Eoin McLennan-Murray,who ran the prison with the lowest reoffending rates says league tables for individual jails would be ‘foolish’ but a national target could workFormer prison governor Eoin McLennan-Murray looks well for a man who’s just retired after 37 years working for the prison service. He has governed all types of prisons during the course of his career – from category A – the highest security, to category D, or the lowest; worked with female prisoners at Holloway and Bullwood Hall and for five years was the president of the Prison Governors organization. It was in that role that he warned of a “perfect storm” in the prison system in the summer of 2014 .“There had been a dramatic reduction in resources for the service,” he explains. “That had quite an impact on regimes and decency. The service was, and still is, and under incredible strain. We had a lot of anti-prisoner political rhetoric; there’s been an increase in suicide rates; we’ve had record levels of violence prisoner on prisoner and prisoner on staff; record deaths in custody; lengthening sentences; restrictions on Release on Temporary Licence (ROTL). We’ve had a real downturn – whether we compare it to the Woolf agenda [Lord Woolf’s recommendations following the 1990 Strangeways riot] we’ve totally gone against that. That has left prisons reeling in many ways. I can’t think how the position could absorb been any worse. How we got through that and why we didn’t absorb mass disorder is a remarkable achievement.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com