Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Not so much Lord Acton, more East Acton given what we now know about the abuses at Wormwood Scrubs in the late 1990s.  In prisons, as in other total institutions like psychiatric hospitals and homes for the elderly, the potential for corruption and mistreatment is ever-present.

It is too easy to blame a few bad apples.  No doubt prisons do attract some staff with authoritarian and dictatorial attitudes or who just like giving orders.  But they also attract some of the very best people I know – both as governor grades and as frontline staff.  For the past seven years, I have written a monthly column for Prison Service News in which I have been pleased to celebrate the decency, commitment and example of individual prison officers, PE instructors, and healthcare staff.  Ordinary people doing an extraordinary job, as the cliché has it.

No, it is not about the people.  Rather, the potential for wrongdoing is the inevitable consequence of the power-imbalance between prisoners and their guards.  This power-imbalance may be legitimate and necessary (one group has the keys, the other does not), just as many of the cruelties of imprisonment are necessary cruelties (restrictions on possessions, restrictions on movement, the reliance on security intelligence).  But any system where the relationship between the parties is so unequal is susceptible to exploitation, malpractice and worse.  This is the reason why external monitoring and accountability of the prison system is so essential.

Our English arrangements for prison monitoring are unusually rich.  (I use the term English advisedly; different processes apply in other parts of Britain, and our structures are exactly replicated in no other part of the world.)  They are made up of the three official monitoring bodies: the office of HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, the office of the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, and the local, lay Independent Monitoring Boards, buttressed by a vibrant voluntary sector and a free media.  (I appreciate that this is to simplify somewhat and to exclude the role played by the Parliamentary Ombudsman, by Parliament itself, by the Courts, and by specialist bodies like the National Audit Office.)

No-one set out to design our system in this way.  It is a historical accident.  For example, my office emerged from the Strangeways riot and the subsequent Woolf Inquiry; Independent Monitoring Boards can trace their lineage to the ‘nationalisation’ of the prisons in the 1870s.  And this conglomeration of agencies may at first sight look like an excess of inspection and regulation.  Indeed, I assume it was this viewpoint that led to the attempt to merge the five criminal justice inspectorates into a single body.  In contrast, my view is that even our multi-layered set of monitoring arrangements is far from perfect and each of the constituent parts could be strengthened.

Take the Inspectorate of Prisons.  It is a jewel in the crown of British public life, and its survival as an independent organisation has been welcomed by just about every observer of the prison system.  Yet the budget granted to the Chief Inspector means that most prisons do not receive any inspection from one year to the next.  It has limited capacity to carry out ad hoc inquiries.  And until the appointment of the present incumbent, the Inspectorate was extraordinary weak on race issues.  

What of the Independent Monitoring Boards?  They have very extensive powers, but how many use them to best effect?  As someone who reads every IMB annual report, I know there are many boards that are hard-working, diligent and focussed.  But there still seem to be some less interested in the welfare of the prisoners than in their own relationship with the governor or Prison Service HQ.

A flourishing voluntary sector is another of society’s vital signs.  But while I have form and must be careful what I say, some of the pressure groups seem to be fighting last year’s battles (prisons are no longer full of short-term petty offenders) or to substitute agit-prop for analysis.  One well-known activist recently published an article on deaths in custody without mentioning that investigations are now conducted independently, indeed without once mentioning the Ombudsman’s role or that of the Independent Police Complaints Commission.  “Investigations,” she wrote, “often attempt to blame and demonise the deceased and their family for the death to deflect attention away from the responsibility and agents of the state.”  (Er … I think not, Comrade.) 

As for the media, most of the newspapers only report prisons in terms of stereotypes – escapes and riots (not enough of those these days) or drugs, drink and high jinks in open establishments.  Even the serious newspapers have their biases.  Reporting on success gives credibility to reporting on failure.  But not one newspaper told its readers that last year’s rate of self-inflicted deaths had fallen to its lowest level in a decade.

Motes and beams, you may say.  Yet I am all too aware of how far my own office’s performance needs to improve both on the complaints side and following a death in custody.  I believe we are shamefully under-resourced given our important public duties, the requirements of Article 2 of the European Human Convention on Human Rights, and an apparently unending increase in the complaints caseload.  As a consequence, investigations are too frequently delayed and may be over-influenced by what staff say they would have done rather than finding out what they actually did.  Furthermore, we have no resource to analyse or disseminate our findings, or to follow up on recommendations.  We have no policy staff, no researcher, no statistician.  Our death in custody database was actually designed by a student on work experience.  Not surprisingly, it is creaking at the seams.

Years ago, I recall that PRT used to have a poster proclaiming its role as opening up a closed world.  Although you could reasonably argue that this country’s prisons are as open to scrutiny as any, this remains a critical function.  Indeed, perhaps all the more so as the language of penal policy becomes more ‘managerial’ and ‘commercial’.  Morality and justice are not excluded by questions of contract and competitiveness, but neither are they the first things that come to mind.

Compared to many prison systems, our jails have been relatively free of institutionalised abuse and corruption.  I am certain that one reason is the extent of independent external monitoring and accountability.  Just look what happens when those things are absent – say in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay.  But we have also had our own ‘hate factories’ – Birmingham, where Barry Prosser was kicked to death by staff in the 1980s; Wormwood Scrubs, more recently – and we have no grounds for complacency.  The toughening of the public and political mood towards prisoners carries new dangers.  As I have discovered from my investigations in immigration removal centres, no staff are immune from the coarsening of the way those in their care are described in the media and on the public stage. 

We need more monitoring of prisons, not less of it.  And those of us charged with that precious responsibility need to up our game.

Stephen Shaw is the prisons and probation ombudsman and was director of the Prison Reform Trust before taking up the role. This article is taken from Prison Report 71, Spring 2007.