Rory Stewart

As prisons minister, I saw how bad things really are on the inside

People often emerge more dangerous than when they entered

What happened on Streatham High Road last weekend was exactly what I had feared during my time as prisons minister: a recently released convict mounting a terror attack. It was the second incident of this nature in Britain in three months, but the truth is we are lucky that there have not been more like it.

When I was appointed prisons minister in January 2018, I was introduced to the full scale of the problem. In one wing of a prison in Liverpool, half the windows were broken. Prisoners could stick their hands straight out to take drugs from drones. In Lewes, an X-ray scanner — which was meant to detect what prisoners were smuggling back into the cells — had been defunct for seven months.

Ancient Victorian prisons like Wormwood Scrubs needed to be closed (not least to free up land for affordable housing in London) but there was nowhere else for the inmates to go. Across the UK, 82,000 prisoners are crammed into cells designed for 62,000. On one visit, I saw a man walk straight up to the governor, shout ‘Fuck off’, and continue without any reprimand. Violence had tripled in five years. There were more than 10,000 assaults on prison officers a year.

I spotted something else: most terrorist offenders had only been convicted of relatively minor offences, so would be released sooner or later. It meant there was only a short period in which to make these men less dangerous. Deradicalisation is possible and has succeeded in the past. But when it doesn’t work, the impact is horrifying. Prison officers are extraordinary public servants but they are not experts on radical Islam. Hard-working prison imams would admit to me that they struggled to debate jihadist ideology with educated fanatics.

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