History > 2007 > UK > Prisons (I)

Special investigation

Bribery and drugs

exposed at private jail

Undercover reporter offered £1,500 by inmates

Monday April 16, 2007
Guardian
Eric Allison
and Duncan Campbell

An investigation by an undercover reporter working as a prison officer has exposed conditions in a private jail where inmates have easy access to drugs and mobile phones and subject overstretched staff to intimidation if they are too diligent in their work.

The investigation into Rye Hill prison, Warwickshire, has unearthed a catalogue of failings at the jail which has already been strongly criticised over the murder of one inmate and the "avoidable" suicides of vulnerable inmates.

During the five-month investigation by Guardian Films and BBC's Panorama, the reporter, a former soldier, worked as a custody officer on some of the most volatile wings in the prison run by Global Solutions Ltd (GSL). He was asked by inmates to bring drugs into the category B high-security prison and assured that his "fee" of £1,500 would be paid into his bank account via Western Union, a practice an inmate claimed had been used before.

Last night, Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said the investigation called into question the role of private prisons at a time when half of the new 8,000 prison places promised by the government are expected to be privately run. "These revelations are guaranteed to fuel concern about the long-term effect of privatising our prisons, at a time when the government is keen to push greater private sector participation in the probation service as well."

In one clip from the film, to be shown tonight, a young female custody officer is threatened with violence by an inmate. The woman, who had angered prisoners because of her thorough approach to her work, is advised to "back off" by a senior colleague.

Another prisoner told the programme that staff considered too strict were attacked by prisoners, who were paid with drugs by fellow inmates to assault them. Newly-qualified staff, operating alone or in pairs are depicted trying to control upwards of 70 prisoners on a wing while they are unlocked and on free association.

After being given an outline of the film and shown some undercover footage, John Bates, director of corporate communications for GSL, said 47 mobile phones had been recovered inside the jail already this year "which would tend to suggest that there is a very prevalent problem."

He said the prison was "progressing well" and called staff training extremely thorough. But Mr Bates said it was "completely unacceptable" that prisoners were attempting to "groom" officers to bring in drugs. Of the undercover reporter, he said: "He failed his colleagues and he put himself at risk." He added: "I don't think that you quite understand how difficult and complex running a prison is."

Despite two damning reports on Rye Hill by the chief inspector of prisons, GSL are the main providers of private prison places in England and Wales and considered likely to win the government contract to provide a further 4,000 places.

Conditions in the jail were highlighted last month at Northampton crown court when the prison was criticised after the collapse of a manslaughter trial over the death in 2005 of Michael Bailey, a prisoner on suicide watch. Four officers were cleared in connection with the death and the judge described it as an "avoidable tragedy".

Fewer than three weeks after Michael Bailey died, another inmate, Wayne Reid, was stabbed to death in his cell - two inmates have been convicted of his murder.

    Bribery and drugs exposed at private jail, G, 16.4.2007,
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,,2058097,00.html

UK headed for prison meltdown

Saturday March 31, 2007
Guardian
Duncan Campbell and Alan Travis

The former head of the prison service has warned that up to 100,000 people could be in jail by the end of the decade unless drastic and immediate action is taken by the government.

The prediction from Martin Narey came as the prison population in England and Wales reached an all-time high yesterday of more than 80,300, with only four spare places left in emergency police cells anywhere in the country. The crisis meant prison service officials were, for the first time, forced to turn to cells in magistrates courts with hard benches, no beds and no toilets. The move had near disastrous consequences. Securicor officers were asked to volunteer to look after four prisoners held overnight at a magistrates court in north London. One of the prisoners made a suicide attempt which was only prevented at the last minute.Speaking to the Guardian, Mr Narey warned that Britain is heading towards US levels of imprisonment.

"I wouldn't be surprised at all if by 2010 there were 100,000 people in prison. I think there is every chance that, at the end of the decade, we will look back nostalgically at a figure of 80,000. The US experience shows there is no end to this."

He added that about 6,000 people were locked up at any one time who are "profoundly mentally ill".

The former director of the prison service was speaking as part of a Guardian investigation into the huge rise in the prison population over the last decade.

David Blunkett also admitted his regrets that, as home secretary, he was unable to convince judges of the importance of non-custodial sentences for minor offences.

"If I have a big regret about the three and half years as home secretary, it is that I never quite got that message across. Judges used to say to me that 'there is a contradiction here; you keep saying you want more community sentences and less short prison sentences but then in the next breath you're talking about tough sentences and life meaning life.' They are entirely compatible as far as I'm concerned... I never wanted them to go soft but to be consistent."

A former prison governor, Stephen Rimmer, now director of strategy at the Metropolitan police, suggested that only another Strangeways riot might gain the public's attention on the issue of overcrowding.

Yesterday the jail population in England and Wales reached an all-time high of 80,316, including 397 locked overnight in police cells under Operation Safeguard.

But, with impending local elections, the home secretary John Reid is firmly against any new early release programme.

Ministers are in the process of building 10,000 extra prison places with "temporary custodial modules" being rushed into existing prison perimeters to create 700 more places this year. The bulk of the extra places, however, are several years behind Mr Narey's prediction.

Lord Falconer, who will take over responsibility for prisons in May when they pass into the control of the newly created justice ministry, said yesterday the role and limits of incarceration needed to be clarified and acknowledged the need to manage the "burgeoning prison population" better. He refused to rule out a new early release programme and said he would consider legislation requiring judges to consider prison overcrowding when sentencing.

The last three years has seen a 26% increase in the number of children and young people criminalised and seven times as much is spent on youth custody as on prevention schemes. We lock up 23 children per 100,000 population, compared with six in France, two in Spain and 0.2 in Finland.

    UK headed for prison meltdown, G, 31.3.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,,2047012,00.html

Bulger, Blunkett,

and the making of a 'prison fetish'

Changing public attitudes following murder of toddler have contributed to doubling of number behind bars
in 15 years

Saturday March 31, 2007
Guardian
Duncan Campbell

The crisis that has manifested itself in the prison system this week has its origins in a grim event that was to cast a shadow over Britain more than 14 years ago. On February 12 1993, two boys in the Bootle Strand shopping centre in Liverpool took a toddler by the hand and led him away to his death. In doing so, they acted as the unwitting agents of a dramatic change in the criminal justice system that turned the country into the most punitive in Europe.

Senior criminal justice figures who have spoken to the Guardian fear the UK is becoming a society that criminalises its children. In addition, the country's drug addicts and mentally ill people are locked up in overcrowded prison warehouses which have become symbols of an inexorable drift. It started with the murder on Merseyside.

"James Bulger is seminal," said Rod Morgan, who resigned this year as chairman of the Youth Justice Board. "It had a huge impact on the system." At the time, Tony Blair was shadow home secretary and had coined the phrase "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime"; Labour was determined never to be soft on the issue again.

Stephen Rimmer, currently director of strategy for the Metropolitan police, has a unique perspective on the criminal justice system, having been governor of Wandsworth prison in south London, deputy governor at Strangeways and Glen Parva jails in Manchester and Leicester, a Home Office adviser, and now part of the hierarchy of the police service. "The Bulger case seemed to put the public into another place, into a sense of, 'If we don't put some real markers down about what is acceptable behaviour in the most unambiguous terms possible then we are going to lose our bearings as a society'."

As a result, we are now in the grip of what Alison Liebling, director of the prisons research centre at Cambridge Institute of Criminology, calls an "imprisonment fetish", with around 80,000 in jail.

In the 1970s the then home secretary, Roy Jenkins, warned that if the prison population reached 42,000, "conditions in the system would approach the intolerable and drastic action to relieve the position would be inescapable".

In the 80s social cohesion came under enormous pressure as the number of jobless rose.

"In the 80s, the social glue melted with mass unemployment," said David Blunkett, who was home secretary from 2001-04 during a sudden growth in prison numbers. "People who once had status had no status any more, kids who once had apprenticeships did not have the mentoring that went with it. There was the disintegration of any kind of mutuality of respect, the drive for individuality, everyone for themselves.

"What happened in the 90s was the backwash in the massive increase in class A drugs from the States."

In the late 80s, when Stephen Rimmer was private secretary to John Patten, then the Conservative Home Office minister, he remembered that "the phrase then was 'punishment in the community'.

"I remember John Patten saying the key test was - would the public be comfortable about burglars getting community [punishments], not custodial ones. That seems now a very distant debate."

During the period, there was a noticeable hardening of attitudes and a growing distance from other European countries in terms of how we dealt with crime. Martin Narey, former head of the prison service, believes there must be something in Anglo-Saxon culture that helps to explain the shift.

"It's not just England and Wales, the Scots are not far behind us, although they are light years ahead in terms of treatment of children." Mr Narey said the Australians and Canadians had similar attitudes, "and the US, of course, is off the map.

"The number of times I've read 'Joe Bloggs walked free' despite being given a fairly demanding community penalty is very significant. If we can manage with a population of 40,000 in 1991, why do we need to lock up 80,000 now during a period when crime has been falling?"

There are other theories from academics to explain the predicament Britain is now in. Ms Liebling quotes Hans Boutellier, author of a study called The Safety Utopia, which likened our society to a bungee jumper. "He argues that we want maximum freedom and maximum safety," she said. "And the more freedom we have, the more we need a sense of safety. Because prisons have been humanised, it doesn't satisfy the public's yearning for safety and they can't satisfy this urge."

A study by academics Stephen Shute and Roger Hood showed that parole boards were more cautious than a computer would be. "People lose their jobs if mistakes are made," they said. "We have lost the capacity to take risks and part of rehabilitation requires carefully controlled risk-taking."

The fear of getting it wrong affects all areas of the criminal justice system.

Mr Blunkett recalls the day in 2001 when a report on sentencing was published. "I was travelling at the time and I was listening to this blasted Halliday report. A lot of it was just verbiage, but I came out determined to try and get some balance between community sentencing and tough sentencing for heinous crimes and some emphasis on reparation and rehabilitation.

"If I have a big regret about my three and half years as home secretary, it is that I never quite got that message across. Judges used to say to me that 'there is a contradiction here; you keep saying you want more community sentences and less short prison sentences but then in the next breath you're talking about tough sentences and life meaning life.' I said there's no contradiction. They are entirely compatible as far as I'm concerned."

Because of the attention that crime and punishment now attracts, politicians particularly are wary of trying anything that involves risk. "There was a moment in the parliamentary cycle when we could be quite brave in what we would do," said Mr Blunkett. He introduced the Criminal Justice Sentencing Act, that allowed prisoners to serve half their terms in jail, and the rest under supervision.

"The right saw it as complete betrayal and the liberal left didn't know what I was talking about. Charlie [Falconer, the lord chancellor] said he was totally against it. He said he would get the judges to be much more consistent in the sentencing and that would solve the problem - which it clearly hasn't. I never wanted them to go soft but to be consistent."

Rod Morgan argues that the most remarkable transformation from old to New Labour is in the party's attitude to youth crime, and the idea "that criminalising more young people is an achievement, that it signifies more of them being brought to book, thereby closing the 'justice gap' ".

The fact that there are falling crime rates at a time of rising prison populations is not a sign that, as the then Conservative home secretary, Michael Howard, once boasted, "prison works".

"It could be an enriching and transforming experience," said Martin Narey. "The reality is that, because the population has expanded so quickly, the amount of rehabilitative activity that any one individual gets is so diluted that it's not possible to make much of an impact."

Stephen Rimmer, who in his governor roles had a ringside seat, agrees. "A lot of offenders live very chaotic and opportunistic lives and some of them - you see this when they walk out, the minute they've left prison, that's it, now they're on to the next thing and prison, unless something particularly awe-inspiring or horrible has happened to them, is just part of life's rich tapestry." He added: "There are some people who are not necessarily uniquely bad or evil but they are so chaotic that you know that, if they weren't in prison, they would be doing more and more damaging stuff, some of it to themselves."

The prisons ombudsman, Stephen Shaw, also believes that there are good reasons why some people who might not have been in prison in the past now find themselves there. "I am quite critical of the liberal reformers - and I would identify myself as a penal liberal - because I don't think they have faced up to the way in which the structure of the prison population has changed.

"We have become, it seems to me, a less tolerant society. You can say tolerance is usually regarded as a good thing but you can see posters up saying 'zero tolerance on domestic violence' and many Guardian readers would say 'quite right'. We now treat sexual crimes more seriously than we used to. There are more homicides than there were. There wasn't crack cocaine like there is now, there was nothing like the extent of the addictions you have now. I am critical of some of the penal liberals because I think that, if we give the impression that the prisons are full of people who steal sweets from Woolworths, we're not doing any good. They're not."

If the James Bulger case was the tipping point on punishment, it is easy to forget that there were similar moments in penal history which led to other examinations of what prison meant to society.

The Strangeways riot in 1990 was, said Mr Rimmer, "hugely powerful in symbolising a failed criminal justice policy". But those involved were savagely dealt with and there is little evidence of a prison culture that would organise such a revolt today. Mr Rimmer suggests that only another Strangeways might gain the public's attention on the issue of overcrowding and indeterminate sentences but accepts that such an event could also have the opposite effect.

"The most authentic television programme about prison is Porridge," he said. "It portrays a community of old lags which imposed its own hierarchy on younger and more chaotic prisoners. That has all gone now. There isn't a defined prisoner culture any more. Obviously you get gangs, you get status, you get hierarchy but it's much more anarchic. It's got so many sub-sects and drugs and mental illness are so overtly part of it."

Almost every old lag was once a young lag - and England and Wales seems to reserve punishment for them far beyond what happens elsewhere in Europe. The last three years has seen a 26% increase in the numbers of children and young people criminalised and seven times as much is spent on youth custody as on prevention schemes. We lock up 23 children per 100,000 population, compared with six in France, two in Spain, 0.2 in Finland.

Why are England and Wales more inclined to punish children? "Other Europeans say that we love our pets and hate our children," said Rod Morgan. "The answer is that volume crime has gone down but street crime hasn't. It has probably got worse because domestic burglaries are more difficult. Incivilities in public spaces have probably got worse and this is what affects people's quality of life, which is what they represent to MPs at their surgeries every Friday." The police respond.

Mentally ill people in prison remains another crisis largely untackled.

"For many people, care in the community has become care in custody," said Mr Narey. "About 6,000 people are locked up at any one time who are profoundly mentally ill. Twenty per cent of men in custody have previously tried to take their own lives and 40% of women." Nobody argues that there is an easy solution, or that there is likely to be a change of heart within government, despite the surge in jail numbers. "I wouldn't be surprised at all if, in 10 years, there were 100,000 people in prison," said Mr Narey. "I think there is every chance that, at the end of the decade, we will look back nostalgically at a figure of 80,000. The US experience shows there is no end to this."

    Bulger, Blunkett, and the making of a 'prison fetish', G, 31.3.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,,2047025,00.html

G2 special

A day inside [ part I ]

The prison system is in crisis. Our jails are bursting with convicts and crumbling with age. At least, that's what the headlines tell us. But what is daily life like for the 80,000 people locked up - and for the 25,000-plus who work with them? For this G2 special we talked to 42 people about one day last week - from Category A prisoners whose escape would endanger the public to Category Ds trusted with their own keys; from a money-launderer jailed with her baby to a teenager who caused death by dangerous driving; from the head of the prison service to a father whose son died in custody

Monday March 12, 2007
Guardian

Gina Westaway, 51
Senior prison officer in the care, support and reintegration unit, HMP Styal, Cheshire

Checking our list of self-harmers was one of my first duties, and I noticed that there was a "code blue" on a female prisoner yesterday evening. She had tied a ligature round her neck, and an officer went into her room and cut it off. Self-harming is an issue in our unit - in February we had 140 incidents. The women break the plastic cutlery to cut themselves, or rip up the sheets to tie ligatures. What we try to do here is to keep them busy. When I arrived at 7.30, the prisoners were having their breakfast. They are given any medication afterwards, and at nine we start moving them to their education classes or work. The ones who stay in the unit clean their cells or have a bath before going outside to the exercise yard. They have their lunch at about 11.45, and then go back into their rooms. At 1.30 we move them to education or work again, and some go to the calm room, a therapeutic place where they can have their hair or nails done, or just relax. Female prisoners are much more dependent on the staff than male prisoners. The women have specific worries about their children and families and can get quite distressed. They are in their rooms again at four, where they have a radio (and will soon have television). Dinner is at five, and between six and seven they have association time. At eight they are back in their rooms. The job is stressful, but I love it. Sometimes I wonder, looking at the prisoners, why they are here in the first place. Many of them are eventually moved to secure hospitals. They are vulnerable women with a lot of problems. If I am lucky I leave around 5.30, but I can be in the unit until 9.30.

Tufal Akthar, 23
Serving four years at HMP Cardiff

I got up at half past seven and the doors were unlocked at quarter to eight. I put down my food choices for later in the day, had a shower, had breakfast, exercised and then at 8.30, I went to work. I have three jobs: as a cleaner on my landing, as a server of food and as a "listener". A listener is someone who is trained to listen to other prisoners' problems. We can't help with anything practical, but we can give them advice on how to deal with things. Loneliness comes up the most. People when they're first here don't know what to do. We break the ice. After lunch you get two sessions for visitors - my mum came to see me today. And there are gym sessions four times a week. You come back from work at 4.30; people who serve the food are let out at 5.30, dinner is at 6, then prisoners are banged up 8. The food is OK; there's halal if you want it. I'm a Muslim, and on Wednesdays and Fridays there are facilities for worship. Boredom is the big problem. There's a library open three times a week. I read faith books; Islamic books. I'm all right.

Gerry, 45
First ever day in prison. Serving 12 months for deception at HMP Wandsworth, London

It's better than what I was expecting. I was scared. I expected it to be more austere, and that people would give me unpleasant looks. I woke up at 7.40 today, but waited until my cellmate was up before putting the telly on. He is also a first-timer, and had been advised not to speak about his crime. Some people do, some don't. We had a cup of tea and waited for somebody to open the door to let us out. I was surprised by how decent the facilities were - three individual showers, for example. I expected to be freaked out here, but feel quite matter-of-fact about it all. My cellmate is having a more difficult time, and I've been trying to calm him. He's a smoker, and I'm not. But he's sensitive to that and smokes by the window, which I appreciate. We got lunch at 12. Tuna bake, rice and broccoli. Again, it was pretty good. After lunch we were locked up. In the afternoon I was moved to another cell. The new guy I'm sharing with also smokes, but he's not so considerate. That could be an issue. I'm pretty intolerant about smoking. I've been surprised by the amount of people who have offered help - mostly prisoners. I hope to be out of here within six months. There is zero chance of me reoffending - no way am I coming back here.

Paul Saunders, 43
Search officer at HMP Whitemoor maximum-security prison, near Peterborough

I arrived as normal at eight. There was a meeting in the security department where the intelligence gathered over the past day is discussed. We know who the players are. There's a hierarchy on every wing. We do late searches and early searches, depending on the intelligence. When we search, we'll arrive at a prisoner's door or collect them from work. First, we give them the opportunity to tell us what they have. Everyone is strip-searched but we don't touch them - they remove their clothes and we search hems and seams. If the intelligence is good we ask to "squat" the prisoner. It is up to him if he squats. He will go down on his haunches so if he is what we call "cheeking" something it will fall out. It's not something we relish. It's degrading for both parties and embarrassing, but unfortunately it is warranted, given the way these individuals secrete stuff. Sometimes prisoners have items hidden higher up but we don't do intrusive searches. We can only wait and monitor them until something comes out. We always check their cell in pairs. We're not thugs; we don't go around smashing stuff. We leave the cell as we would like to find it ourselves. We usually have a little laugh with the prisoner and tell him the only thing we haven't done is make his bed.

Phil Wheatley, 58
Director general of the prison service, based in London

I arrive in the office at 7.40 to face an overflowing in-tray, which I have to go through very carefully. Within it there are difficult decisions to make and problems to examine, so I can't afford not to read through everything. Managing a service with 80,000 inmates means I can't leave things hanging around. I abandoned breakfast years ago and make do with fruit before I leave home. Once the in-tray is complete, I go into a series of back-to-back meetings. Much of my work at the moment is dealing with the overcrowding. There have been substantial increases in population, which means many of the prisoners have to move around a lot. Lunch is a sandwich at the desk, which I bring from home and eat while I work. The big things that worry me are tight resourcing and full prisons. However, much of my time is spent pointing out that there isn't a crisis in the prison service. The rate of absconds and assaults has come down and we are coming in on budget. By six, I am getting ready to leave the office. But I always carry my bleeper with me.

Paula Curtis, 24
Serving eight months for money laundering and having fake documents, HMP Holloway, London

I was pregnant when I came here in September and was put in C4, a unit for pregnant women. After my daughter Simi was born, I went to D4, the mother-and-baby unit. There are 10 of us on here, with babies ranging from newborn to eight months. Then you have to move to another prison, which takes mothers and babies up to 18 months. My day started at 6 - that's the time my baby wakes up. The officers come around at seven and say good morning; you have to be ready by 7.30 and then you have breakfast. After that, my baby goes to a creche and I have classes from nine. We can study for qualifications. My favourite class is art: I'm learning how to make a baby blanket by sewing together different patches. I'm also learning how to cook for my baby. She's my first, I want to get it right. We break off for lunch at 12, then from two you can go back to education or stay on the unit with your baby or go to the gym. The creche is nice, with toys. We have dinner about five and there are five or six choices, including vegetarian. It's not bad. At eight we go to our rooms. I have a toilet, a single bed and my baby's crib in my room, as well as a telly and a cupboard. People can send you bed covers, so you're not using prison stuff. I've got another 11 weeks to go.

Liam Bailes, 19
Serving four years for causing death by dangerous driving, at Swinfen Hall young offenders institution, Staffordshire

I've got a working-out placement, so I get a wake up call at seven and get picked up about 8.30 in the prison minibus and taken to the Acorn charity shop in Lichfield, where I work until 4.30. It's a massive relief to be out there, it speeds time up, and it's a relief to talk about different things. We get back at five, and are strip-searched on the way in. The first time it's very daunting, but by now I'm used to it. You take your top off first, put it back on, and then your bottoms, and you can get it over quickly. I'm back on the wing by 5.15 for tea, and from 6.15 onwards it's associative time: you're expected to socialise, to play pool and have a chat with your mates. After a few months I started to think there were only so many games of pool I could play so I started doing library orderly duties and mentoring other young offenders. It gave me a bit of an insight into teaching, and I think when I get out that's what I want to do. At eight we get locked into our cells. It's up to us when we turn our lights off - I usually read or watch TV until about 11. It does get lonely sometimes. If you've had bad news, or a bad day, once that door closes you think, "I wish I had someone to talk to." When I started my sentence, back in May 2005, I thought a lot about how much time I had to go, and about the accident - about being responsible for it, about what people must be thinking of me. There was no malign intent with the accident. I just didn't think about what I was doing. Since I've been inside I've always conducted myself properly, and never caused trouble for anyone else. It's the demons inside that you can't get away from.

David Bulman, 49
Father of Ronnie, a 19-year-old who died in custody while awaiting trial. Tattooed his face after the inquest

I got up at six, made a cup of tea and went immediately to the computer to see if any government bodies have responded to my emails detailing the concerns I have about Ronnie's death, in July 2005, at Castington young offenders institution. No responses today, so I started scouring the internet looking for email addresses of high-profile people who take an interest in the prison system. When our son was remanded in custody, we thought that at least he would be safe. How wrong can you be? I have another cup of tea at 11 and start writing to people who don't have email addresses. At midday I start looking up different cases of deaths in custody to see what similarities there are to Ronnie's death. Then on to the prison service's website to see the rules for checking prisoners during the night. Staff should get a "verbal or facial response", but when Ronnie was checked at 4am we know he had vomited down his shirt and would have been gasping for breath. The alarm was not raised for more than four hours. Have something to eat and start writing more letters, looking for solicitors who will apply for a judicial review and/or try and take our case to Europe. Go to bed, knowing that today's routine will continue until we get the truth about how our son died.

Kenneth Hanson, 54
Literacy mentor and laundry orderly. Serving 11 years for drug importation, HMP Garth, Lancashire

Unlocked at 8am as normal and shot down to the laundry to get the first wash on. I had breakfast at the same time; multitasking. I have one mentee on our reading programme (organised by the Shannon Trust) and he is profoundly dyslexic. He is the most challenging I have ever had. He arrives at nine and we read for about an hour. I saw him just after he arrived from HMP Leeds and I realised he couldn't read the menus. Now he can read his daughter's letters. I am doing an Open University degree in social science and I work while doing the washing. I made a decision when I received my sentence that I was not going to waste the time. I had lunch at 11.30 - jacket potato and chicken supreme - and we were back in cells at 12. Unlock was at 1.45, and I went back to the laundry. Tea at 4.30 to five and we were banged up again at five until 5.45 and free association. People played table tennis and snooker. At 7.45 we were banged up again until the following morning. I studied a bit, watched TV, did a bit of modelling, my hobby. I am Category B. Maybe at the end of March I will be downgraded to Category C. I get on with other inmates; if I have learned one thing, it is that they would really take it badly if their washing was to be mixed up. I make sure it never happens.

Duncan Hallam, 45
Doctor, HMP Lancaster Castle, Lancaster

I arrived at Lancaster Castle - which is in an actual Norman castle - at eight. I've been treating prisoners here for nearly 12 years now. I collected my keys and went through to the healthcare department, where I asked the nursing team if they'd had any problems over the weekend. There had been an assault, and the alleged perpetrator had been put in segregation. There were four other men in there: one who'd had a falling out with someone on his wing and didn't feel safe there, and three who were being punished. It was an unusual day in that only four patients had booked in, two of whom didn't turn up, and two of whom were late. Usually I get about 10. Generally, two of those will try to persuade me to prescribe opiate-based medication, and at least two will have a mental-health problem. Seventy per cent of prisoners have some mental-health issue, usually depression. You also get untreatable personality disorders; sometimes it's difficult to tell these apart from treatable psychiatric illnesses. We treat a lot of hepatitis C and smoking-related ailments. Fights do happen, so we get black eyes, bruises, bite-marks. There's the occasional allegation of rape. For me, the hardest to deal with are the patients who persistently self-harm, the ones who cut themselves, attempt to hang themselves, or swallow razors. Some have been on drugs since they were 12, and have terrible backgrounds, and you think, "This chap had no chance." I'm regularly faced with manipulative behaviour, and sometimes you have to be quite firm. Once I had a desk turned over on me, but that's the worst that has happened.

Bekir 'Dukie' Arif, 53
In the 10th year of a 24-year sentence for drug distribution, Whitemoor maximum security prison, near Peterborough

Another interrupted night's sleep; the night screw, who must wear size-18 boots, given the noise he makes, shone his torch in my face every hour. Unlocked at five to eight and I made an application for money to go on my Pin numbers, so I can make phone calls. Called to labour at 8.55, checked off the wing with a rubdown and metal detector. The work - breaking up used CDs - is about as mind-numbing as it gets. Finished work at 11.10am, checked back on wing, then exercised in a small yard - totally inadequate. Gave my lunch away, as usual, then back to work in the afternoon. Locked up until just gone five, then association till 7.10 before lock-up for the night. My big concern right now is that my daughter visited me regularly until she was 16. Then she was deemed an adult and had to be security cleared. Up to now, this has taken 19 months, which was when I last saw her. This is my own daughter, remember.

Graham Kerridge, 41
Cat C officer, D wing, HMP Wayland, Norfolk

At 8.20am we unlocked the prisoners. Once everyone was out of their cells they went off to work. Wayland has immense training facilities. You have prisoners coming in with no qualifications and leaving with Open University degrees. There are bricklaying courses, plumbing courses, everything. We then collated the prison roll to make sure no one was missing. I did my core duties on the wing, which involved making sure the cleaners were working, undertaking security searches and checking that the prisoners' parole papers were up to date. I'm the personal officer to about 12 prisoners - I got to know them personally when they first came onto the wing. Every day I sit down with one of them and help him go through his paperwork, try and facilitate visits etc.

You build up a rapport. You get to know about their family life. I f you spend time with the prisoners it makes your day that much easier. Most of the prisoners just call me Mr K and there's very rarely any trouble.

By about 11.30am the prisoners fi nished working and went to the exercise yard for half an hour. I patrolled the wings until they returned to their cells for lunch. I then went to the staff room to eat before heading to the gym. We use the same facilities as the inmates - it's a top-class gym - and it's not unheard of for offi cers to work out with the prisoners.

The prisoners came back from work at 4.30 and got locked up straight away. At 5.30 they had a recreation period where they were allowed to play snooker and watch TV, then at eight everyone went back in the cells. We collated the roll again and I went home just after eight. I enjoy my job from the time I get into work until the time I go home.

Anne Owers, 59
Chief inspector of prisons, London

I arrived to the usual flurry of emails. One was about an event I went to concerning people in prison who have learning disabilities. Another related to a trip to Poland to talk to their ombudsman and look at their prisons. We have many things in common, such as overcrowding and the challenges of monitoring the prisons. Our system is generally regarded as a model for how to do it. I looked at a letter from the west Yorkshire coroner. I gave evidence there last week at the inquest of a mentally ill young woman who killed herself. The fi gures are startling. Women are 5% of the population but account for over 50% of the self-harm cases.

Later in the day I signed off a press release for a report on Edmonds Hill Prison, Suff olk. I produce 74 inspection reports a year but only about half a dozen get any publicity. When I give a prison a good report, which happens quite a lot, I tell them that the bad news is that hardly anyone will get to hear about it. There have been huge improvements in prison healthcare, education and training, but with the population at this level I worry if it can besustained. Maybe we will look back and say this is as good as it got.

Eduard Ngienga Lukombo, 33
Asylum-seeker awaiting deportation with wife Angelina, 29, Ashley, 4, and Joshua, 11 months, Yarls Wood removal centre, Bedfordshire

We wake at seven to feed the children. I try to go back to sleep but thoughts of how we were snatched from our home in Glasgow invade my mind. A friend telephones; he is worried about the children. I try to get them to change my wife's medication - they took hers away when we came here and the replacement isn't working. Likewise my daughter's medication for eczema.

At noon I try to pray but cannot concentrate - images of us being forced into a van and taken to airport come back. We were taken off the fl ight at the last minute, but I can hear the screams of the other Congolese being forced onto the plane. My son has had constipation ever since we came here. Both children, who were born in the UK, are confused and cry all the time. This behaviour is not their habit and my wife is not able to handle the new personalities they have acquired in detention. In the afternoon I sit gazing out of the window. I get a call from my pastor who encourages me to hope in God. At 10 pm we go to bed, but my eyes stay open. The family were released at the end of last week.

Sandra M, 30
Criminal justice link worker for the Prison Advice and Care Trust (Pact), HMP Holloway, London

It's my job to offer practical and emotional support to women on their first day in prison, both women who have never been in custody before and those who are in on new charges. On a busy day we might see as many as 23 prisoners, but today was quiet - only 10.

One woman I saw was a tearful single mum who had just been sentenced to three months for not sending her kids to school, and had never been prosecuted for anything before. When she went to court she had told her four children that she was just going to the shops, so none of them knew she was in prison. When I called her oldest daughter, who was 21, they were both very upset. Like a lot of people, her idea of prison comes from Bad Girls, and she was worried that her mum would get beaten up. Then I called the woman's sister to see if she could look after the younger children.

Two of the prisoners were foreign nationals, one a Chinese woman on remand for having forged documents and one a Pole in for burglary. Neither could speak English and were very puzzled as to why they were there. So with the help of some prisoners who could speak their languages, I was able to explain the situation and make international phone calls to inform their relatives.

Alison Adams, 56
Chaplain, Glen Parva young offenders institution, Leicester

The day begins with the first person coming in, lighting a candle in the chapel, saying a prayer and checking the answerphone. You might have had a call from an anxious parent or a prisoner wanting to come and talk. A big part of the job is to do receptions - there are two of us, and one sees every prisoner as they come in. I ask them simple questions like, "Did you sleep last night?" or "Do your parents know you are here?"

This afternoon I did some music teaching. We have a band and I was struck by the development in self-esteem of one individual. He said he had not played for ages and wanted to keep it up when he got out. One played a tune he had written called Glen Parva Blues. It had us all tapping our feet. I also spent some time in the segregation unit. Sometimes they are just glad to see a face - it's not easy being isolated. I took a rosary for someone who wanted that.

We have a capacity of 808 in Glen Parva. Around 46 attended chapel on Sunday and 40-odd Friday prayers. Tonight I took Bible study. Imagine exploring the issue of forgiveness with a sex offender or someone who has committed GBH. We have some very interesting discussions. I tend to go home at about 8pm, having started at 8am. It's hard work but I love it.

    A day inside, G > G2, 12.3.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2031841,00.html

G2 special

A day inside - part 2

The prison system is in crisis. Our jails are bursting with convicts and crumbling with age. At least, that's what the headlines tell us. But what is daily life like for the 80,000 people locked up - and for the 25,000-plus who work with them? For this G2 special we talked to 42 people about one day last week - from Category A prisoners whose escape would endanger the public to Category Ds trusted with their own keys; from a money-launderer jailed with her baby to a teenager who caused death by dangerous driving; from the head of the prison service to a father whose son died in custody

Monday March 12, 2007
Guardian

Tina, 27

Gym orderly, two years into a seven-year sentence for manslaughter, HMP Styal, Cheshire
I stabbed my abusive partner on the spur of the moment. Prison has saved my life. When I came in, I didn't care if I lived or died. But I've had a lot of help and am now as happy as I can be, given the circumstances. For almost a year and a half I've been working as an orderly in the prison gym for around 48 hours per week.

I'm a recovering alcoholic and before coming to prison I didn't look after myself, but exercise has really helped me. When I'm on the treadmill I don't even feel as though I'm in jail. On Monday I worked at the gym all day and in the evening I revised for my exam - I'm training to be a gym instructor. Then I read a book in the bath (I live in a house with 19 women, so we have bathrooms) and was in bed asleep by 10.30. On weeknights I like to get an early night, because the governors and other people high up in the prison often come to work out in the gym in the morning and I like to give a good impression.

Male prison officer, 30s
High-security unit, HMP Belmarsh, London

My shift started at 7.30 this morning. You have a briefing first of all, and then I was a gym officer this morning. That just means the prisoners are allowed to go to the gym, and I monitor the session. Then they go for showers, and we have another session. There's not usually any hostility; I get on with the prisoners quite well, on average. Then there's lunch and a debrief, and after lunch I was on the spur [living quarters ] for the association and exercise period. It starts with exercise - they get an hour in the exercise yard from just after two until just after three - and then they have association time, which is time to clean up their cells, make phone calls to families, friends and solicitors, or play pool, table football, that sort of thing. That lasts until 4.30, which is the start of feeding.

One of the things that makes this job different from a lower-security prison would be the sorts of checks we have to do. The frequency of searching, for example. This is a high-risk unit within a high-security prison. Most of them are on remand for Category A offences (importation of class A drugs, firearms offences, murder, terrorism) and have the ability or resources to escape. That's our main concern. People are quite intrigued by the work I do. I don't make a habit of telling people, but when I told my family they were quite shocked, I think.

Tessa Lovington, 70
Independent monitor, HMP Onley, Warwickshire

About 11am, a prisoner threatened to break the chaplain's neck. The chaplain pushed one of the alarms and everybody came running. He was surrounded very quickly. In that sort of case, our job is to observe, which I did - the prisoner was being very bolshie.

I spent the rest of the morning dealing with the blue forms that the prisoners put in boxes on each wing. Many are about lost property, especially trainers which seem to cost £500. My job is to investigate these complaints. A lot of the property gets lost in the gym, or when prisoners are transferred. One of the other forms was from a chap who was complaining about having his privileges removed - he had been an enhanced prisoner, which means he is allowed a television in his cell, to associate with other prisoners and to go to work on the prison site, for which he gets paid. But he had these privileges withdrawn for threatening an officer with violence. I looked at his complaint and, I have to say, I thought revoking his privileges was fair and I told him so. There is a lot of violence towards prison officers.

Being such an old buzzard, the prisoners don't give me any trouble. They call me madam or your worship - I used to be a magistrate, you see. But whenever we visit the segregated wing, where 15 people are held in solitary confinement, we are always accompanied by a prison officer.

Phil Forder, 53
Arts interventions manager, HMP Parc (a private prison)

My main role in this job is to deliver a course called The Art of Living, which I put together. It is for groups of prisoners, six at a time, and I've just finished one today with a group on the vulnerable-prisoner unit, who tend to be sex offenders. Today, which was the last day of the course, I brought in a huge piece of paper and had all six men paint one huge painting together in silence.

I did have some men who came into the group challenging everything I said just for the sake of it, and one of them stood up at the end, after getting his certifi cate, and said, "I came into this course feeling very negative about it all, but that has changed." I thought, oh wow! That was really nice to hear.

Prisoner X, 62
Child-sex offender, HMP Albany, Isle of Wight

I get up at 5.30am, when the prison is very quiet. It's a good time. I have my first mug of tea and settle down to my Open University assignment on Foucault and Wittgenstein. At seven, an eye appears at the "judas hole", at 7.30 the doors open electronically and the noise begins. Put the Jazz on DAB. Costcutting has replaced cooked breakfast with tea bags, powdered milk, sugar and cereal. Radio 4 news. Lots of banging accompanies the men going to workshops.

At nine I start working on my case for the Criminal Cases Review Commission, but my only real chance of justice is if those who lied at my trial develop a conscience. I am not far into 15 years; mostly for things that never happened, more than 20 years ago. After lunch I read for my PhD proposal for the Open University (the use of language in false convictions). At 5.30 I try to go to the gym, but there aren't enough staff to open it so I play pool, badly, for an hour. At 6.30 we're locked up. I do a bit more work on my OU assignnment and my novel. I watch Question Time on TV, then go to bed.

Raymond Lewis, 49
Prisoner, three weeks from release, HMP Blantyre House, Kent

It's not been too bad today. I work as a cook in a care home, so I had to get up at 5.30am to get the house bus into Staplehurst, followed by the 7am bus to Maidstone. Then I start work at 7.40, and finish at four in the afternoon, before getting the buses back to the prison. It's all I've been doing for the past year: work and sleep, work and sleep.

I was in the merchant navy for 30 years, though, and that was harder than this. I'm only cooking for 24, when I used to cook for 300 on the boat. And because I was in the navy all those years, I was also already institutionalised, so it has been quite easy for me being in prison. I just look at it like doing a long trip on a boat. I was sentenced to seven years for importation of ecstasy, and I'm going to be released on parole after three and a half on March 27. To be honest, I don't know where the time's gone . But that's because I've kept myself busy. On my first day out, I shall buy a couple of things for my flat. I've got a TV, but I want to get a little DVD player too, because there's about 300 movies I want to watch.

Helen Rinaldi, 45
Governor, HMP Elmley, Isle of Sheppey

I have a 50-minute drive in to work, and then I make a cup of tea and we have a quick operational briefing. Many mornings we'll have prisoner adjudications - if there's been a fight, or someone's failed a drugs test, or been found in possession of something they shouldn't have. It's like a miniature court hearing, except that makes it sound a bit grand. The prisoner can call witnesses, and the burden of proof is the same as in the criminal court. If you're involved in a fight, for example, you might find yourself having a period of cellular confinement - two or three days, maybe a week. You'd like these things to be a rarity, but when you're packing 985 guys into a relatively small space, there are going to be tensions. My main focus today is a high-profile visit we've got tomorrow, including two people from Lord Carter's prison service review. He's trying to see if there are any more efficiencies that can be squeezed out of us, so we're keen the visit goes well, and that we don't give them the impression we're lavishly funded! Because we're not.

When I tell people I work in a prison they always say, "Oh, which female prison do you work in?" I don't want to sound sexist, but I think being a woman in a male prison is an advantage. The average prisoner will be fairly respectful of a female, and women staff as a whole bring a nice balance to what's historically been quite a macho culture.

Deaths in custody are up there among the worst parts of the job. You feel so much for the family and the relatives but it has a massive impact on the staff as well.

Fran Jane, 31
Serving 9½ years for drug importation, HMP Styal, Cheshire

I woke up at 7.30, had a shower, got dressed, made my breakfast. We have roll call around eight each morning but the officers don't tend to wake us up; I have my own alarm clock.

I live in a prison house - in many ways it's like a large house, except that the front door is locked. There are 16 of us. You are free to move inside the house, and we all have keys to our own rooms. There are also cells elsewhere in the prison; the women doing detox or serving time for violent crime tend to go there. This month I'll have done two years.

Every morning I do admin support for the distance-learning coordinator. We went round to see the inmates in their units, checked how they were getting on with their courses, that kind of thing. I came back for lunch about 11.45 and then in the afternoon went to the "calm centre", where I work as an orderly. The girls can come there for education, computers, arts and crafts, to have their hair washed. I earn £10 a week for my morning job and £10 for the afternoon - that's quite a high wage in here. I'm trying to put away £10 a week for when I get out.

Our house is self catering, and there are three of us who take it in turns to cook; it was my turn so I did baked potatoes with fried chicken, onion and tomato. Most people have groups of a few people who they eat with each night, though at Christmas we all cooked a big meal together. It's a nice unit to be on; in general we all get on pretty well. I finished dinner about 5.15 and got ready for the gym. I go every day, mainly cardio stuff, because I'm trying to lose some weight.

I got home about 7.20, had a shower and did my studies - I'm doing an NVQ in business administration. I used to run a nightclub before I came to prison, so I do have some management skills, which really come in useful. With a criminal record I know it's going to be hard when I get out, so it's important to keep learning. My family live in Devon now, so they don't get up to see me very often, maybe once every four or five months. I do miss them, miss my freedom. But in general this is a nice jail. I could be in a cell somewhere.

Laura Kerr, 55
Probation officer, Sheffield

I arrived at the office at 9am, and in theory my first appointment was at 9.30. That person didn't turn up, however. Once I'd discussed his situation with a manager, it was decided that we ought to go ahead and do the necessary paperwork, so I spent the morning doing that, writing reports and risk assessments.

The man booked in for 10 did not come either. He is remanded on bail in a probation hostel to protect the victims of his offending. I would have been writing a report on him, but now I just issue a letter saying he's failed to come.

Given the pressure of work we're under, when people don't come, sometimes you just think, thank goodness for that, now I can get on with all the other work. I also fielded a lot of telephone calls today, such as one from a social worker who has been working with someone with serious alcohol-abuse issues, compounded by brain damage from a car accident. She was very concerned about the risk he poses to other people and to himself. Then there was a parole clerk from a prison telling me that someone had just been granted parole, which is one of the good bits of news we get every so often.

Two of the less serious offenders who have been on probation for about a year now have also done very well, so I'm taking their cases back to court to ask them to revoke the order a bit earlier in recognition of their good progress. I've been extremely busy, which is normal. I haven't mentioned half of the things that I did.

Michael Parker, 53
Wing therapist, G-wing (sex offenders), HMP Grendon, Bucks

I got to work around 7.30am; our first meeting is a handover briefing from the weekend staff at 8.30, but I like to be here early. I am a trained group analyst and the most senior of the therapists on G-wing, working with 40 men, all of whom are sex offenders.

At nine each morning we have a community meeting in which the inmates and as many staff as are available discuss the business of the wing, chaired by one of the inmates. One of the men was "winged", which means being held accountable for bad or antisocial behaviour in front of the whole community. It is based on a culture where you look at your behaviour and talk about it and take feedback from the other men and staff.

At 11 I had an assessment meeting with one of the men to discuss the targets for his behaviour. The idea is that the man talks about his offence and offending so we can assess whether he genuinely feels any remorse or sadness. The magical phrase is victim empathy. It's a hard one to come by.

I had lunch with colleagues, then a couple of business and administrative meetings. At three we had a sensitivity meeting, in which we meet as a staff team to deal with issues. In this role you are exposed to things that are often quite disturbing, which is tough. I left about 4.30 after handing over to the evening staff. I drove home, cooked and chatted to my family. I don't want to say too much about my home life; I never talk about where I live. I once had an ex-inmate appearing at the end of my road and I never like to give too much away. I was in bed about 10.30.

The thing about working with sex offenders, even if our work doesn't massively reduce people's risk of reoffending, it does give us a real window of understanding into why it happens. A lot of these people have undergone the most horrific experiences themselves. They find, oddly, that to do the same to other people takes away the pain.

Juliet Lyon, 58
Director, Prison Reform Trust

At 8.30am I finished two reports to charitable trusts outlining PRT achievements over the year. Our campaign with the Guardian managed to put a halt to transporting pregnant women prisoners in "sweat boxes". We also helped to save the post of chief inspector of prisons, which the government had proposed scrapping.

At 9.30 our press and policy meeting concentrated on two big events this week: the publication in Best and the Mirror of our SmartJustice opinion poll showing strong public support for community sentences for women; and Wednesday's launch by Baroness Quin in the Lords of No One Knows. This is PRT's new programme of work with Mencap on learning disability and learning difficulty - a forgotten world in prison.

At 11 I attended the Butler Trust award ceremony and learned about excellent work done against the odds. After a brief meeting with the chair of the Prison Officers' Association, I went to the International Centre for Prison Studies to discuss our joint project on young offenders.

Back to the office at about 4.45 for a meeting with our advice and information service. Today's calls were from prisoners trying to transfer closer to home, and families concerned about mentally ill relatives in prison. At 5.30 our head of policy and I discussed plans to alert people to the massive use of new indeterminate public protection sentences and progress on corporate manslaughter. It's extraordinary that government is trying to omit deaths in custody from the bill.

In the evening, I was a panellist on the Anita Anand show on Five Live.

Eddie Gilfoyle, 45
Serving 15th year of a life sentence for murdering his wife (he has always maintained his innocence), HMP Buckley Hall, Rochdale

I woke at seven to the same thought I have had each morning for almost 15 years - will today bring news that will overturn my wrongful conviction? Get up, make the bed, put the kettle on and shave while waiting for it to boil. Get unlocked at half seven, more coffee, then work at 8.30. I am now teaching industrial cleaning to other prisoners, having got all the qualifications. Return to cell at 11.30, get banged up till dinner at 12.20. Try phoning my solicitor but can't get through. Will ask a pal to pass message on.

Work in the afternoon, more bang-up, then tea and association. Phone friends and family, have a shower before last bang-up at 8.45. Read a paper, watch TV.

People who know I'm innocent ask me what the worst part of this is. I tell them: "My wife and unborn child died and I can't grieve for them until I'm free ... and it might be too late then." Apart from that, it's the waiting.

Alan Meyer, 41
Catering manager, HMP Cardiff

By the time I arrive at 8am, four or five of my staff and 23 prisoners are already prepping lunch. We have to feed 750 prisoners. The breakfast packs containing cereal and bread for toast are sent out to the seven wings the night before. Until six months ago, I was working in the forces and there isn't much difference. Here they get five choices for dinner; in the forces they get seven. For example, tonight they will get a choice of pork or vegetable chow mein, tuna pasta bake, tuna pasta and mayonnaise salad and a sandwich pack containing an egg roll, crisps and chocolate biscuit. For lunch, they get three hot choices - faggots and gravy, vegetable pizza and spicy sausage pizza. We also do some halal meals, as there are about 70 Muslim prisoners. They order the day before so we can cook the right amounts. The menu rotates weekly for a few months before changing. Tuna pasta bake is the most popular because most of them work out in the gym and want the protein.

I spend most of the morning doing orders and checking stock levels. Lunch for the prisoners is from 11.30-12. We then have an hour for our lunch before it all starts again at 1.30. The officers usually go outside for lunch - they don't have a canteen here any more. I usually leave at five, half an hour before the prisoners have their dinner.

I have a budget of pounds 1.79-pounds 1.84 per prisoner per day. It is very tight. We buy in things such as pizza bases, but we do make food fresh. We send out surveys every few months to see what prisoners want. Basically, they want chips every day and hate mashed potato. It takes three prisoners all morning to peel the nine sacks of potatoes we need. That's one of the best jobs in the kitchen, bar preparing the meat. But everyone starts with two weeks of "pan bashing" [washing up] so I can see if I want them working in the kitchen. Security is always an issue. All the knives are locked in a cabinet. They each have a tag and whoever is using them has to have the tag number by them at all times.

    A day inside - part 2, G, 12.3.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,,2031855,00.html

G2 special

A day inside - part 3

The prison system is in crisis. Our jails are bursting with convicts and crumbling with age. At least, that's what the headlines tell us. But what is daily life like for the 80,000 people locked up - and for the 25,000-plus who work with them? For this G2 special we talked to 42 people about one day last week - from Category A prisoners whose escape would endanger the public to Category Ds trusted with their own keys; from a money-launderer jailed with her baby to a teenager who caused death by dangerous driving; from the head of the prison service to a father whose son died in custody

Monday March 12, 2007
Guardian

Mark Drew, 39
Reception officer, HMP Wandsworth, London

I was on the early shift today, which starts at 6.30am and goes on until lunchtime. The first thing we do is go up on the wings to collect prisoners due in court that day. They're moved to holding cells before passing through reception where they'll have a full strip search for any concealed items - drugs, mobile phones, tobacco. They also have all their property searched, x-rayed and logged. They will probably change into their own clothes, before going through to another holding area where they wait to be picked up by police vans.

We often have about 100 people passing through reception in one day, including remand and convicted prisoners; each person spends about 15 minutes going through reception. Experience tells you who will need more help to be put at their ease. For those few moments, you sometimes feel like a father figure - many prisoners come from broken backgrounds and have no fixed abode.

Around 8.30am, prisoners who need to go out to police stations are brought down by wing staff and because London jails are so overcrowded we also have a fair number due for transfer to prisons across the country. From 11.30 there's a chance to catch up on paperwork before prisoners return from court and police stations at midday. The reception process is repeated before inmates re-enter the prison. The late shift take over from 1pm and work until 9pm. The prison service doesn't get the credit it deserves; people think it is just a case of opening and locking doors but our role is to rehabilitate and we're a professional, hard-working organisation.

David Ramsbotham, 72
Chief inspector of prisons 1995-2001, now a campaigner on prison issues

I spent the day at Buckingham Palace for the Butler Trust awards for prison staff and probation staff who have done particularly good or innovative work. One of the members of the awarding panel told me that the seven days he spent judging were the most inspiring of the last year. That's the upside. The downside is that the parts are better than the whole. The prison service consistently fails to turn the good practice for which these awards are given into common practice. How many of the good things that are done in a prison are still being done three years later? It depends on the governor. If he or she goes, the good things too often go with them. I also talked at length to a number of senior probation officers. I'm alarmed at the implications for them of the offender management bill [the controversial plan to part-privatise the probation service]. The bill is riddled with nonsense. If it's about setting targets rather than allowing people to deal with people then you are doomed to fail. It reminds me of when John Reid went to Wormwood Scrubs and criticised probation officers in front of prisoners. That was the worst example I have ever seen of poor leadership.

Prisoner Y, 40
Serving life under the two-strikes law for rape, kidnap and eight robberies, Wakefield high-security prison, North Yorkshire

I woke up at 7.30, had a wash, tidied myself up and pottered about in my cell. Unlock is around eight. I don't bother with breakfast, I just get a carton of milk. Prison food is horrible. I cook my own stuff with four inmates - we all put in money and share a "food boat". Around 8.30 I go to work as a cleaner. I've done cleaning jobs in a lot of jails so I'd say I was pretty good. You do not get security-cleared to clean on the wings with minimal staffing if you're an idiot. I get paid pounds 18 a week, and spend pounds 12 of this on food - mostly tinned stuff and fresh veg. I've met prisoners who are brilliant cooks. You learn off the Asian guys how to do the curries and an Albanian taught me how to do pizza.

I've been in prison most of my life. Most of my offences are drugs-related, and for a long time I had issues with addressing my behaviour. This place has been good for me. Before, prison was just an occupational hazard. When I left jail after a stint, I'd say, "You'll never see me again", but I'd be back in six months. Now I've done courses, had risk-reducing therapy and am about to do a course for sex offenders so that I have a chance when I get out. At seven we are locked up for the night. I write letters, watch TV, read and go to bed at 11-12. For me, it's easy to be occupied. If you can't read or write, and you're not into TV or music, you're in trouble. You'll get depressed and wound up.

The prison service has changed massively over the years. Gone are the days when you sat locked up for 23 hours a day. Even the abuse has gone over the past five years. The government or whoever has realised that the only way to stop people coming back is to concentrate on offending behaviour. There's a lot of psychology in the prison now.

I wouldn't say I was having a good time, but you've got to make the most of it. My next parole opportunity is later this year, but realistically it's going to be another three or four years before I get out. I'll have done 11 years then - double my tarrif. As well as the drugs, a huge issue for me was anger. But it's not a problem these days. Part of it is down to the courses, and part of it is just growing up. I'm more mature now.

Janet Rand
English studies coordinator in HMP Wormwood Scrubs, London

My job is a mix of teaching, organising projects and running the prison magazine. I spent much of the morning working on a new facility called "storybook dads". Prisoners with children read a book, which is uploaded onto a computer, put onto a CD and sent to their child. The idea is to try to keep families together - the loss of family plays a large part in reoffending.

I teach an English studies class in the afternoon. The literacy curriculum is boring and banal, so I tend to adapt it. We have a high number of second-language students because Heathrow is in our catchment area. The most important element of prison teaching is related to self-esteem. When people come to prison, the majority are at rock bottom, so when they come into your class they expose parts of themselves that they don't when they are outside. On the whole you see the best of them - they may well not be like that outside, but here they are discovering a side of themselves and being respected for that.

It's a very stressful environment, but not from the way people might think it is. Sometimes things happen that make you aware that you are in a dangerous place, but I don't ever feel threatened in the education department or on the wings. Most of the men are very respectful and in a dangerous situation most would want to protect you.

Richard Vince, 37
Governor, HMP Preston

I arrived at 7.30 and got a debrief - first in the security department, then from the orderly officer who would be running the jail for the day. We are a busy local prison with 750 inmates, and have to get a lot of prisoners to and from courts, so my first job is to make sure that's running smoothly. I then had a meeting with my deputy governor to assess the new regimes we've just introduced. We are starting more educational activities and lengthening the "core" day to allow staff to spend more time with prisoners. At 9.15, I and a dozen or so managers held our main operational meeting to discuss events over the weekend. We talked about a young man who had been transferred here from another prison because of behavioural problems. We also discussed releases for this week - I need to make sure all public protection issues have been dealt with. My staff reported on prisoners deemed to be at risk of self-harm or potential suicide - 14 today - and we will give them special attention and support. Between 9.30 and 11.30 I did the daily "governor's rounds" with the orderly officer, visiting different parts of the prison. It's important to be visible, to make sure prisoners and staff have access to me, and to listen to complaints and suggestions. After a sandwich lunch, I met two of my senior managers to discuss turning the old kitchen into a new activity centre that will allow us to expand our educational facilities. You have to treat prisoners as human beings. Our central aim is to reduce the risk of them reoffending.

Attiq Mohammed, 34

Prisoner on day release, serving eight years for possession with intent to supply, HMP Kirklevington Grange, Cleveland

My alarm goes off at 5.45am as I have to be out to work by seven after signing my licence. It's a dream at Kirklevington compared to the other prisons I've been in - Doncaster and Armley (Leeds). I have my own room with en-suite shower, basin and loo. We all have a colour TV, which costs us pounds 1 a week in electricity. No one wants to throw these privileges away, especially as most of us only have a short time before our release. I might be out by June.

Everyone here - about 230 prisoners - is working on the outside. I work at a timber merchants as a retail sales assistant. I do a 40-hour week earning the minimum wage. I had my own shop so I know what to do. I now have my own car to drive to work. I have to be back by 6pm, but if there's traffic the wardens are usually pretty understanding if I ring on my mobile and tell them what's happening.

Once back I have to put my phone in a locker, then I go to the gym until 7. We have tea from 7-7.30 and at 8 we have a roll check. By 9 I'm usually asleep. The wardens come round about every hour to check everything's OK, but I've even got my own key to my cell now.

Barry Smith, 42
Discipline officer, induction wing, Castington young offender institution, Northumberland

Every day is different on the induction wing. It is the most important wing in any prison. Every trainee who comes in goes into the induction wing so they can get settled and know what the prison's all about. It's also a good time for us, as officers, to keep an eye on them, and make sure they're coping. As soon as they come in they're given a phone call to friends or family to say that they're OK and we lay down detailed rules and regulations. The last thing I always say to them is that if they respect the officers, we will respect them. You hope it sinks in. This morning I came in to teach the juveniles, which I do part-time. Most of these kids would truant when they were at school, so getting them to sit in a classroom environment is hard to begin with.

I like to try to work my lessons around things that they're interested in - fast cars, football and prisons, would you believe - so a lot of the time I'll show them documentaries about prisons, which seems to keep their attention.

Today I taught a few lessons of English. We talked about them putting themselves in their victims' shoes, getting them to discuss what empathising is. Then we did a bit of role-play, where I put them into a situation where they're a parole board. We're trying to get them to stand up and challenge their offending behaviour. It went well today; it always goes well.

Deborah Coles, 44
Co-director of Inquest, which helps investigate deaths in custody

Early start, to attend the ongoing inquest for Gareth Myatt, a 15-year-old who died while being restrained by three officers in a secure training centre. I met Gareth's mother - I have been helping her and her lawyers with the case since his death three years ago. Late and incomplete disclosure of documents is an ongoing problem. The day's evidence exposes the high levels of restraint regularly being used on children to gain compliance, a purpose the Home Office/Youth Justice Board monitor accepts would be unlawful; that personal items are being removed from their bedrooms to wind them up ("provoking" children is also unlawful); and that children's complaints are being internally "investigated" without anyone bothering to speak to the children.

It was all deeply upsetting for Gareth's mum, so I spent time talking through her anxieties. I went back to the hotel at the end of the day. After a brief call to my children, I spent the evening working on the case with the lawyers, restaurant table piled with files. Ran into a family I worked with 10 years ago after their 19-year-old relative died after 23 hours in Feltham young offenders institution.

Tony Barr, 51
Head of offender management dept, in charge of resettlement, HMP Blantyre House, Kent

My job is about resettling offenders, preparing the way to their release. The main thing today was to have been a parole hearing for three lifers, but it was cancelled as no judge was available. The prisoners were distressed so I spent a bit of time talking to them.

It's tough trying to make sure things go well for prisoners after release. They've all got chaotic backgrounds and you know the odds are stacked against them. The main thing you have to think about is whether they will be a danger to the public. And the truth is that you do all you can to assess them, but the test comes when they are actually out. That's the aspect that weighs heavily in my job. Ex-prisoners need support, but that's often difficult. The main person they can turn to is their probation officer, but as that person has the power to return them to prison, they may not always feel they can reveal everything.

Marilyn Welsh, 53
Head of safeguarding, HMP Werrington, north Staffordshire

The prisoners here are men aged 15-18. Most have spent most of their lives in care; the average reading age is 7 1/2 years. In many ways, being here is more an opportunity than a punishment; society has let them down, and this is a chance to get them back on their feet.

My job is about prisoner safety. I started today as I always do, with a meeting with other staff to discuss individual cases. We talked about a lad of 16 who is going to become a dad. He has just been released and is desperate not to reoffend, but like so many others there are big problems. He was especially worried about being reunited with his mother, who he has not seen since the age of seven. We decided to arrange for him to be seen by the community psychologist so he has got some back-up for what's going to be an emotional and challenging time.

Later I talked to an officer about a prisoner we're worried about. Being locked up is terrifying for a young teenage boy, especially when he first arrives. I've got four sons. If they'd been up against what these kids have been up against, would they have turned out any differently? The odds have been stacked against them; they've known deprivation and disadvantage. If we're perceived as people who just turn keys and forget, I can tell you that the reality here is very different.

Mandy Ogunmokun, 47

In-reach drugs worker, HMP Holloway, London I walked to work and got in about 7.15am and my first meeting is at 7.30 where we find out what has happened over the weekend and what the day holds. I came back to the office and checked my messages. Heroin, crack and alcohol are the biggest problems and we see the same problems, and often the same faces, year after year. We see small improvements in the clients, just little things about attitude or behaviour, but addiction takes time to change.

At 8.30 we have a full team meeting which looks at all the issues for the week and I get a list of clients. I spend a lot of time with clients. They are often devastated when they come back in but I am always pleased to see them as it means they are alive and I tell them that means there is still hope. At lunchtime I popped out to grab a sandwich in Holloway. We had another meeting from 1pm. About 70% of the women who come here are drug addicts so we are central to what happens.

Peter Allen, 52
Serving two-and-a-half-year sentence for arson, HMP Elmley, Kent

I wake up at about 7.30 and get washed up and have breakfast in my cell. We're all unlocked at eight and we can get hot water for cups of tea. Then we go to our jobs. I had a few problems when I first got here. They found out that I've got diabetes. And also I tried to commit suicide - there was a lot on my mind. But I've been seeing a psychiatrist and a nurse who helps me control the diabetes and things are better now. At the moment I'm working as an orderly down in the segregation unit - that's the punishment block where prisoners go when they misbehave. I do the cleaning, and I get on pretty well with the officers. I keep my head down and I've got a clean sheet. I enjoy being an orderly actually, and I might think about going on doing it when I get out.

Before I came inside, I was a manager and I had a two-hour memory loss. That's when the arson happened. I can only vaguely remember it, but I did warn everybody to get out, and nobody got hurt. Now they think that the diabetes might have had something to do with it. I might be eligible for tagging soon. My wife lives in Somerset, and she's hoping I get my tagging - she's not very well herself, she suffers with depression. At five it's tea, then association and then we're locked up at 7.45. It's quite easy getting off to sleep, I work hard all day and with my diabetes . . . its another day done and that's it. Another day off your sentence.

Steve Campion, 23
Serving nine years for false imprisonment, Wayland Prison, Norfolk

I'm a race equality liaison rep, and my day started with an induction for a new prisoner. You've got to explain that we don't tolerate racial discrimination, but you've also got to explain that there are a lot of differences and misunderstandings in here.

I'm like most prisoners - I'm young and black and from London. Most of the officers are white men in their 40s and 50s; they've never known black guys, and there are a lot of cultural misunderstandings. The other day, some prisoners were playing dominoes and they got really rowdy. The officers thought there was going to be trouble, but the truth is that's just how Afro-Caribbeans play dominoes! You have to explain things like that. This afternoon I had a hospital appointment. I was cuffed to an officer and taken there by cab. It's humiliating: you go through the hospital and everyone is looking at you and you see mums with young kids looking frightened. It's horrible, really humiliating.

Seeing the doctor was difficult too. I've got a problem that would be embarrassing enough if I had some privacy, but when you're handcuffed to another person you feel really self-conscious. During my examination the officer put a long chain on me, but it's hard getting your clothes off and the whole thing is demeaning. I can understand why they have to follow procedures, but I think they could take your circumstances into account. I've no history of violence since I've been in prison, which was April 2005.

Becky Newton, 36
Prison Advice and Care Trust (Pact) visit centre manager and first night worker, HMP Exeter

Before Pact existed, if you wanted to visit the prison you just had to queue up outside the gates and wait in the rain for them to be opened. Now everyone who wants to make a social visit has to come and book in via the Pact visitor centre. Monday was quiet - just 20 visits. We can have up to 36. My job as manager is to liaise between prisoners and their families, and put visitors at ease by answering any questions they have. Yesterday I helped one woman whose husband is coming out on a tag at the end of March and going to a probation hostel. She wanted to know if she could meet him at the gate. Another man was coming to visit his mentally ill son who was on remand, and he was concerned after the visit that his son wasn't very well. I was able to make a few phone calls and found out that his barrister was applying to a judge in chambers today for bail, so could tell him that he might be out by 10.30 the next day.

Moulana Sikander Pathan
Muslim chaplain, HMP & YOI Feltham

My normal day is from about 9am until 6pm, but I have been known to be here until about 9pm, running out before the gates get locked on me. We have three shared offices, two primarily for chaplaincy staff. The other is the Roman Catholic vestry/community chaplaincy office. I have four sessional chaplains (who are also imams from the community) who come and help with our work. We see about a dozen boys per day. There has been an increase in the number of Muslim prisoners, though I prefer to call them boys, not prisoners. Nationally, it used to be about 7% but now it's nearer 11%. I am one of very few full-time Muslim chaplains in the prison service. The day is taken up with four basic chaplaincy duties: receptions (seeing the new boys who have come in the night before), dealing with applications, daily visits to the segregation and the healthcare units. There are two types of visit: one is purely pastoral for your own faith community, the second is a generic visit, and we encourage both. When the boys come to prison and are going through a low patch (feeling suicidal, etc) quite often they open themselves up to a chaplain who is then able to provide the adequate support. I've been here for five years and it's nothing like the media says. About five years ago the government employed the first Muslim adviser at prison headquarters, and thatís when the changes really started. Occasionally we get a boy who has come in for a heinous crime. Two or three months after coming to service this boy will stand up and apologise just because heís been coming to worship and an understanding of right and wrong. The difficulty is to continue this when they leave, so we have started a Feltham Community Chaplaincy Trust, which links the offender to volunteers/mentors in the community that theyíre returning to.

Prisoner Z
Serving 10 years for rape, HMP Albany

The first spyhole check was at 7am. At 7.35am I staggered to the washroom, stepping over a rainwater puddle on the landing. I emptied my toilet bucket, washed, then returned to my 7ft x 7ft cell. The hot water machine was broken again. At least Radio 3 sustains me. At 8.20am "Down for labour!" resonates up the hallway: since the intercom broke down three years ago E wing has developed a shouting culture. While others go to workshops, I study for my OU degree. Did my bowls course at 9am - that's something else I've learned in my four years here. Unfortunately this time it was spoiled by barracking and silly arguments: half the old codgers are deaf, the other half can't count. At 11.55am I collected lunch and my Guardian, and at 12 I was banged up. Listened to Donald Macleod on Radio 3, who helps me understand why I don't like Wagner. Lovely letter from my wife, the 995th. We talked at 6pm, exchanged stories of our days. Banged up at 6.45pm - listened to Mozart. Iím grateful I'm in a "four-star" prison, otherwise I'd go mad. But what else could a psychotherapist convicted of rape expect?

Pia Sinha, 34
Head of safer prisons, HMP Wandsworth, London

I worked in Wandsworth prison as a chartered psychologist before I took on the safer prisons role. Wandsworth is unusual in having a psychologist in this position. We always have meetings scheduled, but a lot of your work gets diverted into whatever the crisis might be that day. The highest-risk group for suicide and self-harm are first-timers in custody and those who are detoxing. People are very frightened when they first come to Wandsworth because of its reputation. We try to see the individual not just as someone who is coming to prison because they have committed a crime but as someone who is dealing with the impact of incarceration. It's a distressing time for them. Today we had a learning and development programme, where high-risk prisoners get intensive therapy. One of the prisoners was very anxious because he's got court on Monday. He is someone who historically would be very worrying for us because he's an impulsive character. He finds it very difficult not to react when he gets news. This time he was able to convey to officers that he was very anxious and he'd like to move to a safe cell at the weekend so he cannot harm himself.

June Marriott, 43
Head of education, Wormwood Scrubs

I managed to get a seat on the Central Line and grabbed some breakfast when I got in, so all in all not bad. Then the first lot of students started arriving and I had to help find them the right rooms - there were a couple who were lost. I also had to make sure all the teachers had turned up and were in the classrooms before anyone was allowed in. There were a couple of queries from students, one about funding and another who was doing the wrong level course. Then I had 30 minutes to go through 69 emails - you may have a plan for A to B here but you nearly always end up going via X, Y and Z. The first lot of students left and I had a couple of hours to catch up on other things. Today I interviewed new teachers and I have a new deputy starting, so I was helping him settle in. I even had time for a sandwich at my desk, which was an unbelievable luxury. In the afternoon we have a similar routine of students and classes. As far I am concerned the education service is the crux of the whole prison service. We are trying to ensure that what's available on the outside is also available on the inside. We are trying to offer these men a seamless transition when they leave.

Emma Ginn
North-west coordinator for the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns

At 8.45am I went to the inquest of a prisoner found hanged at Harmondsworth Removal Centre, where I spoke to a journalist who asked, "What's the hook?" After that I talked to "Pierre", feeling awkward asking what implements Congolese guards had used to torture him and if he'd been raped. He is destitute, homeless and disbelieved. He asks how any immigration judge could say that his "ill-treatment in detention" did not "amount to torture", considering the Home Office describe Congolese prison conditions as "life-threatening", synonymous with disease, hunger, abuse, torture and death. At lunchtime I bought soap for "Jane", who can't understand why she has been detained for months even though her asylum claim hasn't been refused. In the afternoon I took a call from a mother with a screaming baby - totally desperate and inconsolable about her husband's deportation tomorrow. Then I talked to a doctor about "Hassan", a teenager who arrived as an unaccompanied asylum-seeking child, and the hunger strike Hassan said he'd started. Then I tried to call a detainee but the detention centre phone rang off the hook six times. Later that evening I emailed my MP asking why my tax money is spent detaining men, women and children who are not accused of any crime at an average cost of £1,230 a week when 47% of them are later released.

Alphonsus Uche Okaf-Mefor
Nigerian asylum-seeker, Tinsley House removal centre, near Gatwick

I was allowed out of bed at 6am after another sleepless night. We are restricted to our rooms between 11pm and 6am. I watched TV to take my mind away from my problems. Breakfast at seven, but how can I eat when I could be dead soon? Watched the news about the British kidnapped in Ethiopia; thought about the Africans who, like me, were kidnapped in Britain. Asked about my medication - they are still not providing it. Later I heard from my solicitor. The Home Office has rejected a new appeal and the nightmares start again. He will apply for bail and a judicial review. Why do they reject my claim when we have provided photographic evidence of my Massob [Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra] activities in Britain and the Home Office's own policy is to grant asylum to members of Massob? Phone call from a supporter in the afternoon. Am so thankful that there are people fighting for refugees. All I wanted was to show people human rights abuses in Biafra/Nigeria. Now I will be returned to become one of the abuses. Spoke to solicitor. He seems to be doing his best. Nothing for me to do but hope and pray. Watched more television in the evening, but the guards turn off the power at 11 o'clock. I complained that this leaves me nothing to do. They replied: "You've only been here for a day and you're already causing trouble." I try to sleep.

· Because of security and victim issues, some names could not be used.

    A day inside - part 3, G > G2, 12.3.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,,2031858,00.html

Sick, suicidal - and locked up in jail

A shocking new report claims that too many of the 4,300 women in Britain's prisons are vulnerable and a danger to themselves - and already this year two have taken their own lives

Sunday March 4, 2007
The Observer
Jamie Doward, home affairs editor

Susan's mother saw bodies in the walls of her house and blood pouring from the ceiling. She attacked her husband with an axe. One day she painted the outside of her house pink, including the lawn.

Even before she had hit puberty, Susan was encouraged by her mother, who was prone to hallucinations, to drink alcohol. For Susan it was a way of coping with her mother's violence and her manic mood swings. Soon Susan was taking amphetamines. When she was 13, Susan's mother took her out of school. Social workers noted Susan had become a 'virtual prisoner' in her own home.

By the time she was 17 Susan was a real prisoner, serving a sentence for assault. Uncared for, confused and emotionally unstable, she and an acquaintance had kidnapped a girl, tied her up and cut off her hair. Prison was not a place for a vulnerable teenager and the self-harm got worse, with Susan regularly covered in blood after slashing her wrists. She is now in a secure psychiatric unit.

Susan's story is typical of many of the 4,300 women currently in the UK's prisons. Now a government-commissioned review, to be published in the next few days, will warn there are too many Susans in prison, too many vulnerable women prone to suicide and self-harm.

Baroness Jean Corston's review was triggered by the deaths of six female inmates at Styal jail in Cheshire over a 12-month period, starting in August 2002. The deaths came after a highly critical report by the Chief Inspector of Prisons that recommended sweeping changes at the prison, few of which were acted upon.

Experts who have worked on the review, including Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, believe Corston will not pull her punches, given the information with which she has been presented.

Corston's message is expected to be stark: the prison system is not suited to caring for vulnerable women. Instead Corston is set to argue there is a need for a fundamental policy shift, with much greater emphasis on community-based rehabilitation programmes and less on incarceration. The report is expected to be a watershed moment for the prison service, leading to significant changes in the way women prisoners are treated.

'We are looking to this report to set out a clear, unequivocal case for a reduction in the needless imprisonment of women,' Lyon said. 'We hope it will present the strategic blueprint for responsible reform.'

The review will also highlight the tragic circumstances that result in many vulnerable women ending up in prison. Susan's story is again instructive. Her mental health deteriorated dramatically as she was moved around fostering agencies and bed-and-breakfast accommodation. Then, at 15, she was placed in a specialist care centre where, with intensive supervision, she started to stabilise her life and self-harm more infrequently. On her 16th birthday, staff hired Susan a dress and bought her a cake. Her mother refused to come to the party. Her father was in prison at the time.

Then Susan's local authority stopped paying for her treatment. She was placed in a council flat on a sink estate, despite warnings from social services teams that the area was riddled with drugs. Unable to cope on her own, Susan hooked up with another teenager. In 2003 the pair kidnapped another girl, tied her up and cut off her hair as they demanded money. Susan was found guilty and sent to prison, where she spent almost 22 hours a day in a small cell. She self-harmed on an almost daily basis.

A report written by a young offender treatment worker monitoring Susan when she entered the prison system noted: 'Susan seems to be a typical example of the type of prisoner with mental health problems, treatable or not, that the [prison] service does not seem able to deal with, however hard they try.'

On 11 September 2005, Susan was rushed to hospital for a blood transfusion, having slashed herself repeatedly. She came close to death. Susan is now in a specialist psychiatric unit where she is said to be making progress.

Susan's desperate life before being moved to the unit is recorded in a bulging file presented to the government's Treasury solicitors, who have launched an official inquiry, the first of its kind, into allegations that she was failed by a series of public agencies.

'She was allowed to slip through the net and nothing was done until it was far too late,' said Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, which is backing Susan's case. 'People used to pay to gawp at mad women in Bedlam. Now we simply use the criminal justice system to treat people whose behaviour ranges from the bizarre to the dangerous.'

Susan survived. Just. Others were not so lucky. Sarah Campbell, an 18-year-old former heroin addict who suffered from clinical depression, committed suicide in January 2003, a day after she started her sentence for manslaughter at Styal. Her mother, Pauline, said Sarah was terrified about returning to the prison, having spent six months at Styal on remand. 'Every time I visited her [while on remand] I saw a marked deterioration in her mental and physical state,' Pauline said after her daughter's death. 'She didn't receive the care she needed to treat her addiction and she was kept locked in her cell for 23 hours a day.'

Many of the women currently residing in Britain's prison system have much in common with Susan and Sarah. 'The rates of mental illness among women in prison are horrendously high,' said Cathy Stancer, director of the campaign group Women in Prison. 'The majority suffer from at least one mental illness. Most come from extremely chaotic backgrounds.'

The Howard League's files are littered with such cases. 'These women don't come from nice families,' Crook said. 'They come from families who inject them with heroin, who prostitute them, who drop them on their heads.'

Two women have already killed themselves in British prisons this year. 'We went to Holloway prison the other week,' Stancer said. 'All the staff talked about was the number of women they had to cut down every night because they were wrapping ligatures around their necks.'

Those women who have been inside say suicidal urges are common. 'During the two and half years of my incarceration I was to discover the depths of despair one can fall into,' one former woman prisoner told the Prison Reform Trust. 'I learnt about self-harm, physically and emotionally; I learnt how to survive, yet at the same time how it feels to want to die every day. Prison is not a place for the mentally ill, and too many women are there already that should not be.'

Campaigners warn suicides and self-harm will become more frequent if the government fails to take action after Corston publishes her review. Over the last decade, the number of women in prison has increased by 173 per cent, placing acute pressure on the prison service.

'Staff say they find it very difficult to look after women with support needs,' Stancer said. The statistics tell the story. One in five women prisoners has been in local authority care; 40 per cent of those on remand have used heroin; more than half have suffered domestic violence; and a third have been sexually abused.

Recently pressures on prisons have been greatly exacerbated by the use of 'indeterminate sentences' - custody without a fixed release date. This new form of sentencing is handed down by judges in cases where the offender is classed as being a risk to themselves or society. Campaigners argue indeterminate sentences are simply a custodial solution to a mental health problem.

The decision to lock up more and more women has been regularly attacked by penal reform groups. They point out two thirds of women in custody are actually on remand. Of these, fewer than half receive a prison sentence, while one in five is acquitted. Fewer than 10 per cent of women remanded into custody are charged with violent offences.

And far from helping those inside go on the 'straight and narrow', prison contributes to their problems once outside, according to campaigners. Rehabilitation charity Nacro found almost 40 per cent of women prisoners had lost their homes as a result of imprisonment. Each year the living arrangements of some 8,000 children are affected by the imprisonment of their mothers, according to the government's Social Exclusion Unit.

Given such factors, penal reform campaigners say it is hardly surprising reoffending rates among female prisoners now stand at 65 per cent.

The Howard League says it is often councils that are to blame, claiming officials often do not pick up the warning signs that teenagers are in trouble and do not intervene promptly enough. The league cites the current example of a 17-year-old heroin user and former prostitute.

Her mother argued she should have been classified as a 'child in need' by social services when she came out of prison. Concerned her daughter would simply end up in bed-and-breakfast accommodation, her mother took her in, despite having severe problems of her own. With a lack of support from social services and desperate to feed her drug habit, the daughter turned to crime. The teenager is now back in custody.

Among the desperate stories there are rays of sunshine. The 218 Project in Glasgow, a community-based programme that offers help and support to women offenders and was visited by Corston, is considered a success and is likely to feature highly in the review's recommendations of what should be done.

But campaigners say these types of holistic programmes, which offer everything from advice on housing to getting a job, are rare. Unless this changes they warn there will be more Susans and more suicides as vulnerable women continue to be lost in the prison system.

On the desk of Chris Callender, a solicitor with the Howard League, there are a number of gifts Susan has made for him. There is a small, carved wooden tree, a Christmas bauble, a photograph frame and a coaster made out of plastic beads. Tiny trinkets of thanks. Callender looked at the objects with pride and some anger. 'We're all she's got,' he said.

· Some names have been changed.

In figures

4,334 women are in prison
64 per cent of women offenders serve sentences of 6 months or less
1/3 of those have been sexually abused
37 per cent of women offenders attempt suicide before prison
70 per cent of women offenders suffer from two or more mental disorders
5 the number of times women are more likely to injure themselves in prison than men
55 per cent of women test positive for class A drugs on arrival in custody

    Sick, suicidal - and locked up in jail, O, 4.3.2007, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2026178,00.html

4.45pm update

Reid announces plans for new prisons

Friday February 16, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Peter Walker and agencies

Two new jails are to be built to ease serious overcrowding in the prisons system, the home secretary, John Reid, announced today.

In a speech at the site of one of the planned jails - to be built next to the Ashworth high security mental hospital, on Merseyside - Mr Reid said the move would provide an extra 1,300 prison spaces.

He said the public wanted more people in prison for their own safety, but warned that this put inevitable pressure on the existing jail system.

Planning permission had already been granted for the 600-place Merseyside jail, to be called HMP Kennett, the home secretary said. It is being built in addition to a "temporary" 350-place jail on the site, announced last month and due to open in the spring.

The second new prison, with 700 places, is planned for a site next to Belmarsh, in south-east London, although planning permission for the scheme had not yet been granted.

While Belmarsh is one of the most secure prisons in the country, holding a number of convicted terrorists, the planned new prison is expected to be a lower risk category C facility.

The plans come with the country's prisoner population having exceeded 80,000 for the first time - the highest per capita in western Europe - and Mr Reid said he wanted to create space for at least another 8,000 inmates by 2012.

He said the increase in prisoner numbers was due to a series of factors including stiffer sentences, proper enforcement of bail conditions and community sentences and the use of indeterminate sentences.

The latter measure alone currently accounted for an extra 2,200 people in jail, and this figure is set to rise to 12,000 by 2012.

Mr Reid said the increase in inmate numbers due to indeterminate sentences reflected the desires of the country despite the pressure it put on the system.

"That is something that the public wants, that the public demands in terms of their own protection, something it is right to do, but something that puts considerable pressure on prison places," he said.

He said the recent fatal shootings of three teenage boys in south-east London in less than two weeks emphasised the need for robust law and order policies.

"When we look at the recent awful, violent, tragic deaths in London and elsewhere, of course we all realise that police action and prison places on their own will not necessarily solve this problem," he said.

"But the problem will not be solved ... without firm police action, firm powers and sufficient prison places. They are a necessary, though not sufficient part of the solution to some of these awful crimes."

The shadow home secretary, David Davis, condemned the plans as "far too little, way too late", complaining that overcrowding meant prisoners were not receiving proper rehabilitation while in jail. For the Liberal Democrats, home affairs spokesman Nick Clegg said the entire policy needed to be re-thought as "Labour's policy of mass incarceration isn't working".

After his speech, Mr Reid was due to inspect work on the new temporary facility at Maghull. Hospital wards and office buildings are being refurbished to house adult male offenders, and a secure perimeter fence will be constructed.

New prisons cost between £100,000 and £125,000 per place to build, meaning the 8,000 places pledged by 2012 will come with a £1bn price tag.

Prison overcrowding has become a serious worry for the Home Office, adding to a series of problems faced by Mr Reid since he took over at the department in May last year.

One of the biggest has been the revelation that more than 1,000 foreign prisoners had been freed without first being considered for deportation.

Last month, the chief prisons inspector, Anne Owers, said overcrowding and poor planning meant there was a "serious crisis" in the prisons system, which could not be addressed by extra cells alone.

Also in January, the Home Office was criticised for advising judges that jail terms should only be given to serious, violent or repeat offenders.

    Reid announces plans for new prisons, G, 16.2.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,,2014719,00.html

2pm

Three men jailed

over internet child rape plot

Monday February 5, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Staff and agencies

Three men who used an internet chatroom to hatch a "harrowing" plot to rape two young schoolgirls were jailed today.

Southwark crown court, in London, said the three had been planning a "Holly and Jess-style" attack - a reference to the two 10-year-olds Ian Huntley murdered in Soham in 2002.

David Beavan, 42, Alan Hedgcock, 41, and Robert Mayers, 42, were found guilty of conspiracy to rape.

Beavan was sentenced to 11 years in jail, while Hedgcock and Mayers received eight-year sentences.

The three were the first people convicted of such a serious offence from online exchanges alone. Prior to their arrests, they had never actually met. However, the court heard, this fact had not prevented them from "drooling" over the possibility of turning their sick fantasies into chilling reality.

Passing sentence, Judge Geoffrey Rivlin QC said the men posed a "serious risk of physical and psychological harm to children" and instructed that they be registered as sex offenders for life.

Referring to their chatroom logs he said: "You were drooling over the prospect to take these children into the woods and rape them.

"These logs were further spiced, if that is the right word, by the swapping of pornographic images of young children.

"All three of you were found to be in possession of very many photographs of children, some of them ... very shocking."

Police first heard of their plan when "rape-obsessed" Beavan, of Bransgore, Hants, got cold feet and walked into Bournemouth police station in January last year to tell officers what had been going on.

The greeting cards salesman claimed he was just a "vigilante" gathering evidence against paedophiles, but he was convicted of two counts of conspiracy to rape.

Hedgcock, a film makeup artist from Twickenham, south-west London, and Mayers, of Warrington, Cheshire, were found guilty of the same charge.

During their trial, the court heard that after meeting in an incest chatroom, "child porn addict" Hedgcock had told Beavan he wanted to abuse two sisters aged 13 and 14. His plan was to pounce on the girls as they walked through woods to school. Beavan immediately made it clear he was interested in helping Hedgcock, and sought to recruit Mayers.

But Beavan eventually lost his nerve, when he thought the authorities might be closing in, and decided to contact the police.

After his arrest, police found more then 5,000 child porn images on his computer, 1,249 of which had been downloaded in a single session.

All three admitted various charges, including 50 sample counts of distributing, making and possessing thousands of indecent images of children.

Outside the court, Detective Constable Dave Adams, of the Met's child abuse investigation command, said: "These three men took a step beyond fantasy and have actually identified the children they would target, the location where they would approach them and what exactly they planned to do to them.

"This is a really significant investigation because, for the first time, internet chat logs have been used to prove a charge of conspiracy to rape a child. This case should act as a really stark warning that the internet is not a hiding place to plan and participate in criminal acts."

Three men jailed over internet child rape plot, G, 5.2.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2006456,00.html

Warnings about jail conditions ignored,

says chief inspector

January 31, 2007
The Times
Richard Ford, Home Correspondent

Ministers 'built ark after the flood'

Prison riot came hours after report

The prison watchdog accused the Home Office yesterday of failing to carry out proper planning to provide enough space in jails, resulting in offenders sleeping in court cells.

Anne Owers said that without proper resources and management offenders would simply be recycled in and out of jails through a perpetually revolving door.

In her most scathing criticism since becoming Chief Inspector of Prisons five years ago, Ms Owers accused ministers of trying to build an ark after the flood. She said that a huge increase in prison numbers and lack of cash was an “alarming and potentially extremely damaging combination” for the jail service in England and Wales.

Her criticism came hours after a serious disturbance at Dovegate jail at Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, in which prisoners trashed a wing, setting fire to wastepaper bins, flooding cells and destroying televisions.

Officers at the jail, run by a private company called Serco, were forced to withdraw from the wing on Monday night until reinforcements arrived to enable them to regain control. Thirty inmates have been moved to other jails in the public and private sectors and thirty to other parts of the jail.

In her annual report Ms Owers said that the current overcrowding crisis in prisons was making jails riskier places to run. She spoke as the Prison Service was given some relief after an overnight fall of 200 in the numbers in jail during the past seven days. Ms Owers said that this had caused a huge sigh of relief in the Home Office and provided a breathing space. “We simply cannot accommodate people. We certainly won’t be able to throw up buildings in time to do so.”

In a devastating rebuke to successive home secretaries, she added: “It is normally considered good practice to build the ark before the flood rather than during it or after it. This means long-term planning. I warned last April that we would hit the buffers in autumn and we did. We have reached a different set of buffers. The house was full in the autumn. It is now overcrowded.”

Ms Owers said that she could not see an easy way out of the crisis in the immediate future but refused to be drawn on whether John Reid should consider the early release of thousands of low-risk offenders in order to ease the crisis. She added: “I worry at the moment that as fast as quick-build units will be put up, they will be filled.”

Her annual report states that there are already signs that the overcrowding crisis is leading to falling standards. She said in her introduction to the report: “We have seen too many local prisons recently whose cultures and practices are sliding back, or failing to improve.”

A Prison Service spokeswoman said that Ms Owers met Mr Reid yesterday in what was described as a helpful meeting. The spokeswoman added that projecting the prison population, now at 80,000, was “not an exact science”.

Gerry Sutcliffe, the Prisons Minister, said: “I am heartened by the Chief Inspector’s recognition that, despite continued population pressures, significant improvements continue to take place in many key areas of prison life.”

Warnings about jail conditions ignored, says chief inspector, Ts, 31.1.2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2575624,00.html

Reid urged to free thousands

as jail conditions worsen

January 29, 2007
The Times
Richard Ford and Frances Gibb

Overcrowding 'puts public at risk'

Foreign prisoners await deportation

Britain’s jail watchdog will heap further pressure on the Home Secretary this week by giving warning that prison overcrowding is putting the public at risk.

Anne Owers will say that the overcrowding in England and Wales is hitting rehabilitation programmes intended to make offenders less likely to return to a life of crime.

She will also highlight the position of foreign national prisoners who remain in prison awaiting deportation despite having served their sentences.

John Reid, the Home Secretary, today admits that problems at his department will continue to be undermined by new crises and embarrassments.

He writes in The Guardian: “If you renovate a house you start by taking the wallpaper off. It is only then that you discover more problems. Indeed I expect more problems. Being Home Secretary is my biggest challenge. But it isn’t mission impossible.”

Last night it emerged that he had suffered a further setback in his efforts to speed up the deportation of prisoners from EU states. Poland is blocking attempts to allow transfers without a prisoner’s consent. An EU-wide deal would free 1,500 places.

Ms Owers, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, will also express concern at the number of prisoners being given indeterminate sentences — far more than the Government estimated.

Her intervention comes after an increase of 627 prisoners plunged the Home Office into another crisis and the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, tried to calm the furore over Mr Reid’s statement on sentencing.

In her annual report, Ms Owers will say that overcrowding makes rehabilitation more difficult as resources are spread more thinly and offenders are moved from jail to jail. She will highlight the plight of those with mental illnesses or drug addictions, saying that staff are too overstretched to cope with them. And she will argue that the number of mentally ill people being jailed is making overcrowding worse.

Lord Woolf, the former Lord Chief Justice, urges Mr Reid in The Times today to adopt the “nuclear option” of releasing thousands of non-dangerous prisoners to ease overcrowding. That is a measure that Mr Reid will take only as a last resort.

He also calls on Mr Reid to repeal or suspend laws that “force judges to use more and longer sentences than are necessary”. But he offers support for Mr Reid’s move last week to bring to the attention of the courts the state of the prisons and to restate guidelines that prison should be reserved for the dangerous, violent, sexual and prolific offenders.

Lord Woolf says that it would have been a “dereliction of duty” for the Home Secretary and Lord Chancellor not to issue their statement and dismisses as “muddled thinking” the suggestion that the move represented an encroachment on the independence of the judiciary.

Lord Phillips issued a statement saying it was proper for Mr Reid to remind judges of the state of prisons. He said Mr Reid’s statement about prison overcrowding had given a helpful summary and was consistent with sentencing legislation. “But [it] carries the implication that ministers hoped that judges would be particularly careful to consider, in each individual case, whether there was an appropriate means of disposal that did not involve immediate custody,” he said.

He added that in many cases custody was inevitable, but he said that where judges had a choice as to sentence there was the well-established authority of the Court of Appeal that it was appropriate to have regard to jail overcrowding.

Latest figures show that 51,800 of 90,000 offenders given an immediate custodial sentence in 2005 received six months or less. It is that huge number of offenders being jailed for very short periods that is causing concern as there is insufficient time for effective work to be done with them.

Many in the prison system believe that those who are not prolific offenders should be punished in the community.

The Home Office had hoped that its reform of sentencing, which has led to longer sentences for the dangerous and violent, would be matched by fewer non-violent offenders being jailed. John Denham, the Labour chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, said that radical thinking about sentencing was “desperately” needed — including more effective non-custodial sentences.

Mr Denham, a former Home Office minister, added: “We have got to make community punishments a more demanding and onerous punishment so that if somebody doesn’t go to prison it is still seen by the public as an adequate response to a lower level of crime.”

    Reid urged to free thousands as jail conditions worsen, Ts, 29.1.2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2572266,00.html

Waiting lists for prisoners

Exclusive: Desperate Reid plans 'sentence now, jail later' scheme

Published: 28 January 2007
The Independent
By Sophie Goodchild and Francis Elliott

Emergency measures to place offenders on "waiting lists" for prison places have been drawn up by John Reid, the Home Secretary, in an attempt to solve the overcrowding crisis.

The Independent on Sunday can reveal that a controversial measure for "queuing" criminals, even burglars and people convicted of violent assault, is one of a raft of proposals being considered by Mr Reid.

The move comes amid mounting chaos over prison overcrowding, putting Mr Reid at the centre of a political storm and a worsening row with the judiciary over convicted criminals avoiding jail because of the crisis.

In a damaging new blow to Mr Reid, critics last night dismissed the waiting list idea as a "desperate measure" to get the Government out of a "desperate situation". David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, said Mr Reid was being forced to consider such measures as waiting lists because of a failure to foresee the "obvious consequences of their inadequate prison process".

"There will be a temptation for people on this extended bail to go out and offend again as they will not have been through the deterrent or rehabilitation process," he said.

Frances Crook, from the Howard League for Penal Reform, said offenders should either be in custody or serving a community service order.

"It's very simple. I don't know why John Reid hasn't got that yet. There is a moral and intellectual vacuum at the heart of policymaking."

Harry Fletcher, from the National Association of Probation Officers, said a queuing system for offenders would provide extra places in the short term, but it would not be popular with the public.

"If this was handled properly this could help solve the short-term problem of what to do with people but it would require a lot of management. The Government was warned repeatedly that this [overcrowding] would happen if they did not build more prisons or take a more liberal approach to sentencing."

The move came after judges reacted with anger to a plea from the Home Secretary not to jail low-risk offenders because prisons were close to capacity.

Yesterday, the Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips stepped in to calm the growing row between the judiciary and Mr Reid, declaring it was "appropriate" for judges to consider the state of prison overcrowding when passing sentence.

The overcrowding crisis has been blamed on a failure by the Government to heed warnings that more prisons are needed, and an overly tough jailing policy by the courts in response to Tony Blair's "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" policies.

The jail population currently stands at just under 80,000 and prison service sources are warning that it could soar to more than 83,000 by this summer.

The waiting list scheme is based on similar systems used in Scandinavian countries as well as Poland, where as many as 40,000 criminals are currently on waiting lists, in an effort to keep prison populations down.

Those who have been convicted by the court are placed under supervision in the community and have to report to a police station once a week until their name comes up for a prison place.

Offenders could be kept in a queue for as long as three months before being given a prison place.

Last week, the prisons watchdog warned in an interview with this newspaper that public safety was being put at risk because of the overcrowding crisis.

Anne Owers, the chief inspector of prisons, said that resources were being stretched so thinly that programmes to rehabilitate inmates so that they do not commit further crimes were being compromised.

The current prisons overcrowding crisis is a direct consequence of the Government's own policies, as Mr Reid admitted on Friday.

The Home Secretary said that the Government had failed to anticipate how quickly the prison population would grow as a result of tougher sentencing.

"It is a mistake not to forecast that we would require a larger number of prisons than we have got at present, by putting away a greater number of dangerous offenders for a longer period," he told Channel 4 News.

The number of prison places has increased by 17,000 since 1997. But that expansion has been outstripped by the dramatic 90 per cent increase in the number of prisoners in England and Wales since 1993.

As long ago as 2000 the Treasury announced a wide range of measures following a review of the criminal justice system. These included an extra £2.7bn by 2004 "to drive up performance across the criminal justice system, resulting in an increase in the proportion of recorded crimes for which an offender is brought to justice".

There was also £160m a year, for three years of crime reduction programmes with targets to "cut vehicle crime by 30 per cent by 2004; domestic burglary by 25 per cent by 2005; and robbery in our principal cities by 14 per cent by 2005".

The then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, said: "Offending is too often associated with abuse of drugs and alcohol, having truanted from school or having been in care. By getting Whitehall departments working together, we can win the war on crime."

Attempts to slow the growth in the prison population through the introduction of tagging schemes and other non-custodial sentences proved far less successful than ministers had hoped.

Then new laws that came into effect in 2005 introducing indeterminate sentences for the most violent crimes placed yet more pressure on the system.

No country in Western Europe jails as high a proportion of its citizens as England and Wales, where 143 out of every 100,000 are currently serving time.

Today's figure of just under 80,000 is projected to grow to 106,550 by 2013 if current trends continue.

In November last year the Howard League for Penal Reform warned that the prison system was facing a crisis.

It painted a bleak picture of life in overcrowded prisons, where suicide is a weekly occurrence, violence is rife and drugs are plentiful.

Frances Crook, the director of the Howard League, said then that prisons were failing to protect the public. "The majority of people released from prison commit further offences, whereas community sentences can reduce reoffending by 14 per cent," she said.

"Reoffending by prisoners will increase as prisons are unable to cope with the sheer number of people."

Mr Reid will attempt to regain the political initiative over the issue tomorrow with a speech on penal policy to be delivered in Liverpool.

The publication the next day of Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Prisons annual report will keep the focus firmly on the issue.

The latest crisis to hit the Home Office comes as the Home Secretary is preparing to present to Cabinet this week his long-awaited review of Britain's counter-terrorism strategy.

Last weekend he encouraged speculation that it will recommend the creation of a separate department dedicated to protecting Britain from terrorist attack.

The review has caused serious internal cabinet turf wars between Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, and Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, whose respective departments face losing responsibilities.

Mr Reid is said to want to remove responsibility for MI6 from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He also wants to remove work on tackling Muslim extremism from the Department for Communities and Local Government.

One senior official said: "This looks like a land grab from Reid who wants to walk away with a Cabinet seat and the security and intelligence services and leave prisons and police behind."

HMP Overflow

Severe prison overcrowding in England and Wales has led to a number of emergency proposals by the Home Secretary, John Reid. Measures include the purchase of ships rented from oil companies to be moored offshore and adapted to house hundreds of convicted criminals in place of oil rig workers.

Prison ships

The purchase of two vessels is being negotiated as the prison population approaches 80,000

Military camps

An unidentified RAF camp in northern England will be used to house prisoners, Dr Reid announced on Thursday

Police cells

Around 480 prisoners are being held in police cells which are designed for short-term use only

Psychiatric wards

Thousands of mentally ill prisoners would be better treated on secure hospital wards than behind bars

    Waiting lists for prisoners, IoS, 28.1.2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2192984.ece

No wonder the prisons are full

Published: 27 January 2007
The Independent
By Nigel Morris, Home Affairs Correspondent

John Reid was engulfed by criticism from all sides as judges and criminal justice experts tore into his attempts to get a grip on the prison population crisis.

The Home Secretary's week came to a disastrous end as Rod Morgan resigned as chairman of the Youth Justice Board (YJB) with a withering attack on Mr Reid's plans to build more jails as a "counsel of despair".

Judges also reacted angrily to Mr Reid's plea for them to lock up fewer non-dangerous offenders, variously warning they would have to release people who ought to be jailed or that they would not be swayed by his strictures. And Mr Reid suffered the embarrassment of having to admit in the High Court that his department had been acting unlawfully by locking up young asylum seekers.

Pressure has been mounting all month on Mr Reid, who has acknowledged his head is "on the block" if he fails to turn round the troubled department. Tony Blair intervened last night, insisting that the Home Secretary had merely been reminding the judiciary of existing guidlines on sentencing.

The Prime Minister said: "Let me make this absolutely clear: if any judge feels that a person is a threat or a danger to the public, and feels that they should be put in custody, then they should put them in custody."

Mr Reid said he was only following a "perfectly normal procedure" by writing to judges and magistrates.

Professor Morgan has presided over a steady increase in numbers of under-18s in custody, despite a Home Office commitment to reduce the total. As it became clear his contract would not be renewed, he quit his job with a damning verdict on the policies of his political masters. Professor Morgan told BBC2's Newsnight: "We are standing on the brink of a prisons crisis. We have tonight lots of people in police cells because there is no space for them in custody and that's true for children and young people also.. The Government's targets for bringing criminals to justice were having "perverse consequences", he protested, as minor offenders who were previously dealt with informally were caught up in an over-stretched criminal justice system. Professor Morgan said locking youngsters up had very little success in stopping them reoffending, describing the idea of building ever more prisons to solve the crisis as a "counsel of despair".

Martin Narey, the former director general of the Prison Service, said: "One of the reasons why we are in the midst of such a dreadful population crisis in prisons is that many offenders - many of them children - are in prison when there is no need for them to be there."

Meanwhile, Keith Morris, 46, from Newton Abbot, Devon, pleaded guilty to child sex offences but was granted bail following Mr Reid's plea to reserve jail for the most serious offenders. Judge Graham Cottle said: "There are difficulties remanding people in custody at the moment and the only reason I am having any discussion about this is because of those difficulties." And on Thursday, in giving Derek Williams, 46, from Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd, a six-month suspended sentence for child pornography charges, Judge John Rogers said: "As of yesterday I have to bear in mind a communication from the Home Secretary".

At Northampton Crown Court yesterday, Judge Richard Bray said politicians should wake up to the fact that prisoners were reoffending "because judges can no longer pass deterrent sentences". He said: "I am well aware there is overcrowding in the prison and detention centres. That is not going to prevent me from passing proper sentences in each case."

At the High Court, Mr Reid conceded his department had broken the law over the detention of scores of young asylum seekers. His admission that the policy "did not strike the right balance" came as the court considered four test cases brought by teenagers who are seeking damages for loss of liberty. Lawyers say the final numbers seeking compensation could exceed 100.

The storm around Mr Reid overshadowed a move to make it easier to deport foreign criminals. Under the UK Borders Bill, immigration officers will gain new powers of arrest. It will also make it easier to deport foreign nationals in prison.

* Amnesty International said it was deeply concerned for the safety of two men - known as "Q" and "K" - recently deported from the UK to Algeria. They are believed to be in the custody of the DRS, Algeria's military police, which been repeatedly accused of torturing prisoners. They were deported on security grounds after being labelled "suspected international terrorists" by the UK authorities.

For the reason behind the jails crisis, we should look no further than this government's get-tough policy. Here are 10 examples

Naked rambler's seven months

Richard Gough, 47, was jailed for seven months in August after a court ruled that, during his efforts to promote naturism, he had committed a breach of the peace and exposed himself in public.

The depressed mother

Angela Schumann, 28, was jailed for 18 months in November after trying to kill her daughter by jumping from the Humber bridge with the two-year-old. She was suffering from depression.

Climate change demonstrator

Irene Willis, 61, from Suffolk, was sentenced to 21 days' in prison two years ago after refusing to pay a fine for demonstrating against climate change and nuclear weapons at USAF Lakenheath.

Council tax refusenik

Josephine Rooney, 69, from Derby, spent one night in prison last year for refusing to pay her council tax bill. She was released early after a stranger paid the £798 bill for her.

RAF man said war was illegal

Malcolm Kendall-Smith, 38, an RAF flight lieutenant, was jailed for eight months for failing to obey a lawful order in relation to service in Iraq. He had argued that the war in Iraq was illegal.

Homeless hostel couple

Ruth Wyner and John Brock were sentenced to four and five years' jail for allowing drugs to be sold at their hostel for the homeless in Cambridge. Their sentences were reduced by the Court of Appeal.

Teenager who took her own life

Sarah Campbell, 18, from Cheshire, committed suicide in prison in 2003 after she became the first person to be convicted of manslaughter by harassment after stealing credit cards from a stranger.

False benefits claimant

Tameena Nadir, 38, from Leeds, received a seven month sentence in December after falsely claiming £40,000 benefits that she said she needed for her children's education after her divorce.

Pensioner's protest

Richard Fitzmaurice, 75, from Norfolk, was sentenced to 32 days imprisonment in November last year for not paying his council tax in protest at the soaring bills wiping out his pension.

Stole a mobile phone

Joseph Scholes, 16, was sentenced to two years in 2002 a week after the Lord Chief Justice declared that mobile phone thieves should be jailed. He hanged himself in his cell.

'Not fit for purpose'

* OVERCROWDING

The prison population passed the 80,000 mark last November. Mr Reid has activated a plan that involves the use of police cells. There are doubts about how an extra 8,000 prison places promised by the Government will be funded

* SENTENCING ROWS

Yesterday, Mr Reid denied accusations that he pressured judges and magistrates by urging them, in a letter, to jail only the most dangerous and persistent criminals. He said he was merely reminding them of existing guidelines

* OFFENCES ABROAD

An internal inquiry is underway into why the details of 27,500 offences committed by Britons abroad were not added to the police computer

* CONTROL ORDERS

A third suspected terrorist vanished within days of being issued with a control order that was meant to restrict his movements

* OPEN PRISONS

The Prison Service admits that it does not know how many inmates have absconded from England's 15 open prisons. It estimates that almost 700 walked out in the 12 months to April last year.

'We're standing on brink of a prisons crisis'

Professor Rod Morgan, OUTGOING HEAD OF YOUTH JUSTICE BOARD

"We're standing on the brink of a prisons crisis. We have lots of people in police cells because there is no space for them in custody and that's true for children also."

Judge Richard Bray, NORTHAMPTON CROWN COURT

"What message does it send to criminals when they are told in the dock they will only have to serve half the sentence the judge thinks appropriate?"

Judge Graham Cottle, ON DECISION TO RELEASE PAEDOPHILE

"There are difficulties remanding people in custody at the moment and the only reason I am having any discussion about this is because of those difficulties."

Martin Narey, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF BARNARDO'S

"One reason there is such a population crisis in prisons is that many offenders - many of them children - are in prison when there is no need for them to be there."

David Davis, SHADOW HOME SECRETARY

"People guilty of serious offences should not escape custody. But, yet again - as a consequence of the Government's failure - this is what is happening."

Nick Clegg, LIB DEM HOME AFFAIRS SPOKESMAN

"You have to engage with offenders, young or old, to bring them back from a life of criminality, and that is what this Government has systematically refused to do".

    No wonder the prisons are full, I, 27.1.2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2190029.ece

Tough on Crime?

The Home Secretary’s prison budget is missing

January 27, 2007
The Times

This week began with John Reid floating the notion of splitting the Home Office. It ends with the Secretary of State looking as if he may be, politically, cut in two as a consequence of his department’s actions. A series of errors and omissions has left the impression of sheer institutionalised incompetence. The bewildered citizen is entitled to conclude that the total abolition of the Home Office, not its division, could be the ideal solution.

Some of these issues are, in fairness, not the fault of Mr Reid or civil servants. The much heralded “resignation” yesterday of Professor Rod Morgan, the chairman of the Youth Justice Board, was triggered in part because officials decided to readvertise his position rather than extend his contract. His protests about the ineffectiveness of custodial establishments at reducing the reoffending rate of teenagers are plainly sincerely meant, but his contention would be more compelling if there were evidence of other forms of sanctions that produce strikingly better results.

For while Professor Morgan complains that too many youngsters are being deprived of their liberty, most of the public are more concerned that those who should be imprisoned for their crimes are not detained because of insufficient jail places.

The random nature of sentencing has been illustrated by three cases in the past 48 hours. In North Wales on Thursday, a man who was convicted of child pornography charges avoided a cell because the judge felt he was being steered by the Home Secretary against sending him to one. In Exeter, yesterday, a judge stated that he would have to allow a man who has pleaded guilty to sex offences against boys (and who has served time for similar behaviour before) to be bailed, not remanded in custody as is customary. In Northampton, by contrast, a judge asserted in exasperation that criminals were deliberately breaking the law at this particular time because they had calculated that this was a season of soft sentences.

This is less a system of justice than a surreal form of lottery in which the consequences of a crime are determined not by the offence itself but whether there is a bed behind bars free within 50 miles. It is utterly unacceptable. It makes a mockery of the Government’s overall stance on law and order. Nor is it new. In the 1950s and 1960s Britain had “stop-go” economics. For the past two decades it has suffered “stop-go” penal politics. Ineptitude at the Home Office (not spending some of its allocated money) does not help. Yet the persistent reluctance of the Treasury to fund a serious prison-building scheme is the cause of this administrative crime. The Home Secretary is the minister absorbing the heat at present. He is entitled to point to the Chancellor as a long-term political accomplice to this policy fiasco.

It is, alas, probably too late to do anything but resort to ad hoc solutions to the present conundrum as Mr Reid is trying. The lesson, though, has to be learnt on this occasion that planning for public jails and encouraging the private prison sector to provide more cells are essential.

None of this can be divorced from the wider political climate. The determination of Tony Blair to stay in office deep into 2007 seems even greater than the resolution of some judges to save criminals from jail. Yet he looks increasingly incapable of imposing his authority on the Home Office or other Whitehall outposts. A sense of drift is draining the entire Government of its credibility. If this continues, the argument for a selective early-release scheme involving 10 Downing Street will become unanswerable.

Tough on Crime?, Ts, 27.1.2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,542-2568153,00.html

Prisons furore threatens to engulf Reid

· Two more judges question cut in use of jail sentences
· Youth justice chief quits over many children in jail

Saturday January 27, 2007
Guardian
Will Woodward, chief political correspondent

The row over prison overcrowding threatened to engulf the home secretary, John Reid, last night after two more judges called into question his advice on sentencing and the chairman of the Youth Justice Board resigned in protest at the rising number of children in custody.

Rod Morgan, who quit the YJB, said the country was "on the brink of a prisons crisis", three days after Mr Reid told courts to issue custodial sentences more sparingly as jails reached capacity.

Yesterday the official prison population was 79,731, some 356 higher than the same time last week and close to the maximum 80,114 capacity, but slightly lower than unofficial figures for Monday and Tuesday. The Conservative leader, David Cameron, urged Mr Reid to ditch ambitious proposals to break-up the Home Office and concentrate on the job in hand.

Professor Morgan focused on the rise in the number of under 18s in custody, which last month was 2,841, up 224 on December 2005. That includes 331 offenders in custody for serious offences, 1,931 in custody for other offences and 579 on remand.

"We have tonight lots of people in police cells because there is no space for them in custody and that's true for children and young people also," Prof Morgan said in a pre-recorded interview for BBC2's Newsnight. "The Youth Justice Board has a target to reduce the number of children and young people in custody by approximately 10% by 2008. That target is written into our business plan, it has been agreed with the Home Office, it was incorporated in the Home Office five-year plan which was published early last year, and yet we're going backwards."

Prof Morgan also described a 26% rise in the number of children brought into the criminal justice system between 2002-03 and 2005-06 as "swamping".

Ministers had decided to advertise Prof Morgan's job after his three-year term rather than extend his contract. The board's future is also subject to the threat of reorganisation as part of a departmental review, but the new chairman will be offered a three-year term.

Speaking at the Guardian public services summit in St Albans, Mr Cameron condemned "another example of failure of policy, planning and political will at the Home Office".

Lady Scotland, the Home Offfice minister, offered praise for Prof Morgan's work. But a Home Office spokeswoman said: "We refute the claim that young people are being demonised and criminalised. Considerable emphasis has been placed on providing activities for young people. We remain unapolagetic about the need to tackle anti-social behaviour by anyone, regardless of their age."

Mr Reid, Lord Falconer, the lord chancellor, and the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, made an appeal to the courts on Tuesday that prison should be used only by serious, persistent and violent offenders. The move was endorsed by the lord chief justice on Wednesday.

But on Thursday a judge in Mold, north Wales, said a man convicted for downloading child pornography would receive a suspended sentence rather than jail because of the ministers' communication.

At Exeter crown court yesterday, Judge Graham Cottle released Keith Morris, a 46-year-old man convicted of four sex offences against a teenager, on bail ahead of sentencing. Morris has previous convictions for sex offences against boys. The judge curfewed Morris from 8am to 5pm and said he would receive a custodial sentence. But he told the court: "There are difficulties remanding people in custody at the moment and the only reason I am having any discussion about this is because of those difficulties."

Later, at Northampton crown court, Judge Richard Bray sentenced three men for their part in a pub brawl and criticised sentencing policy. "I am well aware that there is overcrowding in the prison and detention centres. The reason our prisons are full to overcrowding, and have been for years, is because judges can no longer pass deterrent sentences," he said.

Mr Reid said last night his appeal to judges had been a reminder, not a change, of the guidelines. "The guidelines under which they operate are exactly the same this week as they were the week before. They have been the same for several years. They are quite clear: violent, persistent, serious offenders should be given custodial sentences or sentences that protect the public. But if they are less serious or not dangerous to the public then they should be put to either paying fines or community service."

At a glance

Sunday Floats plans to split up Home Office into two separate ministries.

Tuesday He and two other ministers remind judges of sentencing guidelines as prison numbers hit a new high.

Thursday Sun reports "John Reid's brain is missing" and condemns "abysmal failure" on prisons.

Friday Chairman of Youth Justice Board quits. Two more judges comment on Reid guidance.

    Prisons furore threatens to engulf Reid, G, 27.1.2007, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,1999890,00.html

1.30pm update

Reid faces fresh pressure over prisons

· Judge defies jail directive
· Head of youth justice resigns
· Child pornography offender spared jail

Friday January 26, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Staff and agencies

John Reid was today under increasing pressure in the prisons debate, with a judge savaging his plea to keep most offenders out of prison and the head of the Youth Justice Board (YJB) saying the juvenile justice system was being "swamped" with minor offenders.

The home secretary was already under fire after his directive this week that prison terms should be reserved for dangerous and persistent criminals resulted in a man who downloaded child pornography being spared a jail sentence.

A series of newspapers attacked Mr Reid's directive, which a judge in North Wales cited yesterday as the reason for not sending Derek Williams to prison. The shadow home secretary, David Davis, today called the situation an "outrage".

"What this is doing is clearly bringing a little more pressure on judges to use prison less and as a result, of course, to put the public more at risk," Mr Davis told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Mr Reid's troubles deepened today when another judge publicly defied the prisons directive, jailing a man and a teenager for their role in a street brawl and complaining that maximum sentences were too lenient.

"I am well aware that there is overcrowding in the prison and detention centres," Judge Richard Bray told Northampton crown court.

"That is not going to prevent me from passing proper sentences in each case. The reason our prisons are full to overcrowding, and have been for years, is because judges can no longer pass deterrent sentences."

Meanwhile, Rod Morgan, who announced his resignation as chairman of the YJB, said youth custody services, like their adult equivalents, were "on the brink of a prisons crisis".

Minor offences that used to be dealt with informally or out of court were now being pushed into an overstretched criminal justice system, Professor Morgan said in an interview with BBC2's Newsnight, to be shown this evening.

This meant work to improve systems in young offender institutions was being "undermined", he said.

"We're standing on the brink of a prisons crisis. We have tonight lots of people in police cells because there is no space for them in custody, and that's true for children and young people also," he told the programme.

"I regard a 26% increase in the number of children and young people that are being drawn into the system in the past three years as swamping."

A statement on the YJB website announced that Prof Morgan, who joined the organisation in April 2004 on a three-year contract, would not be applying for an extension.

He said government targets for bringing offences to justice were having "perverse consequences" by swelling prisoner numbers unnecessarily.

He said the YJB had had a Home Office-agreed target to reduce the number of young people in custody by around 10% by 2008. Instead, he said, "we're going backwards".

He also argued that reoffending rates for those sent to youth custody were extremely high. This meant that "a custodial establishment, no matter how good we make them, is the worst conceivable environment within which to improve somebody's behaviour".

He added: "We've got to invest more in early prevention work with children who are starting to get into trouble rather than locking up more and more young people after the horse has bolted."

Newsnight said he told the programme he had been working behind the scenes in the Home Office to try to get a change of policy.

But when ministers decided to advertise his job rather than extend his contract for another three years, he chose to resign and tell his staff and the BBC about his concerns.

The various comments heap further pressure on Mr Reid, whose department was recently castigated for its failure to keep track of offences committed abroad by UK nationals.

At the start of the week it emerged that the Home Office could soon be split into two separate departments responsible for national security and justice, the biggest single reform since the ministry was created in 1782.

    Reid faces fresh pressure over prisons, G, 26.1.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,,1999475,00.html

10.15am

'Unfit' prison wing reopened

as overcrowding crisis grows

Wednesday January 24, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Press Association

A prison wing declared unfit for human habitation is today being brought back into use to ease the overcrowding crisis in Britain's jails.

The Home Office confirmed that 150 places in Norwich prison's A wing are to be reopened days after it was closed for refurbishment after being declared unfit by inspectors.

A spokeswoman said the wing would be brought back into short-term use to house prisoners on remand, but added that cells unsuitable for occupation would not be used.

The move came as the government was accused of "criminal negligence" over the crisis after urging judges and magistrates to jail only the most dangerous and persistent criminals in a bid to ease overcrowding.

Ministers' "scaremongering" tactics have blocked prisons with petty offenders, vulnerable women and children, as well as addicts and the mentally ill, the Prison Reform Trust said.

"Ministers are right to call at last for jails to be used more sparingly - not because they are full to bursting, but because the government's own scaremongering tactics have blocked prison beds with petty offenders, vulnerable women and children, addicts and the mentally ill," the trust's director, Juliet Lyon, said.

"The government has been guilty of criminal negligence to allow prisons to get into such a terrible mess without intervening earlier in a planned way."

The prison population of England and Wales is believed to have topped 80,000 on Monday, with reports indicating that 480 prisoners were in police cells and that cells at the Old Bailey being made available.

The home secretary, John Reid, has defended his handling of the crisis, saying it was "necessary to a civilised society that those who are a danger ... are put away".

"The public have a right to expect protection from violent and dangerous offenders," Mr Reid said. "Prisons are an expensive resource that should be used to protect the public and to rehabilitate inmates and stop them reoffending.

"However, we should not be squandering taxpayers' money to monitor non-dangerous and less serious offenders."

A home office spokesman said the letter to judges and magistrates had been sent out yesterday and was expected to be received today.

"We are accelerating accommodation arrangements where possible and examining all options for extra capacity in the prison estate as a matter of urgency," the spokesman said.

The Conservative shadow home secretary, David Davis, said it was "outrageous" that sentences were being "dictated by the prison capacity and not by the crime committed".

"Yet again, we see the public are being put at risk by the failure of ministers," he said. "Offenders who should be sent to jail won't be, and all because the government failed to listen to our and other calls to address the lack of prison capacity over the last few years.

"How much longer must the public pay the price of Gordon Brown's miserliness and John Reid's incompetence?"

    'Unfit' prison wing reopened as overcrowding crisis grows, G, 24.1.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,,1997545,00.html

Free after 36 years:

the man who was left to rot

in Broadmoor

Bill Collins tells the 'IoS' how his four-year prison sentence for assault turned into a life wasted in a secure hospital

Published: 07 January 2007
The Independent on Sunday
By David Cohen and Sophie Goodchild

At the age of 19, Bill Collins attacked his girlfriend. He was found guilty of wounding her and sent to prison. It was 1962. He should have been out after four years. Instead he ended up in Broadmoor, where he spent 36 years of his life.

He never denied hurting his girlfriend or complained about being punished. "I was completely miserable," he says now, "but what I did was terrible." What happened to him after he was sent from prison to Britain's most notorious mental hospital was even more terrible. "In Broadmoor I was bashed and tortured, and wasted so much of my life."

He now fears others may be locked up for long periods in secure hospitals for lesser offences than he committed under mental health legislation that is expected to get a savaging in the House of Lords tomorrow.

A series of amendments has been put forward by peers who are furious that ministers have failed to heed their warnings that the Bill will stop people seeking help. The nine changes tabled include that stipulations patients should be forced into treatment only if they do not have the mental ability to make a decision for themselves and that people suffering from autism should not be targeted.

The strong cross-party support for the changes means that ministers may be forced either to rethink or discard many of their more draconian measures.

The Mental Health Alliance, whose members include the Law Society and Mind, said the Government must listen to the concerns of peers, psychiatrists and patients.

"What was laid before Parliament last month is not, in our view, a truly balanced Bill. It will neither promote civil rights nor make the public safer," said Andy Bell, chair of the Alliance.

Bill Collins was first sent to Wakefield Prison, where he studied botany and biology. "But I messed up." He attacked a civilian instructor. A few weeks later, Mr Collins was driven to Broadmoor. And the system forgot he had been sentenced to only four years. He recalls: "The nurses asked me if I wanted to do it the hard way or the easy way. I asked if doing it the easy way would mean compromising my integrity. They replied: 'We know which way you want to do it.'"

Broadmoor has housed many of the most difficult and dangerous people in the UK, including the serial killers Peter Sutcliffe and Dennis Nilsen. But in the 1960s not all of the most violent people were inmates. In the 1970s news leaked of nurses assaulting patients - a practice nicknamed the "boot treatment". The "wet towel" treatment was worse; patients were strangled almost to death with a wet towel. A few sex offenders were given female hormones and developed breasts. One man had to have a breast removed because the treatment went badly wrong.

Mr Collins admits he could be difficult sometimes. So he often got kicked and beaten by nurses. In 1967, three of them broke his arm deliberately.

For many years, Mr Collins's responsible medical officer was Broadmoor's boss, the medical superintendent Dr Patrick McGrath, father of the novelist, also called Patrick, who wrote Asylum. "I often asked him to take me off my medication because it caused me so much pain and so many side effects," Mr Collins said. He has lost most of his teeth, for example. "Don't nag me, Bill," Dr McGrath replied. "I'll take you off when you're ready." It took more than 35 years for psychiatrists to decide Mr Collins could do without the drugs.

In 2000 Mr Collins was released to Thornford Park, a medium- and low-secure unit in Thatcham, Berkshire. There, in one of the unit's flats, he learned to live on his own. Since leaving nine months ago, he has tried to get work but he was always turned down. He passed the tests to be a postman but was asked to provide employers' references for the past five years.

He now chairs a self-help group called Survivors Speak Out. While in Broadmoor, he won three Koestler prizes for performance of the spoken word. One was a 15-minute show about Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Today he works one day a week at the Brunel Museum.

Speaking from his flat in Clapham, south London, surrounded by a mass of books, Victorian prints, files, general mess and two birdcages, Mr Collins is remarkably sanguine. "The British mental health system is crap," he says. "If I hadn't been behind bars, I'd have been a collector."

Expert View

"This Bill is weighted towards compulsion and containment"

Baroness Neuberger; Lib Dem Health Spokeswoman in the Lords

"This will do nothing to bring... legislation into the 21st century"

Lord Carlile; QC, Chaired Committee that Scrutinised Bill

"[It's] rooted in the stereotype that those suffering from severe mental health problems are... dangerous"

Lord Bragg; Labour Peer, President of Mind

"[It] will need to find the balance between patients' autonomy and carers' rights"

Baroness Meacher; Ex-Mental Health Act commissioner

"In-patients from black minority groups are more likely to be detained. The proposals don't address this"

Lord Adebowale; Chief Executive, Turning Point

What needs to be done

The 'IoS' has campaigned for significant changes to existing services and to the Mental Health Bill. We are calling for:

* The right to the most appropriate treatment when needed. This includes those in high-security hospitals, eligible for transfer. Such cases must be reviewed.

* Those able to make decisions about care should have the right to refuse treatment, unless others are put at risk.

* Mentally ill people should not be detained unless they need treatment for their own benefit or have committed a crime.

* They should not be subject to forcible treatment once they have left hospital. We need improved, more flexible and accessible services including the provision of mentors and sheltered accommodation.

Free after 36 years: the man who was left to rot in Broadmoor, IoS, 7.1.2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article2132572.ece