Are outsourcers cashing in on a crisis in the prisons system?

If you’re running some of Britain’s biggest prisons, is it an embarrassment or point of pride when one of your lags pens a paean praising your accommodation? G4S reckons the latter.

The outsourcing giant, which operates five UK jails including the riot-struck Birmingham, sends me a recent letter, published in prisoners’ newspaper Inside Time, from an inmate just transferred from state-run Swansea to G4S’s Welsh PFI prison Parc.

At Swansea, the prisoner writes, “the understaffing is terrible… officers are not listened to by managers, incidents are ignored… [there’s] one officer for 52 prisoners, camp-beds, because of overcrowding, in the shower room...

“I am now in Parc, which is run by G4S, who actually know what they are doing. The prison system should be completely contracted out.”

The inmate’s view isn’t mainstream, especially after the Birmingham prison riots, where operator G4S had to stand back and let the state’s Tornado special squads go in and regain control, leading for calls for total renationalisation of Britain’s jails.

The detention system is in crisis, and facing more scrutiny than a prisoner in solitary.

Overcrowding, staff shortages, riots, drugs, and violence mean, one industry insider tells me, “move over Trump or Brexit, 2016 was a landmark year for Britain’s prisons,” he adds. “ The situation has never been worse.”

A record 119 people committed suicide in prisons in England and Wales last year, up nearly a third on the previous year. There was a 28% rise in prisoner-on-prisoner assaults to 18,510, and staff attacks rose 40% to 6430.

Cuts and staff shortages are at the nub of the issue; the number of frontline prison officers has fallen by 6000 since 2010 while the prison population has more than doubled in the past 20 years.

But they seem to be hurting public-sector jails harder. One high-up at a private prisons firm claims lags fear being sent to Holloway or Brixton from his jails because they’re so understaffed they’re “too scary”.

Former Prisons Minister Crispin Blunt revealed in a Parliamentary debate that cost-cutting pressure saw then Justice Secretary Chris Grayling grab a deal presented by the Prison Officers Association.

If he stopped privatising jails, the union would agree to staffing cuts in the public sector’s bid to try to hold on to the management of Birmingham Prison.

Blunt said: “The winning bid for HMP Birmingham by G4S involved about 150 more staff than the public sector bid.”

And those 150 more staff still couldn’t contain the worst jail riots in more than two decades in December.

Now the Government is back on the hiring trail, promising 2500 more officers and replacing the struggling, inexperienced ones recruited for their cheapness with the tough, experienced (and pricier) deputy governors it previously sacked.

That will potentially make it tougher for the private sector to recruit. At London prison Thameside, operator Serco had already faced hiring struggles because local state-run jails paid higher wages, and offer better benefits, particularly for pensions.

But, with a few exceptions, analysts reckon UK-listed firms G4S, Serco and France’s Sodexo, which run the UK’s 14 private jails, have an easier job of it.

Their costs tend to be lower because they mainly run new-build prisons with better technology and clear lines of sight. By contrast, state-run jails, whose cash is benchmarked against their privately run rivals, are generally Victorian-built, now-crumbling piles.

Per-prisoner spending statistics are tough to untangle — in the public sector, most exclude overhead costs and the hefty bill for staff pensions.

In the private sector, the matter is complicated by the mixture of PFI prisons and management-only ones.

But privatised jails don’t have to take orders from above in the same way as their state equivalents do.

“When I was a prison governor in the public sector, I could be required to take an extra 20 prisoners without extra funding,” explains Jerry Petherick, who has run G4S’s prison business for the past 13 years, and before that clocked up more than two decades in the state prison service.

“But in the private sector we say, ‘yes, we’ll take them, but there will be an additional cost. And the contract changes accordingly.”

The contracts are lucrative — exact fees depend on the jails’ size, and the nature of the contract (management-only or prison ownership) — but when the government handed Birmingham prison to G4S in 2011, outsourcing the running of an existing state prison to the private sector for the first time alongside the running of a new jail in Wolverhampton, the listed firm said both 15-year contracts were worth some £750 million.

Meanwhile, Serco’s contract to run Doncaster prison brings in around £250 million over 15 years. Sodexo’s 15-year contract to run HMP Northumberland is also worth around £250 million over the period. In bidding for the deal, the company promised to secure savings of almost £130 million.

In the US, shares in private prison operators rose sharply after Donald Trump’s election, as the new administration is U-turning on plans introduced by Barack Obama to cut back on outsourcing jails.

The country that locks up the most people had been reacting to a damning report that found conditions in privately-run facilities were considerably less safe than those in publicly-run prisons.

But Trump’s reversal, plus stricter immigration rules that are expected to see higher occupancy rates at detention centres, has seen big US jail firms CoreCivic and GeoGroup enjoy surging stocks.

Back in the UK, is prison life really different in a privately run jail?

After almost three decades working behind bars owned by both, Petherick claims not, saying inmates like the letter-writer “are always coming up with new reasons they do, or don’t, want to be in a certain jail; a tough one might be good for their ‘prisoner CV’ or they might try everything they can to avoid being transferred to a place where the network tells them there’s another prisoner they’ve had conflict with”.

State-sector cuts, he adds, are echoed by privatised jails. “When publicly run prisons cut back on out-of-cell activities, like the [recent] change for Friday afternoons from ‘work and education, then evening association time’ into a ‘domestic afternoon’ where prisoners can make phone calls and have showers and then face an evening lockdown to cut costs, that caused an anomaly between public and private. So the private sector ended up cutting back their regime — and reducing funding — to create a similar timetable.

“We’re all part of the same system with the same pressures.”