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.