Britain’s jails are in terrible crisis, but prison can work. I know, I’ve seen it | Zoe Williams

Prisons had been flagged as a possible candidate for the new government’s first crisis . There were rumours that Rishi Sunak’s surprise summer election was motivated in part by the worry that the prison estate in England and Wales was about to run out of space, destroying any trace of Conservative credibility as the party of law and order. In the event, the riots came first – but, naturally, they’ll feed back in to the prisons crisis, as the perpetrators are prosecuted and sentenced .

Yet the prisons emergency, which has always been told in snapshots of single prisons, has already arrived: Wandsworth was beset by scandal anyway, after the tortuous escape and recapture of a terror suspect last year, followed by the video emerging on social media appearing to show an officer having sex with an inmate. It had a catastrophic inspection in May, which led to the resignation of its governor, Katie Price. The report from that inspection has just been published and details numerous failings, from gross overcrowding and squalor to open drug use and emergency cell bells going unheeded. But the most chilling was that seven suicides had been recorded in the preceding year.

Wandsworth has always been a bellwether jail. It’s one of the largest in England and Wales; it’s a category B prison, with a high rate of churn, so behaviour management and training programmes struggle to bed in; and its Victorian design, resistant to modernisation even when the will and funding is available, exacerbates the problems when more men are housed there than it has capacity for. In the late 80s, it was ground zero for industrial action by prison officers , which briefly shone a light on the medieval conditions: single cells holding dual occupants, the fact that slopping out was still routine. My dad worked there and said that if you turned the kitchen light on at night it was as if a grey carpet was rolling backwards, due to the sea of mice running away.

The headline philosophical change in the prison estate in the late 90s was to move away from the “ nothing works ” strategy of the Thatcher era (other unofficial names like “concrete coffins” described this idea – that prison existed simply to hold prisoners until it was time to release them) to an active plan for rehabilitation and training. But that was underpinned by the explicit understanding that it was very difficult to persuade prisoners that the system cared about them and was invested in their future, if it held them in verminous squalor. Funding and fine words should be inseparable, in prisons more than anywhere; policymakers can say what they like, but if prisoners don’t see it reflected in their lived reality, they won’t believe it.

The immediate and measurable results of an overcrowded prison, in which inmates spend 22 hours a day in their cells for want of staff to supervise them, are increased self-harm and drug use. But the longer-term result, which is also measurable, is that the opportunities of a prison sentence for retraining and socialising prisoners, and dealing with mental illness and addiction, are completely squandered. Wandsworth had a long period, up until 2010, as a surprise success story, with flagship training programmes, innovative peer-to-peer mentoring and psychological interventions, particularly on the sex offender unit, that proved some things did work. It was not that surprising to people in the Prison Service, however, to whom the connection between investment and creativity in offender management had always been self-evident.

So there is no mystery to the prison inspectorate’s report on Wandsworth. Austerity measures since 2012 created a polycrisis , affecting not just staffing and upkeep but everything about life in jail; compromised access to education and healthcare was just the easiest thing to keep track of. Yet if that much is obvious, there is one story that is less often told: a suicide in custody has a devastating effect on prison staff and other prisoners. It is in any institution’s DNA that it is custodial, in every sense. The inmates are its responsibility at the most profound level; it is in loco parentis. The Butler Trust is a charity that recognises excellence among prison staff, and I was a trustee for some years. In the 2010s, it was not at all unusual to get nominations specifically for prison officers who had supported prisoners and other members of staff through a suicide on the wing, or who had prevented an incident. A death from despair will permeate a prison’s atmosphere and come to define it.

Prison conditions have to be understood, then, as more than a question of sentencing and flow, which can be solved by the right fix on early release. The state cannot silo its responsibilities, and consider crime and punishment in one compartment, the practicalities of incarceration in another. This will sound like an importunate statement at a time when rioters and arsonists are in urgent need of sentencing, yet it is exactly the right moment. A government that is serious about law and order has to be serious about the humanity of its enforcement, or the punishment becomes so wide-spectrum as to be meaningless. And it cannot benchmark itself against the outcomes of the worst, most parsimonious and haphazard policies, such as we’re seeing now, but has to look to the periods in not-too-distant history when prison has worked.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie . In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org , or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

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