Prison

At the end of October, just before I started as HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, the inspectorate and Ofsted visited Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre near Rugby. Rainsbrook was built by the Blair government to house the increasing numbers of children imprisoned as a result of policing targets and tough-on-crime policies and it was one of four centres contracted out to private providers. The great hope was that these better-funded centres would provide a more humane alternative to Young Offender Institutions. Rainsbrook holds children aged mostly 15 to 18, but on our inspection we discovered that for their first two weeks, new arrivals were being locked in their cells for 23½

This weekend is the first anniversary of the London Bridge attack. Usman Khan murdered two young people at an event he was invited to, run by the ‘Learning Together’ scheme, which is part of the University of Cambridge. The conference was designed to celebrate the achievements of people like Khan who had joined the course while serving in high-security HMP Whitemoor. Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt were stabbed to death by the dedicated Islamist, supposedly on community supervision nearly a year after being released from prison for terrorism crimes. Twelve months later, are we any closer to understanding that fatal convergence of perpetrator and victims? My organisation, the Counter Extremism Project, in

It was an unusual Christmas morning chapel service. There was a bishop, for a start, and a baptism and then, somewhere between the peace and the eucharist, two of the congregation started trying to thump each other. Boxing day, it seemed, had come early. ‘It unnerved the bishop slightly,’ the priest in charge admits, ‘but as these things go it was a very mild flurry of fisticuffs. Punches were thrown but none landed.’ The Bishop of Kensington, paying a Christmas Day visit to HMP Pentonville, may not be used to this sort of laying on of hands during the liturgy but for the Rev Jonathan Aitken, now six months into

What should we do with adults who murder children? ‘Nothing good’ is a perfectly understandable response. Child killers occupy a unique position on the destitute outer fringes of humanity. Bogeymen made real, they are in fact often pathetic, hideously damaged individuals driven to satisfy appetites we can only guess at. The Conservatives have announced that adults over 21 who murder children under 16 will never be released from custody. It has made for a good Sun newspaper op-ed; justice secretary Robert Buckland is pushing against an open door with the electorate. It’s not just Tory voters who never want these aberrant individuals to see the light of day again. Ask any

Goody goody gumdrops! The Donald has pardoned Lord Black and I couldn’t be happier. Conrad got a bum deal and spent three and a half years behind bars for charges I always believed to be phoney, most of which were overturned. Never mind. One can’t get back the years wasted in a cell for as good a mind as Conrad’s, but one does emerge from the pokey stronger. The Big Bagel Times reported the Black pardon in a manner that can only be described as constipated. Black is a conservative, which is a red flag to envious lefties. But there’s something else. I have spoken to medical experts about the

As much as the country is divided by Brexit, there’s arguably an even more stark division. It’s the one between those directly and repeatedly affected by crime, and those who aren’t. Prison officers – more so than police, prosecutors, barristers, or probation officers – face the worst of state failure when it comes to crime. They go to work and spend their shifts outnumbered by prisoners, and only marginally less constrained in their movements than their charges. They see colleagues – and prisoners – routinely and violently assaulted. Recent cases involve a prison officer having their throat slit. It’s the sort of event that, occurring in any other workplace, would

Kampala I am terrified of being with former death-row prisoner Susan Kigula. This is because she qualified for her driving licence only quite recently, after 16 years in Luzira maximum security prison, and she drives like a maniac on Uganda’s roads. From behind the wheel Susan tells me she was sentenced to death for murdering her boyfriend. Her conviction was based partly on the witness testimony of a four-year-old child and she denies committing the crime. Her cell for five inmates in Luzira’s Condemned section, notorious from Idi Amin’s days, was very cramped with no beds, a bucket for a loo, no window — only an air vent — and

I’ve become obsessed with my BMI. For those of you who don’t know, it stands for body mass index and is supposed to be a more reliable way of assessing whether you’re a healthy size than weighing yourself. It’s calculated by dividing your weight by the square of your height and is expressed as kg/m². If your BMI is under 18.5 kg/m² you’re underweight, if it’s over 25 kg/m² you’re overweight, and if it’s above 30 kg/m² you’re obese. The sweet spot is anywhere between 18.5 kg/m² and 25 kg/m². As regular readers will know, I’m on a diet. At the beginning of the year I was nearly 13st and

The furore over the parole granted to John Worboys, the rapist taxi driver, misses the point entirely — that the system of parole is disgraceful in theory and irredeemably unwork-able in practice. The only thing that it is good for is the employment of large numbers of officials engaged in pointless or fatuous tasks who might other-wise be unemployed. The system is predicated on the ability of experts to predict the future conduct of convicted prisoners. Will they or will they not repeat their crimes if let out early? It is true that, using a few simple statistical measures, such as numbers of past convictions and age, you can predict

Lord Farmer’s review on prison reform, launched this week at the Centre for Social Justice think tank, is ground-breaking for a number of reasons. For starters, it gets family. In an incontestably broad consultation, comprising hundreds and hundreds of interviews with prisoners across Britain, the resounding message that came back was about family. ‘If I don’t see my family I will lose them, if I lose them what have I got left?’, one prisoner told Lord Farmer. The statistics bear this out: the odds of reoffending are 39 per cent lower for prisoners who receive family visits than for those who don’t. To be left bereft by the family sucks

I received a sad letter this week: Steve is back in prison. Each day the mail comes down to the wing in a pouch, and the office is closed while the staff sort through it, marking a board next to the name of each lucky recipient. When a board is put out, we all have a look, playing it casual but really hoping for a letter, a card, a few quid; anything provides a bit of interest, and the feeling that someone, somewhere has thought of you. It’s nice. Usually it’s nice, but not this time. I knew the handwriting straight away, because health problems that affect his coordination have