Inside the UK prison service by Jim Dawkins

[July 2008]

Drawing from his experiences as a prison officer in some of London's most notorious prisons, and more recently from his Channel 5 programme ‘Banged Up', Jim Dawkins shares his insight into the problems of the UK prison service. Corruption and other discrepancies in prisons have been highlighted in BBC's current series ‘Criminal Justice', while the issue of overcrowding has also been a hot topic in the media recently. Dawkins argues that in order to tackle overcrowding we need to get to the root of current crime trends – educating young people about the consequences of their actions and regaining community spirit. For those who do end up in jails, the systems should be in place so that prisoners are released back into society ‘restored' and able to change their behaviour once they've served their sentences.

I spent over seven years as a prison officer on the landings of three of London's most notorious prisons – Wormwood Scrubs, Belmarsh and Wandsworth. During my time as a prison officer, I found some glaring flaws in the system which I did not agree with, and which ultimately led to my decision to leave the service prematurely in 1999. I documented my experiences in a book, ‘The Loose Screw', in which I made a point of being quite brutally honest about what I witnessed and how I felt the system was being managed. I am totally in favour of the need for prisons and custodial sentences for criminals, and have no regard for anyone who commits crime of any sort. However, I know first-hand that there are some serious problems in the current prison system, which need to be addressed with immediate effect.

The initial flaws of the prison system are the ‘bad apples' among a minority of staff, who spend their days bullying and assaulting prisoners and putting other more junior members of staff under immense pressure to do the same. Some people have the opinion that it's part of the process that prisoners should have a hard time while they're ‘inside', but staff bullying has a negative effect and does not help criminals to see the error of their wrongdoing. As a prison officer, you are employed to protect the public by keeping those committed by the courts in custody, and to help them lead law abiding lives on their release. You are given absolute power over the prisoners, as you control their every move. The problem with power is that it can often go hand in hand with corruption. To quote a well-known phrase by Lord Acton: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Although members of staff who participate in these acts are a minority, they do cause incredible strain on other officers and prisoners, who are just trying to do a difficult job well, or get through their sentence, learn to understand the consequences of their actions, and change their behaviour for their release back into our society.

The most important job as a prison officer is to act as a role model for the prisoners under your care and to show them the errors of their ways. Those officers who walk the prison landings like predatory animals, build reputations of preying on weaker prisoners, and assault prisoners in unprovoked attacks, are not teaching inmates that breaking the law is wrong and will not be tolerated in our society. I've also known prison officers to have planted contraband in cells and smuggle contraband into prison, for a price, of course. These acts breed a vicious contempt between prisoners and staff and prison ultimately becomes a battleground for survival. Furthermore, prisoners end up leaving prison with nothing but resentment and often more bitterness and hatred for authority than they entered with.

Whilst I feel very strongly about staff bullying and corruption, I also feel that relaxing the regime too much can have a negative effect. I have dealt with many prisoners during my time, and most of the inmates I was closely involved with were serving long sentences. The majority of them preferred the old routine of twenty-three hour lock-up to some of the latest regimes of all day association, including televisions and computer games in cells. Many people who find themselves in prison are from underprivileged backgrounds, and so for them to be suddenly given access to equipment they may not have had access to outside prison seems ludicrous. When Wandsworth prison first opened, Queen Victoria apparently delayed its official opening by ordering the removal of the latest but expensive invention of the time - integral toilets. The toilets had been placed in every cell to showcase the latest in modern Victorian technology. The Queen reasoned that most of her subjects who had not committed a crime did not have the luxury of a toilet in their homes, so why should criminals have such luxury in their prison cells? It seems that we have missed some things in the 21st century that Queen Victoria spotted decades ago. The more you give someone in a prison environment, the more chances you create for bullying and corruption on all levels, which in turn gives rise to the emergence of hierarchies.

So what should be done about the state of our prisons?

Primarily, and in order to have an effect on the apparently rising problem of more violent crimes in our communities, the way we manage our prisoners needs to be seriously redressed. My ideas, based on experience, would be to begin by removing the softer regimes and reintroducing a standard regime across the board. This way, everyone is equal and no-one has more or less than each other. This would instantly remove many of the possibilities of bullying and corruption. I would then introduce more interactive therapy classes, such as psychology, sociology, and creative activities such as art and drama, which help inmates to express themselves and release anger. There should also be more commitment to anger management courses and perhaps most importantly, restorative justice, where the criminal can face victims of similar crimes and are forced to see and understand the consequences of their actions. This is something most criminals never have to do, but often produces the most definite and positive response from both criminal and victim. The only time a criminal should be rewarded should be following satisfactory completion of a carefully planned set of courses. At this stage, an inmate's release should be considered. If prisoners fail, they should be ‘back-squadded', in a similar way to army recruits, and be made to retake the course again.

Although this solution would work for people already serving custodial sentences, it would not address the current problem of crime wracking communities and overcrowded prisons. To tackle this, I believe we have to commit to educating our young people about the pitfalls of crime and the real horrors of spending many years in prison. Every day, we turn on our televisions or open our newspapers to see another tragic death or serious injury as a result of some form of violent crime. With rising gun and knife crime among young people, it's this age group I believe we need to seriously target now, to begin to tackle the problem of overcrowding in our prisons in the future. In my current TV series, ‘Banged Up', I played the part of the senior prison officer in an authentic but disused Victorian prison in Scarborough. With the help of the former Home Secretary, David Blunkett, criminologists, psychiatrists and former criminals who now work for various reform groups, we took ten young men aged sixteen and seventeen and introduced them to what life would be like if they continued on their path towards living a life of crime. The effect the programme had on each individual was profound. They all arrived as cocky young men with naïve views as to what it would be like to be locked-up in a prison cell. Each of them had the opinion that prison was easy; information which they had all derived from at least one friend who had told them stories of their time in prison. They came to realise that their friends are obviously not going to tell them the truth about life in prison, as it would do their ‘street cred' no good at all. They would not admit that they cried themselves to sleep on the first night or that they could not sleep as they were terrified that their cell mate may physically or even sexually assault them. They would not describe the hours of mind-numbing boredom when, due to lack of staff or an incident, they were locked up in a cell measuring four foot by eight foot.

It's these stories that young people need to hear before they find themselves in a prison van at the start of a five year prison sentence or worse. Young people also need to feel some pride back in their communities, in the hope that they will learn not to destroy property or rob the elderly or become involved in futile gang fights, where no one wins but lives get destroyed. But just as prison officers have to be role models to inmates; adults also have an obligation to behave as role models for young people to look up to and respect in their communities. Perhaps if more of us pulled together to try to do more to encourage these young people to channel their energies into getting some community pride and spirit back, and if we earn their respect instead of taking every opportunity to chastise them, we may be able to deter these young people from a life of crime. In turn, the problem of overcrowding in our prisons would naturally be tackled too.

Many young people really believe that crime pays, but I have yet to meet a person who has been involved in a life of crime who would not swap the measly amounts of money they may have made for the chance to have the years back that they wasted in prison. Getting this message across to our young people is the key. They need to hear first-hand from people who have experienced the grim reality of being locked up for years or how it feels to be a victim of crime. And to reach the source of prison overcrowding, we need to work on our own communities to bring back the community spirit I remember when I was growing up, so that we no longer fear attack every time we leave our homes.

Author note

Jim Dawkins is an ex-prison officer at Belmarsh, Wormwood Scrubs and Wandsworth prisons, the author of two books and is currently in Channel 5's television series ‘Banged Up'. His book, 'The Loose Screw, is available to buy on Amazon.

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