A former prison officer has described the 'nightmare world' inside English and Welsh jails, where assaults, suicides and self-harm have become routine due to funding cuts and staff shortages. Alex South, who spent ten years in the prison service, recounted saving three inmates from hanging in a single week at Wormwood Scrubs, along with multiple daily self-harm incidents.
South said the frequency of such events forced officers to focus solely on saving lives, often at the expense of their own wellbeing. 'You have to try to switch yourself off, otherwise you'll never go into work,' she explained. The Ministry of Justice recorded 16,543 self-harm incidents in the first quarter of 2023, a 12% rise on the previous three months, equating to one every eight minutes. In women's prisons, self-harm rates are at record levels, 11 times higher than in men's jails.
An Observer investigation found that three-quarters of prisons in England and Wales now have unsatisfactory standards in at least one respect, with more than a third deemed insufficiently safe. Assaults on staff have risen sharply, with almost 8,000 attacks in the year to March 2022. A survey of 6,582 prison staff by the parliamentary justice committee revealed that half of all officers do not feel safe in their jail.
South attributed the decline to austerity measures, which created a cycle of falling staffing levels, increased violence, and more officers leaving. 'No one joins the prison service because they just want to lock and unlock doors,' she said. The chief inspector of prisons, Charlie Taylor, has warned that the rising inmate population, which now exceeds capacity, has 'consequences for all of us'. Emergency measures, such as holding prisoners in police cells, have become routine, while entire prison wings are closed due to a lack of officers to run them safely.
