You have committed a crime and been sent to jail. What will your life as a prisoner look like? Thanks to the prison watchdog’s new report on Wandsworth Prison, released this month, the horrific reality has been laid bare for all to see.
This imposing building is a category B facility, in a system where D holds the lowest risk prisoners. When it was built in 1851 it was intended for 964 inhabitants to be held in ‘safe and decent accommodation’. Now, due to overcrowding, the prison is home to 1,513 men. And each week, 130 more are admitted.
Let’s imagine you are one of them. You arrive, fresh from your sentencing. You have to mill around for four or five hours before getting sent to the induction unit. There, you watch a video, which you have 50/50 chance of understanding (half the prisoners at Wandsworth don’t speak fluent English and the video has not been translated). This means you will likely feel totally confused and unprepared for your stay. You are likely scared. On the bright side, the video is apparently more “engaging” than it used to be.
Eventually, you are led to your cell. For some solitude, you might hope. But no. You’ve only got a one in five chance of that. Even though these cells are miniscule, cramped and designed for one person, you are overwhelmingly likely to be sharing with another person – due to the prison being almost double capacity. It’s hard to overstate the impact of this. You will be with this person, another prisoner, almost constantly without any supervision.
You take a look around you and feel horrified. The cell is dirty and heavily graffitied with broken furniture, as just one in five prisoners reported a clean cell on their first night. It contains a toilet in close proximity to your bed. You are given one set of clothes including one set of underwear that will likely have to last you a full week, although you won’t be told this, you will just wait for the next “clothing exchange day” to come. And wait, and wait, and wait.
You ask for a shower. Good luck. In some cases, prisoners were found to have waited up to five days between showers due to a lack of hot water. You feel very alone. Prisoners have to wait weeks to have their PIN numbers added to the system, meaning they could not contact their family and friends. Inmates told the chief inspector of prisons, Charlie Taylor, that weak contact with family was a key driver for their low mood, exacerbated by extensive waiting times for PIN numbers. Perhaps the worst part of the report is that it found leaders weren’t aware of many of these problems.
You might hope to spend time outside and away from your jailmate and filthy cell. You probably do not realise that you may be spending up to 22 hours of your day trapped with this other man within those four walls. When you finally do stumble outside, you will be greeted with “large amounts of rubbish in exercise yards attracting vermin”, piles of litter being “on wings” and “thrown from cell windows”.
You might hope to distract yourself with work, but half the prison population is unemployed so you would be lucky to find a job. Unsurprisingly, the inspection found many prisoners who were clearly in distress without an appropriate level of support. The rate of self-harm was found to be high and rising.
There is an emergency bell, but you do not know that 40 per cent of emergency cell bells are not answered within the first five minutes in which time a lot of damage can be done. And indeed, there will be violence: 69 per cent of prisoners do not feel safe at Wandsworth. Only 41 per cent of prisoners say that staff treat them with respect. On the other side, staff don’t have it easier either. They are overworked, feeding a vicious cycle of staff shortages. Many are off sick due to “trauma and mental health problems”. In November, the national chair of the Prison Officers’ Association, Mark Fairhurst, said that the last time he visited Wandsworth there had been 69 prison officers on duty for more than 1,600 inmates. Chris Atkin, who served time for fraud in Wandsworth, has previously told Sky News he saw “people attacking officers on almost a daily basis” and “dozens of assaults every day”. Seven people have taken their lives in Wandsworth in the last 12 months alone. This prison is famous for the escape of Daniel Khalife last October, which led to a thrilling manhunt but exposed the disastrous security conditions at the site.
Charlie Taylor, chief inspector of prisons, described Wandsworth as harbouring “a degree of despondency that I have not come across in my time as chief inspector”. His report proposes emergency measures be enacted with immediate effect. “For this troubled prison to begin to recover,” Taylor writes, “Wandsworth needs permanent, experienced leaders at all levels who are invested in the long-term future of the prison to improve security, safety and guide their less experienced colleagues.” The prisons minister, Alex Chalk, now has around two weeks to reply to the report. He has to produce an Action Plan and identify the key people who will bring about the change required.
The fate of 1,513 men who have committed crimes is not a natural priority for everyone. But as a society we have standards about how we treat people – and our prison system is undermining them. Wandsworth is one of the worst prisons, but it is still indicative of a national crisis. In November last year prisons in England and Wales were at 98 per cent capacity. As of this month, they are now at 110 per cent capacity. England has 87,691 people incarcerated, yet 79,507 is the number that the Ministry of Justice considers to be the number of people that can be held in “safe and decent accommodation” in prison. Two thirds of prisons in England and Wales are over capacity.
It was Fyodor Dostoyevsky who wrote that a society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals. Dostoyevsky was writing in late 19th century Russia, when prisoners were sent to labour camps (the precursors to gulags). But modern day Britain is cruel in its own way. We do not treat people with adequate dignity or respect – and this matters for reasons beyond human rights, if that were not enough to persuade you. On results basis alone, housing prisoners in squalid conditions where they languish in filthy cells for 22 hours a day does not constitute effective rehabilitation. And morally, it puts us all to shame.