There’s fevered speculation about inside jobs or state actors involved in the HMP Wandsworth prison break by terror suspect Daniel Khalife. But as police close in on Richmond park, whether he’s found cowering in a ditch or at a press conference in Tehran, this dramatic escape reveals just how close we are to a full blown crisis across our prison system.
Wandsworth has been failing in plain sight in front of helpless officials at the Ministry of Justice for years. Repeated inspections have revealed squalor, overcrowding and chronic staff retention problems with young, inexperienced officers out of their depth. Writing about another filthy jail recently, Chief Inspector Charlie Taylor, rapidly running out of superlatives for crisis, correctly said that dirty and uncared for jails were a proxy for far more serious problems. At Wandsworth, summed up by recent prison leaver Chris Atkins as ‘chaos run by schoolchildren’, all the ingredients for this week’s catastrophe were there already, without the James Bond flourishes.
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