own safety was concerned, the only people I wanted with me were the young Mirror journalist (who by this time was quite shaken at the prospect of going across the yard without any protection) and my junior, Dora, who was extremely courageous in agreeing to accompany me.

I shall never forget that walk from the office to the prison wing. It was one of those occasions when there was a great stillness – not a leaf moved, not a bird fluttered, no sound anywhere – and I sensed that every single prisoner was at a window watching me. And it was even more terrifying as I had recently seen the dramatic reconstruction of a prison siege at Attica jail in the USA, which had ended in disaster. Clearly there must have been prison officers hidden away, but also watching, so all eyes were on this apparently empty yard.

Each pace was like a mile, and with each stride I wondered whether I’d been completely mad to agree, but there was no turning back. I hardly dared look up from the ground, for fear that any untoward movement might be misinterpreted by the onlookers. After what seemed an eternity we got close to the window and, true to Bowden’s word, various weapons were thrown out – though they turned out to be an adapted pair of scissors and a sharpened comb. I hoped, of course, that he hadn’t kept any back. He then dictated to the reporter, through the window, the statement that he wanted put in the press. Every word seemed to take a painfully long time, which I trusted would not push the patience of the prison authorities beyond the limit.

I then had to go round and into the office to ensure that the Assistant Governor was released unharmed as part of the bargain. The ultimate phase was in a way the worst, because I had to wait while Bowden unlocked the door and I couldn’t be sure what I was going to find. I had a kaleidoscope of thoughts. Suppose my trust was misplaced and Bowden had kept back a proper knife? Suppose he rushed me? Suppose he wanted to take the Assistant Governor with him in order to secure his release? How would I react?

When just seconds later the door opened, my panicky fears were unjustified – but I was surprised to see Bowden not only with the Assistant Governor, but also with another prisoner. I asked Bowden to let the hostage come out first, so that I could see he was unharmed. Thankfully, he was.

The feeling of relief was immense, but I insisted that I accompany Bowden to make sure that he wasn’t beaten up before being taken to the hospital wing.

I then had an interview with the Governor, and tried to extract a promise that there would be no prosecution of Bowden, otherwise it would make the resolution without bloodshed of sieges of this kind impossible in the future. If in fact Bowden was punished within the prison system, prosecuted or beaten up by prison officers, he wouldn’t be as cooperative, should there be a next time. At that stage he was indeed treated properly and was not harmed, but eventually he was prosecuted, and I gave evidence on his behalf at his trial. He got extra time.

Our dramatic negotiations with Bowden were regarded as a success and lives had been saved, but it didn’t end there. The young journalist spoke to the night editor of the Daily Mirror, who initially refused to print the statement in its entirety on the front page because it named certain prison officers. I spoke to the editor myself and said that if he didn’t put it on the front page in an unedited form, I would make it known that the Daily Mirror had reneged on the deal and had put other lives in jeopardy. The article was printed on the front page.

While I didn’t expect any particular gratitude for the role I’d played in getting the Assistant Governor released, I did find it odd that when I bumped into him at the main gate on a subsequent visit to Parkhurst, he didn’t say a word, but just walked on by. As for the Home Secretary of the day, I received a most perfunctory acknowledgement. Tant pis!

Although the brutal manner in which he drew attention to his grievances can in no way be condoned, John Bowden had just cause to protest, for the 1980s saw a massive increase in prison overcrowding, especially in local prisons and remand centres where innocent or as-yet-unconvicted people awaited trial. And there was no greater example of the malaise at the heart of the prison system than Risley Remand Centre, near Warrington in Cheshire.

Opened in 1964, Risley was a modern facility built to hold 608 prisoners: 514 men and 94 women. Just over twenty years later it was holding 956 prisoners – 831 men and 125 women – and physical conditions were as bad as they were in the crumbling Victorian prisons such as Strangeways in nearby Manchester.

At Risley, prisoners were in their cells for more than twenty hours a day, while the food was revolting, prepared and served in unhygienic conditions. Before the ‘riot’ in 1989 there had been three suicides in the space of five weeks, yet none of the suicide-prevention measures supposedly functioning across the prison system had been activated. No wonder that in 1988 the Chief Inspector of Prisons, Stephen Tumim, described Risley as ‘barbarous and squalid’, ‘appalling and totally unacceptable’, ‘dirty and dilapidated’.

On 1 May 1989 Risley erupted, in a protest led by an articulate black man called Wadi Williams, who had originally sprung to prominence with his involvement in the Spaghetti House siege in Knightsbridge in 1975. Rough breaks and poor education had led him down a criminal path, but he came to realise his disadvantage and was eventually one of those prisoners who used his time wisely, becoming an Open University graduate.

That May Day, 120 prisoners from D wing at Risley assembled in the exercise yard, planning to stage a symbolic sit-down protest to draw attention to the horrendous conditions in which they were kept. However, a separate protest the night before on B wing had been put down by the ‘MUFTI’ squad – Minimum Use of Force Tactical Intervention squads were the prison officers’ equivalent of riot police, later replaced by Control and Restraint teams – and it seemed unlikely that the D-wing protest would even be able to begin before there was violent intervention. The D-wing men therefore changed tactics and decided to occupy a landing inside the prison. Wadi Williams described the events that followed:

With the MUFTI on the ground floor corridor rushing up the stairs we had a serious head-on confrontation. We were seriously concerned for our safety, given the squad’s reputation for gross violence and brutality . . . We quickly fashioned a barricade and the struggle for control of the wing was on. We were obliged to confront the staves and shields of the MUFTI with whatever was to hand. This included pouring concentrated liquid soap down the stairs to stop them rushing up the stairwell; doors were taken off their hinges and used to barricade the main access area . . . After 10–15 minutes we gained control of landing 5 and turned our attention to landing 6 . . . There was a race between us and the MUFTI as to who would gain control of the flat roof connecting the wing . . . There then ensued a brief but fierce struggle, after which they retreated and we were able to establish our defensive line and take control of the main roof and effectively take control of D wing . . . The uprising was now in full swing!¹

Fifty-four protesters stayed on the roof of D wing for three days. They held up banners and shouted down demands to the media for an inquiry and for improvements to conditions, and for no reprisals against them when they came down. As they staged their rooftop protest, many supporters watched from outside the prison walls.

Among the protesters, the level of political awareness was high. Prison officers taunted the white prisoners, shouting, ‘Throw the niggers off the roof!’ and ‘How can you be led by niggers?’, but the protesters refused to be divided along racial lines. The men made democratic decisions and finally gave themselves up as a united group, having negotiated for solicitors to be present and for photographs to be taken of themselves, in case they were beaten up later on.

I represented Wadi when he and the other fifty-three were charged with riot, and although riot is defined as ‘unlawful violence for a common purpose’, we mounted a case on the grounds of self-defence against an inhumane system. This was a first, in which I was supported by prison law expert Tim Owen and solicitor Jeremy Hawthorne, manic Liverpool FC fan and an everlasting fount of hilarious political anecdotes; we argued that the inmates were using ‘reasonable force’ in a situation where they were effectively falsely imprisoned. Much of the ‘riot’ was on CCTV, so when the seventy prison officers began to give evidence, it soon became clear that some of them were lying. Under pressure they admitted racism, hosing the prisoners on the roof, scant knowledge of suicide precautions, and the use of force. Some also admitted that Risley was a dump.

Suddenly some new evidence was sprung on us. It emerged that a course tutor in Hull Prison (where Wadi had been transferred from Risley) thought it his moral duty to hand over to the prosecution an article written by Wadi that was graphic in its description of events during the ‘uprising’, as the prisoner called it. (The account above is an excerpt from this article.) The idea of this manoeuvre was to try to discredit Wadi, destroy confidence in the protest and divide the defendants, but it failed, and the public gallery certainly enjoyed the more lyrical elements of the article. When it was time for the course tutor to explain his rationale, I had barely begun my cross-examination when I turned to find that he had fainted and collapsed over the side of the witness box. The very same thing had happened to the first witness in the first trial I ever did. What is it about me?

The trial had its diverting moments. One of the inmates, who was defending himself, would occasionally begin the morning’s proceedings by producing his breakfast on a plate, turning it upside down to show how it had congealed and stuck to the dish. Another diversion came when graffiti appeared on the outside walls of Walton jail in Liverpool, where the defendants were held, announcing in true theatrical-poster style: ‘coming soon – ken dodd!’ The entertainer was facing tax-evasion charges at the time, but he was acquitted and never did make an appearance in Walton jail.

When the jury heard the defendants’ serious catalogue of grievances, they were understandably horrified and were convinced that things had to change, but the judge was unsympathetic towards the prisoners and directed the jury to ignore our arguments of justified protest. The jury, however, chose to ignore him and acquitted all of them – and the Risley protesters celebrated, in Wadi’s words, ‘the awesome creative strength . . . released in people whom society had for so long dismissed as irrelevant’.²

After his release, Wadi was subsequently nabbed burrowing into a bank in Norfolk, a region where his colour rather marked him out – and so it was back to jail for him. I hope that by now he is free and rebuilding a life that better uses his charismatic powers, though I shouldn’t wonder if he still signs his letters with the acronym ‘RITS’ – ‘Revolution Is The Solution’. The prosecution never did work it out. They thought it was like ‘SWALK’ – ‘Sealed With A Loving Kiss’ – a term of endearment!

(I later used Wadi’s name for the boy hero in a children’s book entitled Whale Boy,³ for which my teenage daughter Anna created some charming drawings. These inspired our friend Maggie Raynor, a professional illustrator, to provide beautiful illustrations for the published version. I donated my royalties to Friends of the Earth and the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, and hope they saved a few – and I’m delighted that the book is still set reading in some London schools.)

Risley was rebuilt after the uprising, and the men’s remand centre was converted to take category-C prisoners, serving medium-length sentences. Conditions in the refurbished blocks were much improved by an end to slopping-out, more visits, less censorship and greater access to telephones, while staff attitudes became less aggressive. However, by 1993 the increasing remand population in the north-west was once again being housed at Risley, with unconvicted prisoners being put in the old, condemned wings of the prison.

The ‘women’s side’ of Risley remained unremittingly dire: overcrowded, uncaring and unsanitary. When the new Chief Inspector of Prisons, Sir David Ramsbotham, visited in 1996, women told him that the previous weekend they had been locked up the whole time, except for meals; that there had been no access to the phone; that there were inadequate bathing facilities and nits and fleas were spreading; that staff treated the women like children and assumed all prisoners were drug-takers, but there was no assistance for those who were; that male officers were looking into women’s cells; that the food was disgusting; that prisoners were being arbitrarily transferred across the country; and that visitors had long waits to get in. And so the age-old problems resurface and are perpetuated. When will this merry-go-round finally come to a stop?

The Risley verdict was a public humiliation for the government, and one it would take major steps to avoid in future: in the wake of the massive revolt that spread from Strangeways Prison through the entire system the following April, criminal charges were deliberately rephrased so as to render a political defence virtually impossible.

The Strangeways riot on Sunday 1 April 1990 involved a notorious rooftop protest led by Paul Taylor, whom I subsequently represented, and former prisoner Eric Allison wrote an important summary of the conditions there in a book entitled Strangeways 1990: A Serious Disturbance, for which I wrote the foreword. Eric is an ex-con, so his experiences are first-hand and therefore entirely authentic.

To the outsider, Strangeways – before April Fool’s Day 1990 – was just another dustbin of a local prison. The sort to be found in most major cities. Old, though far from crumbling, the squalid Victorian relic was grim, overcrowded and crawling with cockroaches. Two or three men were sharing cells designed in the 19th century as the minimum space that one man could live in. Within that space (12ft × 8ft) the men would eat, sleep and perform all their bodily functions. When they needed to piss or crap after the last ‘slop­out’, they would do so in open buckets, or wrap their excrement in newspaper, to hurl out of the barred window. Each and every morning, the ‘shit parcel patrol’ would collect hundreds of these offerings from the floor of the exercise yards. Small wonder the cockroaches and rats prospered. The food was lousy, as was access to showers or baths (once a week), and communication with the outside world severely limited – one letter a week and a visit once a month. But as bad as the conditions were, they served only to annoy, inconvenience and humiliate the prisoners. The factor that engendered the rage and hate among the jail’s population was the brutal, sadistic and savage behaviour of a sizeable section of the staff.

You see, above all else, Strangeways was a ‘screws’ nick’; it was the staff’s writ that ran, not the rules supposedly put in place by the Home Office. And they were proud of it. They took pleasure in letting you know in no uncertain terms that it was their jail. The general attitude was epitomised by the ‘heavy mob’, the bullies who handed out the beatings and were far from ashamed of it. These men strutted the wings and landings in their steel toe-capped boots and slashed peaked caps. In the 1960s, many of this group wore National Front badges on their uniform – in a prison with a large black and ethnic minority population.

The segregation unit at Strangeways – known as ‘the block’ – was where the worst of the treatment was dished out. I spent many months there, in that prison within a prison, in the two decades that preceded the uprising. I heard the screams and saw the blood-spattered walls that evidenced the torture. So confident were my keepers that they made no attempt to hide the nature of the regime from the priests, doctors and governors who, supposedly, went down the block to monitor the welfare of those segregated.

That is why, on that April Fool’s Day in 1990, during a period when I was at liberty, I went down to Strangeways to express my solidarity with the generation who had said enough was enough and rioted.⁴

The eruption at Strangeways should not have been a surprise to anyone, as it followed years of tension and frustration within British jails: in 1990 alone, there were major disturbances at over twenty prisons. Conditions were dehumanising and prisoners’ complaints rejected by the authorites, while families’ needs were neglected as well.

Shortly after 10.25 a.m. that Sunday, the Reverend Noel Proctor found himself facing an unusually large and restless congregation at his morning service. As he delivered his sermon, one of his 300-strong audience, twenty-eight-year-old Liverpudlian Paul Taylor, snatched the microphone and, sparking the events that would cause more than £55 million-worth of damage, declared: ‘This man has just talked about the blessings of the heart and about how a hardened heart can be delivered. No, it cannot, not with resentment, anger and bitterness being instilled in people.’

Minutes later vital keys were in the hands of the prisoners and being used to release everyone, and with only 100 guards to control up to 1,647 inmates, the struggle was one-sided. The officers soon deserted the prison.

In any prison, sex offenders are the ‘beasts’, ‘monsters’ or ‘nonces’, and before long the Strangeways prisoners had turned on unconvicted sex offenders on remand in C and E wings. The paedophiles were beaten and kicked, and one remand prisoner, forty-six-year-old Derek White, later died from his injuries.

Fires were started in parts of the building as dozens of prisoners scrambled onto the roof, and as a helicopter hovered overhead, police reinforcements were met with a bombardment of slates. On the Monday, as the world’s press gathered outside, prisoners returned to the roof in makeshift balaclavas, continuing to hurl both missiles and abuse as, below, MUFTI officers in riot gear fought to gain control of four of the nine accommodation wings.

By the third day many inmates were beginning to feel the pressure, and violence gave way to negotiation, but as the days progressed the protest became a siege. The authorities responded by cutting off the electricity supply, spraying the roof with cold water and playing loud pop music non-stop, to wear down the prisoners’ resolve. A steady trickle of prisoners gave themselves up, until only a hard core of protesters remained.

Taylor, the ringleader, used a traffic-cone as a megaphone to transmit his messages to the press, blaming the ‘arrogant and ignorant attitudes’ of the staff and maintaining that the prisoners had only planned a peaceful sit-in. He also sent a message of condolence to the family of Walter Scott, a prison officer with a history of heart disease, who had unfortunately died of cardiac failure.

On 25 April, after three and a half weeks of protest, which had made headlines around the world, the last five men to surrender were carried from the roof in a hydraulic ‘cherry picker’, with Taylor, the last man down, raising a clenched fist in a final gesture of defiance.

The Strangeways riot was the biggest protest in British penal history. When it was over, this Victorian fortress – a symbol of state power at the heart of Manchester city centre – lay in ruins, and when the dust had settled two men were dead, 194 inmates and staff had been injured and the gutted prison needed total rebuilding.

To defend Paul Taylor at the subsequent trial I was briefed by solicitor Mary Monson, who put me up when I was in Manchester and was endlessly generous and frenetically fearless. Unfortunately, when it comes to dogs I am not, and her two Rottweilers terrified the life out of me on a regular basis, but I thoroughly enjoyed playing football with her sons at the end of a court day.

The protesters were put on trial in groups, and on 14 January 1992 nine of the core ‘ringleaders’ went before a jury in Manchester Crown Court: it must have been intimidating for them as there was heavy security, with armed police, a bulletproof dock and screening of all lawyers and relatives. The men had all been charged with riot and some with the murder of Derek White, the alleged sex offender on remand, but before long the murder charges were dropped for lack of adequate evidence, combined with the fact that White had a pre-existing thrombotic condition.

Unlike the Risley trial, we were unable to run a ‘self-defence’ case, but were forced to concentrate on the minutiae of who did what to whom, because larger issues of social policy were disallowed.

This was the only time in my career where during trial I was obliged to withdraw my representation, because my position had been compromised by my client’s change of instructions. (For reasons of client confidentiality, I am not permitted to reveal what the change was.) Taylor defended himself, was convicted of riot and spent an extra ten years in prison – but it is my understanding that he received sackloads of fan mail, particularly from women who had seen him bare-chested on the roof at Strangeways and were offering proposals of marriage. Despite having parted company, we remained on good terms.

The Strangeways riot made a difference. The prison was rebuilt and renamed HMP Manchester. Slopping out was ended; phones were installed on the landings; showers could be taken daily; and the men were out of their cells longer than they were in them. But as at Risley, the biggest difference was the staff’s attitude: the arrogance was gone.

Risley was in many senses a precursor to Strangeways. Both protests exposed appalling conditions and the brutality of prison officers; both destroyed the myth that only long-term prisoners would protest; both wrecked large sections of the prisons, forcing closure and refurbishment. In other ways Risley was very different from Strangeways: the protesters there were far more organised, and although it was easier for the state to contain the riot physically, it was much harder to deal with politically. The new offence of prison mutiny in the Prison Security Act, introduced in 1992, was as much a response to the deliberate political protest at Risley as to the largely spontaneous uprising at Strangeways. It states that ‘any prisoner who takes part in a prison mutiny where two or more prisoners, while on the premises of any prison, engage in conduct which is intended to further a common purpose of overthrowing lawful authority in that prison shall be guilty of an offence’.⁵ It attracts a maximum ten-year prison sentence. This is equivalent to the repeated attacks on the right to strike. If nobody listens, as they clearly don’t, then prisoners may be driven to stage protests – which of course should not endanger life, but which should not be categorised as mutiny.

The protests in the 1980s and 1990s did at least accelerate the speed of change throughout the prison system.

David Waddington, Home Secretary at the time of the Strangeways riot, invited Lord Justice Woolf (later Lord Chief Justice) to report on the cause of the protests, and the results of his investigation were published in February 1991, calling for root-and-branch reform of the prison system and roundly condemning those in authority, who for decades had resisted all moves to extend even the most basic human rights to prisoners. Woolf envisaged smaller jails of 400 inmates, divided into units of fifty to seventy prisoners, where respect and trust could be built up between staff and inmates. But he rejected calls for legally enforceable minimum standards, and instead opted for a voluntary setting of standards resulting in a system of ‘accreditation’ of prisons, which has never really worked. There was no specific proposal to banish the institutionalised brutality of so many regimes, and the use of medicines for the control of prisoners is still widespread.

Unfortunately, almost twenty years after the Woolf Report, there is an abundance of evidence to show that, across the penal estate, inmates are still forced to endure atrocious conditions. In January 2008, our outspoken Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, published her sixth annual report, which stated:

Our prison system is at a crossroads. There are signs of a more effective and measured approach to policy and strategy, some new initiatives, and plenty of good operational practice to build on. But, on the other hand, the risk is that we will move towards large-scale penal containment, spending more to accomplish less, losing hard-won gains and stifling innovation.

Owers predicted a prison-population crisis:

During the year, the prison population went from one all-time high to another, staving off disaster only by a series of short-term, often expensive, emergency measures, together with the crisis management skills of those working within the prison system.⁶

At the same time there had been a dramatic rise in self-inflicted deaths (suicides) in custody, which rose by 40 per cent during 2007. Many suicides were among some of the most vulnerable – foreign nationals, indeterminate-sentenced remand prisoners, and women – and at the most critical time, in the early days of imprisonment. The report noted delays in replacing poor accommodation, building workshops and fully rolling out the new drug treatment system.

I believe the refusal to initiate far-reaching change has its roots in our attitude to convicted prisoners – a disregard, an ability to forget those who are out of sight, as if they barely exist. And in so many of the regimes I have witnessed over the years they hardly do. There is something about the aridity of these places, the lack of stimulus and care of the intellect and soul, that really offends me. I believe that each individual has the capacity to change, given the right help and encouragement. Even the simplest of things can open up locked personalities – such as the chance to learn an instrument in a brass band, or write and act in a theatre group – the positive effects of which I saw in Wandsworth Prison, for example. Some institutions take an enlightened approach to their inmates, while others are stuck in a custodial psyche that prevents any prospect of rehabilitation or personal development.

Anne Owers warned of the dangers of investing in prison building at the expense of sufficient funding in regimes and called for full implementation of the report on vulnerable women and innovative proposals to reduce reoffending and to deal with underlying problems in probation, mental healthcare and social and voluntary services. ‘At a time of severely restricted public funding, there is now a real risk that we will get worse, as well as more, prisons.’ Finally, the Chief Inspector called for a Royal Commission or major public inquiry to develop a blueprint for a coherent and sustainable penal policy for the future.

I’m not holding my breath.