Two days after the shocking conditions in Birmingham Prison were made public, and the government took it back into public control from G4S, the private company running it, the headline of the French newspaper Le Figaro ran as follows: ‘Escapes, assaults… the black summer of French prisons’ with an article detailing serial escapes, attacks on warders, suicides and “a penitentiary system at the end of its tether.”

But the fact that things are just as bad, or perhaps even worse, elsewhere does not make things good at home. Last week’s scathing report by the Chief Inspector of Prisons, Peter Clarke, said HMP Birmingham was the worst he had ever inspected, with cockroaches, rats and an overwhelming smell of drugs.

All this suggests deficiencies not only in the prison but in his own inspectorate – the large-scale riot in the prison in 2016 should have alerted them that close or special attention needed to be paid to it. Cockroaches, rats and large quantities of drugs do not appear overnight.

I arrived in Birmingham prison as a psychiatrist and medical officer in 1990, as conditions began to improve. Integrated lavatories had recently been installed, putting an end to the antediluvian process of ‘slopping out.’ I came to have a high regard for the officers.