CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Prisons aren’t a new problem. Ian Acheson wrote about the decay of the high-sec estate for us last month; David Gauke painted a bleak portrait of the current spending settlement in December. A year ago, I examined the abject failure of the Government’s promise to have delivered 10,000 new jail places by 2020 (actual number delivered at that point: 206)."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson wrote: "Tommy Robinson, a self-invented English ‘patriot’, was free to attend yesterday’s St George’s Day event in central London which descended into ugly clashes between participants and police. Earlier in the day, he had been released from court after successfully arguing that a police dispersal order that resulted in his arrest and charge in November last year was unlawfully applied to him due to a paperwork blunder. He says he will now sue the Metropolitan police.

Robinson has nearly half a million followers on social media. They have, by now, fully absorbed the narrative that when it comes to protest, Britain has a two-tier system of policing."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Aldous Huxley’s dystopian best seller Brave New World, published back in 1934, envisaged a society where stability was enforced by a numbing drug called ‘soma’. Constant consumption of soma, mandated by the state, dulled the senses, vanished despair and discouraged rebellion. I was reminded of this by comments made by some of the Times‘ new crime commissioners as they launch a year-long project to fix our broken criminal justice system. They were speculating as to why we weren’t seeing a national jail insurrection similar to what happened here in the spring of 1990 when multiple prisons across the country exploded in violent disorder. After all, many of the precursors that existed then are now present once again: severe overcrowding, demoralised and overwhelmed staff, endemic brutality and squalor.” 

"Professor Ian Acheson, a former prison governor and author of Screwed: Britain's Prison Crisis and How To Escape It, was shocked when he came across the figures."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson: "Every morning, men and women serving on the front line of His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service pull on a cheap uniform and go to work in what's been called the most hostile work environment in Europe.

The endemic violence in our jails means many of them are ending their shifts in hospital rather than home with their families.

A month ago, an officer went on duty on B wing in HMP Whitemoor, one of our maximum security prisons. He left in an ambulance and was put on a ventilator, unconscious, after a vicious assault."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "The high-security prison system – the specialist jails where hundreds of the worst offenders in the system such as predatory rapists, child murderers, organised crime bosses, and terrorists end up – is in trouble."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson interviewed: "The state of Britain’s prisons is under renewed scrutiny as report after report describes more and more jails as overcrowded, filthy places, rife with vermin and violence."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Synthetic drugs exploded across the prison estate causing devastation and helping entrench a drugs economy led by organised crime that is now almost too big and too lucrative to fail. My independent Government review of Islamist extremism revealed a senior management of the prison service defined by endless, useless layers of bureaucracy unable or unwilling to stop terrorists in the making. Instead of tackling these major problems, this invisible and unaccountable boss class busied itself with virtue signalling. I still can’t get over the Director General of the Prison Service piously ‘taking the knee’ outside a prison where you would hesitate to house cattle. A vivid representation of a law enforcement agency in terminal decline."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Whatever the latest banalities issued by the Ministry of Justice in response to claims by Steve Gallant – a hero of the London Bridge terror attack and former inmate of HMP Frankland – that Islamist gangs have orchestrated a shift in the “balance of power” at the prison, the state is not fully in charge of our prison system. Nowhere near. Years of criminally stupid austerity cuts to front-line staff, supine leadership and incompetence by unaccountable senior mandarins have combined to produce a battle for power inside jails that we are losing."