LONG inured to the squalor and violence of Britain’s prisons, Peter Clarke was still shocked by what he found in Birmingham on a visit in early August. The government’s chief inspector of prisons observed filthy common areas with rubbish piling up; fleas, cockroaches and rats; blood and vomit left overnight; and cramped cells “not fit for habitation”. Some prisoners refused to emerge from their cells for fear of violence. His inspection team’s own cars were torched in a supposedly secure car park. On one occasion Mr Clarke was so overcome by the smell of drugs that he had to leave one of the wings. Overall, it was the worst prison he had ever seen.

Consequently, on August 20th the Ministry of Justice announced that it was taking back control of the jail from G4S, the private company that had run it since 2011. The crisis in Birmingham highlights the chronic problems afflicting much of the country’s crumbling prison estate. It has also reignited the debate about whether private companies should carry out core functions of the state (see Bagehot). The government plans to build six new prisons. A private contractor has already been chosen to build and run one of those. The fallout from Birmingham will help to determine whether it will be the last.

Birmingham may be the worst of the 117 prisons in England and Wales, but the dreadful conditions there reflect worrying trends throughout the system. After 2010, when David Cameron’s coalition government began to cut prison budgets as part of an austerity programme, all the indicators began to point the wrong way (see chart). In the year to March 2018 there were 31,000 assaults in prisons, a record high. Self-harm rates are also at their highest since records began. Positive drug tests are 20% more common than a decade ago—and that doesn’t account for new drugs such as “spice”, a synthetic cannabinoid said to cause aggressive behaviour. Include that and the scale of the drug problem has more than doubled.

A lack of staff and surplus of prisoners are to blame for this dramatic deterioration. Between 2010 and 2015 the prison service’s budget was cut by a quarter. It shed 27% of its staff during that period. But the prison population, now about 83,000, remained stable. After realising how badly the staff cuts had affected order in prisons, the government launched a recruitment effort, and has since rehired about half the number of staff originally laid off. A leaked government report into the causes of a riot in Birmingham prison in December 2016 found that officers were “worn down by the chronic staffing shortages.”