Prisons in England and Wales are comprehensively failing to rehabilitate offenders, according to a damning report from the chief inspector of prisons.
Nick Hardwick said it was “hard to imagine anything less likely to rehabilitate prisoners” than current routines consisting of "days spent mostly lying on their bunks in squalid cells watching daytime TV".
He said the existing situation, which included increased use of legal highs alongside higher rates of violence, self-harming and inmate deaths "can't go on like this".
Hardwick gave prisons their lowest overall grade since 2005, when the current assessment criteria came into force, and described some prisons as “places of violence, squalor and idleness”.
The number of prison murders was at its highest level since records began, while there was also an “alarming” increase in serious assaults.
Some 239 inmates died last year, which is a 29% increase on the first year of the coalition and 6% up from the previous year.
Assaults on prison staff increased by 28% since 2010 to a total of 3,637 last year.
SHORT-STAFFED
The prison population has increased to 87,000, while the number of full time staff in public sector jails has decreased by 29% from 45,080 to 32,100.
“There is no doubt in my mind that staff shortages and over-crowding and the sort of flurry, I think, of some quite misguided policies in the past have been a significant contributing factor to the problem,” Hardwick told Radio 4’s World at One.
“They simply haven’t sometimes got the staff available to unlock the men from their cells and get them into the activities which are then standing empty.”
"The ball is in the secretary of state's court and he needs to respond to that," the report concluded.
YOUNG OFFENDERS
The report echoed some of the findings in a recently published review by Lord Harris into young people committing suicide in police custody.
Harris found that young adults in prisons and young offenders institutions were “not sufficiently engaged in purposeful activity” and their environments were “not conducive to rehabilitation”.
Prisons minister Andrew Selous said prisons must “punish those who break the law, but they should also be places where offenders can redeem themselves".