What's good about prisons - and why it matters

It seemed like a good idea at the time. And having now visited 62 prisons, clocked up 9000 miles (enough to get to Mumbai and back, with plenty to spare), and held 186 forums with individual groups of prisoners, officers, and managers, it still does. The idea itself is simple but ambitious: visit every jail in England & Wales and ask, in each one, “What’s good about this prison?”

While we’re all familiar with the litany of negative stories about prisons, I’m lucky enough to have had the privilege of being the Butler Trust’s Director for over a decade now, overseeing our Annual Awards for people working in correctional settings across the UK. In that time, we have received several thousand nominations for prison staff – (many hundreds of which actually came from prisoners). I knew there were good things happening throughout the estate and yet, going by media coverage, you would hardly believe it.

The problems and challenges of prisons are regularly aired, and it is right that they should be. They are very real, and significant, and cannot, and should not, be ignored. But the good stuff matters too.

It matters, because the unremittingly negative narrative makes things more difficult than they are already, sapping the morale and confidence of staff and their managers, making it harder to attract good people to the Service, and increasing staff sickness and attrition.

It matters, too, because if we are serious about getting our prisons back on the upward path they had been on for two decades, before the impact of staff cuts and Spice, we need not only to cut out the bad stuff, but also to build on the good.

Asking “What’s right?” instead of “What’s wrong?” (especially in prisons) is not easy – after all, humans have a well-established ‘negativity bias’. Sometimes, the groups I sit down with find the whole notion difficult to grasp. And often (they are prisons after all) there are jokes: some version of “Well, this will be a short meeting, then!” is a popular one. But once the groups get started, they consistently engage seriously with the question – and find they have lots to say.

I’m writing up the potted results from my individual visits and posting them, along with a tally of prisons visited, days on the road, miles travelled and forums held, at GoodBookofPrisons.com. In due course, there’ll be a detailed narrative report accompanying the full set of results, and we’ll publish a book.

And while I don’t want to prejudge the outcome, my visits have served to confirm that there really are lots of good things happening, all over the country – and staff, managers and prisoners have all described positives in every single jail I’ve visited. This project will, I hope, help to shine a light on this, the other side of prison; it’s rarely heard about, but the good stuff is real, and it really does matter.

On good stuff...

I visited Guys Marsh on Tuesday and met some truly inspirational staff and prisoners working to bring the two closer together. It’s just one of so many inspiring examples of excellence I’ve seen in the 58 jails I’ve visited on behalf of the Butler Trust so far this year - and a world away from the image of our prisons presented in the media. There are many and substantial challenges facing the service right now of course, but we should never forget the efforts of so may outstanding staff and volunteers working tirelessly, in spite of everything, to make a difference. And not forgetting the efforts of prisoners too - many of whom also play an increasingly important role in supporting staff and their peers across the estate. There's more information on my travels at www.GoodBookofPrisons.com.

PAVA

I have the utmost respect for the various commentators who’ve expressed concerns about PAVA spray being rolled out across the estate [link]. I must say I feel uncomfortable about it myself. But prisons are undoubtedly struggling at the moment, and if this helps staff to feel more confident and regain control of our jails then so be it. After all, it’s they, not us, who have to run towards trouble when the alarm bells sound, and they, not us, who put their bodies on the line when needs be. And as far as I understand, this has been trialled in a number of prisons and hasn’t caused the problems suggested.

Michael Spurr

So the MoJ have announced that Michael Spurr is to leave his role as Chief Executive of HMPPS next March [link]. Michael has been a true public servant who has dedicated his life to the prison service as an officer, a governor and a senior leader over 35 years. As Director he has played an incredibly difficult hand with his customary integrity, commitment and compassion. He will be sorely missed.

Getting the facts right

A recent article in the Observer led with the claim that: "Hundreds of senior staff and management have left the Prison Service in the past five years without being replaced". Their evidence for this included that: ‘[over the last 5 years] there were 205 outgoing managers compared with 23 incoming, while only a single replacement was hired in place of 295 custodial managers’.
I may have got the wrong end of the stick here, but while we all know there’ve been significant cuts in staff at all levels, and that these have caused significant problems across the service, I’m not at all sure these particular data support the article's central claim - ie that there’s been a huge decrease in the number of operational managers in HMPPS over the last 5 years. At least of late, the prison service has not generally recruited directly to operational management posts and instead has typically promoted from within. So we’d expect to see few operational managers having been replaced from outside. I’m not sure therefore that it’s a surprise that: ‘[over the last 5 years] there were 205 outgoing managers compared with 23 incoming, while only a single replacement was hired in place of 295 custodial managers.’ The implication here is that there are now 294 fewer CMs and 183 fewer senior operational managers now than in 2013, but unless the article is badly worded, I don’t think that’s what these data actually show - and I’m not at all sure that that is the case, although the published workforce stats don’t enumerate operational management levels separately from the rest of the workforce, so I may of course be wrong. Can anyone enlighten us?