Inside those walls

It's never going to be easy to root out drugs from prison - they are part of the jail economy
    • The Guardian,
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When Gareth Davies, the ex-governor of Pentonville, came back from a secondment in Iraq, the Prison Service News ran rather a jaunty piece about it: "His mission - to get Iraq's prison service up and running. His obstacles - angry, stone-throwing protesters; bombs hidden in dead dogs; and just one prison to house an escalating prison population!" It's the punctuation I like; so cheerful!

Anyway, you can't blame Davies for the problems besetting Pentonville at the moment, which have seen 14 officers suspended on charges including bribery, drug running and "inappropriate relationships with prisoners". He was in Iraq and is extremely well thought of, principled and erudite (one of the reasons he was sent to Iraq was that he's fluent in Arabic). But it would equally be a mistake to blame his successor, Gary Deighton.

I did a piece on the anger-management course in Pentonville five years ago, during Davies's tenure, and the place was awash with drugs. In week 10 of the course, I arrived to find two of the inmates having a fight. I posited that they weren't managing their anger very well, and one of them explained: a group of them had been on kitchen duty; they'd been kicked off it when one of them was found cooking crack in the microwave. He proceeded to explain how many privileges kitchen duty conferred, how much it was worth in the prison economy. I was confused because to be cooking crack in the first place, they'd have needed a hell of a lot of cocaine, and wasn't it slightly hard to come by, being as this was a prison?

The institutional acceptance of all this was more than tacit. Prisoners were frequently put on rehab programmes: these are nominally for people who arrive in prison having had an addiction outside, but the physiology and logistics of drug use trip this up - you don't get six months into a sentence still struggling with a heroin addiction you had outside. Lots of the prisoners walk around with their hands down their trousers; it is the strangest thing. When I asked a psychologist what that was all about, she said: "It's a classic YO [young offender] characteristic. It's partly for security, and partly because it's a good place to hide drugs." Clearly there is something unusual going on in Pentonville - it is relatively common for officers to be suspended singly, but when 14 go at the same time it suggests something, if not more corrupt, then at least a lot more organised.

This is not a situation you can see being resolved by better administration. This is not corruption feeding down from the top. It isn't the Shawshank Redemption. You take a bunch of delinquents, and put them all in the same place; ensure that most of them have some relationship with illegal drugs before; and construct an internal economy where tiny privileges and moneys take on huge proportions while drugs operate on a more affordable scale; and make visiting rights the cornerstone of those privileges. Now what are you going to do? Strip-search all the visitors? While it is reasonable to demand integrity from public servants, and reasonable to ask prison officers, as you would ask the police, not to break the law the whole time, it is unreasonable to expect people to work in an environment where they see the fundamental rules flouted all the time on a unmanageable scale, and yet continue to take rule-abiding seriously. I'm not excusing the 14 suspended officers. If there was a clear solution, Davies, Deighton or any one of the scores of governors whose prisons are also full of drugs would have thought of it. But as an aside, getting Iraq's "prison service up and running" - do you not think we have a sodding cheek?

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