Will we learn the lessons of Daniel Khalife?
It depends what those lessons are. If they revolve solely around prison placement decisions, security protocols, and risk assessments for inmates assigned to work details, then perhaps we will. These sorts of lessons are appealing. They appear to address the immediate causes of the absconsion. They make it look like ministers are doing something tangible. The word ‘crackdown’ can be broken out by Ministry of Justice press officers and newspaper headline writers alike.
But what about the other lessons? When a suspect of Khalife’s profile is able to escape from a prison kitchen, attach himself to a food delivery truck, and lead police on a four-day manhunt across London, it raises questions far beyond the security policies of HMP Wandsworth. There’s been a lot of talking-head blather about Khalife’s army background and how his training would have enabled his escape and initial evasion of capture. This is nonsense. The lad is 21. He was a network engineer for the Royals Signals; he wasn’t doing ISTAR for the SRR. You can gauge the level of training he underwent by the fact he was a) still in London after four days and b) arrested by a plain-clothes police officer.
Khalife’s escape was not down to any tactical genius on his part but a result of our outdated, outmoded, overcrowded prison system. Wandsworth is currently operating at 163 per cent capacity, making it the third most overcrowded prison in England and Wales. A 2022 inspection by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons found a horror show.
The prison was ‘very overcrowded, with many prisoners living in very poor conditions’, including ‘dirty, graffiti-covered cells’. Prisoners were showering in ‘squalid conditions’ and were only able to wash their clothes every two weeks. Wing offices were ‘messy’, cleaning cupboards ‘dirty’ and inspectors observed broken windows, ‘piles of litter’ on the wings, and ‘large amounts of rubbish in exercise yards attracting vermin’. Bedsheets were being used ‘to stop bird excrement falling through the netting’. On the mental health unit, conditions were ‘unacceptable’ and failed to meet standards for infection prevention and control. Supervision of cleaning was ‘poor’ and the unit required a ‘greater focus’ on ‘the control of vermin’.
Violent incidents were ‘high’ and had risen since the previous inspection in 2021, with a doubling of serious assaults and an increase in ‘gang-related issues’. The use of force against prisoners was also high and still increasing. Management admitted that force had been used ‘disproportionately’ against younger prisoners and, at time of inspection, there were 65 use-of-force reports still outstanding. Forty-four per cent of Wandsworth staff were ‘non-effective’, defined as ‘absent from work or unable to carry out their normal duties’. Those who were present ‘did not notice or challenge poor standards’ and ‘lacked confidence in challenging poor behaviour on the wings’. Officers were having to share just 77 body-worn cameras, meaning some regularly went onto the wings without video recording equipment.
That isn’t a prison, it’s an institutional nervous breakdown with bars on the windows. Is it any wonder Khalife was able to abscond with such ease? Wandsworth is a deeply troubled institution. In addition to dangerous levels of overcrowding, 45 per cent of inmates are foreign nationals, with the additional strain that puts on logistics and services. Charlie Taylor, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, has told Sky News that Wandsworth ‘really needs closing’.
But is it really that much of an outlier? As Taylor observes, there’s ‘a crisis’ across the prisons ‘in terms of population and places’. The custody population is on the rise again after a drop-off during the pandemic. As of June, there are 85,851 inmates (excluding Scotland and Northern Ireland) and this number is projected to hit an unprecedented 94,400 by March 2025, with forecasts going as high as 106,300 in the two years after that. This is a recipe for more overcrowding, more unsafe conditions and more opportunities to escape.
The idea that more people in prison equals less safety for the public doesn’t land well. It’s counter-intuitive. It sounds like a sneaky way for bleeding-heart liberals to spring wrong ’uns out of the clink. We’ve been conditioned to put an inordinate degree of trust in the state and its ability to keep us safe. But the state is incompetent. It mismanages. It reacts (and overreacts) to political and institutional pressure. The state spends too much here and too little there. It promises security but for the most part only delivers the illusion of security. That could almost be the motto of our prison system: the illusion of security.
Better prisons means fewer prisons
Prisons are necessary. They ought to be infinitely safer, cleaner, more humane, more dignified and less populated than they are, but there is no avoiding their necessity. There are some offenders for whom custody is the only option, sometimes for their own good as much as society’s. However, when prisons grow distended by prisoner numbers all out of proportion to their capacity, they become a risk matrix that puts public safety in jeopardy. Most of the time, this happens by placing large numbers of offenders in close quarters, contributing to the ‘Crime U’ effect in which criminals become ‘better’ — or at least more habituated — lawbreakers though exposure to other criminals. Factor in the dehumanising and coarsening effect of detention in violent, unclean and unsafe conditions and it becomes clear that prison can be a perverse ‘continuing education’ environment for harmful, anti-social, illegal behaviours.
Sometimes, however, our prison estate puts the public at risk in a more direct way. We cannot know whether Daniel Khalife is a dangerous person. He is on remand awaiting trial and has been convicted of nothing. Under our system, he is innocent until a court says otherwise. But we can see in his escape the ease with which other prisoners, potentially including those convicted of very serious offences, could slip out unnoticed. This is why it is an error to put so much stock in his army training. The ruse via which he escaped is so close to the laundry truck cliche of a thousand Hollywood movies that it must have occurred to many a resident at His Majesty’s pleasure. The more overcrowded and under-staffed prisons become, the more attempts at escape we can expect.
To many the obvious answer is to build more prisons, hire more prison officers and max out custodial capacity. This solution appeals especially to those on the political right, yet these are the very people who should know that government doesn’t work like that. What would happen is that conservatives would concede the need for higher taxes to pay for more prison places then the revenue raised would go to anything but. Some new facilities would be constructed (late and over-budget) and others would be renovated (ditto), but the primary outcome would be an expanded bureaucracy at the MoJ and HM Prison Service. More civil servants and more public sector workers, and anyone objecting would be branded ‘soft on crime’, as would any future attempt to downsize this bureaucracy. Conservatives have to learn that the state is not their friend.
The lesson of Daniel Khalife’s escape and of the dismal state of Wandsworth and other jails is that better prisons means fewer prisons. The primary purpose of incarceration should not be punishment, which can often be delivered via community and other sentences, but incapacitation for those offenders who need to be rehabilitated before they can re-enter society and those who may never be able to, as well as those on remand who are deemed a flight risk. As long as our legislators keep legislating ever more offences and as long as courts are required to sentence ever more offenders to custody, the prison population will only expand and prisons will only become less safe.
We need to rethink what prisons are, why we have them, who should be in them, and how much we should be investing in them. That is a big and difficult and unpopular conversation but it ought to begin with short sentences, non-violent offenders and the Misuse of Drugs Act. Narrow the parameters of incarceration and you would not only reduce the prison population but potentially make prison more effective and prisoners and the public safer.
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