Diary: Prisons

Inside story: How a prison operates is a matter for the governor and the department of Justice. But, asks Billy Mann, shouldn't the taxpayer also have a say in the matter? 

You can't beat the system: If somebody wants to kill themselves outside a prison, the will to prevent them is minimal. Inside a prison, wheels and machines exist to prevent suicide.

As part of the rehabilitation I have been engaged in since suffering a stroke three years ago, volunteering has become a mainstay. I help in educational workshops and one of them is in the education block of an inner city prison. I have joined classes in which I offer advice on writing and editing to prisoners who are involved in making their own "in-house" magazine. After 3 sessions, I was required to undergo security vetting should I want to continue. And once I had been successfully vetted, I was required to attend a day's security awareness training. That took place yesterday.

For obvious reasons, I cannot go into much detail. When it comes to prisons in the UK, what happens behind the big wall and the barbed wire stays there.

So, the stories about the various grisly methods of self harming (eating razor blades, pulling out your eyes) will have to wait, as will tales of the latest synthetic drugs and the methods of delivering them into prisons from outside (drones are popular).

What I can mention are two impressions that stood out. The first is that the stated duty of care undertaken by the British state inside a prison is far greater than the duty of care it exercises outside in the community. If somebody wants to kill themselves outside a prison, the will to prevent them doing so is minimal. Inside a prison, wheels and machines exist to prevent suicide.

The second impression is that prison operate as closed systems. This is obviously a statement of the obvious, but the ways in which each system in each prison works is determined separately. They are all required by the department of Justice to meet certain requirements of the European Convention on Human Rights, but beyond that and the ways in which they meet those requirements are determined locally. This opens the door to internal systems that play out beyond the scrutiny that might normally apply to other departments of state.

The question therefore arises as to whether the taxpayer, as the ultimate financier of these systems, should be entitled to oversee them in some way, either through the media or through some other form of representation.