PRISONS

Bill Keller, former editor of the New York Times, has documented the appalling dysfunction of the US criminal justice system. Now he watches on as UK prisons head the same way

“A noisy maze”: HMP Coldingley, where Keller attended the “Lifer Day” event

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As prisons in the United Kingdom go, HMP Coldingley in Surrey ranks somewhere in the grim middle. It is not one of the crumbling Victorian-era hellholes that make up about a third of the prison estate, but it is showing its age. Opened in 1969, it is a noisy maze of cold, dark cells, broken windows, shabby common areas and communal toilets. In some wings, according to the most recent government inspection in January 2022, “waits to use the lavatories were so long that prisoners often had to revert to using a bucket in their cell.” Levels of violence, the inspector reckoned, are “around average”, which is to say, frightening; they are largely associated with control of the prison drug trade. Work and education opportunities for inmates were deemed “disappointing”. On the brighter side, staff-prisoner relations were rated “excellent”.

Most of Coldingley’s 500 or so residents are serving long sentences, making it an appropriate location for a special event called Lifer Day. On an overcast Thursday in March, some of the country’s leading prison authorities convened on a stage in the prison’s nondescript chapel. The day-long gathering was intended to improve morale and help inmates navigate the frustrations that come with a life sentence. (In the UK, as in the US, “life” usually means the offender has a prescribed minimum “tariff ”, after which he—the prison population is 96 per cent male—can be set free by a parole board, though he will be subject to some level of supervision for the rest of his days. Life without the possibility of parole—what Americans call LWOP and Brits call “whole life”—is far less common in the UK than in the US. At least, so far.)

The luminaries who came to speak at Coldingley—most of whom had decades of experience of the system—included longstanding parole board members, a retired Crown Court judge and the heads of two leading prison reform charities, the Howard League for Penal Reform and the Prison Reform Trust.

Two shifts—about 50 lifers each, one after the other—organised themselves on folding chairs. They questioned the experts about new procedural hurdles the government has erected for lifers who hope to graduate to less restrictive conditions—either an open-category prison, where the facility may authorise furloughs to spend time with family or at a job, or a “progression regime”, which allows inmates to earn greater freedom step by step.

Much of the discussion revolved around efforts by Dominic Raab, the justice secretary at the time, to restrict access to more liberal facilities. Last summer, Raab declared that he would veto any transfers that were not designated “essential”, or that might “undermine public confidence”. He didn’t define his terms, but he left no doubt of his intent. Before he asserted his new powers, offenders who could present evidence that they had been rehabilitated had a greater than 90 per cent chance of moving to less restrictive custody. Since Raab’s intervention last June, 90 per cent of requests had been denied. A bill currently at the committee stage in parliament proposes to expand the justice secretary’s power further, authorising him to overrule the parole board not just on where prisoners serve their time but on when they can be released, which is pretty much the board’s main job. (Raab resigned the following month in the face of accusations that he bullied his staff. His successor, Alex Chalk, served briefly as minister of state for prisons, parole and probation and has a reputation for being more centrist. He declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Inmates I talked to on Lifer Day were grateful for the sympathetic hearing and the chance to vent. A few picked at leftovers from the Marks & Spencer sushi lunch ordered for the visitors after the morning session. No one expressed any confidence that the political climate, with or without Raab, would favour an improvement of their situation. One lifer who is 13 years into a 22-year minimum term told me that the Lifer Day gathering “just brings back to the forefront of my mind the plain truth: that we’re fucked.”

As alate-in-life student of American criminal justice, I want to be a little humble about throwing stones at the UK’s penal system. It is hard to imagine a system more perfectly designed for failure than ours in the US, which in the name of “corrections” helps perpetuate a cycle of poverty, crime, community dysfunction and despair. The UK (for this discussion, England and Wales; Scotland and Northern Ireland operate separately) locks up a larger percentage of its subjects than its neighbours in western Europe, but its per capita incarceration rate is only about a third of America’s. While the UK, like most democracies, long ago abolished capital punishment, the US put 18 prisoners to death last year and has about 2,500 more awaiting execution. The US also has an insane gun culture, on both sides of the law. And there is no equivalent to His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons, the independent agency that conducts unannounced, in-depth inspections and publishes the often harrowing findings.