If you're worried about prison conditions, you should be deeply disturbed by what happens after inmates are released

Privatisation of the probation service hasn't just made it far less effective – it's becoming downright dangerous

HMP Birmingham is just the tip of the iceberg: there are systemic problems across Britain in both our prison and probation services (PA)

It’s not just HMP Birmingham – although the staggering tales of Spice-intoxicated inmates roaming the hallways and guards locking themselves into their offices certainly mark it as an outlier. The whole of Britain’s prison system is in a state of crisis. Staff working in dangerous conditions report chaos on prison wings, and feeling unsupported and fearful on a day-to-day basis. The situation is so bad that a third of those who join the prison service now leave within a year.

Figures compiled by the Labour Party, and leaked this week, found that 33 per cent of prison officers leaving their jobs in the past 12 months had been in the role for less than a year, up from 7 per cent in 2010.

The government had been publicly celebrating its success in recruiting a new generation of officers, but they should hold the champagne corks. The applause sounds rather hollow now.

Meanwhile the prison population just keeps on rising, as the number and length of custodial sentences awarded creeps upwards too. Almost a third of indictable offences carried a custodial term in 2017, and the average term spent in jail is 16 months.

Prisons are at breaking point, and the pressure they are under – due to both a lack of funding and now clearly of experience too – has led to big mistakes. A report published this week found that hundreds of sex offenders had been released from HMP Dartmoor despite posing a public risk, a result of “unplanned” release. That such an event can occur, and multiple times, demonstrates the extent to which control over the business of rehabilitation has been lost. Damningly, many of these men – who, despite their troubling crimes, should be recognised as vulnerable as well as potentially dangerous – were allowed to leave prison despite their release leaving them homeless.

Yet, this is not the full story. If you think things are bad inside prison, take a look at what’s going on outside. It’s not just prison officers buckling under the pressure, the probation service is also nearing the point of collapse.

Private companies drafted in to manage offenders in the community, and paid by results to do this, have failed utterly in their task.

Some three years ago, the probation service was split in two. The government-run National Probation Service continued to manage the most high-risk offenders, those who have committed very serious crimes or who are judged to pose a serious and ongoing risk to the wellbeing of others. And despite being streamlined, and losing a lot of its staff through redundancy, it has been assessed as continuing to do a good job. That in itself should not prompt significant celebration; it is, surely, the least we can expect from a functioning government, that it is able to protect its population from danger and exploitation.

The privatised part of the system, however, is made up of community rehabilitation companies – private organisations who bid for the work and are paid according to their achievements – who look after those offenders who are considered to pose a “low” or a “medium” risk. Their key task is to support their rehabilitation and prevent reoffending; to move former criminals on to new, positive, productive lives.

There are 21 of these companies in operation. So far, only two have managed to cut the reoffending rate. The latest assessment of their work has been damning: Dame Glenys Stacey, the chief inspector of probation, said staff at the CRCs – who are inexperienced, as a huge number of long-standing probation officers took redundancy or retirement when the service split in two – are doing a bad job of managing their caseloads. Too often, communication with their clients was taking place by telephone, with little effort to build the supportive relationships that could turn lives around.

Payment by results means these failing CRCs could make yet more staff cuts, with worse outcomes for their charges – and for the communities in which they live. Payment by results is all very well in manufacturing, for example, but when those measurable results are the health and wellbeing of our society, it isn’t just logistically challenging but also extremely high risk.

What makes the situation even more troubling is the way that some crimes are categorised. At the point of privatisation, women’s charities warned that those convicted of domestic violence may fall under the category of “low” or “medium” risk – even though it is well known that domestic violence can escalate very suddenly. That put them under the care of less experienced officers, who operate a lighter touch approach. There is little recognition in the system for the fact that the risk posed by someone under the probation service can wax and wane. How can an officer possibly know that this risk level is shifting if they have so little face-to-face contact with them? Two woman, remember, are killed by their partner or former partner every week in England and Wales.

The rapid decline in the quality of the probation service has created a dangerous cycle of neglect, where criminals who are not properly supported both pose a higher risk to the community and are also more likely to seriously reoffend – which leads to a further conviction, which then (thanks to rising incarceration rates) leads to a sentence, and yet more pressure on the buckling prison system.

The government admits, in its own statistics, that more than a third of offenders now have what it describes as “long criminal careers”. That situation is untenable.

In managing the post-prison lives of violent and dangerous criminals, the government, ironically, has proved it can do something well for itself. Too bad it is still so seduced by the whiff of profit that it’s willing to cast aside our most vulnerable in pursuit of ideology over success.