Twelve years after they came to power the simple fact of the matter is that when it comes to the subject of prisons Labour has failed, and failed spectacularly.
They have failed prisoners, failed prison governors, failed prison officers, and they have failed the public too - and much as they try they simply cannot escape responsibility for it.
Of course we can all point to measures they have introduced in the last 12 years that have made our prisons better, handing prison health care provision over to the NHS for example, introducing mental health in reach teams, funding drug detoxification programmes and incorporating the European Convention of Human Rights into domestic law are others but, by and large, the prison system that we have today, cash strapped and massively overcrowded, is the disaster that it is because Labour has failed.
They failed to plan, failed to prepare, failed to resource, and even failed to put their failures right when numerous people who have forgotten more about prisons than the cretins in Labour who have had control of them will ever learn, pointed out their failures time and again.
Today Labour are at a stand still on prisons, lost for direction, lost for policy and soon perhaps they’ll be lost for time too. Since coming to power 12 years ago Labour have introduced a top down approach to prison management, that has seen some of the most knowledgable people on prisons, like the Chief Inspector, Ombudsman and voluntary sector heads ignored, while others, such as Lord Carter of Coles - who could write what he knows about prisons on the back of postage stamp and still have room to sign it, have been parachuted in as saviours when in truth they have caused failure.
Lord Coles of course gave us NOMS, the fusing together of the prison and probation services, which five years after this monolith was created is still in the process of restructuring itself without any measurable improvements; if a fundamental function of our prisons is to reduce reoffending, how crazy is it that not a single governor can tell you how many of those discharged from his prison come back again?
How crazy is it that we release around 120,000 prisoners a year with enough money to last one week, when they are legally banned from accessing the benefits system for a fortnight - and how shocking is it that seven years after the Social Exclusion Unit reported that the discharge grant was an incitement to reoffending, that nothing has been done to change it?
Labour have ignored all the advice on prisons that has been put their way by experts - and taken the advice of others who couldn’t find their way around prison cell without a map.
For example when all the advice given to them said 2003-2008 figures on the projected prison population showed that jail numbers would spiral out of control as a result of their disastrous 2003 Criminal Justice Act, and the idiotic indeterminate sentences for public protection that came out of it, Labour turned their back on prison building and opened police cells instead - as the Chief Inspector said: ‘We told them that the flood was on its way, but they simply failed to build the Ark.’
The result today is a prison population that is so overcrowded and lacking in resources because of government insistence on ever more prisoners to the pound that Paul Tidball, the President of the Prison Governors Association (PGA), warned last week at their annual conference that the prison population is now so large that there is the potential for a "catastrophe of widespread disorder" by inmates as jails struggle to make ever more savings demanded by ministers.
At the PGA conference held in Buxton on 6-10 October, Tidball told how he had just discovered that the hard-hitting three percent cut in his budget next year was actually going to be over twice as much at seven percent - on a prison’s annual budget of £10m, that demands savings of £930,000 - which is equivalent of losing 50 officers for a whole year; what kind of a prison can operate in that way?
Mr Tidball quoted one unnamed prison governor who told him that his prison regime would have to change so much because of budget cuts he accepted the possibility of dangerous consequences.
"Twenty-three hours' lock-up would not give me 7% efficiencies.
“Even the application of reduction of prisoner visiting days by half does not get me there," said the governor's email to the PGA president.
The unnamed governor whose email Mr Tidball read out said that "safety, security and decency will be thrown out of the window. the potential for prisons to blow is about as heightened as it gets in my view."
Wow, serious stuff then, so what has the government done since then? How has the Ministry of Justice reacted to these dire warnings of danger by those professionals who have a lifetime’s experience of prisons and their management?
You’ve guessed it, they’ve done absolutely nothing.
Jack Straw says everyone else is wrong and he knows best - has he forgotten Strangeways?
How can Jack Straw who has never managed a jail in his life, so completely ignore the dire warnings of the professionals who he himself employs to run them - does he think they’re just kidding?
Does he think they’re making it up in order to force budget cut concessions - those are the kind of industrial tactics that would be employed by the Prison Officers Association, but its not something the PGA have ever done.
While it’s not the first time that this government has made the mistake of ignoring the warnings of its own experts of danger ahead, ignoring this one could actually be their biggest mistake of all and, what’s more, their last.
