Danger that ‘prisons become a revolving door’ says Chief Inspector of Prisons

We discuss this prison release further with Charlie Taylor, who’s the Chief Inspector of Prisons, and began by asking about the government saying it had no choice.

Charlie Taylor: Yes. We were in a situation where they simply had to release people from prison or stop sending people to prison. It wasn’t palatable. It wasn’t possible to stop sending people. So they had to release some people early.

Jackie Long: As many devastating reports you’ve produced over the last couple of years, today, by chance, is one of the worst, your annual report. Many prisons just warehousing people in squalor, brutalising conditions that are fundamentally undermining any efforts to reduce reoffending. How does releasing prisoners today help any of that?

Charlie Taylor: It at least helps the immediate pressure that the government has faced over time. But ultimately, this is a much longer task that prisons face. In your video just earlier, you were showing pictures of Wandsworth Prison. That was one of the most squalid prisons that I’ve ever been around when we inspected it at the beginning of May this year. So there is a huge way to go where you’ve got people, as I said, warehoused in what are really appalling Victorian conditions, often worse than Victorian conditions, because you’ve got two prisoners sharing a cell that was originally designed for one person.

Jackie Long: Part of the problem is, if you look at some of the detail in your report, this whole scheme looks doomed to fail on so many fronts. Your report today says ‘prisons across the board are failing to offer inmates purposeful training. They’re failing with basics like teaching them to read, with education, with training’. So today we’re seeing many prisoners not fit for the outside world. How can this work?

Charlie Taylor: That is the great frustration that we’ve had in the inspectorate recently, is the lack of purposeful activity that we see within prisons. The amount of empty workshops we go to, the amount of empty classrooms we go to. The failure of prisons to be able to get prisoners out from the wing and into the sorts of education and training that is going to help them to resettle when they come out at the end of their time.

Jackie Long: But all of that makes reoffending, as many of them admitted today, not just a possibility, but actually likely.

Charlie Taylor: Certainly, and certainly the preparation for release that we are often critical of, where prisoners don’t have anywhere safe to live, where they’re not linked in with things like a GP practice, they’re not getting their mental health needs sorted out, they’re not being supported with things like substance abuse. The danger then is for many prisoners, as the prisoner being released from Brixton talked about, prison just becomes a revolving door where prisoners return within days, who are caught in this cycle of mental health difficulties, of drug misuse and of crime, and prison just becomes a second home for some of them.

Jackie Long: Leading on from that point is equally critical what happens to the prisoners when they get out. We know that significant numbers of prisoners are released homeless. Today, they leave a crisis in the prisons and walk straight into a crisis in probation. The probation union today describing the early release as a ticking time bomb with the risk it could cause public harm. That’s right, isn’t it?

Charlie Taylor: Well, absolutely. I’m in little doubt that a number of those prisoners who are released today will be back in prison within a week or so. There are not the number of people in the probation service…

Jackie Long: It defeats the object of the scheme, though, doesn’t it?

Charlie Taylor: Well, sadly, we will see some prisoners commit further offences, but also other prisoners simply will breach the terms of their licence conditions and particularly those who are leading very chaotic lives, particularly those who are going out from prison homeless. A number of those will be very quickly back inside again.

Jackie Long: So what is the point of this scheme? It is clearly not a long term solution. Many people would argue it’s not even a short term solution to the crisis.

Charlie Taylor: It is, we hope, will take some pressure off in the short term. And from the inspectorate’s point of view, that has to be a good thing, that some of the pressure that we’re currently seeing in prisons with staff absolutely stretched to the limits of their capabilities and their time, has to be a good thing. But in the longer term, there are some more difficult decisions to be made. The government is unlikely to be able to build enough prison spaces even to be able to cope with the capacity that’s projected to come through within the next three or four years. So there are some difficult and potentially unpalatable decisions that need to be made over the next couple of years or so.

Jackie Long: But history has shown us that political parties in power don’t like to have that conversation, do they? They don’t like to have a conversation which says maybe we should be sending fewer people to prison. Do you think this government is ready for that conversation?

Charlie Taylor: Let’s wait and see. In the meantime, we’ve relieved the pressure on the crisis in the short term. But over the next year or so, we’ll see how this plays out. And the danger, of course, is that we’re facing another prison population crisis in a year or two.

Jackie Long: Obviously, prison at its core is supposed to actually be about victims, about preventing re-offending so that prisoners don’t leave and re-offend. There will be many victims today, we heard the domestic abuse commissioner in the piece say that ‘some victims are paying the price of this system collapse’. I mean, do you accept that? Do you worry about re-offending and more people being harmed by the scheme?

Charlie Taylor: If you have prisons like Bedford, like Wandsworth, where prisoners are locked in their cells for 22 hours a day in what are often unsanitary conditions, where they are exposed regularly to high levels of drug abuse, where they’re not doing anything meaningful at all with their time. The danger is that any sort of rehabilitation that might take place is simply fanciful and the people will come out from prison, that re-offending rates currently are at 37%, and the danger is they will come out from prison and then very quickly they’ll come back in again. But in the meantime, they will have created more mayhem in their communities and more victims of crime.