While the sheer extent of decrepitude in the nation’s schools uncovered by the crisis over aerated concrete might have been an eye-opener to some policymakers, a story that highlights the parlous state of the prison service will have surprised almost no one.
There are two main problems with prisons, which while interlinked are not entirely down to the same causes: the crumbling state of the prisons themselves, and the lack of space inside them.
Wandsworth prison in south-west London, from which terrorism suspect Daniel Khalife’s escaped on Wednesday, is supposed to hold 900 men. But Steve Gillan, head of the Prison Officers Association (POA), said it currently has 1,600.
The picture with overcrowding is a slightly complex one. The 120 prisons across England and Wales hold a fraction over 87,000 people, 96% of them men, which is less than 1,000 below the service’s maximum capacity.
About 20% of prisoners are held in overcrowded conditions, often spending most of their time in cramped cells.
All this is not helped by the second part of the picture: the austerity-exacerbated lack of new jail capacity, and the increasingly grim state of existing jails, with a backlog of maintenance estimated as costing more than £1bn.
Things are so bad that a German court recently refused to extradite a man to the UK because of the conditions he would face.
Added to this is the potential chaos of whether some prison buildings are constructed using possibly crumbling reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac), something the prisons service has yet to uncover.
It can seem anomalous that prisons are so full when, in another much-chronicled failure of basic public services, police are arresting and charging fewer suspects, and those who are charged often have to wait years for trial.
The answer is that, as well as people waiting long period for their trial in jail on remand, sentences have got longer – rising more than 50% on average in the decade to 2022.
All of this has an obvious impact on the final part of the prisons picture, and the one perhaps most relevant to Khalife’s escape, seemingly strapped to the underside of a vehicle: staffing levels.
Gillan told Times Radio that the 1,600 prisoners in Wandsworth were being overseen by a duty roster of 70 officers – a balance of numbers that, he said, often meant “shortcuts are taken” when it comes to security. Such an escape was, he said, “only a matter of time”.
“There’s not enough security like perimeter checks and things like that are being cut back,” he said. “People aren’t getting enough time to do the security task that they should be doing.”
A highly pressured workforce often also means one with a high turnover of staff – and this is very much the case in prisons. Nearly 12% of staff across the wider HM Prison and Probation Service staff leave each year, statistics from June showed, rising to 13.4% for band 3 to 5 prison officers, those who work and supervise on the frontline.
More than 36% of these prison officers have less than three years’ service, notably up from the 30% a year ago. Fewer than a third of the frontline staff have served for 10 years or more.
The circumstances behind Khalife’s escape are yet to be uncovered, and it is possible circumstances will emerge that mean he would have got away even from a non-overcrowded and well-staffed prison. But it feels unlikely.
Successful escapes from higher-security jails such as Wandsworth are vanishingly rare and inevitably create headlines. And this time, much as with Raac concrete in schools, it shines a focus on the wider state of the prisons service.
