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High Security Prisons: Prisoner Perspective Prison Information Bulletin 4
Summary
Public interest in prisons has been increasing as stories of overcrowding, suicides and striking prison officers have filled the media. Specific groups of prisoners have received particular attention: women, children and foreign nationals. For campaigners attempting to make a case for penal reform, it is all too tempting to concentrate on those groups that elicit the most public sympathy and whose plight in prison seems the most unreasonable and unjust – echoing the rescue calls of ’women and children first‘ in ship tradition.
One very large group of prisoners that receives little attention from the world outside is those adult men serving long term sentences. As of September 2007, there were 33,959 male prisoners in England and Wales serving four or more years, or indeterminate sentences. And within that large group, a crucial subset – those 5,895 long termers housed in high security prisons – has received even less attention.
This is, at once, understandable and profoundly strange. The gravity of offence associated with long term sentences and category A status is unlikely to ever endear those sentenced to the wider public. Put in the bluntest of terms, the story of a man who has committed a serious violent and/or sexual offence will never have the emotional ‘pull’ that can be achieved with the story of a child who died behind bars, or the young mother now separated from her baby. Yet at the same time, the very seriousness of the offence and the danger posed to the public that placement in the high security estate implies, should surely hold our attention. What happens to those men in high security jails very much matters, as all but a few will eventually be released back into the community.
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