Ann Widdecombe was the Prisons Minister under PM John Major
The former Prisons Minister Ann Widdecombe says the UK’s prisons are in a worse state now than at any time since the 1990s.
She also said that many Victorian prisons needed to be knocked down and rebuilt in order to deal with overcrowding and poor standards.
Speaking on GB News, said: “The mission statement of the prison service is divided into two and the first is to keep people in custody, which means not have them escaping all over the place. But the second one, that just doesn't happen on the scale that it should, is that the prison service is supposed to prepare inmates to lead useful and law-abiding lives, both in prison, and upon release.
“Now, a useful life means that you're occupied, that you might be doing work in the prison workshop or in the education department or you might be attending behaviour courses.
“But what actually happens is that as soon as you get any overcrowding in our prisons, which we've got, what we call purposeful activity is the first casualty because all the officers are then so busy upon movements of prisoners, that they're not actually able to put the time into a purposeful activity.
“There are appalling stories coming out of our prisons at the moment, that there are prison officers having relationships with prisoners and goodness knows what else. Once that happens, you run the risk of those officers bringing in drugs.
“I haven't seen our prisons so bad since the early 1990s when Ken Clark brought in somebody from the private sector to try and sort it out. And then after him came Michael Howard, who had a very clear view, that we should not just accept that crime was going to happen. And for a while the prison service actually was humming along and was doing useful stuff.
“I always used to say if somebody comes into prison, unable to read and write - and 75% of them are actually in a state of illiteracy - they should leave the gates able to read and write, that, to me, is so basic and shouldn't even need stating.
“It's actually an incredibly difficult one to call and I am not one who sits in judgment on the prison service because I think it's one heck of a challenge and they've got to make individual judgments. They’re bound to get some wrong.
“We need to do a certain amount of [rebuilding] but you can't do it wholesale. But over time, that is exactly what should be happening. And we have built modern prisons over time and under successive governments.
“We have built modern prisons, but there's still too many prisons of the old estate state left. The worst I saw was Armley Road in Leeds, when in 1995 they were only just ending slopping out. This was in the 1990s, not the 1890s.”
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