Alex Cavendish On Discrimination & Failings Of The UK Prison System

Alex Cavendish is an ex-prisoner who initially received a four year sentence, but only served two on licence, due to a problem with his conviction. For those of you who are curious, the crime committed was part of a white collar financial conspiracy. He couldn’t go into too much detail, as it’s a matter for The Supreme Court and he is currently waiting for a lifting date.

Currently, Cavendish is highly respected and followed for his active involvement in debates around the topics of crime, prison and probation services. I decided to speak to Cavdenish to discuss discrimination and due lack of care within the UK prison system, as a result of a young brother's suicide in HMP Winchester.

It didn't come as a surprise when Cavendish disclosed that he, himself, had seen so many cases, which ranged from medical negligence where treatment wasn’t sought to prisoners being dealt with very inappropriately to victims of sexual assault, who’d been raped and subsequently ended up killing themselves. On the whole he said there was "..negligence of mental health issues."

I asked him why is that vulnerable prisoners are slipping under the radar and being un-noticed. "I think there are two factors, I think the first is overcrowded and understaffed prisons. I don’t think there is enough staff to deal with the day-to-day runnings of a prison in a safe and humane way. But I also think there is a secondary element to this and that is, some prison staff feel it is their duty to continually punish prisoners beyond the fact that they’ve been sent to prison by the courts. And you do tend to hear a lot about prison officers who focus on really making life difficult and unpleasant as they can for prisoners, particularly those who have committed a crime that they disapprove of. If they have been involved in domestic violence or offences involving children or old people,then there is a tendency among staff that they feel they have a moral duty to make life as unpleasant as they possibly can on a daily basis. I’m not saying all staff do this but there is a substantial majority who do take that view and they see any disaster that overcomes a prisoner in prison – whether a prisoner becomes a victim of crime or even themselves, they become ill, that they are some type of lesser type of human being and therefore whatever they suffer is in many ways deserved. I’m afraid the mind-set in prisons is very corrosive," he explained earnestly.

Discrimination

 "Discrimination is a serious problem, the overwhelming majority of prison officers are from basically a White background and a lot of them have been in the army. And I think that there is a kind of institutional racism within prisons. I think there is a tendency for example, for what I would call the responsible jobs in prison, so auditing in the offices, in the stores, in the kitchens, all the positions that are involved in privileged positions, always going to specific groups of prisoners and that often depends on personal preference. I’m an ex-prisoner; certainly in the prisons that I’ve been in. all the best jobs tend to go to White people," he said.

Cavendish is certainly not shy to provide critical analysis of the failings of the prison system and the reasons for this also. He describes prison as "a very  bureaucratic environment". 

" About 50% of all prisoners have a reading age of 11 or below, many are functionally illiterate or don’t speak English. I mean there are a large number of prisoners now, not just from The European Union, foreign nationals who don’t speak English or speak very poor English. And the result is, those prisoners who are functionally illiterate or English is not a language they are able to function in, they are excluded almost automatically as a result of this  bureaucracy ."

"Many prisoners from a non-English speaking background suffer from really severe problems in prison but they don’t know how to write to the authorities, they don’t know the prison bureaucracy works. So prisons are really set up for people who are English speaking and have a degree of literacy that enables them to fill in the forms or complaint forms or application forms and if they aren’t able to do that, they are almost immediately excluded from all sorts of rights and privileges in prisons," he stated.

Tackling this issue of illiteracy in prisons

Cavendish stated the importance of having "good diagnostic practice" within the prison system to tackle prisoners' illiteracy. He told me,"there needs to be a system that if there are new prisoners coming into the system that are functionally illiterate, there should be some effort made to astain why they are illiterate. Because I think some people haven’t strived in school, some people have been excluded early on, or they may have a learning difficulty that hasn’t been identified early on, things like dyslexia. It may be that they have had very bad experiences in school, so they’ve become school phobic – simply forcing people who have literacy problems into formal classroom settings, fails. Because a lot of the problems they have maybe when they were young children, resurface in adult life. 

He argues that the most effective way if helping illiterate prisoners, is after a proper diagnosis, having a period of one –to-one tuition delivered by a professional who has expertise in knowing and dealing with what learning difficulty is. "Now there are schemes in prisons for learning how to read –on a one to one basis they are very effective – problem is there aren’t enough opportunities for people to deliver that train one-to-one or work with every prisoner that has a learning difficulty and/or illiteracy. So what you tend to find is, because of staff shortages, opportunities are lost where you could have a prisoner working with another prisoner learning. Those opportunities are often lost because there isn’t enough staff to open sales and to provide those opportunities for prisoners to meet on that one-to-one basis," he said.

"If you’re only allowing prisoners out of their cell for one hour a day, which is happening in a lot of prisoners for a lot of prisoners, then within that hour they’ve got to try and phone home using the payphones, so there may be a long quee. They probably need to go have a shower, they might need to put an application in, so often very little, what I would describe as opportunity time .. Whereas they would leave prisoners locked in their cells for 22/23 hours a day, but without using these opportunities to have peer mentoring. Also, certainly there aren’t enough paid staff in the education department, who would be capable of dealing with the scale of the problem," Cavendish went on to say.

Tackling discrimination against Black people and ethnic minorities

"I think the issue is BME (Black and Ethnic minority) people are disproportionately represented in prisons. So, I think every prison needs to take seriously their responsibilities under the Equality’s act. I think almost every area of operation in the prison needs to be subject for a review regular basis, to see these obligations are being met. Prisoners need to have some means of expressing concerns and expressing grievances, without the risk of being victimised afterwards," he said.

 Speaking from his own experience, he told me," The vast majority of prison officers on the wing come from a White British background, so I think they would need to address their own recruitment problems as well, because I think if you have practically an all white administration, you have a large body of White prison officers and tutors in the education department. It presents a challenge in terms of equality, because there are very few positive role models, for particularly young people from a BME background. But I also think they need to look at how many people are represented on the basis of ethnicity in education, should be more done to address balance? "

 "Quite a lot of people I know from prison that come from a minority background, might not have a close family in the UK, that means they don’t have that level of support that many indigenous prisoners would have. Also prisoners who are from an overseas background and are non-UK nationals face all sorts of barriers when it comes to communicating with their families, because if the family is, say from Nigeria, the cost of phoning the family is astronomical. Now, they do have some. some overseas prisoners do qualify for one free overseas call a month, but compared to a prisoner who’s family is in the UK, if they have money they can phone everyday really. So, I think it’s a very isolating experience for prisoners who do not have close family network, supporting them in the UK. I think a whole range of issues needs to be tackled, I think we need to start with recognising institutional structural imbalances. All too often its assumed that because people aren’t complaining, that there aren’t any problems, when in reality its because they have been silenced," he said.

COMPLAINTS SYSTEM

"Prisons are very reluctant to recognise discrimination for what it is. Although most prisoners will now have an Equality’s officer, who is an appointed serving officer who has responsibility for monitoring, often my experience in dealing with these individuals is, that they can be very well-meaning but they don’t often understand the issues themselves because they come from a White British background and they haven’t had appropriate training. In many cases, I think they lack the vocabulary to do this job properly and I think that also prisons don’t want to admit they have individual officers who discriminate on the basis of colour, ethnicity or indeed sexuality for that matter. I think every prison needs to have an equality audit and be done regularly," he told me.

PRISON NEGLECT/MENTAL HEALTH IN PRISONS

"I think the first observation that I’ve made is, in general, mental health problems in prisons are an area of huge neglect. Part of that is the issue of resourcing – in virtually every prison, there is no mental healthcare. The second problem is that because there is so little healthcare, they can only really deal with the most acute cases. And what that encourages is, prisoners who are in crisis, think the only way to get attention from the healthcare team, is to self-harm. So I’ve seen examples where people have asked for support from the healthcare professionals and have been turned down and then have gone on to self-harm (cutting, overdose) and committing suicide, in response to being told that their condition isn’t serious enough. If you ration care on that basis, then inevitably prisons, which are in genuine crisis, will take things further that will qualify for mental healthcare. Prison officers are not trained to be mental health professionals.

Prisons are not suitable places to confine people who are suffering from severe mental health problems. Unfortunately there is a tendency now, on the part of the courts to use prison as a default setting for people who have serious mental health problems but cannot be referred to an appropriate secure hospital. I think we are expecting as a society, for prisons to do a job that they aren’t equipped to do.

A lot of people either develop serious mental health issues in prison, or they might have underlying, undiagnosed mental health problems that become far worse in prison. There needs to be a much greater investment in mental healthcare within prisoners and prison officers need to have much better training in how to deal with people day to day with mental health issues or who are in crisis. However, I think we should be actively discouraging the sending of those with mental health issues to prison as a default setting, because it is not a place of safety for them or other people. That includes staff and other prisoners."

We now have a situation who would be subject to sectioning or a committal order are now finding themselves as a default setting – those people are sent to prisoners where they have virtually no support. The result of this is a rising death rate, self-harming, the number of incidents recorded as self-harming. As conditions in prison are deteriorating, there are far too many prisoners often doubled up in single cells and many are spending 22/23 hours a day locked behind a prison door and those are conditions that lead to violence of different kinds – self harm, violence against other prisoners and staff. I would see mental health issues in prison as one aspect of a wider crisis, across the whole prison estate.

PUNITIVE TREATMENT FOR BME PRISONERS

Cavendish explained how most of the prisoners that he had met in prison were on what is called a Basic regime, which is punitive treatment or those who have broken minor roles, or who are seen as t being disrespectful towards prison staff. "They would be put on basic for not turning up to work on time, not keeping their cell tidy and clean, not showering regularly, disrespecting an officer who tells them to do something, these are mostly low level – what they would see as administrative offences and you get issued an IEP warning – (incentive and earned privileges) after two warnings are issued, then you can end up on the basic regime. Some prisoners virtually spend their whole sentence on the basic regime – no TV, no personal possessions other than books, often no radio, no personal clothing, they have to wear prison uniform, they got no association time – so no time to call their families," he told me.

He went on to say,"They have reduced visits – they’re allowed 1 visit a month as opposed to three, they’re not allowed to spend any money, they aren’t allowed access to any extra food. "

"In Bristol prison, there has been a case, where the inspectors discovered that individual prisoners who were on basic were being denied food, starved, now that’s illegal, but it does happen. The inspectors doing that at Bristol caught them. The officers concerned were disciplined – they were given formal warnings that it wasn’t lawful. The vast majority that I encountered were from often from a Black British background, Black Caribbean background. They were the ones more likely to be put on basic, as they were most challenging and assertive and persistent.They were much more confident and assertive about their victimisation and that’s what led them to being punished as what is perceived as disrespect. Certainly in my experience, there were a disproportionate number of Black prisoners on basic regime," he said.

"I knew a prisoner who was a foreign national and he had. He was given an 8-year sentence; he served the full 8-year sentence because he couldn’t be deported because of his immigration status, because I think he didn’t have indefinite leave. He was then held in immigration detention in prison, for a further 8 years and it was only when I spoke to him and basically he suffered terrible mental health issues as a result. He had been inside 16 years – had he been a British national, he would have been released at the four year point and then been on a four year licence. Instead he done 16 years and it was only because I wrote to George Galloway, and Galloway raised this in Parliament and the issue was reviewed and he was subsequently released, but he had done three times – he spent 6 months at Rangy prison, naked in a punishment cell."

They put prisoners in a strip cell if they believe they are liable to harm themselves if they are given clothing. This guy, whom I got to know very well, had a lot of mental health issues as a result of such long confinement – I think he also had mental health issues before he was in custody. Ranby is a bad prison, it had a lot of violence and so he was literally chucked into a strip cell, naked and left there. By the time I had met him, he was in a d-cat local prison, so he had been moved, he was on a normal location. I went through his paperwork for him, before I wrote to George Galloway, I was absolutely horrified by what I saw. As I say, he was subsequently released. He had done 16 years in prison, whereas a British national would have done 4.

The toxic combination of overcrowding and understaffing and massive budget cuts, I mean Chris Grayling cut £9m alone. All of these functions, anti-discrimination, equality, mental healthcare, all of these areas have suffered substantially as a result of these budget cuts. I think that is one of the reasons why our prisons are in crisis. The government wants us to believe that prisons are in crisis because prisoners behave badly, in reality prisons are in crisis because of bad political decision making by the Conservative party. We need to acknowledge that this is not an impractical problem that has come from nowhere; this is a problem to do with party political decisions.  They have not tackled the issue of sentence inflation, or prisoners who are being held long after their minimum tariffs, the end result is that this is an entire political crisis; the solution is a political one. We have to start sending far fewer people to prison, especially those that are not violent and those that should be dealt with by the community and receive community care- not be thrown in prison and ignored. I mean sentencing by the court needs to be revisited, there is also the issue that if we are going to imprison people for public protection, then they need to be properly cared for, because if they’re coming out of prison in a worse state than they went in – they have worse mental health, worse physical health, maybe they’ve developed drug habits that they didn’t have before, on the outside, they’re self harming. All of those things are ticking time bombs and they will be released back into the community. If there is no early intervention, then the likelihood is that they will reoffend and they will create more victims in the community – often their own families or neighbours. We need a different approach – we need to look at best practice, why do Scandinavian prisons have such impressive positive results? Why do they have much less re-offending? Why do they have people who go prison and they successfully complete rehabilitation and education programmes and do not reoffend. That is good use of society’s resources – but to keep them in human warehouses in dangerous environments seems to me, to be counter-productive. I am not calling for the complete abolition of prisons, I’ve met some very dangerous people, but unless we are going to address the problems they cause in a pro-active way, by looking at behavioural modification, by looking at the education and vocational training, I just see that we are wasting public money, we are pouring money into failure, our prisons are a failed institution. If you look at the re-offending rate, the self-harm rate, the suicide rate, violence, the number of new crimes that are being committed in prisons … all of these things are continuing in prison, they are not being addressed. The only conclusion we can come to be that the prison system in England and Wales as it currently stands is a failed system that is not fit for purpose.