Charlie Taylor is His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons.
Just as the drama of the escape and recapture of Daniel Khalife settled down, HMP Wandsworth returned to more routine problems. On Sunday, another prisoner was hospitalised, having been stabbed by a fellow inmate. Quality of staff is critical. The best officers have an intuitive sense that something is going on This sort of violence
When the Covid pandemic began, one fear was that the virus would tear through prisons and cause up to 5,000 deaths. The prison service, at its best in a crisis, introduced lockdowns and control measures. These were effective and, from March 2020 to September last year, only 207 prisoners died having tested positive for Covid-19
At the end of October, just before I started as HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, the inspectorate and Ofsted visited Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre near Rugby. Rainsbrook was built by the Blair government to house the increasing numbers of children imprisoned as a result of policing targets and tough-on-crime policies and it was one of
Last Easter I left the special school for children with behaviour problems, where I had been head for six years, for a job advising on behaviour at the Department for Education. Recently, I went back to my school and bumped into a boy called Jack in the corridor. He looked at me for a few