'Ashamed': Former Scottish prison governor speaks out on grim conditions

It might reasonably have been called “J’accuse”. It convicts those of us who fancy ourselves liberal, progressive and enlightened for historic and continuing crimes against our fellow human beings.

It’s the work of Professor Andrew Coyle, who was prison governor of Greenock, Peterhead and Shotts before moving south to take charge at the notorious Brixton Prison. His career in Scotland was characterised by a desire to run prisons with humanity. This was based on an understanding that what had brought most of the inmates to these places was the failure of society to address issues of severe psychological trauma arising from lives spent in persistent deprivation. HM Chief Inspector of Prisons lavished praise on him for accomplishing “a remarkable transformation” at Brixton.

He has since become one of the world’s leading authorities on penal reform and criminal justice with a plethora of awards and distinctions throughout the globe that testify to his influence. He has visited and reported on prisons in 70 countries where his counsel is sought as an authority and an advocate of prison reform.

We meet not far from the Scottish Parliament in the shadow of St Giles Cathedral. Outside are the wizened cobblestones that once bore the feet of spectators hurrying to public executions on the Grassmarket. Scotland doesn’t execute its miscreants now, but in many other respects life for its prisoners hasn’t much changed since the days when we hung them as a public spectacle.

He is the epitome of the reticent academic, preferring to let his work speak for itself and happy to be known for it by the people who matter in the field of prison reform. He wears his intellect and achievements lightly. Not for him the well-travelled route by which some health and education gurus seek fleeting celebrity.

Coyle might have chosen to open our conversation with some well-polished reminiscence about getting prisoners off the roof at Peterhead or discussing theology with Mehmet Ali Aja, would-be assassin of Pope John Paul. Instead, he relates a story that caused him to question his own judgment.

It’s about ‘Donald’, a prisoner he encountered at Peterhead. It came to pass that Donald, on finishing his sentence, had made a special request for a travel warrant to take him to London, rather that somewhere local. “I was happy to grant it, though with some reservations.

“A few years later, on my first day as governor at Brixton, I was being given a guided tour as curious prisoners looked down from the cell-blocks at the new boss. Suddenly, a Scottish voice rang out. ‘Haw; Mr Coyle. How are you?’ It was, of course, Donald. He was inside once more on a three-year stint for shop-lifting. He chided me gently. ‘You probably thought you’d seen the last of me.’ For Donald, no matter where he was in the UK, prison was his only home.”

It’s a funny story and it’s told with a twinkle but Coyle isn’t really laughing. He talks about how solitary confinement remains a tool of the prison sector in 21st century Scotland. One high-profile Scottish prisoner has lived like this for years since he was first imprisoned. “They move him from prison to prison every six months, saying that they’re still trying to work out a plan for him. It’s actually a form of torture.”

This is what Charles Dickens wrote about a prisoner at Newgate Prison in 1836: “The girl belonged to a class – unhappily but too extensive – the very existence of which, should make men’s hearts bleed. Barely past her childhood, it required but a glance to discover that she was one of those children, born and bred in neglect and vice, who have never known what childhood is … Talk to THEM of parental solicitude, the happy days of childhood, and the merry games of infancy! Tell them of hunger and the streets, beggary and stripes, the gin-shop, the station-house, and the pawnbroker’s, and they will understand you.”

Professor Coyle says that since then conditions in some prisons and society’s attitudes to prisoners has hardly changed. He suggests that were Dickens to visit Pentonville prison today, a place which he described in withering terms in 1850, he would have been equally repulsed. “In 2015, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales said that he had found prisoners in Pentonville being held in appalling conditions. They were ‘located in filthy cells with no eating utensils, toiletries or adequate bedding… many men shared very small and cramped cells designed for one’.

“In almost every other area of our existence we have evolved better and more humanitarian ways of dealing with the problems of life,” Professor Coyle says. “But the way in which we treat those who have stepped outside the law – even when they pose no serious threat to society – remains in the Victorian era. Prisons have become a convenient and simplistic device for dealing with the complexities of human failure.”

In Scotland where we fancy ourselves to be a little more progressive; a little more enlightened about these things the same attitudes prevail. Prior to the 2014 independence referendum there was a campaign to permit prisoners to vote in a plebiscite that might define Scotland’s future for generations.

It’s known that several SNP politicians accepted that this was the right thing to do; that you can hardly talk about rehabilitation if you refuse even the slightest nod to including the prison population in something that would affect them when they gained their release.

Yet, they refused to entertain this small and reasonable concession. They had simply permitted their convictions to become hostage to hard-right populism. “It was crazy,” said the professor. “Across Scotland there were hundreds of prisoners due for release just a few days after the referendum, yet we couldn’t give them even the slightest sliver of redemption or compassion.”

In 2019 researchers at the Council of Europe’s committee for the prevention of torture published a devastating report following inspections of several Scottish prisons. The conditions that greeted them inside Cornton Vale, Scotland’s only women’s prison were truly horrific. These included a psychotic women being held inside a cell smeared with blood; a woman who had set her hair on fire and another who had bitten her arm through to the bone.

More than a dozen women had committed suicide inside its walls over the preceding years. A majority of women have been found to have been subjected to violent abuse by partners. Many were suffering from acute mental health problems. There were high rates of alcohol and drug addiction. Responding to the report by the torture inspectors, Professor Coyle said: “as a nation we should be ashamed.” He described various Scottish Government responses as “disappointing and anodyne”. A report last month by the Sunday Mail revealed evidence of cover-ups and suppressed reports into the suicides of several young men at Polmont. This is where Katie Allan took her own life in 2018. Three years later her family are still waiting for answers. The Scottish Government might not quite lock them up and throw away the key but the effect is the same.

When Kenny MacAskill as Justice Secretary freed the man found guilty of the Lockerbie bombing on compassionate grounds (he had a few months to live with cancer) he was howled down by many in enlightened Scotland for his act of compassion. MacAskill is one of the very few senior politicians aware of Professor Coyle’s work and often sought his counsel.

He said: “There are few who know as much about incarceration or show as much humanity as Andrew. He was pivotal in ensuring the roll-back from privatisation. He had rightly counselled against it. When I became Justice Secretary the pressure from senior civil servants to proceed with privatisation was intense. As a new Minister the pressure was intense and I still recall seeking Andrew’s counsel which was vital in holding out against the pressure.

I hold him in the highest regard. His book is revelatory and I was unaware of the situations and dangers he has encountered. Those who simply parrot lock them up should listen to a man who has. He knows that prison must be the last resort. His comments on justice reinvestment are prescient and the direction we must follow. Scotland owes him a great.”

The moral and ethical interface where a civilised society seeks to balance the need to punish serious offenders with a human obligation to treat them with dignity and a measure of compassion is gaseous. Professor Coyle says it will always be a test of our common humanity.

“This is the reality,” he says. “In any prison system murderers, rapists and other seriously violent offenders make up a small proportion of the jail population. The overwhelming majority are people who have spent their lives on society’s margins. Their offences are merely one part of a chaotic lifestyle often underpinned by a suite of mental health problems. We only engage with them formally when they are processed through the criminal justice system which is simply not equipped to deal with their underlying problems.”

In Scotland, a 2005 survey found that half of the country’s prison population came from just 155 out of 1222 local government wards. One quarter of those came from 53 wards, most of which were in Glasgow’s most deprived areas. The professor advocates the Justice Reinvestment approach which links humane attitudes to imprisonment with unarguable economic benefits. It rests on a challenge to think differently; to re-deploy funds for jailing young people to local authorities to invest in targeted prevention programmes. This was pioneered in the US in Oregon and similar schemes are bearing fruit around the globe. “Thus, a block grant was awarded to some counties in Oregon equal to the amount the state spent imprisoning young people from these areas,” says the professor. “It resulted in a 72% drop in youth prison numbers in these places.”

In progressive, enlightened Scotland though, a craven government remains fearful of red-top populism and of being considered a soft touch.

In his native Scotland, where he lives quietly in Edinburgh’s New Town, dividing his time between there and London, Professor Coyle remains largely unknown in the political establishment. There may be a reason for this. He bears messages that some in Holyrood might not want to hear. He is Scotland’s jail whisperer, a persistent voice in the wilderness calling for change.

Prisons of the World, by Andrew Coyle, is published by Policy Press, an imprint of Bristol University Press