It’s perhaps not the biggest come-hither to the audience for a lecture if the lecturer confesses at the outset that the subject upon which he is going to speak is one that in part he is fairly ignorant of, and in another part quite bores him – yet that is exactly my position. Many of you will be either professionals working in the prison service and its satellite agencies, others of you will have more than an accidental and cursory engagement with penology. My position is this: as a writer I am interested in just about everything under our febrile sun, and my knowledge of the British prison system, such as it is, is partly a function of my work as a writer. In the mid-1990s I was invited to judge a short story competition organised by the Koestler Trust. When it became time to present the awards I went to HMP Wandsworth – it was only the second time I had been inside a prison.
At the little ceremony – which was held on F Wing, at that time the clearing house for Rule 43 prisoners in the system – I met Stephen Tumim, the then Chief Inspector of Prisons; and afterwards he invited me to join him on a spontaneous tour. Those of you who ever encountered Stephen Tumim will be aware of the fearlessness and brio which he brought to his job: we stalked the corridors and landings, with him barking at prison officers and gubernatorial staff to open this or that door, then he would poke his tousled and snowy head inside cell or canteen or association area, and enquire civilly of the inmates how they were getting on. As for the staff, where he felt they were being obstructive Tumim was critical, where he found conditions not to his liking he was scathing.
It didn’t take too much of this for me to grasp that Tumim understood his remit as being vitally concerned with the wellbeing of those the state had deprived of their liberty. His standpoint regarding the morality of custodial sentencing as a punishment was not an issue – and possibly even an irrelevance – clearly, what he felt himself to be responsible for was ensuring that prisons worked in this sense: that their inmates were not subject to the arbitrary fiat of their guards, that their rights – such as remained – were observed, and that they were provided with an effective recourse for perceived injustices. I can safely say that in many years now of observing the machinery of the British state, that hour spent with Stephen Tumim remains as a strange bright interlude, illuminated by the sheer force of his integrity, in the murk, muddle, bureaucratic obfuscation, and even outright malfeasance that encompasses incarceration, making of it, if you will, a jail within a jail.
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