Control, Order, Hope: Foreword
The discourse on prison reform very often excludes the people who work face-to-face with prisoners in our criminal justice system. Front line prison staff are our greatest asset in the fight to bring safety and opportunity back to a prison system disfigured by years of underinvestment and poor leadership. All too often this vital role is rendered invisible by those who fail to understand or acknowledge the profoundly important duty they carry out.
Our addiction to cheap custody has entrenched the instability and extreme violence that makes it all but impossible for prisons to do the job we pay our taxes for. An obsession with managerialism and pious abstractions has done nothing to make English and Welsh prisons the engines of human transformation they could be. Many other countries manage to model this positive vision, and we should be no different.
Prisons don’t have to be inherently harmful. Destruction of the spirit, all too common across the system, is not inevitable and it is not unfixable. It simply takes leadership, will, and proper resources. Those who actually work in our prisons can do the rest.
This is a manifesto to get our violently disordered prisons back on their feet again. It deliberately avoids the tired rhetoric of a criminal justice ‘commentariat’ who too often confuse prisoner advocacy with public safety and are sometimes shamefully silent on the security and welfare of the men and women who work our prison landings.
We have been practical and straightforward about the changes needed now, to make prisons safe places capable of doing more than delaying the offending of the people inside them. It builds on the work already started by Prisons Minister Rory Stewart, one of the most intellectually and morally engaged holders of that post for many years.
Prisons manage human failure. Our aim is to put forward ideas that will help make custody productive — where confident and skilled staff can assist people in their care to break away from criminality and realise their potential. But without the foundation of security, order, and control, no amount of warm words on hope and progress will make a jot of difference. In my experience at all levels of prison management and leadership, where you have well supported staff who feel valued, have dignity, have agency — anything is possible.
Order and control is emphatically not a recipe for state oppression as our detractors will inevitably suggest. It is in fact, as anyone who has ever walked a prison landing knows, the starting point of a journey to legitimacy and ambition for our citizens in prison. This manifesto, building on previous CSJ work on practical prison reform, describes that journey in detail.
There are big questions to answer about who we send to prison and the price we are willing to pay for it as a society. In the meantime, 82,000 prisoners, most of whom will be released back into the community and 23,000 uniformed staff, who want to help keep them there, deserve our respect and our help to succeed.
That key relationship and what it could achieve is at the heart of this work.
Ian Acheson
Ian Acheson is a former prison Governor who led the landmark 2016 independent government review of violent extremism in prisons.
