We know our prison system is awash with drugs but just what are they smoking at the Ministry of Justice? A shocking story in the Times yesterday revealed what a desperate state Britain’s jails are in. Paul Morgan-Bentley, an undercover reporter, was hired at breakneck speed to work as a uniformed Operational Support Grade (OSG) escort at beleaguered HMP Bedford. He lifted the lid on a security nightmare.

Drugs were being smoked openly in front of officers

A catalogue of errors and incompetence emerged. He wasn’t security cleared before starting his sensitive post. He had access to prisoners in this Category B jail after a day’s training where even his tutor complained of a ‘pandemic’ of unlocked security gates. On two occasions, scanners at the gate were completely unmanned, allowing him and dozens of other workers to walk straight in off the street into the heart of the prison potentially carrying anything from a mobile phone to a firearm. On other occasions, gate staff complained they had not been trained to use the scanners and workers were waved through after rudimentary checks. Drugs were being smoked openly in front of officers corralled behind perspex in a central office. A female colleague of his, barely trained and with no personal protective equipment, escorted male sex offenders through places with CCTV blind spots.

So what did the Ministry of Justice have to say about this shameful and reckless dereliction of security? We learned that His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) had a ‘zero-tolerance approach’ to drugs and those found with them would be punished; we were also told that ‘OSGs should not escort prisoners without the presence of an officer’. It’s hard to interpret this facile word salad without hallucinogenics. Yet this is the default response, with a few variations, that is wheeled out after each catastrophe in our jail system is revealed, often only because inspectors or reporters dig underneath these implausible bromides. Sometimes it is a ‘zero-tolerance approach to violence.’ Sometimes, as here, it’s plain sophistry.

OSGs shouldn’t do lots of things but out there in the real world, far from the fantasy island of HMPPS headquarters, they routinely fill in for better trained and vetted prison officers. This is because in Bedford and dozens of other prisons a recruitment and retention crisis mean there is a daily requirement for a person in a uniform to keep things from truly falling apart, even one given less training than a burger flipper.

The Prison Service’s headquarters function employs 5,592 full-time staff. I’m not sure how many of these essential workers make it into the MoJ’s plush London offices, but these people, whatever they do, have amongst the lowest sickness absence rate in the organisation as a whole. It’s no wonder, because very few of them seem to be breaking a sweat on keeping prisons safe and secure. At the top, chief executives, director generals, executive and non-executive directors, chief operating officers and prison group directors fall over each other in the C-suite corridor. For their denuded and battered front line, in places like Bedford, Bristol, Exeter, Werrington, Cookham Wood, they seem to have no answers, and to the public at least are entirely unaccountable. When was the last time you heard the chief executive of the Prison Service interviewed about failing prisons or lethal probation mistakes? These people are remote, invisible and many have been in place far too long for all the good they have done.

Justice Secretary, Alex Chalk, must be well aware of this. But he’s busy letting violent prisoners out earlier just to fend off governors closing the gates. Any work to tackle the corporate incompetence that is the silent partner to this shambles always has to wait. Perhaps the voters of Cheltenham will relieve Chalk of this poisoned chalice before the year is out. Even so, a fitting legacy would surely be to announce a fundamental review of the capacity and capability of the prison and probation leadership team.

Those who would defend the senior mandarins as dealt an unplayable hand by overcrowding must answer this: HMP Bedford has effectively been in special measures for the last seven years after a six-hour riot at the height of austerity cuts caused £1 million of damage. In 2018, the prisons inspectorate described a prison in ‘inexorable decline.’ This prompted the first ‘red flag’ urgent notification to ministers requiring immediate action which then had to be repeated in 2023. In 2019, watchdogs described the place as ‘filthy and decrepit’. After a brief rally in 2022, last year inspectors said it was worse than ever. Even the prison services internal marking system rated the prison’s performance of ‘concern’ or ‘serious concern.’ Yet despite years of poor performance, endless coaching teams and temporary staff boosts and pilot schemes, the prison remains filthy, violent and, as we now see, wide open to security threats. Is it any wonder that a prisoner escaped from the jail two years ago on a bike he stole from a prison workshop?

As Rory Stewart pointedly remarked when he was prison minister, with a literally captive workforce there’s no excuse for a dirty prison. Bedford is a squalid rat and cockroach infested dump. While this is bad enough, it’s worth noting that even our high-security prisons have been slated in the last year as filthy.

There are two simple questions here: if you can’t keep even the bins emptied, what else more serious is going wrong? And if we have a prison bureaucracy that is helpless to stop places like HMP Bedford going over a cliff, what the hell are we paying them for?

Ian Acheson’s book, Screwed: Britain’s prison crisis and how to escape it is published by Biteback on 9th April