It is ironic that of all people, prisoners have a highly tuned sense of justice and injustice. I've always thought that this comes out of the particularly intimate relationship that we have with the power of the State, which is unlike that endured by the average Joe in his daily life. For us, it is up close and personal.
Normally, no one would give a damn how we feel about things, but there was a single point in time when it actually mattered - the 1990 riots. Thousands of cons across the estate shook off the shackles of lethargy and went on the rampage. There were five major riots and by the end of the month, around 22 prisons had some type of disturbance. The prison system came within a whisker of being broken.
The inquiry into these riots was undertaken by Lord Woolf, later Lord Chief Justice, and was remarkable for two things. Firstly, the inquiry actually went out to get the views of prisoners; this was unheard of; secondly, his conclusion as to the causes of the riots avoided the usual pitfall of claiming it was just cons being scumbags. Instead, Woolf concluded that prisoners felt aggrieved that … "the Prison Service had failed to persuade these prisoners that it was treating them fairly". As another criminologist put it rather nicely … "the intensity and extent of the disorders is only intelligible in the face of a widely shared sense of grievance and injustice" (Sparks 1996).
The question is, has anything changed? And if it has, is it for better or worse? In an effort to solve the problem of perceived injustice and the structural deficiencies in the prison system, Woolf made 12 major recommendations. Some of these are dull management-related stuff, and I'll do you a favour by skipping over those. Yet others were spot on, directly affecting our daily conditions. Those were important. Did they ever leap from the pages of good intentions to become reality? Let's have a shufti...
Woolf Recommendation 3:
"Increased delegation of responsibility to Governors of Establishments."
Different prisons have different population mixes, by gender, age, sentence, offence type, education needs etc. Sounds obvious, as does Woolf's idea for allowing Governors more leeway in how they operate their prison. So over the following decade after Woolf, the Prison Service went on a mission to weigh Governors down with a ton of Orders and Instructions and took away what little discretion they had. The Prison Service is now controlled from the centre in a way never before imagined, and this leads to restricted regimes that are meant to fit all prisoners in all prisons. This situation is far worse now than it ever was.
Recommendation 4:
"An enhanced role for prison officers."
The POA are forever whining that screws are treated like turnkeys and that they have little to do with the actual work done with prisoners. This may have something to do with the fact that the POA fosters a prisoner-hating attitude, which tends to limit how much their members will interact with cons. Not even the personal officer scheme works in anything but name in most nicks.
Recommendation 5:
"A 'compact' or ‘contract’ for each prisoner, setting out the prisoner's expectations and responsibilities in the prison in which he or she is being held."
The idea here was quite clever but it didn't get off the ground until 5 years had passed and when it did, it came in the form of the IEP Scheme. I'll come back to this later.
Recommendation 6:
"A national system of Accredited Standards with which, in time, each prison establishment would be required to comply."
The hope was that as prisons achieved these standards, they would become legally enforceable. Instead, the Prison Service published the Standards Manual and made it plain on page 1 that these are in no way legally enforceable standards.
Recommendation 7:
"A new Prison Rule that no establishment should hold more prisoners than is provided for in its certified normal level of accommodation (CNA) with provisions for Parliament to be informed if exceptionally there is to be a material departure from that rule."
The Prison Service dealt with this in a spectacularly slippery way - they just changed the title. They don't work off ‘certified normal accommodation’ anymore; they work off ‘operational capacity’ - which is the maximum number of people you can squeeze into cells before there is a major kick-off. So overcrowding hasn't been dealt with in any way, shape or form 18 years after it was identified as a major contributory factor in riots.
Recommendation 8:
"A public commitment from Ministers setting a timetable to provide access to sanitation for all inmates at the earliest practicable date, not later than February 1996."
I remember hearing the Minister announce that slopping-out had ended in 1996. I would have been more impressed if I hadn't been carrying my bucket to slop out at the time. It still hasn't completely gone
