I became a prison officer in 2012 at HMP Whitemoor, a high-security adult men’s prison in Cambridgeshire. It is small, housing only 400 men. It is relatively modern too, particularly when compared to the Victorian architecture of the more notorious English jails: Wormwood Scrubs, Pentonville, Wandsworth. Modern, small, but most certainly not without risk. Almost all the men inside Whitemoor are serving life sentences, some what the legal system euphemistically calls “natural life”, meaning they will die in prison. But considering the crisis that has emerged in British prisons over the past decade, the place was a comparable paradise.
During the time I worked at Whitemoor, from 2012-15, prisoners were out of their cells for up to eight hours day. They had access to activities including Open University courses, music production software and fully-equipped carpentry workshops. And when they returned to their residential wings, they were able to use the mini-kitchens, gyms and laundry rooms located there. This is not the norm. Most prisons do not have gyms and kitchens within the residential units. But then, most prisons are not Whitemoor. The significance of the men having so much time out of cell was not just about things they could do, but the people they could speak to. As officers, we spent a considerable period of time each day with the men on our wing. We got to know them, and they us.
When I joined, many of the officers I was working with had more than 20 years’ experience. They knew prison. These officers were acutely attuned to subtle shifts in atmosphere, the kind of things that I didn’t even know to look for at first. They taught me the difference between a cell door that’s been pushed to, and one that is being held shut from the inside. They taught me to pay attention to changes in behaviour, mood, personal routine. Someone who suddenly starts putting his hands in his pockets may have a reason to be hiding his knuckles. Someone who starts giving his property away one evening may not be planning to wake up the next morning.
It’s impossible to measure the impact of these skills, but there is no doubt in my mind that they are the reason behind the fights that didn’t break out, the self-harm that didn’t happen, the incidents that never took place. In the three years I spent at Whitemoor I saw only three acts of violence and barely any self-harm. Perhaps most importantly, those officers taught me the value of consistency in prison. After a difficult conversation with a particularly challenging individual, I asked my buddy officer, the man assigned to guide me through my probationary period, what I should do. His answer was simple: “Come back in tomorrow.” The role of a prison officer isn’t just knowing when to talk and when to listen, or what to watch for, it is also about showing up. Consistently, reliably, and being fully present in an environment that demands nothing less.
In 2015, I was promoted to senior officer at HMP Wormwood Scrubs, a Category B jail in west London. Scrubs is different to Whitemoor in every way. It is bigger, older, busier. The wing I was based on held 317 men in multiple-occupancy cells, as opposed to the 120 single cells I was used to from Whitemoor. And yet, when I talk about Scrubs, even saying “men” feels misleading. By this point, Young Offender Institutions were already becoming overcrowded. Prisons like Scrubs had begun accepting Young Offenders aged 18-21 into the general adult population. As the prison became increasingly overcrowded, we had no choice but to locate people together who ideally should be nowhere near one another. Young offenders with adults, lifers with short-termers, remand prisoners with sentenced, sex offenders with the general population, drug addicts living alongside convicted dealers. Overcrowding was a problem then, but it would only get worse.
Over the next 12 months, Scrubs lost a lot of very experienced staff in a very short period of time. This was largely due to the Voluntary Early Departure (VED) scheme offered to more experienced staff, and originally intended to cut costs. The VEDs scheme was one of a series of austerity measures the Prison Service implemented between 2010 and 2013. Almost 7,000 front-line prison officers would leave the service as a result. Predictably, as more experienced staff left, the violence and self-harm increased. And as the prison became more dangerous, even more staff left. Officers, senior officers, custodial managers, administrative staff, nurses, doctors, all of them hanging up their keys for the last time, walking out of that infamous gatehouse and not looking back. And so Wormwood Scrubs was placed on an emergency regime, or a “23-hour bang-up”, which meant prisoners were locked in their cells 23 hours a day because there weren’t enough staff to facilitate a regime. A Prisons Inspectorate report that year found that only 13 per cent of prisoners at Wormwood Scrubs left their cells to attend an activity.
The “bang-up” meant that prisoners didn’t come out to shower, or make a phone call, or empty their bins. So they threw their uneaten food and litter out of the cell windows. Modern prisons have metal cages attached to the cell windows to prevent littering and contraband being passed from cell to cell, but Victorian-era prisons like Scrubs do not. At mealtimes, the grass beneath the cell windows would look as if it was rippling. If you looked closer, you would see that those were the rats. The emergency regime also meant that prisoners couldn’t use the wing phones. So demand for illicit mobile phones went up, and was met. Drones would deliver contraband directly to cell windows. Years later I met one of these prisoners again at HMP Belmarsh, where he told me that he was making £4,000 a week selling phones at Scrubs at that time.
Prisoners were bored and desperate and angry. To no one’s surprise, self-harm continued to increase. I saw prisoners in states of such acute psychological distress that they sewed their lips together and attempted to gouge out their eyes. Ideally, we would have moved the mentally unwell prisoners to the healthcare unit, but it was overcrowded: there was no space. The impact of overcrowding was seen with interpersonal violence too. I recall one young man stabbing another prisoner multiple times. He should have immediately been relocated to the Segregation Unit, but the prison was overcrowded, and that unit was full. He stayed in the general population.
These are appalling conditions for prisoners to live in; they are equally appalling for staff to work in. Toilets that don’t work, smashed windows, bloodstained walls, filth, and cockroaches and rats. The cuts had affected the governors’ budgets just as they had staffing, and we were short of toilet roll, bedding, clothes, officers’ uniform. Experienced staff were asked to bring in any spare uniform they had at home to give to the new officers, who were starting work without a proper set of clothes to wear. The Prison Reform Trust described Wormwood Scrubs at this time as a place of “Dickensian squalor”. But Scrubs was not just squalid, it was dangerous. Two months after I left, a prisoner was murdered in his cell.
I left Wormwood Scrubs to return to the High Security Estate, where I had felt safer. I transferred to HMP Belmarsh, a Category A prison in south-east London. These prisons are assigned greater funding to account for higher security measures, so the cuts took longer to impact the Category A estate, but they did. And when they did, we were so short-staffed that we were only able to let prisoners out of their cells for their association period once every three days. I had counted myself lucky that I left Scrubs when I did, that I was not there for the murder, but then a prisoner was murdered in his cell at Belmarsh too. Things got worse and worse, and more staff left. By this point, I knew three officers who had taken their own lives. And countless others, who had left a job that had once meant so much to them, and that they were remarkably skilled at, because the stress, intolerable trauma and lack of support had become too much.
During my time at Belmarsh I was awarded a Churchill fellowship to research the impact of correctional environments on staff well-being. I travelled to prisons in Canada, Australia and the US. I saw incredible work being done in these places to support staff. A real focus on specialist psychological support that acknowledges the impact of repeated exposure to trauma. The need for proper, decent working conditions. The importance of high-quality training delivered regularly and in person – our current recruitment process is conducted entirely over Zoom, and much of the ongoing training is via eLearning. An emotional well-being service that far exceeds a generic employee assistance helpline. And peer support teams who receive regular, extensive training by professionals, and who are given the time and resources within their day to carry out that work.
I left the job in 2021. I was burned out. Despite what my buddy officer had said almost a decade before, I could no longer come back in tomorrow. But since then, the crisis in our prisons has only spiralled. In May this year, the Labour Party published a report that found prisons and probation staff had taken over 770 years’ worth of mental health sick leave in just 12 months. The cross-party parliamentary Justice Committee found that half of the prison officers in England and Wales feel unsafe at work. Not unfulfilled, or even unhappy, but physically unsafe. In 2022, more than a quarter of new officers left the job within a year. And I don’t blame them.
It is clear that we need more prison spaces. Since the summer riots, we have seen overcrowding approach its maximum capacity, and the early release of prisoners simply to create more room. It is clear also that we need to have intelligent discussions about what resources and activities prisoners will have access to when these new prisons are built. However, all of this is null and void if we do not talk about staffing first. There is no point building new prisons if there’s no one to run them. As recently as March 2023, one of the biggest prisons in the country, HMP Five Wells, had an entire housing unit unoccupied.
Prison reform is the subject of the moment, as it should be. The impact of poor penal policies has shown us in stark clarity that what goes on inside most certainly does not stay there. Prisons are not hidden worlds. They are a microcosm of society; they show us what we might not want to see. But if we are prepared to look, prisons can offer us solutions as well as problems. Prison reform is about more than systems and buildings and numbers. It is about people. And it is not possible without officers. Retention as well as recruitment. And once we have those officers, we must look after them. We must ensure they come back in tomorrow.
This is an edited version of a testimony the author delivered to the Lords’ Justice and Home Affairs Select Committee in September 2024.
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