In the same week as the Conservative Party is pushing ahead with its drive to look tough on crime, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of prisons said 10% of these are not “fit for purpose.”
Charlie Taylor was particularly critical of around 14 English and Welsh prisons built in the Victorian era which, thanks to decades of mismanagement, are so overcrowded and ill-equipped that they cannot provide proper accommodation for inmates.
The Guardian was the first to report the story, and notes that slipping standards mean “thousands of prisoners were being held in vermin-infested buildings with too few staff and inadequate facilities for retraining and education.”
Taylor told the paper:
There are a lot of inner-city local prisons that won’t be closed any time soon. But they really struggled to fulfil their purpose. Wandsworth was built for around 1,000 prisoners and I think has 600 over; Pentonville [in north London] was built for around 450 and I think there [are] about 1,200 prisoners in that jail. So there are an awful lot of jails that have got just far more prisoners than … they were originally designed for.
But also the infrastructure of some of those jails really struggles. You’re probably talking about 10% of jails that struggle to be fit for purpose.
There are more than 120 prisons in England and Wales, the vast majority of which are run by His Majesty’s Prison Service—that is to say, the government.
On the Pentonville prison, the chief inspector’s latest report complained that the “lack of privacy alone could not be described as decent or humane.” Outdated infrastructure is producing safety risks both for inmates and staff; an “accident,” the report concluded, is simply “waiting to happen.”
And it is unlikely to be averted any time soon. There are too many crumbling necessities—like our schools—that need fixing all at once.
