Earlier this month, Michael Gove addressed prison governors and admitted that the most recent figures for deaths in custody and violence in prisons were terrible.

This chimed with the Justice Committee’s report into prison safety published four days later. In this report the committee examined the government’s response to the ongoing and rapid deterioration in prison safety in England and Wales that began in 2012.

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Gove, in his speech, went on to say that there is no point trying to minimise, excuse or divert attention away from the increasing problems we face. Unfortunately, the grim statistics he presented only tell part of the story. He was correct when he said that there were 100 self-inflicted deaths in custody, up from 79 the year before and he was also correct when he said assaults on staff were up by 36% to 4,963 and that there has been an increase of 25% in incidents of self-harm.

But as bad as these figures are Gove still managed gloss over the reality of the situation. To understand the true state of the decline in decency and the increase in the awful conditions prison officers and governors are working in, Gove should have gone back three years, not 12 months.

In the 12 months leading up to March 2013 there were 52 self-inflicted deaths in custody, three years later there were 100 – an increase of 92%. In 2012 there were 23,158 incidents of self-harm and three years later there were 32,313 – an increase of 39%. The number of serious assaults in the same period was approximately 1,200 and three years later it was 2,813 – an increase of approximately 130%. Almost every statistical graph the Ministry of Justice produces in this area shows a slight variation in serious incidents of harm or deaths in the nine years before 2012 then an alarming shift upwards.

So what happened in 2012 that might explain the reason for this shift? Between 2010-11 and 2014-15 the National Offender Management Service (Noms) made cumulative savings of almost £1bn and the savings made in public sector prisons were £334m.

A large chunk of these savings was made by shedding staff while the prison population continued to grow. This was achieved with the implementation of a prison benchmark applied across the service, which changed prison regimes and dictated both the grades and numbers of prison staff. In order to get the staff out as quickly as possible, Noms offered them severance payments to leave. This resulted in the loss of experienced staff and, when staffing levels fell below what was required, Noms was unable to recruit replacements quickly enough – even offering those they had paid to leave the opportunity to return.

On top of that the new staff coming in did not have the experience of those they were replacing and many simply left under the pressure adding to the recruitment problems. The impact of these changes were seen in 2012, when the changes were being phased into prisons. The statistics provide good evidence of what happened – prisons were cheaper to run, but this came at a cost.

The government wants to give governors more autonomy and this will be achieved with the prison reform programme referenced in the Queen’s speech. This is what prison governors have been crying out for; but not at any cost. The early adopter prisons are all very different and have their own unique challenges, ranging from local issues such as staffing turnover to the age of the prison buildings and cost of maintenance.

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When giving governors autonomy the government must re-invest what it has stripped out in the past five years. Prison reform will inevitably bring some immediate improvements with the long overdue abolition of the all-pervasive public managerialism that has infected the service. Governors are, however, starting from a much lower position than they were before austerity deprived them of resources. The changes made to prisons to cut running costs cannot simply be reversed at the stroke of a pen: they will take many months, maybe years, to turn around. Centralisation of contracts, procurement processes, budgetary controls, recruitment, and the management of education was introduced to initiate savings and cannot be instantly jettisoned. In order to understand the enormity of the challenge ahead it is necessary to appreciate where we really are now.

Gove acknowledges that a radical reform programme will take years to implement before it begins to yield the positive difference governors are capable of delivering. I hope that this is not simply rhetoric and that governors really will be given enough time, and resources, to rehabilitate prisoners and make society a safer place. Governors, without the imposition of centrally-driven diktats, are capable of so much more than they are currently allowed to demonstrate. Gove states that only when our prisons are places of calm stability and order can we make the difference we need to. That is probably true but in order to achieve that we must recognise that the prison population is overcrowded and the cuts went too far. We are all now paying the price.

John Attard is national officer, Prison Governors’ Association

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