From the inside looking out

Consider this. Does lightning ever strike twice in the same place? Along the magnolia corridors of the most expensive prison ever built in England, in the sombre half-light of a locked-fast double cell, it struck fatally (if metaphorically) once and almost fatally another two times before an oblivious prison service woke up to what was occurring right under their noses — a bizarre sequence of events which they eventually exposed as the premeditated machinations of a serial killer.

‘The Strange Case of Glenn Wright’ (as David Wilson himself entitles this meandering tale of dastardly homicidal intent) constitutes the most sensational section of this trenchant polemic. Although the author stops short of openly accusing the state of outright murder, he makes no bones about precisely where the blame lies for the above, and for hundreds of other needless deaths in custody. In his own words, the 26 murders (between 1990 and 2001) and over 500 suicides (between 1997 and 2003) that have taken place across the bleak, unwieldy acres of prisons throughout the land, were ‘a foreseeable consequence of political, policing and judicial decision-making… [and that] those who make those decisions should be held accountable’.

Wilson is unequivocal. If one believes that such damning figures are undesirable in these ‘enlightened’ times, responsibility and culpability are not only knocking on the doors of the Home Office, they are rattling the gates of Downing Street itself. It is the distinguished professor of criminology’s stated aim (Wilson had 14 years’ experience as a prison governor before ‘going over to the other side’ as it were, to wave his accusatory academic wand from the University of Central England) to curtail and ultimately abolish the use of imprisonment for all but the most heinous offenders.