A former prison officer has shared the reality of the impact of overcrowding on inmates and staff in a harrowing anecdote.
Alex South shared her experiences with The London Economic after it was reported that police are being advised to arrest fewer people in a bid to ease the number of people in prisons.
Force chiefs are being told to consider halting “non-priority arrests” until there is capacity in England and Wales’s jails, The Times reported.
The newspaper said it obtained an internal document from the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) which also said “any planned operations where large numbers of arrests may take place” should potentially be paused to ease pressures in the criminal justice system.
Commenting on the news, former prison officer Alex South has shared the harrowing reality of what overcrowding means for inmates and officers in UK prisons.
Read the transcript in full below:
The reality of prison overcrowding – by Alex South
Adam has done it again. He’s assaulted another prisoner. But this time is the worst.
He’s stabbed him multiple times and then carved his own initials into his forehead.
‘A.J.’
Adam could be hard work. Chaotic, unpredictable, erratic at times. But he was also funny and charismatic. And he was 18. Only a few months before, Young Offenders (prisoners aged 18-21) couldn’t be housed in an adult prison like the one I worked in at the time. But Young Offender Institutions were overcrowded and violent, and for some reason transferring Young Offenders to serve their sentences in adult establishments made sense to politicians who had no experience of either environment. So boys like Adam moved to adult prisons. And that’s where I met him.
At 25, I was young to be a Senior Officer. But I’d had an excellent education in how to be a prison officer, learned through several years spent working in a high security prison alongside officers with decades of experience. They’d prepared me for the violence, the boredom, the rules and regimes and the subtle changes in mood that could signal a problem. But they hadn’t prepared me for the politics of it all. The ways in which the decisions of people who have never set a foot inside prisons are perhaps the most influential, unpredictable and incomprehensible part of the entire system. The ways that decisions made in boardrooms and government offices affect life on prison landings, in cells, in staffrooms and meeting rooms like the one I sat in with Adam.
He admitted it was him. He couldn’t really pretend otherwise, given that he’d effectively left his signature on the victim’s head. He admitted it, and he admitted too that the weapon he’d used was not a crude, prison-made one. Or a shank, as they’re typically called inside. It was a real knife. Thrown over the perimeter wall perhaps, as contraband so often is when prisons are located in busy, inner city areas. Or perhaps it was delivered directly to Adam’s cell via a drone, as happens in pretty much every closed prison in England and Wales. More inventive methods of smuggling in illicit items include gutting dead pigeons with drugs, phones or weapons, sewing them back up and then throwing them over the wall. Just another dead pigeon for a prisoner on cleaning duty to sweep up. I’ll never know how that knife got in. But I know what happened when it did.
Adam shouldn’t have been sitting opposite me in that room. He should have been in the Segregation Unit. What he’d done more than warranted it. But the prison was full. More than full. It was overcrowded, just like the YOI he’d come from and the next jail he’d move on to. The Segregation Unit was full. Full of prisoners like Adam who’d committed acts of serious violence against others, and also of men so severely mentally unwell that they pulled out their own teeth, or sewed their lips together, or tried to gouge out their own eyes. Men like Hashem, who I used to know so well.
Hashem was boisterous, energetic and loud. He wore pristine white trainers and immaculately styled hair. And then he took spice. After that, he was a shell. A man who shrunk into a scared, confused little boy. A man who wore matching tracksuits and shoes one day, and then ripped his mattress apart and slotted his body into it the next. He stayed like that for weeks, wearing his mattress like a sandwich board, talking to himself and shuffling in circles round his cell. The doctors called it drug-induced psychosis. This was a man I’d seen every day for two years, but who now had no idea who I was. He didn’t recognise me and I didn’t recognise him.
Hashem shouldn’t have been in the Segregation Unit, but there were no cells available for him in the prison Healthcare Unit. Ideally, he should have been in a secure hospital receiving specialist treatment. But there were no beds free there either. The hospitals were full. Hashem became another one of the thousands of prisoners suffering acute psychotic distress who grossly exceed the recommended 28 days of being held in prison before being transferred to a secure hospital. In the meantime, he stayed in the Segregation Unit where at least he could be closely monitored. But with the hospitals and Healthcare Units and Segregation Units all full, there was no room for Adam. So he stayed on the wing. He had stabbed a man multiple times and he received little to no punishment.
Adam’s story is one of many I could tell. I could tell you about his victim, who should have been transferred out of the jail immediately for his own protection, but all the local prisons were full. So he stayed, vulnerable and at risk, and with his identity very much marked. Or I could tell you about the sex offender who had committed a string of serious violent offences. He should have been in a specialist sex offenders prison, undergoing specific treatment targeted at addressing the considerable risk he posed to women. But those prisons were overcrowded too. So, like Adam and Hashem, he stayed. And like all the prisoners, he was locked up for 23 hours a day.
The prison might have been full of inmates, but it was comparatively empty of staff. If there aren’t enough officers to unlock cells, or enough officers to escort prisoners to education or workshops or the gym, if there are no officers to even facilitate mealtimes, then it all stops. Meals are delivered to cell doors. Packs of noodles and stale cheese baguettes. No hot meals. No association. No showers. No phone calls. Bang up, bang up, bang up.
If this sounds like an easy ride for officers, let me clarify. Boredom in prison is poisonous. Hours spent staring at a locked door does not bring out the best in people. Prisoners become frustrated, angry, paranoid. I’ve known prisoners who fought with their cellmates just so someone would unlock the door. Just so they could roll around with staff on the floor, fighting and screaming and spitting. Just so the door would open. Prisoners who lied about headaches, back pain, toothache, anything, just so the door would be unlocked and they could walk the few steps to see a nurse. And I’ve known many more who weren’t lying. They slammed their heads against the concrete walls, poured boiling hot water on their skin, or sliced it open with razor blades, sharpened chicken bones, smashed toilet seats or snapped biros. Their heads just as intolerable a place to live as the dirty cells they spent so much time in. Too much time. Sometimes they ripped out the light fittings, leaving themselves in darkness. They smashed the observation panels, the heating pipes, the windows. Jagged holes that let in the rain, the cold, the wind. And there they stayed. Even as they used the shards of glass on their own bodies, still they stayed in those cells. Because where could they go?
Everywhere is full.
I couldn’t stay long in that office with Adam, much as I wanted to. I wanted to know what was going on with him, why he looked as if he was about to cry, why this was his 7th stint in prison and he’s still only a teenager, why he says he’s sorry but he didn’t have a choice and if he hadn’t done it then he would be next and now he is crying and his sleeves are covered in snot and he asks me to please not be angry with him and does this mean he can’t come and talk to me in the office anymore.
I want to talk to him so he tells me where the knife is. How it got in. How to stop the next one. I want to talk to him because I can see that’s what he needs. He doesn’t need another closed door. But I can’t. Because somewhere else an alarm bell is sounding, a prisoner is self-harming, a fight is breaking out, a fire has started after someone used a burning mophead to make holes in the safety netting that now flaps forlornly above the yard. A bigger space for the drones to fly through. Bored. Nothing to do. Too much to do. No one to talk to. So many people that need to talk. No space. Everywhere is full. Empty classrooms. Empty workshops.
There is nowhere to go.
Everywhere is full.
It’s been two years since I left the Prison Service. I’ve read the recent articles about the overcrowding crisis. But this isn’t a problem that’s crept on us. And it isn’t one that didn’t come with plenty of warnings. The Prison Service itself acknowledged in 2018 that the prison population would reach unmanageable levels by 2023. And now here we are. At 99 per cent capacity. Overcrowding in prisons doesn’t just mean we can’t let anyone else in, it means we have nothing to offer those already there. Overcrowding means that Young Offenders are housed with adults. Lifers are housed with burglars and petty thieves. Bullies housed with their victims. The mentally unwell housed in Segregation Units. And everyone else, housed in their cells. For hours on end. Nothing to do. Nowhere to go.
Everywhere is full.
Alex South’s 2023 book ‘Behind These Doors’ is about my experiences as a female officer. It was adapted in The Times, selected as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, Daily Mail Book of the Week, Guardian Book of the Day, Evening Standards Best Summer Reads, and longlisted for Waterstones Best Politics Book of the Year 2023.