Q: What are your thoughts on the current prison standards in the UK and treatment of prisoners?
A: Prison standards have fallen over the years. In some respects they’re better because we have integral sanitation. When I first went to prison in 1984 there was a bucket in the cell as my toilet and it was like that for 8 years. They started to put electricity and running water in cells in the mid 90s. Now there’s more access to hygiene facilities so in those terms it’s better, but if the purpose of prison is to get people out better than they were when they went in, it’s not just about those basics it’s about attitudes and treatment. To give prisoners a toilet but just keep them locked up in that toilet for the best part of a day is pointless. We have to give them the opportunity to learn work skills and to advance themselves in education. If they need educating we should provide opportunities for them to be educated. If they need work skills, we should provide work training. In the 80s prisons were smaller, in every prison (8 or 9 during my time) there were brick laying courses, painting and decorating courses, plant laying courses – skill building courses. The prison population has grown but facilities have not grown with it.
There are too many people locked up for too long. If you look at the last prison inspector’s report, it says that prison outcomes are the worst they have been for the last six years. Prison suicides are up, there’s been the highest number of deaths in the last year since records began in 1978. Something isn’t right. Prison suicides have been going down for years, now they’re up again. Last year there were 88 prison suicides, six times more than the population outside.
Physical conditions on the face of it look like they’ve improved. New buildings have been built, there’s integral sanitation and prisoners have televisions in their cells, but the attitudes towards them and political rhetoric has got more negative. When the prime minister says the idea of a prisoner voting makes him feel physically sick, why? Does he know this prisoner? What’s happened is the media has presented this dark mysterious figure: the prisoner who is out to cause harm. We don’t think of individual people with needs who perhaps have mental health problems, drug problems or behavioural issues. Some of these are damaged people, people with needs and failings that need to be addressed, that need to be helped. We don’t think about it, we just think that prisoners don’t deserve to have anything.
The Sun has just campaigned to stop prisoners using mobile phones. Why campaign about that? That’s not the big problem. The big problem is reoffending amongst our released prisoner population. 70%(?) of our prisoner population reoffend within a couple of years because our attitude towards them is that they are prisoners so they’re not allowed the human rights the rest of us are allowed, like the ability to vote. We don’t give prisoners the vote so that allows society to see them as different to the rest of us.
Then there are prison stories in the media. You get one prisoner who’s smuggled a phone in, takes a selfie, gets it outside, puts it on Facebook and that one aberration is presented in the popular press to enrage society. ‘What about his victims?’ So we all then think, ‘what are prisoners doing with mobile phones? What are they doing taking selfies?’ But they’re not. There are 85,000 prisoners: men, women and children. They’re not all using mobile phones and taking selfies, but the media focuses on these particular cases and politicians pick up on them. This means we’re all generalising about prisoners, but actually if you meet prisoners and talk about what the issues are, you meet fellow human beings with failings. They may have caused some harm, sometimes significant harm, but when you dig a bit deeper you see that actually this person needs help. They need to be supported and encouraged. Not to make their life better primarily, but to make society safer when they get out and reduce the number of their potential victims. We don’t help these people, so they come out and cause more harm and distress and because we focus on punishment as a deterrent we’re thinking ‘we’ll give them a hard time then when they get out they won’t do it again”. That’s ok for a rational thinking person but if you’re in a criminal lifestyle you’re not thinking about the consequences of what you do. You’re thinking where can I get my next fix? Where can I get money for some booze or to pay the rent? Your mind isn’t thinking in a rational, civilised way. I am generalising, but most of the people who go to prison are from dysfunctional backgrounds. It’s hard to get out and you get caught up in that lifestyle. You feel like life is against you and you make a mistake, you get into a cycle. Once you become a criminal and get a criminal conviction that is it, that’s not just two or three years, it’s on your record for the rest of your life.
The treatment of prisoners has gone down over the last twenty years. When I went into prison in 1984, I was a life sentence prisoner serving life for murder in a high security unit. I was called up to the governor’s office and he said, “My job is to get you back out there, functioning.” On paper I was an unlikely candidate for rehabilitation but that gave me some hope. I wasn’t thinking about getting out, but he knew that was his job. Now, governors aren’t really sure what their job is. Is it to get people out functioning? Is it to rehabilitate? Is it to punish? Every time they read the papers or listen to a politician it’s about clamping down. Our attitudes towards people in prison have got more negative over the past twenty years, primarily due to politicians. The prison population has gone up and we haven’t funded the necessary increased capacity.
Q: Was education compulsory in prison?
A: I got to choose. A psychologist persuaded me that I had to get an education. I was nearly 30 years old and I thought there was no chance. I thought I was too thick, but this person coaxed me and encouraged me so I got evening classes first of all, then I did a degree eventually.
Now education is compulsory. You’re assessed on basic skills when you go in and if you’re below level one, like most prisoners are, it’s compulsory to take the programme. Martin Narey introduced it in the early 2000s. He said ‘nobody is going to leave prison unable to read and write’, but there’s no programme for progressing from basic skills to GCSEs and higher education.
The structure of a prison is such that you have accommodation wings where the cells are, then you have education departments where teachers are waiting to teach in a classroom, but trying to get prisoners to class isn’t a prison officer’s priority. It’s those little impracticalities that make prison education today haphazard because the teacher struggles to get to the gate and wait for prisoners who may not turn up. There are always problems with getting people to where they should be in prison because of staff shortages.
In the early years the education department at the prison funded my degree with the Open University but now they don’t do that. You can do it, but you have to get your own funding by applying to charities. I’m not saying prisoners should be handed all of this on a plate, if they really don’t want it and they’re not going to respond, don’t have it and stay where you are, but my experience was that most people I met in prison had the desire to change and the desire not to be criminals. For some people the problems they have are just too deep rooted to overcome. Whatever damage they’ve had that causes these dysfunctions is sometimes too deep rooted, so because resources are limited they focus on people who are easy to help. Really we should be focusing just as much on people who are harder to help because they are more likely to commit more offences.
Q: If prisoners don’t get an education how do they spend their time?
A: They used to watch daytime television but now the justice minister has banned it. If they can read they’ll read and some of them have got play stations and DVDs. They just try and pass the time somehow, but we’ve made it so hard for them to do constructive things. You can only watch so much Jeremy Kyle or play so many games or watch so many films. These people are going to come out of prison, we mustn’t vegetate them while they’re in there. Why can’t we give them computer screens built in on the wall with access to educational programmes and thick Plexiglas so they can’t break the things? In Scandinavian countries they have limited access to the Internet in prisons and can’t access certain sites. For some reason in our country we’re reluctant to give prisoners those opportunities. We just lock them up and they lie in their cell and wait for Saturday when they might get a visit or maybe read a book, bearing in mind 60% of prisoners are illiterate.
Q: How are the staff affecting the prisoners?
A: In the past three years they’ve laid off 30% of prison officers. In the UK I’ve seen a wing of 150 prisoners run by 4 prison officers. I felt fear. When I go into a prison I don’t usually feel nervous, but I thought ‘if anything goes wrong here we’re in serious trouble’. Our prison officers in this country get six to eight weeks training. A milkman or employed labourer one minute, six weeks later in charge of hundreds of prisoners. We don’t train them sufficiently. In Scandinavia there is one prison officer to one prisoner and three years training. The basic training is four months and then they have a progressive training regime.
We need a change in attitude. If we train our prison officers to degree level in psychology, sociology or social work, they will know when a prisoner needs help instead of having a negative attitude because they think that’s what society wants. Society want prisoners treated less than human. It takes a brave prison officer to stand out and say that a prisoner needs help. In prison it’s very hard to be gentle, kind and polite because you’ll get crushed and there’s the same peer pressure amongst prison officers. I’ve seen first hand a prison officer being called a Care Bear by his colleagues, denigrating his humane efforts to help the prisoners that he saw needed help.
It comes down to funding and resourcing. Nobody cares if prisons aren’t getting anything. They’re not going to be protesting, they shut their eyes until it’s someone in their family or a friend. Up until recently you couldn’t send a prisoner a book, that’s how negative our attitude towards prisoners was. Luckily certain interest groups like the Howard League for Penal Reform started a campaign and got authors and high profile people involved to say this is wrong, we should be able to send a prisoner a book. It was said that it was for security reasons, but it’s because they didn’t have enough appropriate staff on reception to check the parcels. It’s much easier to say no to parcels, then they don’t need a prison officer on reception.
Q: Are all the problems mostly due to lack of funding?
A: It’s political will. We’ve never had a politician who’s stood up and said ‘I’m going to work towards a prison system that’s going to work on getting people out better than they went in’. It’s going to be a challenge. We need courage and we’ve got to be bold, but it’s in our interest. If we can provide people in prison with the help, support and training that they need then there will be fewer victims. We haven’t had a politician brave enough to say that. They will talk about a rehabilitation revolution ‘we’re going to make them work hard, we’re going to clamp down, no PlayStations, no day time television’, but they can’t just talk in a rational, humane way about prisoners. They always have to bring in the tough agenda instead of just saying ‘they’re in jail, they’ve lost their liberty, they’re not free, they don’t have many choices ‘. When I was in jail I used to think about how I’d love today’s newspaper, now I can go to the shop and pick up a whole barrel if I want. Those are the little choices you don’t have when you’re in prison. Politicians have demonised prisoners so much over the years that it’s not about funding; it’s about political will. If there was political will there would be the funding necessary. There wouldn’t be so many people in prison. Why do we need 85,000 people? When I went in there was around 40,000 people in jail, then Michael Howard really came down hard on prisons and prisoners, ‘if you can’t do the time don’t do the crime’. Then John Major wrote a column in the News of the World and said ‘it’s time to understand a little less and condemn a little more’. If we don’t understand why people commit crime we’re never going to remedy it. If we just condemn and beat them with a stick, we’re never going to get to the root of why they’re doing it. We don’t want to engage like that, we want to give them a hard time. In Norway the reoffending figure is around 16%. They still have sympathy for victims and think prisoners are scum but the system works so they continue with it.
Q: Do all Scandinavian prisons have the same attitude towards offenders?
A: Yes, the attitude throughout the prison system is the same. Rehabilitate, focus on the needs of the prisoner and get them out better than they were when they went in. The attitude to prison in Norway and Sweden is totally constructive. The Swedish prisons chief, Nils Oberg, said ‘we’re not there to punish; their punishment is loss of freedom. We’re there to enable, to get them back out and give them some help.’
We’ve got a long way to go. We’ve gone so far it’s hard to go back. We’ve got so many people in prison; we’re building the biggest prison in Europe. How will that benefit society? It’ll save money because big means cheap. We’ll cram them all in, but we’re not actually going to address their needs and their deficiencies. Giving them a hard time might deter them but if you have a dysfunctional life and problems that are driving your criminality it’s not enough to beat them with a stick, you’ve got to help them.
Q: Which crimes do you think shouldn’t deserve a prison sentence if we were to reduce the amount of people in prison?
A: As a society we have a government and an executive who decides on those things. After I educated myself I started to think about society and it occurred to me that we send people to prison in this country for either too long or not enough time. To me, going to prison for 3 months is pointless. It’s a short, sharp shock. All it does is interrupt the prisoner’s life for a while. If it’s a persistent offender it might give the community some relief from his or her activities, but it doesn’t solve the problem of their criminality. It doesn’t achieve anything; it just costs the taxpayer a couple of hundred pounds a week to keep them in, maybe more. It takes longer; you can’t just change in 3 months.
I think if you physically harm someone you should go straight to prison, no question, but there are thousands of women in this country who are in prison for shoplifting and I think it’s ridiculous. It needs to be acknowledged that the people who have been thieved from are suffering because of an individual, but instead of sending them to prison give them community service where they can do something constructive, get some skills and get some help. Banging them up in a cell for a few months doesn’t achieve anything; it just gives the newspaper reader a chance to feel that they’ve been avenged.
Q: How can our system change?
A: The government would have to go against tabloid newspaper editors who would accuse them of being soft on crime. One politician tried it, Ken Clark, who was the Tory Justice Minister. He used to stand up and be really vocal about what was needed in our prisons, but it was too easy for him to be branded soft on crime even though he was talking sense. For some reason Tory conferences hate that sort of talk. They want tough on crime, tough on the cause of crime and prisoners. We need a powerful, charismatic politician who can stand up against the media and say ‘we’re going to have prisons that treat people with humanity and address their failings and needs in order to reduce the victims of these people.’ It’s not about being soft to prisoners or giving prisoners an easier time, it’s about reducing the number of victims.
I was just a kid when I committed my first crime. I was 10 or 11 and I broke into a sweet shop. I wasn’t a dangerous person, I was just a kid who lived on the streets, but they criminalised me. They put me away and for the rest of my life I thought I was a criminal. So when I was struggling a bit, it was no big deal to have a fight, get drunk, steal a car. It gradually progressed and my criminality became worse because all I ever got was punishment. The tragic irony in my case was that I never got any help until I was convicted of murder and went to prison for life. I think if we can help these people who are coming out of prison earlier, we can stop them becoming serial, violent offenders who cause serious harm to other people. When people start accumulating criminal convictions, statistically they become more serious offences. It’s no good saying just give them bigger sentences. Give them a big sentence by all means, but while they’re in there help them.
Q: Do you think things would have turned out differently for you if you hadn’t had an education in prison?
A: When you realise you have value, it’s very hard to go back to being a criminal. If we give prisoners an experience that gives them a purpose and makes them feel good about themselves, they will be less likely to hurt other people. If you don’t care about yourself and don’t feel good about yourself, how are you ever going to care about your impact on other people? Prisoners should be treated humanely first and foremost. A third (?) of people in prison have been through the care system. I was in care from the age of 11 to 15 and in my experience you don’t get love and warmth in there, you just get looked after. You don’t get what a family, loved ones or a community give to you. You’re just a care kid and that impacts on how you see yourself in relation to other people. I’m not making excuse for criminals, there’s no excuse, but there are reasons why some people end up hurting other people and committing crimes. If we don’t use the time when people are in prison to find out what these reasons are and try and remedy them, the chances are they will come out and do it again. People fall quickly, they go back to their old gangs or associates that they knew and unless we give them a chance when they get out they end up back in. They give up.
Q: How much counselling is offered in a standard prison?
A: Different prisons have therapeutic wings but mostly there’s no therapy for anyone who isn’t asking for help or seems like they’re managing. I think every prison should be like HMP Grendon. The majority of people I met in prison had issues that needed to be dealt with. I went to Grendon to interview someone there and I was tearful. When I think what I went through for 18 years, I’d been de-humanised. HMP Grendon is the most successful prison at reducing reoffending, especially for serious offenders.
When I was talking to the phoenix group in Pentonville prison about my experiences, most of them had the desire to change. I said ‘how many people here want to live crime feel lives?’ and every single hand went up. You don’t meet people in prison who like being criminals. If they have the desire and we can give them an environment to help give them the changes they need, the chances are we’d have fewer criminals coming out of prison. If we constantly give them a hard time in prison they’re going to come out angry, embittered and more detached from society than they were when they went in and they’re going to commit more crime. It’s difficult, if you’ve been hurt badly by somebody it’s very hard to think rationally about what should happen to them in prison. You want them to suffer. We’ve got to get over that as a society. We need a policy that says our prison regime will be enabling. Other people will get angry about that but in the long term it will serve us better and make society better. There will be fewer people in prison.
This new prison they’re building is going to cost hundreds of millions of pounds. If we had fewer people in prison and more people serving community pay back it would save a lot of money. The government have cut prison staff down so much that prisons are now unstable. There aren’t enough staff to run the regimes or to keep people safe so they’re now having an emergency recruitment drive. There’s no fixed, agreed policy. What is it we want from our prison system? Now that I’m a member of society, I want people coming out of prison less likely to hurt others but I know what it’s like in there and I know that’s not the case.
Q: What should happen now?
A: It should be an agreed policy. We should take prisoners out of the political arena so politicians aren’t allowed to interfere with what’s happening. There should be an executive of the prison service who is in charge and the government should say to him ‘we want you to run a prison system that brings people out less likely to commit more crime. We want you to have a figure of around 30% reoffending and if you can do that we will support you.’ Then leave them to it and give them the money to do what they need to do. The Chief Executive of NOMS, Michael Spurr, should be the man who decides what happens in the prison, but he’s not. We’ve got the Justice Minister who says ‘no books for prisoners’, makes them wear uniforms and decides what time lights are out. He is a politician interfering with the day-to-day running of prisons and that shouldn’t be allowed. In Scandinavia they don’t have politicians interfering, they agree how things should be and get on with it. That’s the key: get prisons out of politics.
GOING STRAIGHT 