Professor Ian Acheson FRSA MISRM HonDLItt is a Senior Advisor on the Counter Extremism Project and author of ‘Screwed: Britain’s prison crisis and how to escape it’.
The government has asked Amber Rudd to review the whole prison system. That is both overdue and potentially dangerous.
Overdue, because anyone who has set foot in a modern jail knows that the system is failing simultaneously on security, safety, rehabilitation and basic order. Dangerous, because Whitehall has an unrivalled talent for taking a hard problem, wrapping it in managerial jargon about “complex pressures”, and then quietly doing nothing.
In 2016 I was asked to lead a much narrower exercise: an independent review into Islamist extremism in prisons, probation and youth justice.
That work was about one specific threat – the spread of a violent, anti‑democratic ideology inside institutions that were already fragile. It concluded that Islamist extremism was not a marginal nuisance but a growing subversive force, exploiting weak management, poor intelligence and a lack of moral courage.
The government accepted most of those recommendations and created a Security, Order and Counter Terrorism Directorate to drive them. That was quietly abandoned with the departure of the report’s commissioner Michael Gove from the Ministry of Justice. Many other badly needed initiatives were ignored or watered down by officials more affronted by being revealed as incompetent than the national security crisis they presided over.
Rudd’s review starts from a wider lens. Her terms of reference talk about a “strategic, risk‑based assessment” of the current, emerging and future risks facing prisons, and they range across security, safety, violence, self‑harm, overcrowding, capacity, workforce and rehabilitation. It is a wholesale look at how the carceral state is coping – or failing to cope – with everything from drugs and drones to staff attrition and sentencing trends.
On paper, that is a strength.
For once, ministers are not pretending that you can fix drugs or violence without talking about staff numbers, training and safety, or that you can talk about rehabilitation while ignoring the realities of overcrowding and decrepit jails. The review is explicitly tasked with looking at long‑term reforms, not just another round of sticking plaster announcements.
But breadth can easily turn into blur. When everything is a “priority”, nothing is.
The risk with a system‑wide mandate is that distinctly different threats – overcrowding, organised crime, Islamist extremism, chronic under‑staffing – are flattened into a single story about “pressure”. That is comforting for the centre, because it implies a kind of inevitable systems failure. It is much less comforting if you work or live in these awful places.
A prison system that cannot distinguish between failing roofs, failing leadership, failing staff culture and a failing response to ideological subversion will end up managing all these badly. One of the reasons my 2016 review made an impact was that it named a problem the system did not want to acknowledge: that some prisoners were not just badly behaved, but actively working to delegitimise the state, radicalise others and build parallel structures of authority inside the walls.
Rudd’s review will have to decide whether it treats that as merely another “risk factor” alongside drugs and drones, or whether it recognises that ideology, corruption and cowardice are threat multipliers. Islamist extremists, gang leaders and serious organised criminals do not simply add to the background noise of a busy prison. They thrive in weak institutions, exploit the timidity of management and the paucity of front‑line supervisors, and then remake the culture in their own image.
The terms of reference talk about “workforce challenges” and “capability”. That is Whitehall‑speak for a simple truth: you cannot run a safe prison from a headquarters stuffed with rear echelon progressives who think their job is more about social engineering than running a uniformed law enforcement agency. You either have confident, well‑led officers and first‑line managers on the landings who feel backed when they enforce rules, or you have chaos. Every serious review of prison failure, here and abroad, ends up rediscovering that basic point. The first thing I would do if I was Rudd, is what I did a decade ago. Junk the terms of reference and write ones designed for action, not bureaucratic arse covering.
So what should we look for from Rudd’s work?
First, whether it is willing to say that the problem is not just “pressure” but a loss of authority. Second, whether it is prepared to be explicit about ideological and organised threats, rather than burying them in euphemisms. Third, whether it proposes reforms that actually change incentives for ministers, governors and senior officials – or simply reshuffles governance charts and invents new acronyms.
There is a final danger. Reviews are often used in Britain as a way of outsourcing political courage. Amber Rudd and her panel can describe the disease in forensic detail. They cannot force a future government to pick up the scalpel. If this exercise degenerates into another elegantly written explanation of why prisons are in crisis, then front‑line staff will rightly conclude that the centre has learned nothing.
A wide‑angle review is needed. But if it does not put command authority, staff confidence and ideological/organised crime subversion somewhere near the centre of its analysis, it will confuse symptom with cause. Prisons are not failing because the world is complicated. They are failing because, for too long, we have tolerated institutions that are unsafe, unmanaged and undefended.
Any serious review should start by saying so.
Professor Ian Acheson FRSA MISRM HonDLItt is a Senior Advisor on the Counter Extremism Project and author of ‘Screwed: Britain’s prison crisis and how to escape it’.
The government has asked Amber Rudd to review the whole prison system. That is both overdue and potentially dangerous.
Overdue, because anyone who has set foot in a modern jail knows that the system is failing simultaneously on security, safety, rehabilitation and basic order. Dangerous, because Whitehall has an unrivalled talent for taking a hard problem, wrapping it in managerial jargon about “complex pressures”, and then quietly doing nothing.
In 2016 I was asked to lead a much narrower exercise: an independent review into Islamist extremism in prisons, probation and youth justice.
That work was about one specific threat – the spread of a violent, anti‑democratic ideology inside institutions that were already fragile. It concluded that Islamist extremism was not a marginal nuisance but a growing subversive force, exploiting weak management, poor intelligence and a lack of moral courage.
The government accepted most of those recommendations and created a Security, Order and Counter Terrorism Directorate to drive them. That was quietly abandoned with the departure of the report’s commissioner Michael Gove from the Ministry of Justice. Many other badly needed initiatives were ignored or watered down by officials more affronted by being revealed as incompetent than the national security crisis they presided over.
Rudd’s review starts from a wider lens. Her terms of reference talk about a “strategic, risk‑based assessment” of the current, emerging and future risks facing prisons, and they range across security, safety, violence, self‑harm, overcrowding, capacity, workforce and rehabilitation. It is a wholesale look at how the carceral state is coping – or failing to cope – with everything from drugs and drones to staff attrition and sentencing trends.
On paper, that is a strength.
For once, ministers are not pretending that you can fix drugs or violence without talking about staff numbers, training and safety, or that you can talk about rehabilitation while ignoring the realities of overcrowding and decrepit jails. The review is explicitly tasked with looking at long‑term reforms, not just another round of sticking plaster announcements.
But breadth can easily turn into blur. When everything is a “priority”, nothing is.
The risk with a system‑wide mandate is that distinctly different threats – overcrowding, organised crime, Islamist extremism, chronic under‑staffing – are flattened into a single story about “pressure”. That is comforting for the centre, because it implies a kind of inevitable systems failure. It is much less comforting if you work or live in these awful places.
A prison system that cannot distinguish between failing roofs, failing leadership, failing staff culture and a failing response to ideological subversion will end up managing all these badly. One of the reasons my 2016 review made an impact was that it named a problem the system did not want to acknowledge: that some prisoners were not just badly behaved, but actively working to delegitimise the state, radicalise others and build parallel structures of authority inside the walls.
Rudd’s review will have to decide whether it treats that as merely another “risk factor” alongside drugs and drones, or whether it recognises that ideology, corruption and cowardice are threat multipliers. Islamist extremists, gang leaders and serious organised criminals do not simply add to the background noise of a busy prison. They thrive in weak institutions, exploit the timidity of management and the paucity of front‑line supervisors, and then remake the culture in their own image.
The terms of reference talk about “workforce challenges” and “capability”. That is Whitehall‑speak for a simple truth: you cannot run a safe prison from a headquarters stuffed with rear echelon progressives who think their job is more about social engineering than running a uniformed law enforcement agency. You either have confident, well‑led officers and first‑line managers on the landings who feel backed when they enforce rules, or you have chaos. Every serious review of prison failure, here and abroad, ends up rediscovering that basic point. The first thing I would do if I was Rudd, is what I did a decade ago. Junk the terms of reference and write ones designed for action, not bureaucratic arse covering.
So what should we look for from Rudd’s work?
First, whether it is willing to say that the problem is not just “pressure” but a loss of authority. Second, whether it is prepared to be explicit about ideological and organised threats, rather than burying them in euphemisms. Third, whether it proposes reforms that actually change incentives for ministers, governors and senior officials – or simply reshuffles governance charts and invents new acronyms.
There is a final danger. Reviews are often used in Britain as a way of outsourcing political courage. Amber Rudd and her panel can describe the disease in forensic detail. They cannot force a future government to pick up the scalpel. If this exercise degenerates into another elegantly written explanation of why prisons are in crisis, then front‑line staff will rightly conclude that the centre has learned nothing.
A wide‑angle review is needed. But if it does not put command authority, staff confidence and ideological/organised crime subversion somewhere near the centre of its analysis, it will confuse symptom with cause. Prisons are not failing because the world is complicated. They are failing because, for too long, we have tolerated institutions that are unsafe, unmanaged and undefended.
Any serious review should start by saying so.