What happened on Streatham High Road last weekend was exactly what I had feared during my time as prisons minister: a recently released convict mounting a terror attack. It was the second incident of this nature in Britain in three months, but the truth is we are lucky that there have not been more like it.
When I was appointed prisons minister in January 2018, I was introduced to the full scale of the problem. In one wing of a prison in Liverpool, half the windows were broken. Prisoners could stick their hands straight out to take drugs from drones. In Lewes, an X-ray scanner — which was meant to detect what prisoners were smuggling back into the cells — had been defunct for seven months.
Ancient Victorian prisons like Wormwood Scrubs needed to be closed (not least to free up land for affordable housing in London) but there was nowhere else for the inmates to go.
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