Squalid, overcrowded and understaffed: why I believe prisons like Wandsworth should be closed

Keep your eyes on that broken pipe, gov,” a prisoner warned me – and, moments later, a large rat appeared a couple of feet from my face, looked at me without fear and shuffled off to dig out more food from the piles of rubbish outside the cell.

I was looking out of a barred window in a lower-ground-floor cell on B wing at HMP Wandsworth, a prison built in 1851 to house the growing number of criminals emerging from the slums of our expanding industrial cities. It was opened by enlightened Victorians who thought that solitary confinement and muscular Christianity were better alternatives to the death penalty or transportation. Prisoners were to be housed in single cells, kept apart from the bad influence of their peers and given repetitive tasks such as unpicking ropes to pass the time while being encouraged to attend weekly chapel services to mend their ways.

It is a testament to the quality of design and construction of that age that so many of the Victorian prisons remain. Built of solid bricks and stone rather than aerated concrete, almost every city in the country still has a large 19th-century jail. After the Second World War, when crime began to increase, new generations of prisons were built. This accelerated in the 1990s, as the tough-on-crime policies of successive governments led to a doubling of the prison population in the following 20 years.

Rather than being closed down and turned into museums or luxury flats, the Victorian prisons were expected to take in ever more prisoners. Their inner-city locations meant they were close to crown courts, so they became predominately used to hold remanded prisoners who were waiting for their trials or to be sentenced.

Wandsworth grew into one of the biggest prisons in the country, holding more than 1,500 prisoners – 600 more than its original capacity. Rather than the enlightened house of correction envisaged by its founders, it became one of the most squalid, overcrowded prisons in the estate.

Exeter and Bristol are further examples of Victorian jails whose magnificent architecture bely the terrible conditions within. Indeed, conditions in the latter two prisons are so concerning that in the past year I have written to the secretary of state to issue Urgent Notifications for their improvement (the equivalent of these prisons being put into emergency measures).

We inspected Wandsworth in September 2021 after a spate of self-inflicted deaths at the jail, and returned again less than a year later because we were so concerned about what we found.

The cells at Wandsworth are small, dark and cramped, with an unscreened toilet in the corner, a sink and a plastic chair. Those on the lower floors suffer from vermin and damp, while the cells on the top landings are unbearably hot during the summer.

Like most reception prisons, Wandsworth has a constant churn of prisoners arriving from courts on remand or at the beginning of their sentence before they are transferred elsewhere in the system. Many of these will be prisoners caught up in a cycle of reoffending, drug addiction, homelessness and mental illness. They will spend years of their lives in and out of Wandsworth’s crumbling walls.

Once they arrive, they are likely to be locked in their cell for up to 22 hours a day – at the time of our inspection there were nowhere near enough education or training places for the population, meaning there were long waiting lists to get onto the sort of course that might help the men get jobs on release and stop them returning to a life of crime. With nothing for prisoners to do all day, it is perhaps unsurprising that Wandsworth continues to struggle with the availability of drugs that are often the cause of the high levels of violence that are a feature of the prison. In short, for many years, it has been a jail that struggles in almost every area.

But the single biggest problem that faces Wandsworth is a lack of staff, with shortages in every area, from healthcare to education. When we inspected, we found that 30 per cent of prison officers were either off sick or unable to perform their full duties. Many of them were very inexperienced, having only recently joined the service, and some were only recently out of school.

Difficulties with recruitment are not confined to Wandsworth: Bullingdon in Oxfordshire and Swaleside on the Isle of Sheppey have wings closed because they cannot recruit enough staff to run the prison safely. Other jails rely on temporary officers, bussed in from the north of England and put up in hotels at great expense to the taxpayer.

The pipeline of ex-forces personnel, who were a reliable source of new staff, has dried up because the military has shrunk and prison officer pay has not kept up with other jobs. Experienced prisoners frequently complain that they have to tell new staff what they are supposed to do.

With good leadership, overcrowded local prisons can just about keep afloat. When they get close to their full staffing complement, they can keep security systems tight and can bear down on violence and the supply of drugs while making sure that prisoners get some time in the open air, a shower and have access to the basics like soap, bedding and clean underwear.

But things can unravel fast: security systems slip, more drugs arrive, prisoners get into debt and inevitably violence rises. This in turn means staff leave and the prison comes under even more strain. Two weeks ago, we inspected Woodhill, a jail for prisoners serving long sentences outside Milton Keynes. It had struggled for years with a lack of staff, but we were shocked by how quickly it had declined. This led to yet another Urgent Notification, the fourth I have issued for a failing prison in just 10 months.

Without enough boots on the ground to deliver a basic prison regime to these men, there are serious consequences. Prisoners will not be unlocked on time because there is nobody to do it. They will not get to education or employment because there is nobody to escort them. They will not have clean clothes or bedding. The demand, and thus the supply of drugs will rise, and with it an illicit economy that leads to debt and to violence.

This is already happening in many jails.

Prisons play a vital public protection role. First, they need to make sure that prisoners are held securely during the time they are confined within their walls. But second, and crucially, they need to reduce the risk of prisoners reoffending once they are released. Too often we find that prisons are failing in this area.

The vast majority of prisoners will get out at some point. If we want them to stop offending, we need to do more for them when they are locked up. That means providing them with skills and education as well as the habits of going to work while they are in prison, so that when they come out they do not create more victims or cause trouble in their communities, but take their place in society.

Escapes, thankfully, remain incredibly rare. But the current pressures on many prisons are unprecedented and Wandsworth is not the first and will not be the last to suffer the effects of these compounding factors. Staff at jails like Wandsworth often do a remarkable job in what are almost impossible conditions, but we all recognise that this is not sustainable. In the longer term the ambition must be to close these vermin-infested, overcrowded, crumbling Victorian prisons and provide jails that are fit for purpose for the 21st century.