Letter: Prison regimes at risk

Prison regimes at risk

Sir: The saddest feature of the current prison scene so powerfully described by Polly Toynbee ("How long before Howard's prisons burst?", 22 May) is that, until the last year or so, the Prison Service was making tremendous progress.

Jails today are unrecognisable from the conditions obtained in the late 1980s. The Service deserves much greater public recognition than it has ever received for the speed with which recommendations in the Woolf report were implemented. And performance since the Prison Service became an agency has been first-rate, notwithstanding the obsessive interference of Home Office Ministers.

Much of this is now at risk. It is inconceivable that prison regimes can be maintained when the prison population is rising so fast, and when perhaps one-tenth of the Service's staff will lose their jobs over the next three years. Indeed, the Prison Service's newly-published Corporate Plan reveals that the average time prisoners spend in purposeful activity has already fallen by four per cent.

STEPHEN SHAW

Director

Prison Reform Trust

London EC1