The new Justice Secretary Dominic Raab has said in the past that he wants prison to be ‘unpleasant.’ To that extent he should be pleasantly surprised. Our prisons are indeed engines of despair, indolence, violence and incivility. Our Prison and Probation Service, notoriously allergic to transparency and accountability, has been able to camouflage this to some extent during the pandemic. It’s harder for prisoners to be unpleasant when they’re locked down in a space hardly bigger than a disabled toilet for 23 hours a day.
In the meantime, the department Raab has now inherited – with an ever-growing army of HQ bureaucrats – has not been idle. The prison service has been producing reams of specious drivel on intersectionality, unconscious bias and all manner of fashionable happy-clappy while the front line bleeds. The Director General of prisons recently sent to staff a photograph of him taking the knee outside HMP Durham – where at the last inspection nearly a third of prisoners reported being unsafe and a third were hooked on drugs.
The prison service has been producing reams of specious drivel on intersectionality and unconscious bias
During this time, the brute reality of prison life has not been slowed by progressive rhetoric.
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