On October 16, 2018, Ben Ireson – a slender 31-year-old with a history of stress – arrived in Nottingham to await sentencing for a domestic violence charge. Distributed in Wing B, he called his mother six or seven times a day from his cell phone. On October 22, Ben informed a staff member that he had been threatened by other detainees and that his cell had been robbed three times – his tea bags, cookies and cross were missing. That night, he told his mother that he had attempted suicide and that he intended to try again. Denise shouted at him to endure. At the time, she was caring for her grandson, who had brain cancer. She spent the nights alone in her apartment worrying that Ben would not survive. Receive award-winning extensive Guardian readings sent to you directly every Saturday morning In the early morning hours of December 13, an officer passed by Ben’s cell and noticed that the observation hatch was covered with a toilet roll. Looking through a crevice, he saw Ben hanging from his wardrobe. The policeman shouted at his colleague and called Code Blue on his radio, activating the control room to call an ambulance. The staff cut Ben off and started CPR. A few minutes later, when a nurse arrived, he advised them to stop: the austerity had already entered. Ben was pronounced dead at 6 a.m. It was the 12th suicide in Nottingham in 18 months. A little over a year later, an investigation revealed the list of failures that preceded Ben’s death. Upon his arrival at the prison, Ben had told staff that he had attempted suicide after a previous separation. It should have been evaluated by the mental health team within five days. When he was finally seen, a month later, he was from a practitioner who had not been given any information about him. When Ben complained that his belongings were being stolen, that he felt threatened and wanted to commit suicide, he set out on a suicide and self-harm prevention plan. Two days later, this monitoring stopped. The staff believed that his condition had improved. In the investigation, the then governor of Nottingham, Phil Novis, described the state of the prison when it arrived in July 2018, five months before Ben’s death. “It’s the worst prison I’ve ever been to. It was absolute chaos. There were no systems. There was nothing. It was simple; it was horrible. “ In early 2018, Nottingham had become the first prison in Britain to be issued an emergency notice, a new form of special measures intended for the most dangerous institutions. “Inspection findings at HMP Nottingham tell a story of a dramatic decline since 2010,” wrote Peter Clarke, then chief prison inspector. The report accompanying the urgent alert – which followed the poor inspection reports they won in 2015 and 2016 – described Nottingham as “a dangerous, disrespectful, drug prisoner” and raised a number of concerns. Staff were attacked twice as fast as their counterparts in other prisons. Prisoners were increasingly turning to self-harm. Eight men had committed suicide since the last check. How did Nottingham get so bad? Over the past year, I have interviewed more than 60 people – inmates, prison staff, lawyers, academics, officials and families – to find out how the prison broke out. (The Department of Justice did not give me permission to visit HMP Nottingham and rejected multiple interview requests from the former governors and the prison priest’s team.) These interviews, along with documents, inspection reports and interrogation records, give a live image of Nottingham disintegration – in In one investigation, an officer likened the prison to a war zone. But the story of Nottingham is not a story of individual crisis. is a particularly shocking symbol of a nationwide crisis. Between 2009 and 2019, prison deaths in England and Wales increased by 86%, while serious staff attacks increased by 228%. “This drop was due to political and political decisions, not all of a sudden a whole lot of prison staff and prison administrators decided to take down tools and do a bad job,” Nick Hardwick, chief prison inspector at 2010 to 2016.. “It’s really important to understand that in prisons – as in other public services – this is a systemic issue.” As a local Men’s Prison B, HMP Nottingham houses all sorts of inmates: men waiting to be sentenced. men serving short sentences for minor offenses; men who have committed serious crimes awaiting transfer to other prisons. A thief can be held next to a convicted murderer. According to criminologist Philippa Tomczak, the constant turnover in local prisons fuels instability. A former Nottingham officer told me that the local prison is the most dangerous place to work because of the unknown. Hailing from an urban area with high levels of homelessness, drug use and organized crime, this sprawling population is confined to about a dozen modern red and white squares, the largest of which looks like a huge warehouse. There were many reasons why things went so wrong in Nottingham, but the staff and inmates seem to agree on two big problems: first, there were too many inmates and second, there were not enough experienced officers. By January 2018, when Nottingham received its emergency alert, it was able to accommodate 718 men without being described as overcrowded, but it had almost 1,000. Throughout England and Wales, this kind of overcrowding became the norm. (Scotland and Northern Ireland have transferred prison systems and are publishing their own statistics.) England and Wales are not only trapping a larger percentage of their population than anywhere else in Western Europe, but are closing them down for longer. There are more prisoners serving life sentences in England and Wales than in Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden and Poland combined. England and Wales also impose harsh conditions on release: when ex-prisoners break them, they return to detention. About half of those released from prison are re-sentenced within a year. It was not always like that. In the mid-1990s, the prison population was about 40,000. But in the years that followed, as Labor and the Conservatives competed to be considered tough on crime, those numbers rose sharply. Under New Labor, the prison population – which is disproportionately made up of men, minorities and people living with addiction and mental illness – reached 80,000 for the first time. In 2003, Martin Narey, director of the Prison Service, resigned in protest. “We could change people’s lives,” he said. “As the numbers keep growing, this will not be possible.” HMP Nottingham. Photo: David Sillitoe / The Guardian The growing numbers were combined, for a period, by the increase in investment. Between 2003 and 2008, prison spending in England and Wales increased by almost 40% in real terms. “This investment has benefited,” said Andrea Albutt, head of the Prison Commanders Association. “The prisons functioned as you would like the prisons to have. “They were decent.” In 2008, an inspection report for Nottingham noted that while the prison struggled with an increasing number of inmates, it was also “an effective local prison capable of meeting many of the challenges it faced.” Then the economic crisis hit and the seeds of the current crisis were sown. In 2008, Justice Minister Jack Straw launched a policy called benchmarking, which aimed to manage prisons in the most cost-effective way. The head of the Prison Service, Phil Wheatley, was asked to identify the best examples of cost savings in individual prisons across the country and then standardize them in every prison in England and Wales. If prisons used to use five staff members to handle 60 new inmates, say, but Wheatley found a prison that did it with only three staff members, then it would investigate how they did it and if it seemed effective and reproducible, it would became the “reference point” on the basis of which other prisons would be judged. The benchmarking imposed a kind of “leveling” in all prisons, making the minimum mandatory. Anything beyond that was considered a waste and cut. Locating these benchmarks was a slow process and in 2010, when the coalition government entered Downing Street and implemented austerity, it was still in its infancy. Instead of speeding up politics, new Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke – who said he was “surprised” that the prison population had doubled since he was Home Secretary in the early 1990s – pledged to save money through privatization and reduce the number of prisoners. But in 2012, Clarke was replaced by Chris Grayling, who abandoned his commitment to reduce the prison population. Instead, it introduced the prison unit cost program, an extension of benchmarking. (This new policy initially gathered …
