John Podmore, author of Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Why Britain's Prisons are Failing talks to Drinks and Drugs News about the influence of drugs and alcohol in prison.
John Podmore spent 25 years as a prison governor and inspector. Now he’s written a book on why the system isn’t working, particularly when it comes to people with drug and alcohol problems. He talks to David Gilliver
‘Prison is really only a deterrent for those who’ve got something to lose,’ says John Podmore, author of Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Why Britain’s Prisons are Failing. While ‘prison isn’t working’ arguments may have become familiar, it’s extremely rare to hear them from someone who spent 25 years in the service – as governor of Brixton and Belmarsh and then as an inspector – which is what makes the book so fascinating and its arguments so powerful.
‘If I were to go to prison, I’ve got a lot to lose – a great family, friends, lots of interests and things I love doing, and that’s true for most of us,’ he says. ‘But for a lot of people out there, particularly in the current economic climate, going to prison wouldn’t actually mean losing very much. If you haven’t got a home you’re not losing a home, if you haven’t got a job you’re not losing a job.’
And, as the book spells out, neither does it stop crime being committed – acting as a networking opportunity for major drug dealers in particular – or people going on to re-offend once they’re released. ‘You hear all this stuff about “we need to make it tougher and harsher” and so on – well, what we need is a larger section of society having something to lose by going to prison,’ he says. ‘We’ve got a huge number of people who are socially excluded, dispossessed and struggling with life, so rather than looking at prison we’ve got to look at society. That’s where we need to put some of the emphasis.’
The book grimly details the systematic over-use of the remand system in particular, especially for people who aren’t even likely to get a custodial sentence if found guilty. The result is a world where those with drug, alcohol or mental health problems presenting before the courts for relatively minor offences will be remanded just to keep them off the streets.
‘We know – but we won’t accept – that we use remand to deal with social problems,’ he states. ‘That is not a good principle for putting people on remand. The least we can do is say “he’s got a problem and needs drug or alcohol treatment or psychiatric support, let’s provide that in some kind of supported housing, not a prison”. We need to have better, more flexible facilities. The remand system is not the place, and anyway there’s no more money – the way the remand population is created, managed and maintained is diverting huge sums away from other parts of the system.’
Government plans to improve the remand process, however, appear to have been shelved, presumably for fear of being seen as ‘soft on crime’. Does he have any optimism that things could change for the better? ‘No one wants a “rehabilitation revolution” more than I do, but by definition in a revolution something has to be overthrown. I don’t see anything major happening, other than privatising a load of jails.’
The book makes a stark warning that privatisation will mean the interests of shareholders coming before those of staff and prisoners. With eight prisons out for contract and up to 20 more expected to be announced later this year, this is ‘privatisation on a scale that no country in any part of the world has ever been down the road of,’ he states
‘I’m not going to be King Canute about this – we’re going to have private prisons. OK, one, let them be more cost-effective – despite what anyone says, there’s no real evidence to suggest that private prisons are cheaper. The whole PFI thing should have given a real warning about that. Two, there should be some positive new initiatives in the service, but if you get the private contractors to talk they’ll say, “they’re not looking for much in the way of initiatives, they just want cheap containment.”’ There is this kind of perception of “private good, public bad” and I’m prepared to listen to the arguments, but in this world of the evidence base, give me the evidence that this strategy is the best one. It’s not there.’
What prompted him to write the book? ‘It was serendipitous, really,’ he says. ‘I was planning to leave the service and I was working with the [freedom of expression organisation] English PEN scheme. I was at an event where someone asked if I’d thought of writing a book and said he knew the guy who ran Biteback Publishing and he’d give me an introduction.’
He found writing it both tough and cathartic, and the feedback so far has been ‘extraordinarily good’, he says. ‘It never worried me that people would disagree with me because the whole aim was to stimulate debate, but one of the most gratifying reviews was from [serving prisoner] Ben Gunn in Inside Time magazine. Ben who, shall we say, is not backward in coming forward in his views of the service said he was “nodding in agreement with almost every page” – although he found himself uncomfortable with that because he’s not someone who normally agrees with prison governors.’
Press coverage has also been positive, including – perhaps surprisingly – in the Mail. With politicians of all parties seemingly running scared of the press, particularly regarding crime and drugs, does he think attitudes might be changing? ‘That’s an interesting question, because I had a call the other day from the Guardian to tip me off that I was a victim of phone hacking. The information they got on me has been redacted so we don’t know when it was, but it may well have been the time I was at Brixton.’
Was that a shock? ‘People have asked me why I’m surprised, but it leaves a very nasty taste. It kind of comes with the territory, but I was more disturbed by it than I thought because it’s such a personal intrusion. But in general terms, I’ve found it’s easy to blame the media. When you deal with the quality media they just want to know what’s going on, so I think if you engage and have a positive relationship with the media it can be mutually beneficial. You’ve got to be wary of tabloid headlines and all that, obviously, but sometimes you get the negative stuff because there’s this kind of media barrier. If you don’t offer anything they’ll just go off at a tangent and do their own thing.’
As the book points out, this was particularly a problem in the Blair years, which he describes as ‘the worst in recent memory’. ‘It was dreadful,’ he says. ‘They were just obsessed with the media and there was no real engagement with what should be done – it was just a case of “we want to stay in power and don’t do anything to stop us staying in power”. I found that very sad.’
He’s also saddened by the way innovation in the system is being killed by risk-aversion and the commissioning process, he says. ‘We need innovation and we need change and that’s not coming about from the private sector. OK, they’re trying to involve Third Sector organisations, but some of the bigger ones like NACRO have effectively teamed up with the large multinationals. The smaller organisations will either get swallowed up or they’ll disappear entirely because they can’t compete in the new world. You can’t say to these small charities that want to get involved in prisons “you’ll only get paid via payment by results” because they don’t have the capital to put up front.’
While there’s a great deal of anxiety about the structural changes to commissioning and delivering drug treatment in the community from next year, there’ll also be a huge impact on treatment in prisons. ‘It’ll be interesting to see where that goes because I think there’s a real danger that commissioners will tend to not favour prisons,’ he says. ‘Brixton is different because you had a degree of coterminosity between the community and the prison, but let’s say you’re commissioning services in the Isle of Wight. You’ve got three prisons that hold about 2,000-plus prisoners and very few come from the Isle of Wight and very few will be returned to the Isle of Wight, so is the health authority body – whatever it’s going to be called – on the Isle of Wight going to look particularly at the prison population?’
The emphasis needs to be on prison governors forming relationship with the local community and health authorities, he stresses. ‘Some governors do that very well, others I’m not sure. The whole commissioning of health and drug and alcohol services is going to be a test of that – when it comes to commissioning time, people are human and if the mutual understanding of need is not there then the prison may miss out on that commissioning process.’
In terms of treatment in prison, the book is a reminder of how much alcohol provision is still woefully lacking. ‘There’s none, really,’ he says. ‘There’s alcohol detox, and they’re beginning to look at commissioning some alcohol services. I don’t know what’s happening out there in terms of contracts, but I don’t think local commissioners are giving any priority to alcohol. It’s an absolute disgrace, because we know how much alcohol is related to domestic violence. There’s disorder and violence on the streets, but how much is alcohol involved in a whole raft of offending? There needs to be much more long-term investment in alcohol treatment in prison. It’s always been the poor relation and I’ve never understood it.’
What’s vital is proper assessment of prisoners’ needs as they come into prison, he argues. ‘There’s always been the emphasis on opiate treatment, but when I was at Brixton crack was the drug of choice. Dealing with people taking crack is more difficult than getting them on an opiate-based programme, so if you’re a prisoner coming into Brixton you’ll be confessing to opiate misuse rather than stimulant misuse because you know they’ll give you something, you’re going to get a prescription.’
It’s widely felt that mandatory drug tests (MDT) are, to say the least, an unreliable measure of levels of drug use in a prison and, as the book describes, reasonably easy to fake. The prison service, however, ‘clings to them’, it says, partly because they can count towards bonuses and appraisals.
‘According to MDT statistics, drug use in prison is either reducing or staying the same,’ he says. ‘Now if you can find me any problematic drug user coming out of prison who says that’s the situation, I’m a Dutchman. What I would advocate is to send in an independent body – or send one jail to randomly drug-test another – and if the figures are the same as the MDT, then fine. But that’s never been done. There’s been no independent, external verification of MDT so what’s the evidence to suggest they’re accurate? The most important thing is to go and talk to people who’ve just come out of jail, or prisoners in jail – they’ll tell you. There’s also research around people’s first opiate use being in prison, and we really ought to be acting on that.’
The book goes on to describe many prisons as having an ‘institutional antipathy’ towards organisations like NA, justified partly on security grounds. Does he get any sense that attitudes are softening? ‘External organisations generally – charities, voluntary bodies – still struggle to get into prisons and get access to prisoners. Again, it comes down to the evidence – we spent £150m on CARATS but where’s the evidence that CARATS works? All I know is that getting someone in from NA to meet with prisoners on a Wednesday night certainly won’t do any harm, and it will get a message out to the prisoners that we are interested in this.’
In terms of making the system work – and, of course, the welfare of those in the system – the transition from prison to community is particularly crucial, especially with the much-increased risk of overdose. ‘There’s a phrase they use in the states about ‘drop kicking’ people into the community, and that’s what we do. Keeping people in prison is relatively easy. Getting them out and keeping them out, is the difficult bit. But we become obsessed – and measure the success of our prison system – by people not getting out when the emphasis of that success should be on getting people out such that they don’t come back.’
As everyone knows, however, reconviction rates remain stubbornly high, as much as 70 per cent for young offenders. ‘The most optimistic statements you’ll get are “rates have gone down from 56 per cent to 55 per cent”. If you had a factory making cars and half cars broke down after six months, you’d close the factory down. If we really had payment by results we’d close down the entire prison system.’
These days he’s a freelance consultant and has just returned from doing some work with New York’s Columbia University. ‘Most of my contemporaries are on a thousand pounds a day doing work for SERCO and so on, but needless to say they won’t touch me with a bargepole,’ he laughs.
He entered the service after being a teacher for eight years. ‘I had a young family and I wasn’t earning very much and getting bored and disillusioned, and I came across an advert one day and thought “that looks interesting”. Twenty five years later here I am.’ How does he look back on his career? ‘I’ve enjoyed it. I think my problem was I enjoyed working in jails but I was a bit of a fish out of water when I wasn’t in jail, apart from when I was inspecting, where you can make a significant contribution to getting things done. But working at Brixton was the highlight.’
So which countries are closest to getting it right? ‘Everyone says Scandinavia, and they are the nearest. In Norway to be a prison officer you need two years’ training to degree level. And what we need here is a long-term strategy, rather than just “how can we save money in the short term?”’