The considerate and insightful The Secret Life of Prisons is a rather decent podcast to hearing the voices that have experienced an institution many of us never visit, never consider or even care about: prison.

It produces good and thoughtful podcasts in and around the world of prisons, inmates, staff, justice, education, rehab and more; in (pretty much) its final 2023 episode it brings listeners The Longford Trust’s 2023 lecture, from November 2023, with a little bit of interesting content around it.

Entitled Rhetoric vs. Reality, this Longford lecture was by Rory Stewart (ex-Prisons’ Minister, but one who made decent efforts and showed how different, more sensible and direct, approaches were needed to sorting out the UK’s prison mess).

Mr. Stewart framed his (about half an hour) talk in a way that clarified and shone a light on a decrepit prison system and its associated politics and attitudes; its themes, as partially alluded to and that I thought were also relevant to many other systems, processes, organisations and institutions were relevant in highlighting today’s seeming need to always measure and show progress by being managerial and careerist, as if real, genuine and pertinent and helpful advances can come through and from an attitude of essentially ticking an inevitably made-up list of boxes, having appropriate soundbites and ideas, not much actual skill or talent in making things (other people do that, don't they?) to seem professional, competent and effective all while taking home of often unjustified wage.

Anyway, rant over.

Do make the effort to listen to the lecture and if possible the effort of listening in to The Secret Life of Prisons podcast to open your mind to a wider set of opinions and perspectives and, hopefully, it’ll complement existing proof that many of these things are actually quite simple, once you break down (and remove) all the (pointless and) self-justifying roles, hierarchies, systems, organisations and companies that seem to be predominately led by the market, its attitudes and financial (gambling and) profiteering.

Common sense is simple and often the correct thing to follow. Trouble is, the market can’t make money out of that, nor certain roles and jobs.

Here’s a quote (transcribed as best I could) from the beginnings of Rory Stewart’s lecture that may help convince:

[…] I am really here not trying to pose as an expert on prisons in any way, but merely to talk as somebody who was a working politician [Prisons’ Minister for 16 months].

And I’m here really to talk briefly and maybe take some questions about the relationship between democratic politics – the way in which politics works – and the problems with reforming prisons.

And, in particular, I want to try to explain why, the nature of democratic politics today – democratic politics in decay, democratic politics in an age of populism – is particularly ill-suited to address the problems in prisons; why in fact we face a form of perfect storm.

In order to explain these ideas I’m going to move relatively rapidly through a series of observations about what I think politics is, how it’s gone wrong and why that makes prisons, in particular, something extremely difficult for Parliament to fix.

So, in terms of framing the way in which I think our politics has moved, I think it’s characterised by three main moments: I think we live in an age of surreal detachment, we live in an age where politics floats free of reality, in a very unusual way; we live in an age of panaceas, so, we live in an age in which we want to believe that problems have quick, immediate solutions and we live in an age of institutional sclerosis, that’s my pompous way of saying, we live in an age in which our institutions, of all sorts, Parliament, Government, the civil service, universities, the media are in different forms of decay and rigidity.

And these problems, when combined, with prisons, become particularly unpleasant and difficult and let me try to explain why.

Rory Stewart Rhetoric vs. Reality

Thoughts

Prison needs sorting in the UK, especially our attitudes and approaches to them as well, alongside better justice and rehabilitation and, like is explained and was sort of managed somewhat by Mr. Stewart when Prisons’ Minister, real, meaningful change can be possible and that his (brief) work proved that less and better focused efforts make real differences.

Much like the conversations and efforts happening in and around the many organisations and good people at the prison coal face, like The Longford Trust, National Prison Radio, The Secret Life of Prisons, the Prison Reform Trust and many more.

Deeper problems exist (and are the things to be solved even if they take longer than an electoral term) in a society if the (politicians and citizens) answer(s) are to always (somewhat mistreat and mis-)use legislation and justice to just send people to prison, regardless of the weight of what crime they have committed, with nearly no recourse to legitimate learning, growth and change nor genuine systemic renewal to counter the near endless political refrain, ‘It's the individual's fault’ without ever examining (and changing) wider, attitudinal fault lines.

Ruts get made and difficulties perpetuate from that kind of approach – adding sticker plaster solutions to sticking plaster solutions – proving, yet again, that actually, to achieve meaningful, sensible and long-term change, less is more.