[Music] Hello, and welcome to another episode of Evolving Prisons with me, Kate and Carrie. If you want to listen to monthly bonus episodes, you can subscribe for only £3 per month by hitting the link in the show notes. Before we jump into today's episode, I'd be really grateful if you'd please rate the podcast on whatever platform you listen, as more ratings mean more people will discover the show. My guest today is Ande Leopold. Ande was in the prison service in England from 1998 until 2024. He worked with vulnerable prisoners, trained as a hostage negotiator, worked on reducing re-offending in the women's estate, managed the security within an establishment as the security principal officer, and was a deputy prison governor. He tells us what training as a hostage negotiator has taught him about life, how more vigorous training and recruitment may mitigate the risk of staff corruption, and how working in a prison teaches you to be less judgmental and realise that you don't always know the full story in a situation. I hope you enjoy this conversation. [Music] Well, Ande, it's such a privilege to chat with you because you've got such a variety of experience in the prison service. You've spent many, many years in the service in all types of roles. And when you started, you were a residential officer, so for people who don't know what that is, it's a type of prison officer. And you weren't in the vulnerable prisoners unit. So tell me a little bit about what your thoughts were about who would be in the vulnerable prisoner unit, and how your perceptions towards them changed over time while working with them. Okay, traditionally, certainly when I started the vulnerable prisoners unit was primarily for sex offenders. They were considered vulnerable because of the nature of their crimes, and they would be under threat if they were on what we call normal location. What I found quite quickly was there were other people on there that weren't necessarily sex offenders. So they were being bullied in the main prison, or they're under some kind of threat. Or the nature of their crimes would not necessarily make them high profile, but it would be known that being the local press. So it was some people on there were the phrase that used is running for cover. So they needed to be kept separate from the rest of the population. That's changed over time. There's a number of prisons who mix sex offenders with normal location, tends to be smaller places, smaller units. And also you'll get workforces which are made up of a mixture. And also some prisons now actually separate people out. So they'll have a sex offender unit, which is specifically the sex offenders. If you've got any other reason why you would not be on normal location, you would go to a vulnerable prisoners unit. So the term vulnerable prisoners, it's actually evolved. Some prisons have got a sex offender unit, and then a separate unit to support people who would struggle on normal location. OK, that's really interesting to know. And I didn't know that. So thank you for sharing that. And from your experience, I mean, with the public, when you hear about sex offenders, it tends to be that people think they're monsters, they're inhumane. But then I've spoken to forensic psychologists who say that, yes, they've done terrible things, but sometimes they can feel shame and normal human emotion. And from your experience of working with people like that, where do you sit on that? Have you seen the human side of people who have committed sexual offenses? I'd say so, yeah. I mean, I only worked on the sex offender unit for, well, it was a matter of months because it was when I started, so that's when I started. And the wing that all the new starters are supposed to go to hadn't been finished. The work wasn't complete in time. So we were dotted around. It's a JMP-1, as it was, dotted around. Various parts of the prism are we waited for our wing to be completed, so we could go to where our place of work was supposed to be. So I wasn't working with vulnerable prisoners for a long time, initially. But obviously, pretty much every prison I've worked in since I had vulnerable prisoners or sex offenders somewhere in it. It's the whole business of not necessarily seeing the crime as seeing the person. You know, you're dealing with people, it's a people industry. Well, whenever anyone talks to you about prisons, that's quite a common line of questioning. People want to know about sex offenders, something you don't really kind of. You don't want to promote that. That avenue of conversation, because people have got their own fixed ideas. Generally speaking, staff who work in prisons, they won't necessarily know what the prison is in for. I mean, you might need to know, depending on what the risk might be, and you might need to know some more details about what, generally speaking, the first topic of conversation between staff and prisoners is not what you're in for. Yeah, and I've heard staff say that a lot of the time they didn't want to know because it might change how they view the person and they just want to see the person where they're at and help them. So I completely get that why that wouldn't be the first thing you would necessarily ask and sometimes we'd never know. And you then moved on and you were trained in hostage negotiation. What made you decide to pursue that? I was trained in quite a few things, because there was a lot of training when I started. A lot of things are on offer, where you could get specialism, so you could go down a route that, you know, kind of, you saw it might float your boat. I actually saw it in action, so I was on duty and it wasn't a hostage situation per se, but it was someone who barricaded their cell. So hostage negotiators are automatically deployed to that kind of thing, because they might have a cell mate who doesn't want to be in there, and even if they're on their own negotiation is still seen as a key tool to resolve these things. So I saw it in action and I just thought I'd like to see more about that. So I just asked to be put on the training for it. And at that time, you had the luxury of being able to put yourself forward for these things, because people would be in training quite regularly. And is it right that you would be deployed to other prisons then? So if there was a situation in another prison, would you be deployed there? Or would each prison have their own negotiators that would only work within that prison? You can be redeployed, but it's based on need and geography. So if your prisoners got a good squad of negotiators, maybe 10, a dozen, the chances are there'll be someone on duty, there'll be a team on duty who could deal with anything that needed to be dealt with in your prison. Less so now, mutual aid is more of a thing now. So if you haven't got enough staff on duty who are trained, you would be asking neighbouring prisons to help. That's a common thing. We help each other. And was it a job that you did you often have to attend situations where there were hostage negotiations? Or is that quite unusual to actually happen? You were deployed quite often, not necessarily with a hostage situation. You were deployed as a negotiator, that the hostage part of it was kind of that's been taken off the targets, negotiated training now. But it obviously sounds far more impressive to be a hostage negotiator. But really you were deployed to negotiate in any situation where there was a communication issue. Usually it would be a situation where a prisoner had made themselves inaccessible and they were not happy. So they could have climbed onto something, they could have barricaded the door, could have gone somewhere they shouldn't be and refused to come out. Yeah, so it was kind of more general negotiation. But yeah, there was a couple of incidents where the prisoner had taken his own cellmate hostage. And another where the cellmate was be tending to be a hostage, so that can also happen. Okay, and how does that work? So they're pretending so that what something happens to the staff when they come in, or how does that work? There can be many reasons. You don't know at the time, you have to treat it as if it is a real hostage situation. But sometimes after the event, it becomes quite apparent that the supposed hostage was complicit from the start. It's not a very bright thing to do to, because once you've done that, it's on your records that you've taken someone hostage. But sometimes prisoners think they might gain advantage from it. There's normally a goal that they're trying to attain, whether that's something as simple as getting the brand new pair of trainers out of their property, for instance. I've had a situation where someone caused an incident, because that was the thing that tipped them over, if you like. It's never just about the issue that sparks the incident. There's usually a background to it. There's usually a build up to it. You can often tell, actually, that's a negotiator, because if someone is actually being held against the world, they'll present in a certain way, even if they don't feel upsetly threatened, and they're quite cool customers, they'll present in a certain way, they won't be happy. But when your hostage is lying on the bottom bunk, behind the hostage to take a feed in the newspaper, it's an indication that it might not be as as serious as you thought. Can you share a couple of things that you've learned from being a negotiator that have helped to navigate relationships with people even outside of prison? Because I'm sure it's giving you a lot of skills in how to deal with people and communicate with them better. Yeah, absolutely. It's something that you learn things that you apply in real life, so you suspend judgment. You don't look at something and think you've got all the answers straight away and you know what's going on, because it's never as it appears to be. Very rarely is what you first see, actually what's going on, and all that is transferable. It helps you de-escalate, because there are conflict situations in real life, socially, families, whatever it might be. You see people falling out in public on a quite regular basis, unfortunately. People seem to get quite aerating cars and on trains and things, and it should you wish to become involved or should you need to become involved in something like that. It helps you de-escalate things. It helps you ease people down from whatever related state they're in. So yeah, it's made applications in real life, which was kind of an unexpected bonus if you like. Once you've learned those skills, you automatically deploy them without thinking sometimes. Yeah, I'm sure it has helped massively if you're able to deal with situations in a trained way. Your career history is fascinating because you've done so many different things, so you also were ahead of security within a prison. It's really interesting because you personally were involved in helping to stop corruption with a couple of staff members, and I want to ask, is staff corruption as widespread as the media like to portray it to be, or is it quite isolated? And the reason I ask is because I am so passionate about people realizing that prison officers do an amazing job, and so many of them do amazing things every day, and that the media never tell us about it. All we hear about is another corrupt prison officer. Are they giving us the whole story, or in your experience, is it quite unusual for corrupt officers to be within the service? What I'd say is that any large organization or small organization, any organization is vulnerable to corruption, either staff who join the organization and then become corrupted, or they actually take on the role and take on the job with the criminal intent. So whether it's a supermarket, a news agent, a bank, all organizations are vulnerable to recruiting the wrong people, and prisons are no different, but when it happens in prisons, it's more of a big deal, partly because it's very newsworthy, but also because the consequences of corrupt staff being left unchecked can be quite serious. So I'd say it's probably no worse now than it was years ago, just the methods are more sophisticated now, and also for various reasons were a little more vulnerable, and that is largely down to recruitment and the rigorousness of recruitment. Okay, and I've seen in the media that people are actually applying to be prison officers in the UK now, where they're part of organized crime groups, but they don't have convictions, and they're applying, and because there isn't that vigorous recruitment, they're getting in as prison officers, and kind of what you've said there, there's that intention of joining the job to be corrupt, rather than being a decent prison officer and being corrupted along the way. Are you happy to share your experience on that? Do you think that is true? The vast majority of prison staff are decent people who are doing the job for the right reason. It only takes one corrupt member of staff, and you've got potential issues with traffic and then other things. So this isn't a new thing. We have had it before where people have joined the job, under the radar, and then it's come to light that the sole reason for being employed was in order to get up to criminal activity or aid and assist criminals inside or out. That's not a new thing, but it's very rare, and also they tend to get caught or certainly become under suspicion, because as I say, that's where I was going. Would the staff in common? The vast majority of staff are decent, a lot of people who are doing the job for the right reason, and they will notice the way it works in a prison. There are routines, things that happen routinely, so they'll notice when their colleagues are behaving unusually in a place they shouldn't be. So it's very hard for them to get away with it, even if they do, even if that is their intent from being employed. With regard to recruitment, recruitment systems now are not as vigorous as they used to be. They're centralized, and they're not as robust as they should be. If you've got decent robust recruitment and training for new staff, and ongoing training and mentoring with people who are more experienced than them, that mitigates the risk. That's probably quite a long answer to your question, but without robust recruitment and meaningful training, we are more vulnerable, but there's no get away from that. You might not be able to answer this, but with the two cases that you dealt with when you were ahead of security at prison, was it people who joined the service to be corrupt or were they corrupted later on? It's one of each. One, it was apparent, had connections to organize crime, and the other one was corrupted, coerced after joining the job. And I have to say as well, and we need to make the point that when we're talking about prison staff, listeners will be automatically picturing someone in black and white, a prison officer. There are many, many staffs that come into a prison. The uniform prison staff probably only make up about maybe a third of the staff who come in. They'll be partner agencies, teachers, healthcare staff, general suppliers, most of our prisons are undergoing or need to have remedial work taken out on the buildings themselves. A lot of them are very old, so you'll get contractors coming in and out, so there's a lot of two in and fro and through the gate. So that's the other thing that's worth noting actually, when we hear on the news about corrupt prison staff and someone being caught doing something illegal with regard to prisons, quite often it's not uniform staff, it's someone else who through their job has got access to the prison. So that's a point worth noting. Yeah, that is really, really important and really interesting. And where it is a prison officer that is corrupted, because there are instances where it's a prison officer, what do you think we can do to mitigate that? Or actually for any staff, what can we do to mitigate any prison staff member becoming corrupted? Because do you think that even with the most vigorous recruitment and great training and mentoring, do you think that prison staff can still become corrupted by some prisoners? People can. So I'll take you back to all organisations of vulnerable to this kind of activity. So it would be folly to say that we could put enough systems in place to make sure that this never ever happened. However, there's a lot of things we could be doing to mitigate that risk that we're not doing. And a lot of it is down to resource and a lot of it is down to staff and levels. A lot of it is down to training of staff and ongoing training. Just to give you an example, when I started in the prison service, 1998, I was bullied up. We all were all new starters were bullied up with an experienced member of staff with 10, 15, 20 years experience. And you didn't get your own line on the shift pattern, you jockeyed on the line on the shift pattern. So for the first three months, when you were in work, you were working with your body or your mentor. When you were in, they were in and you literally worked with them, you shadowed them effectively for three months. And then, I don't know whether there was a formal assessment of how you were doing, but after the three months, presuming you were functioning well and you picked up, you've learned from those three months, you were then giving your own line on the shift pattern and you kind of then fly solo as it were. But you were never on your own, you could always go back to your mentor or your buddy. You could ask other members of staff who had lots of experience. And there was a lot of interaction between colleagues as well, because the workforce was staggered. You had people who just started like me and you had people who were actually looking at retiring, they'd done 30 odd years and everything in between. So there was always someone to go to and there was always someone kind of keeping an eye on you if you like. Whereas the way things are at the minute, we don't have that luxury. I mean, you're supposed to get two weeks induction as a new officer coming off your training before you go live properly, but that definitely slips because of the need for staff and you'll find yourself doing a job for the first time and not really knowing what that job entails. Yeah, and I've heard officers say that they've got three weeks experience on the job and they're left on our wing by themselves because somebody's had to go elsewhere and that must be terrifying for a brand new officer. Yeah, I mean, if the being left on their own, the wing should be locked up. So they wouldn't be left on their own with lots of prisoners milling round. But yeah, that would be what we call patrol state. But that can be, that's a responsibility as well. I mean, if you're the only person on the wing, someone in one of those cells might have a need. They have cell bells they can put on when they need to call a member of staff. So you get three or four of those going and you've got to go and speak to the person behind the door. If you've got no legal experience of that, that is definitely going to be difficult. Yeah. And you, you've worked your way up all the way to deputy governor. And in your experience, why do you think there is such a staffing crisis? Because from looking inwards as an outsider, I think why would you be a prison officer in today's day and age when you don't get the right training because there's not enough staff? You're not supported by politicians, by society. And you're really at risk of harm from the people you're dealing with, because even if some prisoners do want to change, if they're locked behind their doors for 23 hours a day, they're going to be angry. They're going to take out on the first officer that they see. And with the shift patterns and things, it just seems like it's just really detrimental to your health in so many ways, your physical health, your mental health, your emotional health to be a prison officer. So why do you think, though, from your experience, why do you think we're struggling? Is that right? What I've just said, or do you think it's for another reason that we're struggling to keep staff? Okay, well, we're in a little bit of a perfect storm with prisons at the moment, but with just with regard to people coming and working for the prison service, it traditionally was a job that people came to after they got some life experience. It was quite common to employ people who'd been in the forces, but it wasn't a prerequisite. I was never in the forces, and I joined just after 10/30. So people who joined were locally recruited in prisons were recruiting their own staff effectively. So you knew what you're walking into long before you ever went live, because you'd had experience within the prison you were going to be working in. The rot really started with something that was called the beds. The voluntary early departure scheme, and it was about eight years ago, round about eight to 10 years ago. And as part of cost-cutting measures, there's no other reason for it. Staff with experience and time in were offered early retirement. That's a short version. And it was quite attractive to a lot of people who only had a few years left to go early and effectively be paid to leave. So we hemorrhaged an awful lot of skill and knowledge and experience. The people that make these decisions at the center realized too late that they let too many people leave. And so then the recruitment drive started, and it's never stopped. They turn the recruitment tap on and just left it running. But also the way we recruit changed. So instead of it being a local recruitment, it was changed to a national recruitment. It's a private company that do it. I mean, they've been with us for so long. People think that our government department, SSCL, shared services that I've heard too, and they're contracted to all kinds of work for us that used to be done within jails. And that probably made sense financially in the number of departments, but it certainly doesn't make sense with training and recruitment. So the way they are rewarded is by getting people through the gate. And it's quite apparent now that the standard of people that were getting the type of people were getting. Well, they're inappropriate a lot of them. You get people joining the job now. And because of the way things are advertised, they'll come in and they've seen the adverts for flexible work and family-friendly hours, decent career prospects. And all of those are things that we do offer, but not as soon as you start. So you'll get a situation where new staff will start and somewhere in the system where you've neglected to tell them that they've got to work shifts or they're expected to work weekends or they're expected to work nights. That is how little is being done with people before they actually start work in the prison. And we do get people who, a short conversation with them, would have raised alarm bells. The age limit, I don't know what it was when I joined. I think it was 21, I don't know. But there were very few people. I think it's one 21-year-old on my intake. Everyone else was older than 25. You can join the prison service at 18 now. So anyone who's got a son or a daughter between the ages of 18 and 21, they will understand completely that. You probably not got the skills you need to deal with. Prisoners who can be very challenging people. There's no two ways about it. I have met a couple of 18-year-olds, literally a handful, who have been really switched on. Their interpersonal skills are good. With their life experience, I don't know why it will have been, but they're certainly very smart and very suited to the people business. And that's what it is. It's about dealing with people, prisons. We run prisons by mutual consent. Even when we had a lot more staff in prisons, we were still outnumbered. And so prisons have run by mutual consent. You need those people's skills. And generally speaking, younger adults haven't yet developed them. And then obviously, there's a big change when you go from being a prison officer to management and your priorities change. And how did your priorities change when you moved into that management role? Well, it used to be quite gradual. So you'd go from being a prison officer at band three. It is called now. It was just a prison officer when I joined. And then the next level of promotion was to senior officer. And the senior officers, to be honest, used to run the prison, if you had senior officers who switched on and knew the job, they banned the prison for you, really. And then you'd have the next rank up was principal officer, which is kind of a unit manager. So you'd have to be in charge of a wing or a department. And then after that rank, then you would be going out of uniform into senior management. And then you'd be a junior governor grade with higher benefit of hindsight. That system worked really well because you could cut your management teeth. As a senior officer, you were very much one of the staff, what you were directing them, you were supervising them, and you were making sure things happened and you were driving the regime. And you had a boss to support you. It was also in uniform, who had more experience and more knowledge and was ultimately all the responsibility for the unit that you were working on. Again, I don't know why now there was a rationale for it at the time, but they tried to do away with the senior officer rank. And so what that meant was there was a big jump then between frontline prison officer and their unit manager. The names have changed. So a principal officer is now called a custodial manager. But their responsibility is huge because they haven't got the buffer of first line managers and for senior officers, they haven't got that all. To be fair, actually, a lot of jails kept them. So a lot of jails do have senior officers, but in much smaller numbers than we used to have. And that's because some governors decided they were going to try and keep that rank. But from the center, the plan was to phase that rank out. So the progression is much more difficult. So you can now go from being a prison officer to being a band for senior officer as was within a couple of years. And then you can find yourself being a custodial manager or a unit manager within another couple of years. And then you're only an assessment away from being a senior leader and getting a governor grade position, which is incredibly fast, too fast, in fact. When I started in the prison service, you had to wait four years before you could even take the senior officers exam. You could be a custodial manager within four years, quite easily. If the spaces are there, and if you interview well, and it doesn't mean that you actually know what you're doing, it's a very difficult jump now from band three to band five. The custodial manager's job is a band five job. It's a big leap. Everyone knows it. And individual prisons try and support and train and develop staff who have to make that jump, but it's too big a jump really. I had the luxury of slow progression, if you like. I'm delighted to let you know that CrimeCon UK returns to London on the 21st and 22nd of September 2024. If you're not sure what it is, it's the world's leading true crime event and is partnered by True Crime, the expert led True Crime Channel. From fascinating sessions with some of the biggest names in True Crime, to spending time with your favourite podcasters, CrimeCon UK is an unforgettable way for you to really immerse yourself in the True Crime community. I will be there so I would love it if you would come and join me and you can quote prisons for a special 10% discount on your tickets. Information about guest speakers and content contributors are being released on the CrimeCon UK social channels, so keep your eyes peeled for more exciting announcements and I really hope to see you there in September. And do you think that when you become a manager your use change? Because I've had a number of prison officers who say to me, management only see me as a number rather than a human being and it contributes to me not being able to open up about how the job impats my mental health. I find it interesting because those managers were at one point prison officers too, so is there a change of mindset in your experience from going from a prison officer into the management team where you kind of can sometimes forget that the prison officers on the floor are humans and not just numbers to do the job? Yeah I think that's down to the individual to be honest, so if you have come from the ground floor you should never forget what that was like and you should always be empathic and have that in your mind. Putting yourself and other people's shoes, some people tend to forget after they've been in for a while and also middle managers are getting pressure from above, so they're not just having to try and manage and lead the staff that are working to them. They'll be getting pressure from above and also when you become a manager and ultimately hopefully a leader you do see things that you didn't know about when you were on the front line. It's not so much that you change but you were aware of more things, so your perspective changes and your views might change but you should never forget that you've got to take the people, the ground floor with you, you've got to be people at the front line and a lot of that is down to explaining to people. If people know why they're being asked to do something and they can see the merit in it or the reasons for it are explained to them, they're more likely to do it and meaningfully and well they'll be happy to do it if they know why they're doing it. It is supposed to be a discipline service and we do have a hierarchical system and you can be ordered to do something. If you're outranned by someone, any reasonable request from a manager should be considered a direct order. People don't say that so much now but it's still a fact. You can get in trouble for disobeying and instruction from someone who outranges you but that should be an absolute last resort. If you get to that point you should be in a position where you've tried everything else and you've got to the point where this needs to happen and needs to happen now so you're just going to have to do it. We can talk about it later, you can complain about it later if you're not happy but right now you just need to do it. That should be very rare that situation because if you're reading people and they know why they're being asked to do what you're asking them to do, most staff will do it happily. You just need to understand why they're being asked. That kind of information would often come from colleagues, people who have more experience so you wouldn't get staff feeling the need to question managers because someone would have explained it to them. What we have now is a situation where there's so many staff who joined relatively recently, it's been the past few years and certainly since COVID. You can level of experience, the average level of experience is much lower. Roughly half the staff in the prison service have got less than two years in and if you think about that there's some who've only got three years in. It's still not a lot and you can be easily on a unit where if the shift pattern falls the wrong way, you could in theory have nine months in the job and find yourself the most senior person on the unit. Obviously that's extreme but there are anecdotally, I've encountered that or you get someone who's got a couple of years in and they've got promoted to band four SO and they're still there in the job but they're in charge. It's very difficult. It's not the fault of the staff. The staff are not at fault. They're not given the tools for the training or the time to learn how to be a prison officer properly. And have things changed. Obviously when COVID happened, prisons changed dramatically where everything was locked down and the regime was completely different and has it gone back to normal since and if it hasn't, are these staff then not actually aware of how a prison should operate? Yeah, there are some prisons very few. There are some prisons that have managed to get back to some kind of what we would have considered normal regime before COVID. The vast majority of prisons haven't. What I mean by that is they won't be putting on a full regime simply because they haven't got the staff to do it. So given that we've got staff who joined in 2020 when COVID really hit and we're having all the lockdowns and prisons were actually well placed to deal with COVID because we literally lock people up. So isolation wasn't a choice. Prisoners were isolated from each other and from the staff by and large. But what that meant was after years of opening prisons up and getting prisoners out all day. I remember saying to people 23-hour bang up as people talk about it. 23 hours being locked behind your door. It's a myth. It doesn't exist. The only people who are locked in their cells all day are the ones who choose to be because there's education, there's work, there's all kinds of interventions and activities they can get involved in. And when COVID hit, we basically wound the clock back about 10 years and we've never really come out of it. So what you will get is a member of staff who joined in 2020. They've now got four years in. They've never experienced what we used to call a full unlock where every prisoner is unlocked to go somewhere or to do something or we'd have domestic periods or what they used to call association periods where a whole wing would be unlocked to do what they needed to do. You know, their admin, get a shower, housekeeping, go and see them eat, whatever it might be. I mean, there's obviously illicit activity happened during those social periods as well. But the point is the whole unit would be unlocked. Now, in big prisons, you might have maybe eight or nine staff unlocking 150 prisoners. That was the norm and because of relations between staff and prisoners and because they were stable and controlled and prisoners weren't as frustrated because they were occupied all day, it was a safe environment. It was actually safe to do that by and large. You didn't get the incidents that you might think would happen in a big prison or on a big residential unit. But now we've got staff, a lot of staff who have never seen that and just talking about it, you can see it scares them the prospect that they might be asked to do that again. Now, it's not happening in the most jails. Most prisons have got a restricted regime of some sort. So they put on what they can, depending on the numbers of staff they've got. It's a formulaic thing. It's just numbers. If you haven't got the staff, you can do it. If you have, you can. But the prospect of unlocking a whole wing that they might have worked on for three or four years, that gives them some anxiety. And you can see why because they've never experienced decent, stable, controlled circumstances with all the prisoners unlocked. Yeah, of course. And especially if they're in the job four years, they think they know it. And then to do a job that is completely different to how they know it. That must be quite scary. And you finished up your career as a deputy prison governor. So what did your day to day look like? And how did your rule differ from the governor? Right. Well, traditionally, the deputy governor should look after the operational side of the prison pretty much, the general split. Ideally, you should be different people. So a bit of a year and a young thing going on with the governor being the face of the prison, the head of the prison, the one who carries the responsibility for the entire prison. But they, for free to do strategic thinking and be visible and know what's going on in their prison and be finding ways to improve it wherever possible. And the deputy governor's role traditionally is to be a bit of a firefighter, a buffer, if you like, a buffer between what's going on day to day. And that what's going on interfering with what the governor would like to do or should be doing. Obviously, the need to be in the loop to communication between the deaf and the number one need needs to be very, very good. So they need to know what's going on, but they don't necessarily have to deal with it. And that's very much what the deputy governor's job should be. Okay. And in your experience throughout your whole career and being a deputy governor, did you often see prisoners who you felt should never have been in prison? I didn't have to be deaf enough to say that. If you're out and about and prisoners are out of their cells, you know, they will speak to you. You know, it's not like you got some kind of some bubble. And you do need to be out and about, you do need to be visible. But the business of people being in prison who shouldn't be there. Yeah, many times, not necessarily wrongly convicted, but you know that we all know that can happen. It's usually quite high profile when it comes to light. But people and you think you didn't need to come in the first place, but for circumstances in your life, choices you made, company you kept, you didn't need to come to prison. A lot of people, meet a lot of people in prison. And it was the last place they thought they'd end up. So you've got everyone from, you've got everyone from someone who's father, uncles, brothers are all in and out of prison. And it's a bit of a family business. You can see that they were almost always going to end up in prison because it's the culture they've grown up in. But the opposite end of the spectrum, you get people who have made an error of judgment. And the last thing they expected to happen was for them to come to prison. Well, that's been the ultimate sanction when things have gone wrong for them. Just off the top of me heard, there's a lot of people who were in for car crime. I want to say car crime. I mean, you get done for drink driving. If you then get caught driving well banned, the courts see that take pretty dim view of that. You're almost definitely going to get a short sentence of custodial. Breaching court orders as well, not paying your VAT as people in prison for that, never expected to be given a custodial. But of course, you're defrauding the HMRC. It's seriously, it's the crown. And then you've got people who got into an altercation in what should have been a social situation, got into a fight, hurt someone, didn't really mean to. But the consequence of that has been then being jailed for GBH or wherever it might be. So yeah, you'd meet a lot of people and think, you know, you've got four different choices. You, you wouldn't have ended up here. And also, you meet an awful lot of people who, once they've been to prison once, they don't need to come back with the right support, the right things in place. They don't need to come back to prison. But of course, so often they do, they revolve and door. People coming in on short sentences who've got their low risk, but their high need. So they don't take any of the boxes that actually get resource and support. It's better now than it used to be. There's a lot of outside agencies who support people leaving prison. But you do see a lot of people coming in out of prison and it becomes almost habitual and they don't need to. Yeah. And the people who never thought they would end up in prison, do you find that they struggle more with the sentence than people who maybe had their families go to prison? Or have you found people react very differently regard the support their back room once? It's only individual. Some people are naturally resilient. Some people have the wherewithal to deal with most crises in the lives. Certainly, for some people going to prison is an occupational hazard. It's just one of those things. You know, it's something that they're familiar with through friends and relatives. Staff, again, are normally very good at spotting anyone who might be vulnerable, vulnerable with a small V. So when you come into reception from court, it is a bit like a hotel. The system doesn't look like a hotel, but you come into reception and you're processed and you're normally placed on the first night center before you move into the rest of the jail just to give you a chance to acclimatize. But the staff during that process are normally very good at spotting people who will struggle and then they will get different kind of attention. They won't necessarily get wrapped in cotton wool, but the staff will spot them. The experienced staff will. When you say they'll get a little bit of different attention, are they given more support? I don't want to talk about this because of the code spectacles, because there is a difference between the way inexperienced staff deal with prisoners and experienced staff do. So the ideal situation would be the staff are experienced enough to have seen this before countless times and they know what might be needed. They call it jail craft. So they started the conversation. They'll talk to the person. It was obviously not doing very well and go from there. They're also peer support workers. So prisoners who have spent time in prison, they were trusted and they can often support people who are new in prison sometimes, sometimes better than the staff, because A, they've got the time and B, they're speaking on the same level, they're not a position of authority. So someone who's worried this might be more likely to open up about their issues and problems to another prisoner than they are to a member of staff. But having said that, you get staff who are kind of like surrogates at uncles and aunties almost. It's a relationship with boundaries and respect, but quite often they first, quite often you'll find, certainly with the younger prisoners, the first kind of positive role model where the male or female that they've come across might be one of their land and staff, not as common as it used to be for the reasons we've already talked about, but that's the ideal situation. And you only left the service this year and how has that transition been for you because you obviously worked in the service for a very long time and how does it feel being out in society away from that world? Do you feel like you've almost become institutionalised by your career? Do you notice that you're different than you used to be before you joined service? I like to think I'm not different, I like to think I'm the same person I was before, but with a job like that, whether you're a prison officer or an OSG or even a civilian worker, like a teacher or medical staff, whoever it might be, you have to have your game face on and work and the more responsibility you've got, the tougher that game face needs to be. So you don't necessarily show people what you're thinking or feeling, and to that extent, you can't help it, you do become institutionalised, probably with a small I. It's not comparing it to being locked up in a cell for months or years, there's no comparison, but you definitely do. You develop a kind of shield or a buffer, certainly while you're working, which people can let go when they walk out, when they finish the shift and they go home, you know, it's almost like you develop two personas almost, but for me the most difficult thing when I left really was just getting used to the fact that I was back in normal world permanently and it makes you reflect and you do, I certainly talk into other people, you know, when you start talking about things and when you say them out loud, you do start to think to yourself, how did I work in that environment for as long as I did, which is quite sad. For the vast majority of my career, I've enjoyed what I've done, really enjoyed it, you know, it's a bit of a roller coaster, the highs, there can be quite some serious quite lows in the job, because you're dealing with people, challenging people, they've got problems and troubles, and you've got a huge staffing group as well, but you also have some real highs, you have some real wins, so that's what I hang on to. And to be honest, not being in work and not having work be all-consuming, because you never really off the clock, certainly once you've become a senior manager, it's very hard for it not to follow your home or certainly occupy space in your head, and if you're a conscientious officer, that will happen as well, you'll think about work when you're not there, but having space and time has been useful, and I haven't disengaged from prisons as it happens, well, I'm speaking to you, but I'm volunteering for organizations that either I've known or I've cross-passed with before, because I did a lot of seductionary offending work, I've been a head of seductionary offending at three different prisons, you never lose those contacts, and they all know how to get in touch with me, so I'm still having those conversations with people, I'm still trying to help from the outside, if you like, but it's definitely, it's different now, now I'm not on the clock, it's on my terms, I'm doing things that I'd like to do with people I like to work with, they just happen to be connected to the justice system, whether it's divert and people from going to prison in the first place, or helping them once they get released, so hopefully they don't go back again. So yeah, it's been quite an adjustment. I bet, I remember you've seen to me before that you struggled to put your phone away and not think anybody would get in touch with you, because when you were a deputy governor, anybody could phone you at any time and you told me that was a struggle for you. Yeah, just switching it off, well, not switching the switch in the ring, I put it on silent. Yeah, did you say for 10 years, you didn't? Yeah, it's probably over a decade, yeah, yeah, because if it wasn't work, it was partner agencies or other people, and certainly as deputy governor, if your phone rings and it's prison, you've got to have a pretty good reason for not answering it, because if you don't, then it'll get escalated, and that's not good. You'd do that buffer, so things like sleeping in, I always used to wake up before my alarm, which was five o'clock in the morning in latter years. Yeah, yeah, I actually, I don't know if we talked about this, but a few weeks ago, where I had to be somewhere for 11 o'clock, and I thought need to get ready about 9 o'clock, you know, you're doing mental arithmetic with the time and having been used to still waking up between five and six in the morning regardless, I thought I'll be awake by then, and I woke up at 20 to 10, which was both a bit stressful, because then I was in a hurry, I had to rush, but I was also really pleased that basically my body had allowed me to just sleep. I can't remember the last time I slept in. Yeah, I'd say for me personally, I've benefited from leaving in a number of ways. Yeah, I bet. What would you say is one of the biggest lessons that you've learned from working in the prison service for the last almost or just a few years under 30 years in anything? What's it taught you about life or just one lesson? You never know the whole story. So you'll see something, you'll witness something, you'll see CCTV footage, you'll encounter a situation and you'll start to assess what's going on. The worst thing you can do is make snap decisions. If you've got the luxury, you don't need a snap decision making. You've got the luxury of being able to just buy the time and do a bit of digging and inquiring. The things are never as they first seem. I like that. And final question, what is one thing that you hope to see changing in the prison space that will improve prisons and make our society safer and more flourishing? I've only got one. Well, I mean, up to you. If you have a few, feel free to hit me with them. The recruitment process has got to be changed. And although normally continuous improvements and all the rest of it changes good, all these cliches, we need to go back to the way we used to recruit staff, but by and large. Maybe with a few tweaks and a few changes, we need to up the age limit, I'd say it's 25 and just change the way we recruit because it's not fair to the people that we are recruiting and putting on the landings. And it's not fair to the staff who were having to help them and mentor them and develop them. They're getting tired and burnt out. The population, prisons are full. That's the bottom line. Numbers are bandied about about, you know, we only have a few hundred spaces left. Prisons have been full since before Christmas. And a prison runs best when it's no more full than about 80%. Because then you've got, you've literally got space, time to think, to breathe, to move people around. So the whole early release of prisoners, it's not a good thing. It's very contentious and it makes the public nervous, but we haven't got any choice. We need to make space in prisons. And there are people in prisons who probably don't need to be there. So that's got to be done carefully, but that's a necessary evil at the minute. But that will only get us so far because we're within a few months. Because we've done this before. We've released prisoners early before, early custody license, I think it was called. They got released 18 days early. It's not new to us. If they're not given the right support on release, these people releasing early will soon start to come back to us. They'll be recalled on license or they'll commit another crime, a low level crime, which we'll see them put back in prison again. The population situation's got to be fixed, but not by building new prisons. Yes, we need new prisons. So the old ones can be bulldozed. And yes, we need better designed prisons because some of the new prisons that have been built recently, they still haven't been thought through the danger of just becoming warehouses for people. What has happened in recent years is new prisons have been built. And then because of budget constraints and budget cuts, things have been taken out of the design. And then things have to be fixed retrospectively. People who work in the prison service will know exactly what I'm talking about and which prisons I'm talking about. There's a department which looks after prison capacity, the new prisons capacity team. I think the court and I worked with them a little bit for a brief period at headquarters. So there are people who, the hearts in the right place, and they want to build the right kind of new prison, but budget constraints can scupper plans. So you can have the best possible design, but if it's not adhered to and cut to made, you can end up with a substandard product again. Smaller prisons work better than bigger ones. That is just fact statistical and scientific fact. Smaller prisons work better than bigger ones, but they're more expensive to run. It's cheaper to 6,000 people than a brand new big building than it is to build four or five smaller prisons, but smaller prisons work better. The bottom line is this obsession with asking for more with less, asking more of prisons and all of the public sector actually asking all the public sector to do more with less. They may have been arguably overstaffed at some point in the distant past, but they're certainly not now. So we need to spend to save, and that's going to be tricky. That is going to be tricky because that means taxation, that means borrowing, but people, the government need to be brave enough to realize that if they spend money now, they'll save it down the line. But the majority they've got, they could be in for two or three terms by which time things will have started to flourish, things will have started to turn around. Prisons are not a vote winner because most of the stuff happens behind the door, so the general public only hear about things when people escape or something bad happens or someone climbs on a roof, and so it hasn't been given the attention it should because it's not something that the general public get as a rule. But people have got to remember that today's prisoner is tomorrow's neighbor. The vast majority of prisoners have got a release date. It might be 30 years from now, but the vast majority of people are getting out at some point, and if they come back to communities unchanged or worse than they actually went in, that's just going to create more dangerous communities, more victims. You can do more harm, and we've got to copy the other the scandy region countries. We need to learn from their example. They've got fewer people in prison and smaller prisons and their societies have not become more dangerous because they've pumped in the money at the start. It's all very well pulling people out the river and sending them off to jail in massive numbers. But at some point, you've got to walk upstream and find out why they've fallen in the river in the first place. That's the point to stop them. There's a little bit about sentence and this whole business of tough on crime and the causes of crime and all these cliches that politicians like to use nonsense. Prison doesn't work. Short sentences definitely do not work. We shouldn't be sending anyone to prison for less than a year because we need time to do something with them. So once we've fixed all the staff initiatives, the recruitment and training issues and the population issues, then we can actually start fixing people because there'll be the people who need to be in prison and we'll have the wherewithal to fix them. And KSDAM is quite right. This is not going to happen anytime soon, but we've got to start going down this road because if we don't, the consequences will be visited on our communities. And we do pee. I totally agree with you. I wish we'd pump more money into it now because people pee at some point, whether if we don't spend money on it now, we spend money later because you train staff, they leave because for whatever reason, they leave within six months or a year. And then these people, they're in prison, they come out of prison, they reoffend. So then we've got the police fees, the CPS fees, we've got all the fees to then get them back into prison. Whereas if we actually spent more of the money at the start, I completely agree that over time, I truly believe that we will spend less and we'll have less crime. You've only got a look at the short sentence cohort. They revolve and door people. The ones who are low risk and high need, there's different stats on this, but it's somewhere roughly in between 15 billion and 20 billion pounds. That's what they cost the country. This is a stat that I was given recently, which actually even surprised me. It costs us 45 grand on average to keep someone in prison for a year. It would be cheaper to send them to eating. That's outrageous that it's not got people's attention. It's not got politicians' attention, because we are literally wasting lots and lots of money. And that's the start. The 45 grand a year is just to keep them in prison. As you say, you've got the police time detecting, arresting, getting them into court, the court time, the barristers, social workers, probably probation staff. I mean, there's so much involved in just getting someone into prison in the first place. Let's lock up the people who need to be locked up and the ones who don't need to come to prison. Let's help them stay out. Yeah, wholeheartedly agree. Thank you so much, Andy. I'm so grateful to you for coming on and sharing your time. As you say, you've left the service and you said this is your first podcast, which it's been an absolute pleasure to be able to have you on and for you to share your wisdom. So thank you. Well, thank you. I really hope you enjoyed this conversation. If you want to listen to monthly bonus episodes, you can subscribe for only three pounds per month by hitting the link in the show notes. And I'd be so grateful if you'd quickly rate the podcast on whatever platform you listen. It only takes a second and it helps more people to discover the show. [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]
