We think of prisons as being under the control of prison staff. There are 27,000 officers, senior officers and principal officers, as well as a range of specialist staff such as psychologists and teachers who manage the prison environment through, most obviously, locking prisoners behind their cell doors. But despite this level of staffing the penal world is nonetheless one which is often characterised by violence. (For a general introduction to the issue of violence in prison, see Edgar et al. 2003.) For this reason, since 2004, each prison has had to have a ‘violence reduction strategy’ in place, and reducing violence in prisons has become a ministerial priority. Even so, figures obtained by the Howard League for Penal Reform, for example, showed that the recorded number of violent acts in prison has risen by a third in the last 5 years (Howard League 2009).
In 2008, for example, there were just over 12,740 recorded prisoner-on-prisoner assaults and some 2,700 recorded prisoner-on-staff assaults — assaults which might range from a simple fight, to knives or homemade weapons being used, to boiling water being thrown in someone’s face (often with sugar dissolved in the liquid so as to make it stick to the skin). There have been some 5,000 fires in our prisons and in 2008–09, 124 sexual assaults. Just as worryingly, almost a fifth of the prisoner-on-prisoner assaults were in-cell assaults — so that a prisoner is not even safe after he has been locked up. My own research shows that the murder rate in prison can often be double the murder rate in the community (Wilson 2005).
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