Let’s make use of Daniel Khalife’s unauthorised walkabout from Wandsworth prison as a trigger for much-needed penal reforms (Editorial, 10 September).
When it first opened in 1851, the jail was already obsolete – its design copied from Pentonville, built a decade earlier. Little has happened since then to improve the chances of such places changing people for the better.
Prisons in England and Wales play host to a diverse clientele, more than 80,000 in all, mostly men; more than a quarter are from ethnic minorities, and 38% are serving sentences of less than six months. Two-thirds of them have mental health problems. Shortages of staff and money make proper rehabilitation a pipe dream.
We need to make a fresh start: providing security and medical services where needed; experimenting with imaginative alternatives to punitive prisons based on redress, restitution and reconciliation; and evaluating them all to ensure continuing progress in reducing reoffending. And turning Wandsworth into a museum of “man’s inhumanity to man”.
Philip Priestley
Former probation officer; prison historian
Maurice Vanstone
Emeritus professor of criminology and criminal Justice, Swansea University
• I took early retirement from my role as a prison governor last April. The more I read of the declining conditions in our prisons, the more I am assured that I made the right decision. Governors want to make a difference to those in custody and to support and develop their staff. The current situation does not allow that, and there will be nothing more disheartening for my colleagues who remain.
When you are in charge of a prison, you are responsible for it but often disempowered from being able to improve things. I felt enormously privileged to have governed a prison, but I worry about my colleagues and those in custody who are still battling a broken system.
Judith Feline
Maidstone, Kent
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