Even for our broken prison service it’s been a terrible few days. On Saturday the jihadi terrorist Hashem Abedi used boiling oil and ‘homemade weapons’ in an assault at HMP Frankland which hospitalised three prison officers, the Prison Officers’ Association has said. Given the severity of the injuries, with one man suffering a severed artery in his neck and the other being stabbed at least five times in the chest, it’s only thanks to luck that no staff were killed. Then, this morning, it emerged that John Mansfield, a convicted murderer serving his sentence at HMP Whitemoor, was killed by another inmate on Sunday. While few will shed tears for Mansfield, who killed his elderly neighbour in 2006, this killing raises serious concerns about the security and safety of our jails.
What links these attacks is that they both took place in parts of the prison system which should be absolutely secure. Frankland and Whitemoor are both Category ‘A’ jails, meant to house those convicted of the most serious crimes and who often pose a significant risk to other people. But Abedi and Mansfield were considered too dangerous even for the mainstream parts of these jails. At Frankland, Abedi was held in a ‘Separation Centre’, designed to keep the most dangerous jihadist prisoners away from other prisoners. Meanwhile Mansfield was held in Whitemoor’s ‘close supervision centre’ (CSC).
According to the official policy document, CSCs hold ‘the most significantly disruptive…and dangerous prisoners’ in the whole prison system. They are ‘small and highly supervised units’ which seek to ‘provide long-term containment’ for these very dangerous inmates.
Sunday’s killing isn’t the first such failure at Whitemoor. In 2020, two serving prisoners attempted to murder a ‘kind and helpful’ officer, Neil Trundle. It’s not Hashem Abedi’s first attack on an officer either. In 2020, while jailed at HMP Belmarsh, along with two other convicted terrorists, he conducted a ‘vicious attack’ on Paul Edwards, a 57-year-old officer. The justice system sentenced Abedi to another 46 months of prison time, and moved him to Frankland.
This demonstrates the problem. Men like Abedi and Mansfield are already being held in the most secure prison environments the country has to offer. After the attack, the Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood tweeted: ‘I will be pushing for the strongest possible punishment’. But what can the system do? Some more years will be added to the 58 he has to serve and then Abedi will be moved from Frankland to another jail with a Separation Centre, perhaps Long Lartin in Worcestershire.
How will the officers at his new prison feel, knowing that he has now viciously assaulted four of their colleagues at two different jails? Is it fair to expect staff to work with and around someone who clearly poses such a threat to them? Realistically we need a new, more secure environment for these particularly dangerous inmates. They can clearly never be allowed to re-join society, and they will continue to pose a threat to anyone they work with. Just moving them to another ‘high security’ jail does nothing to protect staff.
It has been reported today that prisoners in both separation centres and CSCs have been banned from cooking their own food. Given the risk they pose it’s astonishing these inmates were ever allowed access to such dangerous equipment. On Saturday the Prison Officers’ Association issued a statement which highlighted a culture which seeks to ‘appease’ these very dangerous prisoners rather than controlling and containing them. This observation isn’t new. In his 2022 report ‘Terrorism in Prisons’, Jonathan Hall KC warned that many prison leaders have a ‘reluctance to focus on Islamist group behaviour’.
Three years have passed since that report, and the Ministry of Justice is yet to act. The blame for this must fall on the senior civil servants. I feel sorry for James Timpson and Shabana Mahmood. They are leading a department which is fundamentally broken, and no longer capable of performing its most basic functions.
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