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FREE THE JAILERS
We await this week the Government's promised response to the recommendation of Admiral Sir Raymond Lygo that the management of British prisons should be taken out of Home Office hands.
Reform has been slow to come to the prison system. It is almost two years since Strangeways prison in Manchester ignited, illuminating the deficiencies of the whole system. Since then the prisons have repeat- edly made fools of those with authority over them, most notably Kenneth Baker, whose career almost ended over the Brix- ton escapes. Prisoners have continued to riot. Despite the building of 11 new prisons, 1,400 prisoners lie in police cells, to ' the profound irritation of the police, the result of an unforeseen increase of 3,000 prison- ers coming into the system. Each new report by Judge Tumim, Inspector of Pris- ons, has reminded us afresh of the over- crowding, the misery, the lack of lavatories, the suicides, the run-down buildings and dispirited staff still found in the British prison system, all at a cost to the tax-payer of £1.3 billion a year.
The answer to it is not new buildings, now being desperately erected at a cost of another £1 billion or so, but new manage- ment. It is hard to believe that any com- mercial organisation could survive in such a state as the prison service is now in. Bankruptcy or takeover would surely have long since intervened to banish a manage- ment which had so manifestly failed.
But the Home Office, which runs the prison monopoly, has never had to live in the real world. Its customers are certainly in no position to take their patronage else- where, and its equivalent of shareholders, British tax-payers, have shown in the past a singular lack of interest in the running of their investment in law and order.
Only those who work within the prisons or have been sentenced to their mercies know how long overdue is a profound change in their management. Governors with many years of experience grow rapidly and understandably despondent when they find themselves under the instruction of young male and female Home Office high- flyers ten years out of university who have barely met a prisoner and whose manage- ment experience is negligible. The absence of efficient management in our prisons is so complete that it is almost impossible to find anyone with a clearly defined responsibility for anything, a fact well illustrated by the inquiry into the Brix- ton escapes. Responsibility for the minutiae of prison life, down to the daily bread deliv- eries to Wormwood Scrubs and the regular weekly issue of five pairs of fresh under- pants, rests with the Minister of State. The civil service's acute awareness of possible political problems has led to responsibility being transferred up rather than down.
No wonder that fundamental manage- ment problems beset the prison service, that staff feel a lack of leadership, or that, as Woolf and Tumim reported, 'dissension, division and distrust' exist between all lev-
els in the prison service and that staff labour 'under a blanket of depression'. Nor is it surprising that the Prison Officers'• Association, like the railway unions, has been able to exploit the weaknesses of the management above.
It is telling that, while the Prison Gover- nors' Association and the independent pressure group, the Prison Reform Trust, broadly welcome Lygo's proposals, the Prison Officers' Association remains markedly hesitant about the advantages of jettisoning Home Office control.
It must go. Ministers must keep responsi- bility for major issues of policy, but opera- tional control must be delegated into better informed and more experienced hands. That is, in essence, the Lygo proposal, and that some form of agency status under a Prison Board seems to be the best way to deliver a hope of improvement. Will this Government, if it survives the general elec- tion, be courageous enough to embrace change? Some ministers are nervous at the idea of accountability without full day-to- day responsibility. It is an understandable nervousness, but it must, if there is to be hope of improvement, be resisted.
All change carries some political risk, but the Government cannot afford to leave matters as they are in British prisons. With- in their high walls the depressed and disil- lusioned, staff and prisoners alike, are now, for the first time in many years, expecting improvements. The public outcry over the lack of sanitation, the overcrowded cells, highlighted by the Strangeways riots, Judge Tumim's frank prose and the Woolf report, have all created hope of change, and at a
critical time. Immense pressure is now being brought to bear on the system, both from the rising crime rate and from public pressure for tougher sentencing for violent criminals. The Government's best guess is that the number of prisoners will have increased by 14,000 by the year 1997. There is no more dangerous class of people than those who have nothing to lose. If no improvements are seen to come from these piles of official inquiries and reports, the frustration of prisoners and the depression of those who guard them may result in con- sequences even worse than those experi- enced at Strangeways two years ago.
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