Ed Cooley is back in prison for the fifth time. We served together in HMP Spring Hill, after I was given a five-year sentence for tax fraud and he was convicted of drug dealing.
Since then, he has been released on licence and recalled to jail repeatedly. Ed is caught on the hamster wheel of justice, which goes round and round endlessly, always dumping him back in the same place.
I’m not suggesting you’d feel much personal sympathy for him. He was originally given a sentence of ten years and eight months for drugs and firearms offences back in 2014, and released in 2018.
But here’s the thing: each time he is sent back to prison, it’s not because he has been tried and convicted of any new crime. As he was out on licence, he could be recalled merely on a suspicion – regarded as guilty until the system decides he’s actually innocent.
That is the antithesis of everything British justice is meant to represent, and inspired me to write a new book about our collapsing justice system: Time After Time. Such injustices are common, and are at the root of the crisis in our prisons, with every jail overflowing and no space for new offenders.
Tony Blair speaks onstage during the 2023 Concordia Annual Summit at Sheraton New York on September 19
The overcrowding is so severe that Justice Secretary Alex Chalk yesterday told the Commons a programme of reform is essential in order to create space for the most violent and dangerous prisoners.
Community work projects for non-violent criminals, including tree-planting, neighbourhood clear-ups and graffiti-removal, is one of the suggested options.
So are prefab cells or ‘pop-up jails’, the deportation of foreign criminals, early-release schemes, and sending our own prisoners overseas, to facilities in Estonia for example.
But we can’t fix the problem until we understand where it started. The chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, Mark Fairhurst, said this week: ‘There’s no room left at the inn. We find ourselves, after 13 years of Tory rule, with no space at all.’
In seeking to make political capital out of the overcrowding crisis, he is blaming the wrong administration. While the Tories have slashed prison budgets, the fault lies squarely with Tony Blair, whose New Labour mantra, ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, is at the root of these overflowing prisons.
In 2007, almost a decade before I was prosecuted for tax fraud within the film industry, I made a documentary called Taking Liberties. It criticised Blair for dramatically increasing the number of offences for which people could be sent to jail and also for increasing the length of sentences.
This almost doubled the prison population during the Blair years. And though I make no excuses over my own guilt, there was an inescapable irony in the fact that I became a victim of the very thing I’d warned about in my film.
From my own bitter experience, I know that the great majority of people within the prison system are not monstrous criminals guilty of inhuman offences. No one disputes that murderers, rapists and terrorists have to be locked up in conditions of maximum security for the public’s safety.
But most of the inmates I met during my first nine months in Wandsworth were prolific and persistent offenders with dozens of petty crimes to their name, and prison was an accepted part of that life.
It wasn’t unusual to see a man released on a Friday and readmitted the following Monday. The criminal life, whether that was burglary or shoplifting, was all he knew, and prison was a guarantee of free food and a bed.
It wasn’t a deterrent, it wasn’t a punishment, and it certainly wasn’t an opportunity for rehabilitation. None of these men thought about escaping. Why would they, when the only thing certain in their lives was a return to jail?
Many prisoners are also held back by being detained in category B jails such as Wandsworth, which are designed for newly convicted felons awaiting transfer to a low-security jail and men found guilty of relatively heavy-duty crimes such as GBH or armed robbery.
British Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary Alex Chalk gestures as he speaks on stage at Britain’s Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester
But many offenders would be better off in an open prison where their behaviour would pose no risk to fellow inmates or staff and where they would have a chance of making a genuine fresh start.
In open prisons, offenders can begin to integrate with society, and even apply for work schemes.
Companies such as Timpson and McDonald’s have programmes for ex-prisoners and for many it’s the first time they’ve had an actual job, with a bank account and a bit of self-respect. That can be transformative – and, with the desperate labour shortages – it has real benefits for everyone, as prisoners released into a job are far less likely to reoffend.
But for that to happen effectively, the whole administrative system of our prisons must be overhauled. At the moment, it is stuck in the 20th century, much of it in the pre-computer era.
Far from using digital databases, British jails often rely on handwritten documents and forms filled out in triplicate. This makes communication slow and inefficient, and leads to constant mistakes.
I know of one man who was sentenced to nine years and released after only two months… because someone had mis-read the tariff as ‘nine weeks’. And in my own case, despite being very much a white-collar criminal, I was held for nine months in Wandsworth before being transferred to an open prison, in part due to delays in my paperwork being processed.
Wandsworth is dysfunctional and falling apart and has recently been condemned by the Chief Inspector of Prisons.
Yet I often heard foreign inmates, particularly Ukrainians and Romanians, say how luxurious it was compared to jails in their own country, where felons can be packed into cells by the dozen without even a toilet. Unsurprisingly, those East European prisoners were anxious not to be deported. They protested that they faced discrimination and violence in their home countries, and in some cases this was true – but in others it was an obvious ruse.
Their presence here is one of many causes of chronic over-crowding. But it’s no solution to suggest British prisoners can be sent to Eastern European prisons, as proposed this week. Lawyers specialising in challenges to the legal system will be licking their lips at the prospect.
The most obvious objection, and a probably insuperable hurdle, is that transfers overseas would deny prisoners their right to family visits.
But the biggest problem is personified by Ed Cooley, convicted of drug and firearms offences in 2014 and trapped in the system ever since.
He’s currently back in jail for breaching his licence after being accused of a fracas outside a pub. But with no reliable witnesses, the police have admitted he won’t be prosecuted.
Instead, the charges have been dropped. But he’s still been unfairly imprisoned for over a year waiting for a decision.
He’ll be released after several months and could well be accused of another infraction, only to get locked up again. There are thousands like him who can’t break free, because the odds are stacked so high.
On parole, certain offenders have to live in bail hostels – but the curfews are strict, and because of their backgrounds some of these men have terrible timekeeping. It is entirely possible for a man to be sent to jail because he came back late from the cinema, after the movie over-ran.
Or he might be still in prison, eligible for parole but unable to leave because the bail hostels are also overcrowded and there are no spaces.
That’s what we have to fix. Modernising prisons and the wider criminal justice system, with a common-sense approach to non-violent crimes, would go a long way to undoing Tony Blair’s grim legacy of injustice.
Time After Time: Repeat Offenders – The Inside Stories, by Chris Atkins, is published by Atlantic Books.
