Britain | Porridge plc

What Britain’s private prisons can teach public ones

Nearly two-fifths of jails are assessed as “of concern” or “serious concern”, the lowest of four ratings, in the latest figures. None are privately run.

|HMP ALTCOURSE

RORY STEWART doesn’t like fudge. With a degree of precision unusual in a politician, he promised last August to quit as prisons minister if conditions did not improve within a year. Handily, he supplied a list of ten jails by which to judge his performance. Then events intervened. He was promoted to a cabinet brief in another department, before running a spirited but unsuccessful campaign for the Tory leadership. Boris Johnson put prisons in the hands of the third minister in three months in his recent reshuffle. In the words of one union wag, Mr Stewart had been handed a “get-out-of-jail-free card”.

Listen to this story.
Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.

It was a lucky escape. The latest prisons data, published on July 25th, are grim. Overcrowding is at its lowest for a decade, thanks to a drop in prisoner numbers, but this has not spread calm. Incidents of self-harm are up about a quarter on last year, as are instances of inmates making barricades. Assaults on staff jumped by 15%. In the ten prisons targeted by Mr Stewart, the picture is mixed: drug use is down in half of them, but the overall number of assaults has risen.

The scorecard will give the Ministry of Justice a political headache, but it is interesting for another reason. The 13 privately run prisons in England and Wales appear to be outperforming their state-run counterparts. Of the nearly two-fifths of jails that are assessed as “of concern” or “serious concern”, the lowest of four ratings, none is privately run.

The comparison should be treated with caution. In previous years, the two categories of prison have performed about as well (or badly) as each other. And criminologists rightly point out that it ought to be easier to run a newly built private prison than a crumbling Victorian-era jail, all of which are run by the state. In old jails, “the culture is embedded in the brickwork,” admits a private prison manager. “It doesn’t matter what you do.” On the one occasion a firm was trusted to take over such a prison, it failed: G4S handed HMP Birmingham, which opened in 1849, back to the state after a damning inspection report last year. Even so, state-employed governors could draw two lessons from the improving performance of private prisons.

The first is the importance of retaining prison bosses. Take HMP Altcourse in Liverpool, another G4S jail. It was the first English prison to be built under the private finance initiative, under which private firms stumped up for public buildings and then leased them back to the government. It opened its doors six months early, in 1997. It is the same type of prison as some of the worst-performing ones, but it is highly rated. Inspectors praised the jail for “bucking the trend” of rising violence; incidents of self-harm halved in the last year, staff say.

Managers at Altcourse attribute much of the prison’s success to stability. Five of the eight senior managers joined the prison on its first day and have worked their way up from the lowest rank. And about a quarter of the original intake of warders are still at work. In the public sector, churn is high. About half of the warders in state-run jails have three years’ experience or less. The continuity appears to have kept staff morale at Altcourse relatively high. Sick days are well below the public-sector average. Andrew Neilson of the Howard League for Penal Reform, a charity, says private prisons do a better job at retaining senior staff. “Whenever someone is good [in the public sector], they get moved to another prison to deal with problems there.”

The second lesson is the power of decentralisation. Private prisons find it easier to innovate than public ones, which are often constrained by the need for clearance from Whitehall, says Rupert Soames, boss of Serco, which runs five jails in England. Altcourse was one of the first prisons to buy a full-body scanner to detect hidden drugs and knives. Serco installed computers in cells long before the prison service. Prisoners use them to arrange family visits, freeing warders from menial tasks to spend more time with prisoners. They also help occupy inmates. “You keep prisoners busy or they will keep you busy,” says Mr Soames.

At Altcourse managers try all kinds of wheezes. Depressed or anxious lags can spend time handling birds of prey to gain confidence. Prisoners spend more time out of their cells than at many comparable jails. Some keep bees and make their own honey (“so good, it’s criminal,” the labels boast). Others work 40-hour weeks in a welding workshop, making skips and table legs. “You forget you’re in jail sometimes, when you’re a bit busy,” says one con, measuring up the latest creations. If only more inmates could say the same.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Porridge plc"

Deathwatch for the Amazon

From the August 3rd 2019 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

The future of Drax, Britain’s largest power plant

From coal to wood to carbon capture and storage?

A new hate-crime law in Scotland causes widespread concern

Transgender identity is protected; biological sex is not


Britain’s kings of sourdough

The rapid rise of a firm that makes bread very slowly