Chief troublemaker leaves the nick

Judge Tumim's tough reports as Chief Inspector of Prisons won him few friends at the Home Office. Angela Lambert spoke to him as the news broke that Michael Howard will not renew his contract

Every journalist in the country now knows that Judge Tumim's surname is spelled with two ms. When he took over as HM Chief Inspector of Prisons in 1987, a post he will relinquish in October this year after serving two four-year terms, few people outside the legal world had ever heard of him. He had been a successful barrister specialising in matrimonial cases before becoming a circuit judge in 1978 and two years later a county court judge at Willesden, north London.

Putting such a man in charge of the prison inspectorate must have seemed to the then Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, an innocuous and uncontroversial appointment. Stephen Tumim was and is comfortably located at the centre of the Establishment - a member of the Garrick and the Beefsteak, a benevolent patron of the arts and a former chairman of the Deaf Children's Society. The Home Office and its notoriously impenetrable prison department would have been confident that nice, woofly, white-haired Judge Tumim wouldn't give them any trouble.

How wrong they were. In the course of the past eight years, Judge Tumim's name and his hard-hitting, outspoken prison reports have rarely been out of the media. He has blown the whistle on the prisons of Britain, exposing their inadequacies to an unexpectedly sympathetic public.

In vain the Home Office has tried to contain his iconoclastic views and fearless pronouncements. A press officer sat in on our interview on Thursday lest the judge should be indiscreet. As it happened, it was the luckless press officer who committed the only indiscretion.

"The judge is such a wonderful communicator!" he enthused for my benefit. "I found it quite remarkable how he instantly established a rapport with prisoners, 99 per cent of whom were from ethnic minorities. I was quite amazed." It is not, of course, the case that 99 per cent of the inmates of HM Prisons come from ethnic minorities and neither Judge Tumim nor I had mentioned race.

During his eight years as Chief Inspector, aided by a team 20 strong, Tumim has developed a coherent and challenging analysis of the purpose of prisons. It starts from his belief that only about 2-3 per cent of the prison population is both bad and dangerous. "They are often intelligent, of strong character with dominant personalities, and they are dangerous, difficult and psychopathic: by which I mean, lacking moral quality." The remainder are bad, more or less, but also very often plain unlucky. "Some 80 per cent of prisoners," he continues, "are male, well under 30, have failed to get any real education or qualifications and have had little if any stable family background or upbringing. Nearly half spent some part of their childhood in care. Their crimes are very often connected with drink, drugs or motor cars. If they are violent it is mainly from stupidity."

It is to these inadequates that the prison service should be addressing itself. "We must not ignore the constructive potential of a period in custody - the average is 18 months - and I want to use that period to encourage prisoners to live law-abiding lives. Their education must be immediate and intensive. There are three times as many illiterates in prison as on the inner-city estates, so we must start with the three Rs. Second, we must teach them arts and crafts, to get their imagination and self-respect going."

He points to the walls of his office, hung with a selection of prisoners' art, some of it astonishingly good. "Third, we must give them a moral education: teach them the difference between right and wrong, which many of them do not know.

"These young men may be streetwise, but they have no idea how to behave in the adult world because they simply haven't been brought up. Their position in society is very worrying. Nobody wants unskilled young men who haven't sorted out their attitudes or settled down into marriage or mortgages. These boys, unless they have a terrific grip taken on them by dedicated people who know what they're doing, have had no training in how to handle drink, drugs, Aids, even hygiene. They must be led into this while they're in prison and given a social education, or they will have no place in the real world.

"I would like to see more officers trained specifically to deal with young offenders. I'd like to see bits of the prisons privatised - like catering, for instance - so as to improve the status of highly-trained and skilled prison officers."

Work is the twin of education and essential for the longer-term prisoners, says Judge Tumim. They should be made to work in prison - proper work - and for this they should receive pay - proper pay: comparable to wages in the real world. "pounds 100?" I prompt. "pounds 150? pounds 180? pounds 200? pounds 250 a week?" I wait for him to stop me but instead he says, "At the moment it is quite difficult to earn more than pounds 10 a week in prison ... pocket money. I'd like to see industrial prisons where people earn pounds 180-pounds 240 a week; but they'd have to earn it; they'd have to work hard, pay tax and national insurance on their wages, and contribute towards the support of their families, and, where appropriate, compensate their victims."

People will claim that many prisoners won't work. Experience suggests that while some 50 per cent of prisoners work well and willingly, the other half are either "bloody-minded' (his word) or idle; or have mental problems. Still ... 50 per cent of prisoners earning a decent wage, gaining self-respect by helping to support their families, and learning the discipline and routine of a job? It sounds so obvious one wonders why it hasn't been put into practice before. Judge Tumim says it has always been claimed that the unions would obstruct such a move, although any union leaders he's talked to have been enthusiastically in favour.

But the idea that most excites him is what he calls "relational justice". Outside the circles of penal reformers and moral philosophers, this is a comparatively unknown concept. To put it at its simplest: there is a gap between those who commit offences and the rest of us, and we can either widen that gap, or take the humane view that the job of criminal justice is to narrow it. "It's like on the Tube ... you know...." and he intones sepulchrally, "MIND THE GAP!", perfectly mimicking the robotic voice on London underground stations.

Pleased with his rendering, he repeats: "MIND THE GAP! If we want to widen the gap we can put people in brutal prisons, throw away the key, and say, they're totally different from us. But if we want to try to narrow the gap, the Woolf Report, which I co-authored, would be a textbook answer. You then say, we've got to live with these people, these prisoners and criminals, for the next half century: wouldn't it be better to try and draw them into society so that they commit fewer or no crimes? I find the concept of relational justice very helpful and the idea of narrowing the gap very important."

The former approach is exemplified by the "law and order", lobby, which wants to make police and prisons so harsh and unpleasant that people will stop committing crimes in order to ensure that they never come back. But this, Judge Tumim believes, is based on a logical misconception of the purpose of prison and the nature of punishment.

"What are prisons for? Like all forms of sentencing, they are there to help reduce the crime rate so that when prisoners come out they are less not more likely to burgle our homes and nick our motor-cars. Punishment is for the judges and magistrates, who send people to prison for a length of time which they decide and thus take away their freedom. That is the real punishment. "

His main objection to the law-and-order solution, introduced during Lord Whitelaw's period as Home Secretary and known then as the "short, sharp shock" is that it doesn't work. "It very easily becomes like a gym workout which is very jolly and even quite popular among young men, but it doesn't help anybody. We come back every time to the lack of family training. I am quite sure that is the biggest cause of crime, and an unpleasant spell of physical punishment does nothing to redress that. What did work in these detention centres was the introduction of one-to-one teaching by local wives and mothers. They taught the young men basic literacy and numeracy and that was frightfully good."

Judge Tumim seems perfectly relaxed, although he fiddles with a handsome string of amber worry beads, winding them across his knuckles as he speaks. "I think the young nowadays are much nicer than we were. These 80 per cent we're talking about are perfectly civil and serious to talk to. I've never had any trouble with them."

He quotes with approval the words of Cardinal Manning: "Those who live among statistics and have never lived among the poor little know how poverty brings temptation ... it would be an affectation of scepticism to say that this was not by way of cause and effect." He repeats the phrase: "I love that, don't you: 'an affectation of scepticism'?" No wonder he makes the Home Office nervous.

His greatest achievement as Chief Inspector of Prisons, he thinks, has been to end "slopping out". Under Tumim's insistent lash, this barbaric practice - which was due to be phased out by 2020 - will soon be a thing of the past. No longer will prisoners carrying pots of their own ordure in the mornings pass others carrying breakfast trays. He is also proud that "people know a great deal more about prisons now than they did in 1987 and I've played a part in that".

Insiders say he would have stayed on had Michael Howard renewed his contract. Judge Tumim isn't talking about that. Instead he is looking ahead: "I'd like to do something either in the field of public administration or in the world of the arts. Best of all I'd like to head an Oxford college, though at 64 I'm probably too old for that.The balance in my life is between the prisons, the law and the arts. I've worked in the literary world and in the visual arts and feel I can still make some sort of contribution."

Past it? Not by a long way: as 50,000 prisoners can attest. To them he'll always be known as the judge who took on the Home Office - until Michael Howard signed his release.