Prisons are full of failure – it shouldn’t take an inmate escaping to fix them

Daniel Khalife escaped from Wandsworth prison
Daniel Khalife escaped from Wandsworth prison - Dan Kitwood/Getty

On September 6 2023, Daniel Khalife escaped from HMP Wandsworth by clinging to the underside of a food delivery van.

From his position, he would have been able to see little more than the asphalt beneath him, slowly at first and then faster, uncomfortably close to his face. He would have heard the trademark sounds of prison life; the radio transmissions, gates and keys, the grinding of the vehicle lock as it slowly inched upwards. And then the asphalt faster again, blurring beneath him now, flecks of grit scratching at his cheeks. A rush of air as the van circled the Wandsworth roundabout.

As has been well-publicised, Khalife was being held on remand at HMP Wandsworth. And then, he wasn’t.

When the police stopped the van, they found improvised straps made out of prison bedsheets still attached to the chassis. But not him. Khalife was gone.

Bedsheets are often used for things other than their original purpose in prison; curtains, makeshift boxing wraps, lines to swing contraband from one cell to another. Sometimes the intentions are more sinister. Khalife is not the first person to escape from prison using bedsheets. I worked with a prisoner who used a bedsheet to make an improvised hood, with cut-out holes for eyes, inspired by those worn by jihadi hostages in the Syrian desert. I knew that man well. Or as much as you can know a person whose world stands right beside yours, but which you can never see fully into.

But I didn’t know Khalife. As a prison officer I’d been to Wandsworth several times in the preceding years, most often as part of a team deployed to quell riots, but we’d never met. Though as it happens, I was much closer to him than I realised.

Khalife was found on September 9 riding a bike through an underpass in West London. I was in the area myself at the time, at the The George IV pub on Chiswick High Road, preparing to begin a talk for the Chiswick Literary Festival. I was there with Dr Ben Cave, forensic psychiatrist and author of What We Fear Most, to discuss our books about prison and forensic mental health. The title of the event was “Inside Job: Lives Spent Working With Prisoners”; strangely fitting considering the false speculation that Khalife’s escape had been assisted by staff.

In many ways we were, in that moment, an embodiment of the issues we’d come to discuss. We talked about the ways in which prisons and secure hospitals mirror societal issues, and how trauma weaves through these places like a corridor of its own, linking people to each other just as prison landings connect the cells. We spoke about the impact of poor penal conditions on society, and how prisons are not as distant and impenetrable as we sometimes like to think. But Khalife’s escape had demonstrated that more powerfully than anything we could have said.

As we spoke beneath a glittering chandelier, drinking wine and holding microphones to amplify our voices, Khalife was being arrested, cuffed and returned to a place where his would not matter.

And now, over a year later, he has been found guilty of spying for Iran. He is not the first to escape from Wandsworth, nor is he the first to choose that particular method. The escape says less about him and more about the prison itself. Where a security audit identified 81 points of failure, Khalife identified 81 opportunities. And he made the most of them.

In a way, the escape itself has provided HMP Wandsworth with an opportunity. Finally, the challenges the prison was facing have been acknowledged. CCTV cameras which hadn’t worked for over a year have been upgraded. The Ministry of Justice has stated that extra specialist staff have been deployed to the jail. £100 million has been redirected to the prison to deliver “urgent improvements” over the next five years. I hope that the next story we hear about HMP Wandsworth will be a positive one.

But in the meantime, the stories we tell ourselves about prisons and the people inside could do with changing too. Prison is full of failure. But the truth is, much of that starts long before someone ends up in a cell. And alongside the failures, prison also holds hope, potential and promise. If prison shows us society’s ills, then it can also show us ways to heal. And if prison can teach us about the character of our society, perhaps it can do the same for us as individuals.

Khalife’s escape shows us that change comes when we are prepared to confront that which is glaringly obvious. When we stop seeing prison as someone else’s problem. When we acknowledge just how close those underpasses really are.