The State of the Prisons - 200 Years On

Richard Whitfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134941469
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Sociology

In 1777 John Howard wrote The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with Preliminary Observations and an Account of Some Foreign Prisons. Two centuries later, this extraordinary document commemorates his achievements in campaigning for reform.
In the spirit of Howard himself, the Howard League for Penal Reform have compiled detailed observations of prisons from Sweden to South Africa, and from India to Nicaragua. The result is a valuable resource which includes unique insights into previously undocumented prison regimes.

Chapter One

MAIDSTONE PRISON, ENGLAND

DICK WHITFIELD

I

John Howard visited Maidstone Prison twice. By the time of his first visit in 1779, there had been a county gaol in the town for over two centuries but although the building he visited was only thirty-three years old he was very critical of the facilities it provided. The original prison, inconveniently situated in the High Street, was small, overcrowded, without an exercise yard and incapable of expansion. Yet the ‘new’ prison which Howard visited was equally poor. The small, mean courtyards meant a lack of light or air and despite the use of a sail ventilator to remedy the poor air circulation, Howard foresaw further problems.

Without great attention to cleanliness and the separation of the sick, he warned, there was a great danger of gaol fever. The ‘awful, contagious disorder’ struck in 1783 and killed twenty prisoners and a carpenter who was working in the gaol. Despite remedial work, which Howard acknowledged on a second visit in 1786, the prison was clearly still inadequate.

Finally, in 1806, the West Kent justices conceded that the prison would have to be completely rebuilt. Daniel Alexander, the architect of Dartmoor Prison, was appointed and it was decided that the new building should be constructed on the lines recommended by Howard: individual sleeping cells for prisoners, with day-rooms, courtyards and offices: a strict separation of different classes of prisoner and careful attention to problems of water supply, sewerage and ventilation. The architect, having toured a number of prisons, reported to the justices: ‘In the gaol I have endeavoured to adopt, after much pains and meditation, the good parts of every gaol I have visited, preferring, I own, the principle of Ipswich by Blackburn, Howard's disciple’ (Melling 1969:208).¹

Alexander's new gaol remains the nucleus of Maidstone Prison today. It was completed in 1819 at what was then the staggering cost of £163,457 and was the largest and most imposing building in the town. Nineteenth-century prints show how it dominated the skyline and the area around. Now, offices, the County Hall and even a car park make a bigger impact but the prison retains its huge central site. Solid and secret behind a high stone wall it remains a world apart from the crawling traffic which skirts it on the routes out of town.

II

Probably the most overworked word in any description of the British prison system over the last decade or more has been ‘crisis’. A crisis of inmate unrest, with recurrent rooftop protests or rioting; a staff crisis, with the Prison Officers’ Union forcing thousands of prisoners to be held in police cells; above all, a numbers crisis, with successive Home Secretaries announcing, at various times, that the breaking point of the system would be reached when the prison population passed the 40,000, or the 44,000, or the 50,000 mark. Throughout this time, prison staff and managers passed the various ‘crisis’ totals, got on with the task, absorbed everyone sent to them by the courts and, somehow, despite a crumbling prison estate, avoided total chaos.

The reason for this inexorable rise in numbers lies in the use of imprisonment by British courts both before and after trial. In simple numbers the annual average prison population has grown as shown in Table 1.1. Within these figures there have been peaks as high as 51,000, necessitating the short-term use of military camps to contain the new army of prisoners. The proportion of those on remand, that is, being held prior to trial or sentence, was 14.5 per cent in 1979 but in 1988 had grown to 23 per cent, with the average waiting time for trial at the Crown Court also increasing.

Some of those held on remand will be found not guilty and a significant proportion do not receive custodial sentences when their case is finally heard—points not lost on the government, which is investing in additional bail hostels, special bail information schemes run by the probation service and, more controversially, pilot schemes making use of electronic ‘tagging’ equipment; these are all ways, it is hoped, to reduce what many see as an unnecessary and wasteful use of prison resources.

Table 1.1 Average daily prison population, England and Wales

1979	42,220
1980	43,109
1981	43,436
1982	45,754
1983	43,773
1984	43,349
1985	46,278
1986	46,889
1987	48,963
1988	49,900
1989	48,610

Sources: Home Office (1987) Prison Statistics, England and Wales, London: HMSO
Home Office (1990) Statistical Bulletin 12/90, London: HMSO

An equal problem is created by trends in sentencing. Between 1983 and 1988 the number of men serving short sentences (defined in Britain as 18 months or less) fell by 27 per cent. In the same period the number of men serving medium sentences (18 months to 4 years) rose by 34 per cent and of long sentences (4 years or more) by no less than 82 per cent. The sheer length of sentences imposed, especially when contrasted with our European neighbours, presents enormous management problems in prisons, as the description of Maidstone Prison will show. Beneath these lengthening sentence trends, however, are other equally disturbing problems. Twenty years ago, only 10 per cent of the prison population was aged under 21 years. The proportion now is 33 per cent. Similarly, ethnic minorities are disproportionately represented in prison. The figure had reached 15 per cent of the prison population by 1988 and Afro-Caribbean and African men seem to be most at risk. A belated but growing recognition of both of these problems has seen the development of some special initiatives designed to relieve them; it is too early to tell whether sentencing trends can be reversed but there are early indicators with the under-21s, who are being especially targeted by the probation service in offering courts non-custodial options, that are encouraging.

In comparative terms, Britain's use of imprisonment as a sanction remains high (Table 1.2) and current statistical projections on its continued use remain uniformly gloomy.

Table 1.2 Prisoners per 100,000 population on 1 September 1988

United Kingdom	97.4
Germany	84.9
France	81.1
Italy	60.4
Sweden	56.0
Norway	48.4
Holland	48.4

Source: NACRO (1990) Information Bulletin no. 25 (January), London: National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders

Every year, the Home Office, as the government department responsible for prisons, publishes two sets of projections for long-term trends in the prison population. The ‘non-demographic’ (NDM) projections only take account of expected trends in crime and the numbers sent to prison; the ‘demographic’ (DM) projections also take into account expected changes in the age structure of the general population. The main change is likely to be a fall in the number of young people, which ought to be reflected in the prison population. These projections give a prison population in 1997 of between 64,000 (DM) and 67,100 (NDM) —an increase of between 28 per cent and 34 per cent on current figures (Home Office 1989a).

It is a scenario which drew the following comment from the minister responsible:

For over a hundred years, penal policy in this country has appeared to focus on custody. If a fine is not enough, custody is said to be the only adequate penalty. Other orders are described as non-custodial penalties and assessed as alternatives to custody. All this reinforces custody in a central position. Why do we do this? I hope one of the outcomes of the debate will be to move the focus of penal policy away from custody. Let us think rather of a twin track approach, in which custody is reserved for those who commit serious offences. It should not be the final sanction to which all persistent criminals progress, however minor their offences. It will be a long haul, but we want to make out of date the notion that the only punishment that works is behind bars.

(The Home Secretary, quoted in NACRO Annual Report,
November 1988)

The cost, in both human and financial terms, has been high. The prisons budget of £775 million in 1988 was set to rise by 42 per cent to £1,140 million in 1989, to cover the cost of expanding the prison building programme, emergency measures on overcrowding and the costs of keeping prisoners in police cells. It is a rate of growth no other public service could match. In human terms, the results of Britain's reliance on custody are soberly recorded in the annual reports of the Chief Inspector of Prisons. His report for 1988 concluded that ‘in prison after prison men were still having to exist in conditions which offend against any standard of decency’, and he remarked, ‘Properly fitting clean clothes and regular baths or showers are not luxuries but they remained out of reach for many inmates in 1988’ (Home Office 1989b).

On training prisons such as Maidstone he found, generally, that most establishments were struggling to provide a basic level of regime activities. He thought the quality of life for such prisoners was generally reasonable in that there was ‘no deliberate neglect, no conscious inhumanity and no wilful omissions. The defects that existed in regimes resulted generally from staff shortages, concentration on other priorities, lack of good management or, at worst, lack of concern’ (Home Office 1989b).

The response by government has—primarily—been to embark on a massive prison building programme, despite hopes of making the Home Secretary's ‘twin-track’ approach more of a reality. The building programme, the largest undertaken this century, provides for the construction of 26 new prisons between 1983 and 1995, at a total cost of £870 million at current prices. Together with a programme of expansion and refurbishment at existing prisons there will be an additional capacity of 21,000 places. In terms of relieving overcrowding and dealing with the decay of older prisons, new and refurbished buildings clearly have something to offer but the sheer scale and cost of the proposals (an average capital cost per place of £69,000 and thereafter £13,000 per prisoner per year to run) has drawn much critical comment.

This, then, is the backcloth against which Maidstone prison needs to be considered. Within the broad overall picture, built up from the 129 Prison Department establishments in England and Wales, Maidstone occupies a distinctive and significant place. Adult prisons (for those aged 21 or over) are divided into ‘local’ prisons, which receive people from the courts, whether on remand or at the start of a sentence (and where short sentences may be served in their entirety); closed ‘training’ prisons of which Maidstone is one, and ‘open’ prisons, which have a minimum of security and are for prisoners perceived as posing no real risk to the public. The main problems of overcrowding are in local prisons, which act as holding centres before inmates are moved to training or open prisons. But even closed prisons vary greatly, from the very high security (Category ‘A’) dispersal units to lesser security categories ‘B’ and ‘C’. Maidstone, behind its high stone wall, is a Category ‘B’ prison.

III

The first impression of any visitor to Maidstone prison must surely be one of confusion. The five and a half hectare site contains an astonishing jumble of over fifty separate buildings, ranging from the solid stonework of the 1819 prison to Victorian brickwork and a bewildering variety of modern additions, including the kitchens. There are four main residential blocks, or ‘wings’ with single cell accommodation; Medway, which takes 171 men, Kent (166), Weald (99) and Thanet (102). There is also a Segregation Unit, used both for punishment and to isolate men for their own protection or for other reasons; a hospital unit, and a hostel from which eleven men can work in the town during the day, returning to the prison each night. The prison's capacity, or certified normal accommodation (CNA), is 550.

In some ways, however, Maidstone is several small prisons within one perimeter, for in addition to being a training prison it has two special functions. The first, in Thanet wing, is to act as one of three Vulnerable Prisoner Units in the country. This is a national resource and prisoners are sent here who staff believe would be at risk of violence (because of their offence) in a normal prison setting, or whose fear of violence has led them, themselves, to request such a transfer. Many will have committed sexual offences that other prisoners find abhorrent; some will have been informers who helped the police in the hope of obtaining a shorter sentence and still others may have built up debts inside prison that they cannot repay. It means Thanet wing has to be a ‘sterile’ area, with staff at Maidstone always conscious of the need to keep its occupants separate from the rest of the prison or— when contact is inevitable— well controlled. At the time of my visit about half the men had been convicted of heterosexual offences, mostly rape; about a quarter for offences against children and about a quarter were the ‘grasses’ or informers. Thanet wing attracts additional staff to Maidstone Prison, especially for the Psychology Department, of which more will be said later. It ought to be able to offer more psychological and psychiatric help to the men who inhabit its strange, grey world; more group work as well as individual help is acknowledged as being required by the staff, including the Probation Officer, who have a special responsibility for it, for these are men for whom the risk of reconviction is often very high. Thanet wing, however, has as its primary purpose to keep its inmates from physical harm; the good work that is undoubtedly done there with individuals is almost a bonus.

All men at Maidstone are long sentence prisoners, serving more than four years, and it is at the top end of the scale, with life sentence prisoners, that Maidstone performs its second specialist task. Maidstone is one of a number of designated prisons able to take ‘lifers’ and it can provide up to 100 places for them, although there were only 80 at the time of my visit. Most are concentrated on Medway wing, but not all, and there is no sense of a special regime so far as they are concerned. The growing number of life sentence prisoners has been a considerable problem for the prison service for some years now. Life imprisonment is the mandatory sentence for murder but it is also the maximum sentence for a number of other offences, including manslaughter, armed robbery, wounding with intent, arson, rape, kidnapping, and causing an explosion. In 1957 there were just 140 lifers in prison; thirty years later, in 1987 the number had grown to over 2,200, of whom about one in five had received their life sentence for an offence other than murder.

The life sentence is indeterminate and although the average length of time served is just over ten years, many men stay in prison for much longer periods. Maidstone Prison contains one man who has already served 33 years and st...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of figures and tables
• The contributors
• INTRODUCTION: PENAL REFORM AND PRISON REALITIES
• 1 MAIDSTONE PRISON, ENGLAND
• 2 THE INDIAN PRISON
• 3 THE SLUZEWIEC PRISON IN WARSAW, POLAND: A PENAL LABOUR CENTRE, OR ‘HALF-OPEN’ PRISON
• 4 HELDERSTROOM PRISON, SOUTH AFRICA
• 5 BREDA PRISON, HOLLAND: FROM WATER CELL TO CONTAINER CELL—THE STATE OF THE DUTCH PRISON
• 6 MATAGALPA PRISON, NICARAGUA
• 7 NYKÖPING CLOSED NEIGHBOURHOOD PRISON, SWEDEN
• 8 GEURRERO CENTRE FOR REHABILITATION, MEXICO
• 9 GELDERN PRISON, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY
• 10 THE TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, USA
• JOHN HOWARD: A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
• Name index
• Subject index