BOOK REVIEW: A brief history of doing time

the prisons we DESERVE Andrew Coyle HarperCollins, £15.99

When Andrew Coyle became governor of Brixton prison in 1991, he knew he had a hard task on his hands. That summer, two high-security prisoners had blasted their way out into London with guns, and the top priority on his job description was to ensu re that there were no further, um, embarrassments. What he found was a different sort of embarrassment. Brixton's capacity was for 730 men, but it held 1,150, a fact in which the authorities took "a perverse pride". The inmates were locked up - often thr ee ina room designed for one - for 23 hours a day. There were no educational facilities, no work, no sport: nothing. And then there was F wing, the psychiatric holding pen, the place for prisoners with medical conditions.

"If a man was not unstable before admission to F wing," Coyle writes, "he was likely soon to become so. Nothing in my 20 years in the prison service, not even the extremes of Peterhead, had prepared me for what I encountered. The walls were painted bottle green. Permanent semi-darkness meant that artificial lighting had to be kept on all day. The all-pervading smell was overpowering - a combination of urine, faeces and stale food. And the noise. An unrelenting cacophony of keening, wailing, shouting andbanging which went on even during the night. Each cell had a large flap in its door. These were usually open. A face, usually a black face, peered out from most of them, hungry for human contact."

It is not a pretty picture, though it is one loved by many harsh films. Fiction likes prisons, they are strong metaphors for the struggle between uniformed authority and oppressed free spirits, and they give directors an awful lot of reasons to be fearful - and violent. But the picture of F wing becomes even less pretty when we realise that these inmates were all on remand: they hadn't been found guilty of anything yet. Coyle makes much of this irony but does not allow it to deflect him from his purpose, which is to demonstrate that the way we handle prisoners, the guilty along with the potentially innocent, is appalling.

It is a sobering argument, especially at a time when events on the Isle of Wight have again put the prison system on the front pages. Coyle is not a traitor to his career - indeed part of his intention is to impress on the public that our penal convictions and doubts are an important index of national well-being. He works from the premise that criminals do not go to prison to be punished by the humiliating indignities of the regime - prison itself, the deprivation of liberty, is the punishment.

He does not seem too resentful of the reflex sympathy many of us have for luckless inmates, and our corresponding dislike of uniformed men with keys on their belts; instead he takes a calm look at the mixed response the subject provokes. "This ambivalence is sometimes expressed in an odd combination of a desire to know what goes on behind the high walls of a prison coupled with a refusal to recognise that prisons are the way they are because society wants them that way."

He is happy to agree that it is desirable to put dangerous types behind bars; indeed, he is anxious to tighten security. But he is dubious about the merits of the present system for one reason: it doesn't seem to work. He documents the many mishaps of recent years - from Strangeways onwards - and gives statistical ballast to the suspicion that the more people you incarcerate, the more crime you get, and that the worse the conditions inside, the worse the behaviour. He even mentions the Soviet gulags, and wonders whether the flourishing of crime in Russia didn't germinate in the labour camps.

One of the things that makes Coyle's arguments striking is that he is no shocked or sentimental outsider. Nor is he merely advertising his own sensitivity to moral questions. He is a senior official in the prison service: before taking over at Brixton hewas governor of Peterhead, a bleak jail for Scotland's hardest cases. His book does not dissolve into statistical euphemisms about overcrowding, deterrence, rehabilitation and - most creepy of all - "extra-judicial deaths". And his unhurried but dismayed tone is inspired not only by a theoretical sense of injustice, but also by the weight of what he has seen, heard and smelt.

He looks hard at the past - giving us a brief history of time, as it were. The modern prison, he reminds us - the monumental bricked-in shed stuffed with unruly men (95 per cent of the prison population is male) in serve-'em-right squalor - is a Victorian idea, and like many such ideas not necessarily a very good one. Part of the inspiration was the ancient idea of banishment or exile, and this also drove the transportation of convicts to Australia. But Christianity has to shoulder much of the burden. Coyle is evidently devout, so much so that he enjoys mentioning that the only person promised entry to paradise was a convicted thief. But he is stern about the rotten influence of the church: it is not an accident that prisoners are put in cells, like monks, or that prison life revolves around the chapel. Victorian jails were designed as compulsory monasteries; forced solitary contemplation was felt to be good for the soul.

Coyle traces the present state of affairs back to a 100-year-old inquiry into prisons, the Gladstone report, which began: "We start from the principle that prison treatment should have as its primary and concurrent objects, deterrence and reformation." He is sufficiently riled by this historic slogan to quote it twice. He points out the logical nonsense of having two "primary" objectives, but for the most part he, too, dreams of achieving both things at once. Obviously he is liberal and progressive, but he has a sharp streak of spry individualism as well. He insists that advances are not possible until prisoners are given a sense of personal responsibility, and this can hardly be done, he suggests, by trapping them in riotous squalor. He is cool to the point of scepticism about the interference of the state in penal matters. The compact has been broken between criminal and victim: the state assumes responsibility for punishment, and we the public have been perhaps too happy to have it taken out of our sight, out of our mind.

Coyle wants us to put it back. When he took over at Brixton he broke the taboo of secrecy and invited television cameras in to portray the awful conditions under which both inmates and staff laboured. It cannot have been a popular initiative, but it was certainly bold. At the front of the book is a modest disclaimer pointing out that the opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Home Office. A good job he put that in. Otherwise they might have locked him up and thrown away the key.