‘I nearly lost my sight’: staff tell of rise in assaults in chaotic UK prisons
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Version 0 of 1. The number of experienced officers in Britain’s overcrowded jails plummeted – and the system buckled under the pressure James Grant was on a night shift at Cookham Wood, a young offenders institute in Rochester, when he was called to the cell of a prisoner. “He had pressed his cell bell to bring me to the door,” said Grant, 34. “He was standing there talking to me. Then it just happened.” Suddenly, Grant felt searing pain across the side of his face. He had been doused with a mixture of boiling water and sugar, known as “napalm” inside prisons. “I’m glad I was standing side on,” he said. “If I had been standing straight on, I think I probably would’ve lost my sight.” Grant’s successful claim for compensation was among a growing bill for litigation claims paid by the prisons service. Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service has paid more than £85m in claims in the last three years, with last year’s bill reaching almost £30m. That bill covers claims for everything, from lost property to attacks against inmates and staff. However, experts said it reflected a system under intense pressure, with some institutions in a state of chaos. Meanwhile, official statistics have repeatedly shown high levels of violence against inmates and officers. “The story on prison safety is a pretty grim one,” said Nick Davies, from the Institute for Government. “Since 2014-15, incidents have doubled, from around 13,000 to around 25,000, in terms of assaults on prisoners. Assaults on staff have grown even more – tripling over that same period. So the scale of these payouts certainly doesn’t surprise me or that there seems to have been an increase.” There is little disagreement about the most obvious cause: a huge reduction of staffing under the coalition government. The number of full-time prison officers fell by 27% (6,609) between 2009-10 and 2014-15. The government began to reverse the cuts when problems emerged, but a lot of the experienced staff had already been lost. The number of operational staff with three or more years’ service has fallen by 40% since 2010. “In March 2019, 50% of officers had less than five years’ experience, compared with 22% in March 2010,” said Davies. While officer numbers have gone back up, there is evidence that prisons have struggled to integrate new staff. “A large number of new recruits are leaving within their first couple of years,” Davies added. Gerard Stilliard, head of personal injury strategy at Thompsons Solicitors, who has been working with prison officers for almost a decade, said it had created a “total mismatch” in prisons. “In really problematic prisons, you had an overwhelming majority of staff with very little experience facing prisoners who, because of the way sentences have gone, are more and more experienced with prison life. It’s the vulnerable prisoners who suffer most directly when there’s a lack of proper control and purposeful activity in a prison.” There are now concerns that the government’s pledges to recruit more police, give more money to prosecutors and apply tougher sentences to some serious offences will make the problems worse. Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “They don’t know what the consequences will be. The punitive atmosphere created by the rhetoric has knock-on effects in ways that people don’t realise. It will create more overcrowding in our closed prisons, which have the worst conditions.” Davies added: “The government is nominally committed to improving conditions in prisons, but it doesn’t have a spending plan to deliver that and it hasn’t thought through the consequences of its other policies.” A prison service spokesman said officers were being given body cameras, police-style restraints and incapacitant spray to improve safety. He said £100m would be spent on improving security, £2.5bn on 10,000 additional prison places and £156m on pressing maintenance issues. For Grant, the attack on him was the beginning of the end of his prison service career, while its after effects are still with him. “I’m not the person that I used to be,” he said. “I’m very wary and very timid now when I never used to be. I was always quite an outgoing person. I don’t like being on my own in places any more. I always want people with me. “When I was in the job, we always used to say that it would take something very drastic to make something change. The drastic thing is going to be an officer losing their life.” |