Can a Prison be a Prison and still be Open?

I think a lot of points are being missed about the fires and disorder at Ford Open Prison over the 'New Year' holiday. First, there's an attempt to put all the blame on the shoulders of the already doomed minister Crispin Blunt. What does it matter that Mr Blunt was at a champagne party when the trouble started? If he had lingered there once he had been told, that would obviously count against him. But I have seen no report that he did so.

I have no brief for Mr Blunt, who seems to me (despite an honourable past in the Army) to have swallowed whole the left-wing ideology of the modern age. But I sense that he's being leaked against so as to isolate the government as a whole from direct blame for this ridiculous event, and to end controversy and recrimination with his eventual sacking. He's already a dead man on leave, having damaged himself by taking a public position on prison regimes which embarrassed David Cameron.

This wasn't because Mr Cameron privately disagreed with Mr Blunt on the issue (which I think was about prisoners being able to hold parties inside). It was because Mr Blunt expressed his real views in public and stuck to them - something Mr Cameron is unlikely to do if it looks as if it will hurt him in the polls.

I am sure Mr Cameron, Harold Macmillan reincarnated, only soppier, is privately quite happy for our prisons to have very soft regimes. Like most elite liberals, he probably feels guilty about incarcerating anybody at all. His moral system doesn't provide him with a justification for punishment. His comfortable life has never acquainted him with the awful plight of the honest, decent poor, left undefended against predatory and dishonest neighbours by the policies of rich, aloof wet leftists like himself.

He sees a prison and thinks 'there but for fortune go you or I' - when in fact (though fortune can certainly play a minor part on some occasions) most prisoners in free countries have gone to jail through their own deliberate and conscious choice to break - not once but many times - the known laws of their society.

This is about the fundamental political philosophy which directs our country, Fabian Social Democracy allied with a post-Christian general compassion which does not discriminate between deliberate wrongdoers and others, since it has no real belief in absolute right or wrong (see elsewhere), and attributes human failings entirely to social conditions, and mainly to material social conditions at that - being unable (for instance) to distinguish between moral and material poverty.

Ford (which, in a melancholy touch occupies the site of a former Royal Naval Air Service station) only exists because of the adoption of Social Democratic penal policies by our major parties over the past half-century.

It is completely based upon the idea of 'rehabilitation', a concept for whose existence in practice there is no objective proof whatsoever. In fact, it has generally been used until recently to house prisoners convicted for non-violent offences and white-collar crime, who can be expected to see the sense of behaving well in return for relaxed conditions and lots of days out, interspersed with monthly five-day passes and ending in full-time employment outside the prison. If you select candidates for these privileges carefully enough, it might even look like that elusive thing, evidence for rehabilitation.

Plainly Ford is ill-adapted for the more usual type of prisoner, ill-educated failures accustomed to violence and unused to long-term calculations about the future or even the present, and of course for the myriad drug abusers who now (for reasons which baffle the druggie lobby, but which don't baffle me) have such a high representation in the prison system. They can pretty much be relied upon to be irrational in any matter beyond their immediate desires and needs. But thanks to the failure of our penal policy to contain crime, and despite almost superhuman efforts to let as many people out of prison (or let them off prison altogether) as possible, Ford is now said by the Prison Officers' Association to be housing many inmates who really aren't suited to its regime.

That's why I'm also unmoved by suggestions that it was foolish of the tiny number of officers present at Ford on the night of the disaster to have attempted to breathalyse the prisoners they thought had been drinking. I wasn't there. I don't know, but I suspect that they can have had no idea (thanks to long experience of handling prisoners who wanted a soft life) what was about to happen. It is hindsight to say otherwise.

What is not hindsight is for me to say that the real problems of the British prison system - that the jails are largely under the control of the inmates and that they are full of drugs (and other contraband) which the authorities do little to control, have many times been stated by me. And that these events show this to be true. And it is this feebleness, combined with many other weaknesses in our criminal justice system, which encourages those who might otherwise turn away from crime to commit it. And that it is this that leads to the steady increase in crime, despite statistical attempts to conceal this, and the resulting inability of our prisons and our courts to cope. A proper penal system is about crime prevention. That must be based upon several things- first of all we need to ensure that children are properly brought up under the authority of parents, teachers and other significant adults. The reconstruction of the married family and the reordering of our schools can achieve this.

Then there must be genuine fear, for those who knowingly breach the established rules of society, that the consequences for them will be unpleasant. That means all prisons must be grim - not because they are run by inmates imposing their own twisted code, but because they are run by authorities who believe in right and wrong, and are morally ready to punish wickedness with austerity, discomfort, a measure of humiliation and a lot of hard work.

And this fear must be reinforced by the visible presence of a preventive police force, not paid to chase after crime once it has happened, but paid to prevent it before it happens, by walking the streets on foot.

It's simple. It would work, and it won't be tried until we replace the existing political parties.

The tiny staffing levels, especially at night, the attempts to avoid disorder by providing plentiful facilities for relaxation and distraction - from TV sets and pool tables to semi-licit drugs and legal methadone - the social worker approach in which officers of the Crown are compelled to show 'respect' to convicted criminals, the utter abandonment of concepts of punishment and discipline, the underlying assumption that crime is a disease of capitalist society rather than the product of fearless human evil, all led directly to this.

It is not much use now to get into a state about the prevalence of drugs and drink, the easy conditions, the women being smuggled in. These things are well-known to the authorities (and to me, because I have been paying attention) and have been for years. Nobody in the Prison Service will be even slightly surprised by what has happened at Ford. These conditions will not, for the most part, be altered by this event (though there will be some minor and short-lived cosmetic changes after the inevitable inquiry). They are the consequence of the most settled and most unalterable beliefs of the people who have been misgoverning this country for half a century.

Nothing short of profound political change at the very top will set these things right.

That is why the Tory Party must split and collapse, and be replaced by a genuinely conservative formation. And this is an outcome which I now think is becoming a possibility again, as the Parliamentary Conservative Party experiences in detail what it is like to live under the leadership of the ruthless liberal despotism of the Cameroon machine. They certainly believe in punishment and discipline when anyone thwarts their will, as dissenting MPs are finding. The complaints from Mark Pritchard at the weekend come from a very deep place in the Tory Party, and they are not to be dismissed.

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