Ford Open Prison: the blithering idiocy of the jack-in-office

I have never met a British prison officer. The loss is, no doubt, mine: I should greatly enjoy a conversation about my fellow-jailbird Dostoyevsky’s “From the House of the Dead” with someone who knew the system from the inside. But I somehow suspect that prison officers here do not really belong to the Dostoyevsky-reading classes. I rather fear that, like policemen and social workers, they combine mediocre education with a rather horrifying level of power over their fellow-citizens.

And it’s not that I don’t sympathise with their working conditions. We aspire to be more of a free-booting, vibrant, devil-take-the-hindmost American-style society, while forgetting that the US imprisons (per capita) five times as many of its citizens as we do. And we won’t build the prisons for that, so the ones we have are all heaving. And money must be saved, which inevitably means staffing reductions. We hear that last night, at Ford Open Prison, there were only two prison officers and four support staff on duty.

Was that enough? Well, it was clearly enough to prevent a large-scale prison break-out, which is the bare minimum the public requires from prison management. But was anyone surprised to hear that, in a very lightly policed “open” prison, the inmates managed to smuggle in a certain amount of booze for a pennyworth of wassail on New Year’s Eve?

Now, it’s quite clear to me why alcohol has to be banned in prisons; so much crime is connected to it. The same goes for illegal drugs, with which most British prisons are reputed to be awash. After all, powders, leaves and resins are far easier to smuggle in, if only by reason of volume. But, you might have expected someone in authority to think, is it really so bad if the prisoners stage a bit of a New Year piss-up? The governor would have had every right to say to the powers that be “Look, if you cut our staffing that badly, we’ll still perform the basic duty to keep the cons locked up, but we’ll just have to turn a blind eye to the odd bit of smuggling. It’s only once a year, and no real harm was done.”

But no. Somebody decided that a hard line must be taken. The problem with people of moderate intelligence is that they tend to fall back on rule-books rather than using a bit of nous. And so a full inquiry was ordered. Everyone who might conceivably have been involved in the breach of regulations must be breathalysed. Result: dozens of cons chased around the place by screws with breathalyser kits, refusing to cooperate; the screws wouldn’t back off, and so a riot broke out. Even Ronnie Barker couldn’t make that up. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage done, and hundreds of prisoners now having to be moved to other prisons which are already bulging at the seams.

All because “Mr Mackay” didn’t have the sense of his near namesake, my late schoolmaster Richard McCall. After an extended – and totally illegal – post-exam celebration, Mr McCall came over to me at the morning meal and said “Collard, I strongly suspect you of being the first boy I have ever seen drunk at breakfast. But don’t worry, I shan’t pursue the matter.” But I fear that such men do not become prison officers.