White Noise and Shadow, HM Prison Lindholme, G4S Silver Award for Oil or Acrylic 2010 - image courtesy of the Koestler Trust
As a prison governor, I spent a good deal of the last decade as a regular visitor to the segregation unit in three different prisons. These are the units which hold people undergoing punishment alongside people too vulnerable to cope in the rest of the prison, often the scene of both extreme violence and extreme distress. I signed countless documents giving authority for another human being to be kept apart from their peers in these units for most of the day, sometimes for weeks on end. I passed judgement on prisoners that I had found guilty of disciplinary offences in hearings lasting a few minutes, and sentenced them to effective isolation for anything up to a month. I told prisoners that they would stay in segregation because of intelligence that I would not disclose. And, truth be told, I did it all with a pretty clear conscience.
But it feels uncomfortable to be reading the weighty “Deep Custody” report published this week by the Prison Reform Trust, where I now sit as its deputy director. Nothing in the report is unfamiliar. Indeed, it commands credibility for the measured and knowledgeable picture it paints of life in 15 different prison “segs”. It rightly compliments the skills of many staff who work in these most challenging and complex environments. It minutely describes the dilemmas a closed community faces in tackling problems of extreme aggression and extreme vulnerability.
