1. Prisons, Brutality and Decency
Reflections on thirty years
I want to reflect about threethings, which, it seems to me, have
been of particular significance during the thirty years since I joined
the Prison Service in 1982 as a naïve but idealistic trainee
governor. They are:
The violence in the prison service I joined;
The emergence of management in the service; and
The lost opportunity of population control and the heavy
penalty paid for that today by prisons, probation and youth
justice.
My Joining the Prison Service
I joined the Prison Service pretty much by accident. It was never
something I planned (and when recruiting people to join later in
my career I was always troubled by any young person who told
me that working in Prisons was something they had always
wanted to do).
After graduating in the late seventies I went to work in the NHS –
something I had planned to do – and spent five happy years in
hospital management. In 1981 I was managing a small group of
hospitals in Lincolnshire and my wife and I had our first child.
During that period of life when, as anxious parents, we did not go
out very much, I became hooked on what was then a
groundbreaking BBC documentary, Strangeways, made by the
inspirational film maker, Rex Bloomstein. It was a remarkably
candid expose of the not simply unsatisfactory, but primitive and
cruel Jail in Manchester. I watched all eight episodes and
somewhere in my loft, on videotapes I can no longer play, I have
all the episodes still.

2. The horror of the prison as portrayed by Bloomstein had a
profound effect on me. Then, one Sunday evening later that year
my wife handed me a copy of the Sunday Times appointments
pages. The Home Office were inviting individuals interested in
training to become prison governors and inviting potential
candidates to visit a prison. And that is why, on Christmas Eve
1981, I visited Lincoln Prison. Lincoln, then, as now, was a local
prison, a smaller version of Strangeways. And, as I soon found, it
was very like the Strangeways portrayed by the BBC. It was dirty.
It smelled, overpoweringly, of human waste and in every cell I
was allowed to look there were three men in a space made by the
Victorians for one. The only prisoners out of their cell that
afternoon were sewing mailbags. But what was more depressing
was the open contempt displayed by the prison officers to those
they were incarcerating and the amusement of the Deputy
Governor when I asked him about rehabilitation. But I left there
that afternoon with the firmest conviction that I didn‟t want to do
anything else with my working life and to the horror of friends
and NHS colleagues, I joined the Service in September 1982, just
thirty years ago.
When that day arrived I was nervous for two reasons. First of all
because these were the days when the Home Office dealt pretty
brusquely with new employees. I „d had to resign from the NHS
without any knowledge of where I would be posted and as I left
our home in Nottinghamshire that morning to drive to the Prison
Service College at Wakefield, I promised to ring my wife as soon
as I knew where we might be living for the next few years. To my
later immense relief it was Barnard Castle, home to the then
Deerbolt Borstal, rather than London or the Isle of Wight.
But the second reason for my anxiety was more profound.Since
my resignation from the NHS some months before I had been
following the news reports prompted by a late night adjournment
debate in the House of Commons. The debate was concluded by
the then junior Home Office Minister, but soon to be distinguished
Attorney General, Paddy Mayhew.It was abouta man called Barry
Prosser. Mr Prosser had been remanded in August 1980 to Her
Majesty's Prison, Birmingham for medical reports, having been

3. charged with damage to a lock valued at £1.62. The Minister told
the House of Commons what happened next:
Mr. Prosser was found dead in his cell in the hospital wing of
Birmingham Prison in the early morning of 19 August 1980. He
had been on remand in the prison for just over two weeks, and for
the past week he had been in the hospital wing, because his
behaviour had become disturbed. At the time he died, arrangements
were being made for his admission to a psychiatric hospital.The
post mortem revealed that Mr. Prosser had extensive bruising all
over his body. His stomach, his oesophagus and one of his lungs
had been ruptured.”
Prison Officers murdered Mr Prosser. Three were charged with his
murder. Twice – surprisingly - magistrates‟ in Birmingham
dismissed the prosecution and refused to commit the case to the
Crown Court. This forced the DPP to use unusual powers to
bypass the magistrates and take the case direct to the Crown
Court.
But all three Officers were acquitted. To this day, no one has been
convicted for that brutal and cowardly murder. But the Commons
was assured that there was not too much to worry about. As
Paddy Mayhew told them:
We know of absolutely no evidence that this was other than an
isolated incident. The Government is satisfied that it was not part
of a pattern of maltreatment of prisoners.
Very tellingly –reflecting as it did the power of the POA at the
time - the Ministertold the House that the Director General had
required all use of force by Prison Officers on prisoners in future
to be reported to the governor. The POA ordered the instruction to
be ignored.Mr Mayhew could not bring himself to say anything
stronger than that he regretted that.
That was the Prison Service I joined. Violence was not endemic.
But it was commonplace. And governors were taught to look
away.Just four years previously, an amiable young man called

4. DouglasMcCombe was told to stay in his office by Officers at Hull
Prison who were intent on wreaking revenge on the prisoners who
had rioted at Hull a few days previously. Mr McCombe stayed in
his office as he was told and was prosecuted for malfeasance. The
Crown Court in Hull acquitted him, concluding that he would
have been unable to stop the violence, and had he tried to do so he
would have put himself in danger. A later Home Office report into
the gross violence meted out on prisoners described it simply as
“an excess of zeal”
My first posting
I returned to Lincoln to begin my gubernatorial training and for
four months wore the uniform, and was, a prison officer. Lincoln
was, I would say, largely placid. Run, essentially by a single
militaristic Principal Officer, the governor was an irrelevance. It
was a placid place because Prisoners expected nothing and got
nothing.
They didn‟t protest, they did as they were told and their treatment
was not visibly harsh (ignoring here issues around living three to a
cell, appalling food and slopping out). But although all the officers
knew I was a governor in training they did not trouble themselves
by concealing poor behaviour and I saw visitors (and visiting
probation officers) treated with casual but gross disrespect and I
saw a patently mentally ill prisoner being slapped around in the
segregation unit.
When, at the end of my 4 months as a Prison Officer,when I
returned to the Prison Service College and - no doubt a touch self
righteously - raised the violence and the disrespect with my tutor
at the College and her seniors, I was laughed at.Later, at the end of
my first year of training, we had a lecture about Barry Prosser‟s
death, given by the duty governor at Birmingham on the night Mr
Prosser was murdered (by now promoted to the role of staff tutor
at the College). Mr Prosser‟s wife, described in Parliament as a
woman of quiet courage, resolve, dedication and serenitywas called a
Slag. I protested and overtures were made to me about whether I‟d
made the right career decision. I was, I was told variously, either
unhelpful, uncooperative or, most frequently, naïve.

5. I moved from Lincoln to Deerbolt Borstal at the beginning of 1983.
I saw very little violence at Deerbolt.I think there genuinely was
very little violence there. But I was reminded of the extent to
which it was the norm in local prisons. After a minor disturbance
at Deerbolt, where I was the only governor on duty,about twenty
young men had to be transferred to Durham. I was on duty until
after midnight and saw each of those young men,treated
professionally, and put on coaches to Durham. When I visited
them at Durham the next morning, each of them were black and
blue. Violence in short, was part of the prison experience of the
80s.
After four years I went to Frankland, a new high security
prison.Prisoners were articulate, and many, frankly, untouchable,
not least those with Irish terrorist connections.There was, as far as
I could ascertain, very little violence. But a few months after my
arrival, a new governor, Alistair Papps, called all four of his
assistant governors –of which I was the junior - together and made
it plain that heading off violence against prisoners was our
primary responsibility. And if it happened when we were on duty,
he would want to know why.It was the first acknowledgement
from any governor that violence had to be prevented.That it
wasn‟t good enough to regret its happening. That it couldn‟t be
allowed to happen.
That seems self-evident now. But to understand why a suggestion
that junior governors should ensure staff act professionally was
somewhat novel, one has to understand the reality that in the mid
eighties only the governing governor himself (they were virtually
all men) could give an order to anyone in uniform – however
junior that officer.
Assistant Governors, like me, looked after prisoners, getting to
know them, dealing with their problems and writing parole
reports. One could, and some of us tried, to do a little more. But
our authority was entirely informal. In some areas we were not
allowed to meddle. So, for example, one had to simply observe the
scandalous over manning which fed the unquenchable prison
officer thirst for overtime.

6. At Frankland, in 1986, no governor, including the Governing
governor, could read or understand a shift detail. None of us knew
how many officers were employed on any task on any day or what
they cost. There was, essentially, no management of staff or
money. But by that time I already knew that the primary
managerial challenge in prisons was not about finance, or
planning, or industrial relations. Prison management was – and is
- chiefly about morality. But imposing any sort of moral leadin the
80s was defied by the formal managerial arrangements which
made people like me, and indeed most governors, including a few
that were in charge,an irrelevance. It is hard to overestimate the
importance of the Fresh Start reforms in 1987 which abolished
Chief Officers and introduced governors into the line management
of those in uniform.It was the beginning of what is sometimes
termed, pejoratively, managerialism in the Prison Service. And, as
far as I was concerned, Thank God. Because that managerialism
began to allow the proper management of staff and staff
behaviour, the establishment – at least in some places - of a moral
authority. Violence - while certainly not disappearing and in some
places all too present– retreated to the dark corners of prisons.
Staff began to understand that if caught they might be in trouble.
But it didn‟t happen overnight. It took some years and too many
governors, recruited as quasi-housemasters, were not up to the
challenge.
Becoming Director General
I took over as DG from Sir Richard Tilt in 1998.I‟d spent about
seven years out of the service, as a policy maker in the criminal
justice side of the Home Office before returning to Prisons. I joined
the Prisons Board in 1997 and a year later Richard – to everyone‟s
dismay – departed.
I thought Prisons had become a lot better while I‟d been away. I
thought violence in particular had become all but invisible. But a
wise man called Peter Timms, once Governor of Pentonville but by
now a Methodist Minister, urged me to be more sceptical.

7. I was right to listen to Peter. Just 4 weeks after my appointment I
suspended more than 20 officers who had abused prisoners in the
segregation unit at Wormwood Scrubs. They were allowed to do
so because they had an arrangement whereby even the governing
governor rang down to the segregation unit to give notice that he
intended to visit.So, although violence had become more discreet
it was still there. And it‟s still there now. Prisons and other total
institutions have an extraordinary capacity to degenerate and to
abuse those powerless enough to resist.
Decency
But violence was, at least, on the retreat. There was no immediate
moral conversion. Some staff stopped abuse because they feared
for their jobs. And they were right to do so, two of them a week
were being sacked as I told Governors not to worry about losing
employment tribunals. It was worth a pay out of £20 or £30
thousand to rid ourselves of people who physically abused
prisoners.
I like to think that the emphasis I gave to decency accelerated the
retreat of violence.The decency agenda liberated good staff to act
as decent men. And the arrival of female staff into male prisons
certainly helped, as did closing Prison Officers Clubs at lunchtime
and making plain that drinking three or four pints before an
afternoon shift was no longer acceptable.
Certainly, and significantly, I think decency took some of the anger
out of prisons and, as a result riots and disturbances became less
common, prisons became easier to manage and to work in. I spend
very little time looking at or visiting prisons these days. But
sometimes, when I meet someone from the service, they will say
something about my decency agenda and I like to think it made a
difference. But I know, and Michael Spurr - as decent a man as you
could wish to be in charge of prisons – knows that the war is never
won and the capacity of prisons to degenerate can never be
ignored.Show me a governor who believes that there is no
physical abuse in his or her prison, and I‟ll show you someone not
up to the job.

8. The lost opportunity of population control.
Treating prisoners decently, reducing physical (and then racial)
abuse along with reducing suicides were my first priorities as DG.
But they were not ends in themselves. As vital as they were. I
always believed that decent prisons could provide the framework
on which we could make imprisonment rehabilitative.In 1997, in
his last year as DG, Richard Tilt asked me to prepare the spending
bid for the new Labour Home Secretary. I was pretty extravagant,
suggesting, for example, that we could move from drug treatment
in just four prisons to treatment in half of prisons in three years.
And that we could begin to introduce basic education and
offending behaviour programmes in the same proportion of
prisons. The bill to achieve that was huge. Richard sent me back
and told me to ask for more and, in the end, we put forward a silly
bid.
We asked for a mountain of money and we got it all. Probation did
well too: almost doubling its budget in real terms in the first five
years or so of the Labour Government.It was a time of optimism.
The Youth Justice Board began to function and we began to treat
children in the CJS as children. Probation dedicated itself to doing
things with offenders that really worked.And as I visited prisons,
governors were as keen to take me to the education centre as they
had once been to show me the Segregation Unit.
In the first few years of my tenure as DG, the prison population
grew slowly, and rehabilitative activity grew enormously.
Evidence began to emerge of us beginning to make an impact.
Crucially, the proportion of prisoners going into employment after
release leapt forward by about 10% in two years.The Department
of Health took over healthcare and immediately began cranking
up the quality of both medical and nursing staff. The Department
for Education took over education, and basic skills became
embedded in every prison. I really thought we were gong to
change the penal landscape.
And then the population began to surge.By the time the
population crisis emerged, Jack Straw had become Foreign
Secretary and David Blunkett, with whom I had a mostly

9. unsatisfactory relationship, had arrived.By then, in about 2003, I
was managing both prisons and probation and – although very
few probation officers would believe this – my priority was to
protect probation expenditure (not least because Rod Morgan, as
Chief Inspector of Probation, had opened my eyes to Probation‟s
very own overcrowding problem as numbers under supervision
soared).
But seeking to satisfy what I once described to Tony Blair as the
UK‟s love affair with custody inevitably vacuumed up every
penny we had. I knew that unless we could manage demand for
prison places that making prison and probation work more
effectively was all but impossible. And I certainly knew that
without control on demand the concept of NOMS was doomed.
It‟s worth pausing to remind oneself of the way the population
surged. It rose from 49,000 in 1995, to 65,000 in 1998 and then
stayed at about 65,000 for three years before surging to 76,000 by
2004.
Although I didn‟t get on too well with David Blunkett, no one
could deny that he was a Minister of some courage. I did get in
very well with an inspirational man called Harry Woolf, the then
Lord Chief Justice and I sought to make peace between them. I got
to my office every morning by seven and in time to speak to
whichever Press Officer had read the morning‟s headlines to the
Home Secretary. That meant I was able to persuade him from
firing off some objectionable comment about a particular
judgement or sentence based on what the Daily Star or The Sun
had to say about it.
Finally, and very courageously, David agreed with the Lord Chief
to cap the size of the prison population at 80,000 and the
Sentencing Guidelines Council, of which I was a founding
member, agreed to issue guidelines which would not exceed a
given budget for prison places in any one year. In anticipation of
the legislation – and without it causing very much difficulty - I had
the novel experience of taking every draft sentencing guideline
back to HO statisticians and, if a population rise was predicted, the
Sentencing Council adjusted it.

10. The Bill was drafted. Somewhere on a dusty shelf in the Ministry
of Justice there will be a copy or two with the clause which limited
the growth of the prison population to an annual figure to be
agreed each year between the Home Office and the Lord Chief
Justice.Then DavidBlunkett fast tracked a visa application for his
Nanny. It was the sort of gentle nudge to due process which was,
in my experience, commonplace in the Home Office. Ministers and
senior officials would get a decision on an immigration issue a
little quicker or a passport renewed a little faster. Wrong perhaps,
but not remotely a resigning matter for a Home Secretary who, at
the time, commanded unprecedented levels of public confidence.
But resign he did. Charles Clarke arrived and was immediately
unimpressed with a plan to limit the prison population, thinking
this was not the sort of initiative which would propel him to
Number 10 where a number of people, not least Charles himself,
thought he was bound.NOMs, certainly the NOMS envisaged by
its creator, Pat Carterand passionately believed in by me was
doomed and I resigned a few weeks later.
Conclusion
So what, if any conclusion can I draw from these three
reminiscences? Let me try four.
First, the default option for prisons is abuse. Ignore violence,
believe it doesn‟t happen, and it will flourish. It‟s something which
has to be managed every day.
Secondly that decency, I think, made a difference and continues to
make a difference. It filled a moral vacuum and liberated good
staff and good governors to treat prisoners with greater dignity.
And decency took much of the bristling anger out of prisons and, I
hope, although I was prevented from proving it, provided a
foundation on which prisoners in large numbers could change
their lives.
Thirdly, the decency agenda grew alongside a necessary and
overdue more critical scrutiny of prisons. When Barry Prosser was
murdered – by prison officers – there was no enquiry. No one was

11. sacked. Twenty years later, when Zahid Mubarek was murdered
by another prisoner, there were two public enquiries and, quite
rightly I was in the dock for both of them.
Fourthly, and finally, the capacity of prisons to be effective in
reducing offending depends on high quality and properly
resourced supervision and credible community alternatives to
prison.That vital requirement is frustrated by prisons‟ vast
capacity to consume resources.The answer has to be a quenching
of the insatiable demands on custody. But for the time being a rare
window of opportunity has been slammed shut. But one day, we
shall have a Prime Minister brave enough to argue that, in a
society which necessarily has to ration spending on health,
education and defence, we must ration spending on prisons and in
doing so we might do a better job of protecting the public.