Jails across England and Wales are facing an unprecedented “toxic mix” of increasing prisoner numbers, chronic staff shortages and rising violence that is driving them towards instability, prison governors have warned.
Eoin McLennan-Murray, the outgoing president of the Prison Governors’ Association, dismissed claims by the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, that although jails faced pressures they did not amount to a crisis.
In his valedictory address on Tuesday, McLennan-Murray said that in his 36 years in the prison service he had never known a situation “as challenging, tough and difficult and as bad as it is now”, in the wake of a 30% reduction in prison staff numbers and much harsher rhetoric from ministers.
“Prisons are moving towards and tending to instability. The only thing that will stop that is if we get staff back into our prisons and normalise our regimes. It seems to be there’s a race now on. That race is: can we get sufficient staff into our prisons before we reach tipping polnt?” McLennan-Murray said at the PGA annual conference. “I don’t know how we can reverse the situation. It is a worrying time.”
A series of damning reports by the chief inspector of prisons on individual jails have detailed a rise in violence among a record prison population of 85,000, a large proportion of whom spend most of their days locked up on restricted regimes with little to do.
Despite repeated warnings by the chief inspector and penal reformers, Grayling has remained adamant that there is no crisis and that overcrowding remains below the levels under the last government.
McLennan-Murray said governors had “the deepest concern” about what was happening to the prison service. “We see prisoner-on-prisoner assaults at record levels. Staff assaults at a rate which is higher than ever before. There’s an escalation in the number of incidents. National resources are called out on a regular basis. I don’t know how they manage to sleep, they are on the road so much,” he said.
“Disturbingly, we’ve had a notable increase in self-inflicted deaths. They petered out at the back end of summer but regretfully they have picked up again.”
He said many prison governors were “hanging on by the skin of their teeth … running a semblance of a regime in some of our prisons”. He added: “I have never known the service in that state before. It is a very serious situation.”
McLennan-Murray said “desperate measures” were being taken to deal with gaps left by the shortage of prison officers, including shipping people from one part of the country to another on detached duty at a cost of £500 a week for a hotel in the south of England.
With thousands of disgruntled prisoners serving well beyond their official tariff dates, he said, all the ingredients of a toxic mix were in place. “We are in trouble,” he said.
