Meet the author: Ian Acheson on Screwed: Britain’s prison crisis and how to escape it

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Sunday 20 October at Church House, Westminster.

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION

Threats to lock up anyone involved in the summer riots are likely to lead to a surge in inmates in the UK’s already severely stretched and chaotic jails. How will our prisons cope when the Labour government inherited an overcrowding crisis, with the estate said to be at ‘operational breaking point’? According to figures published by the Ministry of Justice on 2 August, the prison population stood at 87,362 in England and Wales. Capacity, already stretched by the practice of assigning two prisoners to the same cell, was 88,818.

Under emergency plans, thousands of prisoners are due to get early release. Indeed, more broadly, the criminal-justice system has been under intense strain for more than a decade. Court backlogs have raised the number of prisoners on remand. The parlous state of probation services has led officials to claim understaffing is undermining probation workers’ efforts to keep the public safe – and has even been used as an excuse by Labour to refuse the release of prisoners serving imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences, a punishment sentence abolished over 10 years ago.

This has all come as no surprise to Ian Acheson, who had spent years warning of the disasters to come. In his book Screwed, he tells the inside story of the collapse of His Majesty’s Prison Service, told from a front-row seat to it all. Acheson went from officer to governor in less than a decade, and during that time he witnessed the uniformed organisation he was proud to serve crumble into lethal disarray.

His uncompromisingly brutal account exposes the politics and operational decisions that have driven our prisons to a state where rats roam freely, prisoners are forced to use slop buckets, violence and intimidation are normalised and it is easier to get a bag of heroin than a bar of soap. Concluding that the crisis is not unfixable, however, Acheson gives solutions which deserve the widest public discussion.

SPEAKERS
Professor Ian Acheson
senior advisor, Counter Extremism Project; visiting professor, school of law, policing and forensics, University of Staffordshire; author, Screwed: Britain’s prison crisis and how to escape it

Jonathan Floyd
director, Inside Job

Faith Spear
lead author, The Criminal Justice Blog; prison-reform advocate; criminal-justice system commentator; criminologist

CHAIR
Geoff Kidder
director, membership and events, Academy of Ideas; convenor, AoI Book Club