HM chief inspector of prisons: 'If someone were to get a gun into a prison, all bets are off'

How long before a gun gets into the hands of a prisoner who uses it to escape? That is the question HM chief inspector of prisons Charlie Taylor is asking amid the increasing practice of prisoners using drones to have packages delivered straight to their cell windows.

“This has been a problem for some time, but it’s becoming worse and worse. Organised criminals are becoming more sophisticated. They appear to be able to move faster than the Ministry of Justice and the prison service when it comes to the use of this technology,” Taylor tells The House.

Long Lartin is a category A (maximum security) prison holding terrorist offenders and serious organised crime bosses as well as serial killers such as the Suffolk Strangler. Manchester, Strangeways, is a category B that also holds category A prisoners. Both have just been inspected and in both there is an ingress of drones carrying illicit items.

“In Manchester, what we were finding was that there were lots of broken windows, and contraband was being delivered to those cells with broken windows. They then replaced those cells with new, supposedly unbreachable windows. Prisoners realised pretty quickly that they can melt a hole through the window with the element from their kettle,” says Taylor.

The packages, which can be four pounds in weight, mostly bring drugs and mobile phones, but ‘zombie’ knives have also entered this way. Could guns be brought in too? “Absolutely,” he replies. “Of course, if someone were to get a gun into a prison, all bets are off.”

Taylor issues a stark warning: “This is not a business-as-usual issue. This represents an existential risk. It is a national security risk, because if one of these guys gets out, what they can do is really alarming.

“The idea that we’ve ceded our airspace above our prisons holding the most risky men – our so-called high-security prisons – to serious organised crime is just not acceptable. 

“One of the criteria by which category A prisons operate is that it should be made impossible to escape. Well, with the best will in the world, you can have great systems at the gate and around the place, but there’s not much you can do if someone’s got a gun or they’ve taken a hostage.”

“It’s a huge danger, because if someone gets out from one of those jails… With nothing to lose, they may do something horrific”

How are the drones directed to a particular cell window? Some have another prisoner on the phone to guide it, or they can use a geocode system called what3words, Taylor says. At Long Lartin, prisoners make best use of the night-sanitation system, which is still in place despite criticism.

“They don’t have a toilet in their cell, which means if they need to go in the middle of the night and there’s a queue, they have to go in a bucket, and they chuck the contents of that bucket out of the window into a rubbish bag. Those rubbish bags are not being collected, which meant that drones were coming in and dropping packages, which are – guess what? – disguised as rubbish bags,” says Taylor.

“I saw one wrapped in astroturf and dropped onto a pitch. We’ve seen them dipped in grass cuttings and dropped on a piece of lawn that hadn’t been cut. You’ve got people with a lot of time on their hands. You’ve got a massively lucrative market. Even if they lose a fair proportion of the drones, it’s still worth their while to keep on doing this.”

Convicted spy Daniel Khalife successfully escaped from Wandsworth in 2023. What are the chances of another escape, facilitated by drone use? 

Given the ability to bring in weapons, “there are some very strong incentives for people to attempt to escape”, he replies. “It’s a huge danger, because if someone gets out from one of those jails… Thankfully, the guy who got out of Wandsworth didn’t, apparently, pose a big risk to the public, or didn’t create any risk to the public while he escaped. But that isn’t the case with some of these category A prisoners where they are extremely risky. With nothing to lose, they may do something horrific.”

Before becoming chief inspector of prisons in England and Wales, Taylor worked in education. For six years, he ran a west London special primary school for children who had been kicked out of mainstream school. As headteacher, he was spat on by kids who regularly had to be physically restrained (prisoners are, by contrast, “almost universally” friendly to him), but undeterred he instituted a new regime involving tea, toast and massages. It was quickly rated ‘outstanding’.

Taylor then advised the Department for Education on children’s behaviour under Michael Gove, who moved to Justice next and commissioned the expert adviser to review the youth justice system. Taylor ended up chairing the youth justice board and leading the charge to replace secure training centres with ‘secure schools’ (the first has recently opened and he plans to visit next month). 

Now he inspects prisons and produces reports on the findings. In four years, just two prisoners have refused to talk to him during a visit. The inspectorate has credibility among them – plus “they’re just very bored”, says Taylor.

Boredom exacerbates drug use. This usually means cannabis and spice, but “prisoners say now there’s a menu of drugs to pick from” and “in some jails you can get pretty much anything you want”, says Taylor.

With drugs comes debt. And with debt comes violence. This also affects people outside of prison: “One of the ways that debts do get settled is by family members, for example, getting bullied into paying off drug dealers, sometimes with interest added.” 

When he inspected Wandsworth prison last March, “the whole place smelled of cannabis”. At Lindholme, 21 per cent of prisoners said they had developed a problem with illicit drugs since arriving. In Hindley, a category C prison, 58 per cent tested positive at the last inspection; one month, more than 70 per cent of random test results were positive. 

“The number of prisoners who can’t read is just staggering”

“If that many prisoners are under the influence, the idea you’re going to be doing meaningful work, training, education is pretty fanciful,” says Taylor. In turn, critical to solving the drugs problem is ensuring prisoners are occupied.

“Often, prisoners are bored out of their mind,” the inspector notes. “If you’re someone already who has a tendency towards taking drugs and someone offers you something, well, in a way, why wouldn’t you do it?”

Some prisoners are kept in their cells 22 hours a day, and Taylor says Covid is still being used as an excuse for the practice, which is “wearing a bit thin now”.

Taylor looks defeated when discussing the standard of education within prisons, which he describes as “very poor in most cases”.

“The number of prisoners who can’t read is just staggering. The idea that someone does a four-year stretch, coming in unable to read and leaving unable to read – it’s just such a waste. It costs £50,000 a pop to lock someone up. What a waste of taxpayers’ money to miss that opportunity,” he says.

“One of the things that’s worried us is that prisoners, as part of their sentence plan, are expected to complete an accredited programme of some sort. If they complete that programme, they’re more likely to get parole… But what we find in lots of jails is they don’t facilitate the programme.”

It is said that running programmes for prisoners on short sentences is more difficult, but Taylor counters: “I wouldn’t want to let people off the hook when it comes to short sentences either. If you have someone in jail for 10 weeks, say, you could make a huge amount of progress in teaching them to read.”

The inspector, who looks at ‘purposeful activity’ jointly with Ofsted, notes that a working day in prison is often three or four hours. This may be ‘wing work’, involving cleaning or serving food. “Those jobs take a very short period of time – an hour or something – to be done. Then you see those prisoners just sitting, loafing around on the wings, smoking vapes and chatting for the rest of the day. That’s not a good use of anybody’s time.”

And yet, he reports: “Most prisoners want to work. They want to be out of their cells, actually doing something. But they need to be challenged with the kind of work that’s going to be useful to them when they come out.”

The lack of purposeful activity adds to a culture that sees both the prison and prisoners neglected. When Taylor’s team visited Whitemoor, there was a blood stain at the start of the inspection. “The blood stain stayed there all week. It was fresh blood on day one, and by the end of the week it had dried up, but it was still there.” There were blood-stained walls in Manchester recently too, as well as rats and broken furniture.

“What’s depressing sometimes is, when I walk around the jail, prisoners come up to me and ask if I’m the governor. I sometimes say, ‘Oh, do you know if the governor is a man or woman, out of interest?’, and they don’t know that either.”

Instead of being on the wing, governors are “bogged down enormously in bureaucracy, assurance, HR processes”, Taylor reports. “What governors say is that they’re servicing the bureaucracy, rather than the bureaucracy serving them. And I absolutely agree with that.”

Former prison officer and governor Ian Acheson makes the argument in his 2024 book, Screwed, that the empowerment of a “civil servant boss class” has created a fundamental problem in the prison service. When there were around 25,000 prisoners in England and Wales, the 1952 Prison Act established the modern prison service with no more than five prison commissioners who oversaw the work of governors. If the modern number were proportionate there should be 15 to 20 bureaucrats at prison service headquarters, Acheson writes, yet there are in fact a staggering 5,681.

Does Taylor agree that managerialism is one of the key root causes of failure?

The chief inspector compares the experience of governors today to his own as a headteacher: “Setting the regime, recruiting my own staff, deciding how much to pay people, getting in tenders for things like building work, being able to bring in psychology services, therapeutic services into the school, setting the timetable for the day, setting the curriculum for the school. All those things were in my gift as a headteacher. Almost none of those things are in the gift of a governor.”

Prison officers are recruited centrally, so it is when they walk onto the wing that a governor meets these senior staff members for the first time. “That seems to me astonishing. Quite often, someone walks on and governors just say, ‘This guy’s not going to make it’, for whatever reason. Sure enough, you’ve got someone who’s had a lot of money invested in their training, and they’re probably out within a few weeks.”

The institution with the most glowing review by the inspectorate is Oakwood, formerly dubbed “Jokewood”. The cheapest prison per place in the country, Taylor now describes it as the best he has seen in his time as chief inspector. Prisoners are given meaningful work and trusted; for example, not being directly supervised when using tools that could be deployed as weapons. What lessons can be drawn?

“First of all, it’s the ethos of the place. The director, in the case of Oakwood, is prepared to carry the risk of trusting prisoners more,” says Taylor. During his inspection, he spoke to a prisoner working in the gardens who could easily have items chucked over the fence to him.

“I said to the guy, ‘Are you not under pressure here to get packages?’ He said, ‘Why would I give up this? I spend my entire day outside, I get a huge amount of autonomy about my life, I’m getting to train other prisoners in horticulture. Why would I blow that for the sake of someone’s stupid package of drugs?’ Oakwood understands what incentivises prisoners.”

On one occasion, Taylor dropped in to Oakwood to find they were holding a ‘dog day’, allowing prisoners who had behaved well to have their dogs brought in. “What an incentive! People really love their dogs,” the inspector enthuses. “It’s about being creative, talking to prisoners and finding out what is going to motivate them to behave well.”

Controversially, Oakwood is run by G4S, as is Rye Hill training prison, which was also reported on positively last year. Is this evidence that private prisons are in fact a good thing?

“The inspectorate doesn’t have a view on this. My feeling probably is that when private prisons are good, they’re very good, but when they’re bad, they can fall over quite quickly,” replies Taylor. There are “egregious examples” of it going wrong, from Birmingham prison to Oakhill and Medway secure training centres. And there are other places where innovation allows them to flourish.

“Risk-taking is not encouraged within the prison service. I understand why, but it’s not helpful. Leadership is just not always as good,” Taylor says of state-run prisons. 

“It’s about having courage. It’s about having clear values. What are we actually here for? What are we trying to do for these people? Because that’s often quite murky. You talk to prison staff and get a whole different lot of views about what they’re actually there for.”

Although the HM Inspectorate of Prisons warns of a national security risk, with the Ministry of Justice being an unprotected department, prisons still seem far down the government’s list of spending priorities. Does he find public opinion frustrating in his job?

“It’s always going to be hard to push prisons up the funding agenda. It’s a brave prime minister who stands up and says, ‘We’re going to reduce the NHS budget in order that we fund our prisons better’.” Taylor says he likes to reframe the issue by asking people: given that almost every prisoner will be released at some point, what do you want them to be like when they come out?

And if he could encourage Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood to announce a fresh set of policies tomorrow, what would they be?

Governors currently get no training, so train them, and keep them in one place for longer, Taylor urges. He adds: “Give all successful prison governors – people who prove they can cope – greater levels of autonomy to make decisions about what they do in their own prison. That’s essential: stripping back massively the bureaucratic burden on governors. 

“How is it we want them to spend their day? Do we want them out there on the wing checking stuff is being done, holding their staff to account, checking in with prisoners to see that things are operating okay? Or do we want them chained to their desk, plodding through missives from the Ministry of Justice or HR returns?”

The message is clear: it is not just money that is needed. Taylor’s findings suggest ministers must take another look at the bureaucratic weight under which governors sit – because to improve prisons, we must trust those who run them.

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