Prisons are the worst they’ve been since I ran them, says Ann Widdecombe

Former prisons minister Ann Widdecombe (pictured) has claimed that UK prisons are in the worst state they have been in since the 1990s the decade when she was in charge of them.

Widdecombe, who served as prisons minister from 1995 to 1997, told GB News that Victorian-era jails need to be knocked down and rebuilt as the only way to stop current overcrowding and poor conditions. She said the mission statement of the Prison Service is to keep people in custody whilst preparing them to lead useful law-abiding lives upon release, but it “doesn’t happen on the scale it should”.

“A useful life means you’re occupied in the prison workshop or education department or attending behaviour courses,” she said. “But what happens is when you get prisons overcrowded, as now, purposeful activity is the first casualty because all officers are busy upon movements of prisoners, so unable to put the time into enabling that.”

She said that in her day, reforms by then-home secretary Michael Howard improved matters, as he “had a clear vision, and things were humming along, and we didn’t accept crime would just happen”.

Widdecombe stepped down as a Conservative MP in 2010, and later sat as a Brexit Party member of the European Parliament from 2019 to 2020. She is now a member of the Reform party. In 2020 she made a Channel 5 documentary about Norway’s Haden Prison, which she criticised as too “comfortable” – saying that despite the success of its rehabilitation programmes, prison should “not be like normal life outside”.