The cramped conditions of Victorian prisons in England and Wales are limiting the rehabilitation opportunities for thousands of offenders, an official watchdog has said.
As the Guardian launches a visual investigation into the state of Victorian prisons in inner cities and towns, the chief inspector of prisons, Charlie Taylor, said 19th century jails could also be “incredibly noisy and distressing” for autistic people.
His words come after a series of warnings from the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, that England and Wales’s Prison Service was in crisis, leading to the early release of thousands of prisoners this autumn.
Taylor’s annual report in September showed that many prisons were severely overcrowded and understaffed, with 30 out of 32 closed prisons rated as poor or insufficiently good.
Many are overrun with rats and cockroaches and have been infiltrated by drug gangs.
Taylor, who has previously described Victorian prisons as “barely fit for purpose”, said that many of the older prisons – around 10% of 122 across England and Wales – struggled to rehabilitate offenders.
“These prisons are already overcrowded, and tend to be on fairly small footprints. When you look at prisons like Leicester or Bedford, they’re minute jails. There is very little workspace for education and training,” he said. “If the prison population is also double what it once was, then that’s not at all ideal to be able to do anything that might be vaguely thought to be rehabilitative.”
Some Victorian-built prisons are able to rehabilitate offenders, but the conditions “definitely make the job harder”, he said.
“These were places designed to keep prisoners in solitary confinement for long periods of time. And the idea was hard labour, they didn’t get cross-fertilised by their dodgy other prisoners, and they got lots of God, a kind of muscular Protestantism. And that’s not what we’re trying to do in running a rehabilitative prison system today,” he said.
Older jails are “incredibly noisy” and are distressing environments for many prisoners who demonstrate symptoms of autism, Taylor said. “Lots of prisoners have got autistic spectrum disorder and therefore you know that that incredible racket that you get in those prisons is really unconducive to any sort of rehabilitative work,” he said.
The Guardian has analysed the architectural makeup of some of the oldest prisons in England and Wales, gauging the suitability of their design for the modern challenges posed by a growing prison population.
The government is attempting to build more out of town prisons. Three four-storey houseblocks are being built at HMP Highpoint in Suffolk, between the villages of Stradishall and Great Thurlow, near Haverhill.
Construction work has begun on the 700-place expansion, including workshops and teaching facilities to help prisoners get jobs on release, the Ministry of Justice said.
A review this spring of sentencing, conducted by the former Tory justice secretary David Gauke, is expected to recommend alternatives to jail including scrapping shorter sentences and treating more offenders in the community.
