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Origins
Prologue
Ironically, given that privately run prisons are identified with âThatcherismâ, the outsourcing of the Stateâs use of custody began much earlier â and under a Labour administration. In 1970, the Home Office contracted with Securicor for custody of immigration detainees at Heathrow and elsewhere. But after initial protests by pressure groups and Labour MPs, interest died quickly away.
The state of the prisons
There can be few public service monopolies harder to justify than HM Prison Service (HMPS) in the 1980s.
Prisoner numbers increased dramatically in the second half of the decade (Figure 1.1). The rise was primarily in remand prisoners, who already suffered by far the worst conditions. The Thatcher administration was doing something about it â building 22 new prisons plus 8,000 more places within existing prisons. But construction was painfully slow â in some cases taking seven years from issue of the design brief to opening â and cost and time overruns were the rule (see Chapter 11).
Figure 1.1: Prison population and design capacity, England and Wales, 1980â92
As a result, this huge building programme failed for much of the decade even to keep pace with rising numbers, and prisons remained horrifically overcrowded. In 1987, some 19,000 prisoners were held two or three to a cell designed to hold one, with those prisoners enduring the squalor of others defecating into buckets inches from their bunk, the bucket remaining there for many hours. And not just at night: in many prisons, prisoners were locked in their cells most of the day. Regimes were far more restricted than two decades earlier (King and McDermott, 1989). Hundreds of prisoners had to be held in police cells, at vast cost (Figure 1.2), others in a hastily converted ex-RAF site.
The reality of prison life in the 1980s is vividly recalled by a governor at Strangeways prison, pre-riot:
âthe smell of excrement and urine at slop out, the abysmal food that we served, the relationship between staff and prisoners where every second word was âfuckâ, prisoners werenât treated with respect, they werenât treated with decency, visitors were treated as if they were prisoners as well, the place was run for the benefit of staff earning massive amounts of overtime at fantastic cost, where racism and brutality was rife.â (Bastow, 2013)
Figure 1.2: Prisoners in police cells and cost, 1985â95
Small wonder that not even the Home Office believed prisons could turn offenders away from crime. This was the high point of the ânothing worksâ period in criminology â and nowhere more so than in prisons. A 1990 White Paper declared that ânobody now regards imprisonment in itself as an effective means of reform for most prisonersâ and that trying to do so risked proving âan expensive way of making bad people worseâ (Home Office, 1990a).
Management was appallingly weak. The Prison Officer Association (POA) was both powerful (because of the always present threat of industrial action, against which management had no real defence), yet anarchic (the decision to take industrial action had been delegated to branches and that threat was behind every single local disagreement with management). The POA often seemed opposed to anything that made prisonersâ lives better. Governors only controlled their jails with the agreement of their POA branch, and lived with the constant threat of disruption. In October 1990 there were industrial disputes in some 70 prisons (Home Office, 1991b). Both governors and the POA felt a huge gulf between them and the headquarters, headed by career mandarins with no experience of working in prisons.
âManagementâ as such barely existed: headquarters did not set standards that prisons should operate to, and had little information about how prisons were actually doing, or where and how resources were being consumed.
Yet this was absolutely not a service being starved of resources. On the contrary, it was gobbling up money like a black hole. In addition to capital spending on new prisons (roughly ÂŁ1.8 billion at todayâs prices), HMPS had dramatically increased both spending and staffing. Spending rose faster than any other public service â 30% in real terms in just four years to 1989â90 (HMPS annual report, 1989â90). Staffing ratios rose from one staff member per six prisoners in 1950 to 1:2.5 in 1989â99. Yet regimes did not improve: they got worse. It wasnât clear why; but the Service was massively inefficient â and getting worse.
Not only did the Service provide appalling conditions and impoverished regimes, it was barely under control. In one year, 1989â90, there were 67 âacts of concerted indisciplineâ; and 49 incidents where prisoners got onto the roof (HMPS, annual report, 1989â90). The Prison Service could not even keep them inside prison: each year, hundreds escaped, and thousands absconded.
In 1986 this unholy mix of poor conditions, union irresponsibility and management incapacity exploded when management at last tried to get a grip on staffing levels. The POA for the first time deployed the ânuclear optionâ of industrial action: managementâs worst fears immediately materialised. There were disturbance at 40 prisons: several were partly destroyed, 800 places lost and 45 prisoners escaped (Home Office, 1987). There were again serious riots in several prisons in 1988 (Lindholme, Haverigg) and 1989 (Risley). In 1990, the entire prison system erupted in the most serious breakdown ever known. One of the largest prisons in the country, Strangeways, was destroyed and held by rioters for four weeks as prisoners demonstrated the incompetence and impotence of the Prison Service from the prison roofs for the TV news, day after day.
The 1990 riots so terrified the government that it started to implement the investment in renewal, moral as much as physical, recommended by the subsequent Woolf report (Home Office, 1991b), and to bring the prison population down, through legislative and other means. In the early 1990s, it was even possible to close some small prisons. But, by then, the privately run prison was already a reality.
Preparing the ground
With hindsight, what is striking is not how fast, but how slowly the Thatcher administration moved from privatising utilities to introducing competition to public services. Prisons were the earliest example of outsourcing a major, complex, people-based public service: but it was not until just after Thatcher had left office that enabling legislation was put in place.
The first suggestion, in 1984, by the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), apostles of neo-liberalism, was not taken very seriously (ASI, 1984). The ASI argued that the private sector could build more quickly and operate more cheaply. By 1987, Peter Young of the ASI was claiming that privately run prisons in the US were better at pretty much everything: food, healthcare and reducing re-offending (Young, 1987).
Such was the dire state of our prisons, and lack of confidence in their management, that more traditional Tories, and some prison reformers, also thought solutions might have to involve the private sector. A 1985 Tawney Society pamphlet pointed out that remand prisoners, though presumed innocent, suffered the worst prison conditions, and argued that a privately run remand system, with the right safeguards, might be the best route to improvement (McConville and Hall Williams, 1985). Lord Windlesham, a liberal Tory and former Home Office minister, also argued for a privately run remand system quite separate from the existing service and with an entirely different ethos, supported by the Chief Inspector of Prisons (Windlesham, 1993). Other reformers worried about prisons run for profit, but thought some form of alternative provision might be better than continuing public sector monopoly (Taylor and Pease, 1989).
The route to legislation
The process by which this idea, at first rejected out of hand on all sides, slowly found its way into government thinking and then legislation is an interesting â and not very edifying example â of modern policy making.
The first significant event was the virtual hijacking of the Home Affairs Committee (HAC) inquiry into contract prisons by two Tory members, Edward Gardner and Sir John Wheeler, both of whom had, or were shortly to acquire, roles in the private security business. They went at the invitation of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) to see American prisons, but actually saw only saw one adult jail run by CCA (but no publicly run ones). On their return, their praise was uncritical: literally, âthere was nothing we could find to criticiseâ. The report was a travesty of a proper analysis, mentioning CCA 13 times in a report barely three pages long, and containing hardly any data (HAC, 1987). It argued that the advantages of the private sector were speed of construction, scope for deferring capital costs, and âarchitectural efficiency and excellenceâ. It appeared to accept at face value all the CCA had said: evidence submitted to the Committee that there was quite another side to CCA was brushed aside without any investigation (the Committee also ignored a major publicâprivate partnership for prisons then being developed in France, a model curiously like that being adopted by the Coalition government in the 2010s). Not only did the Labour members oppose the report, but several Tory members were unpersuaded, choosing not to attend for critical votes.
The report gained little traction immediately. Traditional Tories were more of an obstacle than the Opposition. Douglas Hurd as Home Secretary initially rejected the very idea of privately run prisons and seemed to be thinking merely of bringing private sector expertise to bear on the prison building programme (HC Deb 16 July 1987, vol. 119, col. 1303). Initially, even Thatcher was unconvinced, telling Windlesham in summer 1987 that âour minds remain open. But ⌠there would clearly be many problems to resolve ⌠At present the balance of the argument seems to be against moving in this direction âŚâ (Windlesham, 1993).
But the HAC report had brought the idea into the mainstream. The Conservative Study Group on Crime again touted the example of CCA â Wheeler was a member â and recommended âan experimentâ with a privately run prison, though already confident that âgenerally, it seems desirable to privatise as many prison services as possibleâ (Conservative Study Group on Crime, 1986). Meanwhile, commercial interests had begun to engage: and they were very keen. Home Office officials had begun to explore possibilities with the City. Michael Forsyth MP, a âprominent privateerâ linked to the ASI, was active behind the scenes. A consortium, Contract Prisons, was set up in autumn 1987, hiring a major PR company to mastermind its lobbying campaign. Other consortia followed. In September 1988 a huge dinner at the Carlton Club â chaired by Gardner â was attended by commercial interests, lobbyists, right wing think tanks, Tory MPs and Whitehall special advisers (Ryan and Ward, 1989b). Money was on the march.
Home Office ministers were pushed slowly along. In autumn 1987, a Home Office minister was dispatched to the US. In early 1988, the government published a less than enthusiastic response to the Select Committee (American experience was still very limited, offered no ready blueprint, the legal and operational cost was very different here; HAC, 1988). But Hurd did commission a Green Paper on the role the private sector might play in âall aspectsâ of the remand system, though handing over management to the private sector would be âmore difficultâ than using outside expertise to build remand centres faster, which seemed to be how he saw the private sector helping (HC Deb 30 ...
