BRITAIN’s jails have become “warehouses” creating better criminals, a former top prison boss has warned as she joins Reform.
Vanessa Frake, who oversaw notorious inmates like Rose West and Myra Hindley, has been unveiled as Nigel Farage’s new crime adviser.
Former Prison Governor Vanessa Frake at home in Saffron Walden, Essex[/caption]
She will appear alongside him later today as he holds a press conference on law and order.
In her first interview in the role, she called for an urgent overhaul of the prison system, which she slammed as a “laughing stock”.
The ex-prison governor told Times Radio: “I read every week negative press about our prison service and drugs, mobiles, violence, suicide, self-harm, etcetera, etcetera.
“And The time is now for somebody to do something about it.
“Successive governments have failed and failed miserably and, you know, that’s why our prison service now is on its knees.”
Ms Drakes added: “I’m not naive in the fact that people don’t want to spend money on prisons – they’d rather it went to the NHS, to education – I’m not naive at all about that.
“But actually, if you think about the whole picture, at the moment we’re warehousing prisoners and we’re turning out better criminals into our society.”
She urged ministers to “do some rehabilitation”, instead, and “make our society safer for our children”.
Ms Frake, who wrote about her previous work in her book The Governor, also referred to a Government scheme which cut temporarily the proportion of sentences certain inmates must serve behind bars from 50 per cent to 40 per cent.
She explained: “In a prison, now they do 40 per cent of a sentence.
“There’s very little you can do with somebody who is addicted to drugs, alcohol, has mental health issues. There is very little you can do within a prison at that time.
“And when people are sentenced to short sentences, they lose their support systems on the outside.
“They lose their home if they had one, they lose family support and we let them out with nothing so their only alternative is to commit crime and get on that crime ladder, and that needs to be addressed.
“What I would like to see is much better community services, much better community and substance misuse services outside of prisons, and much better management of prisoners on the outside.”
Asked whether she was willing to have a “difficult conversation” with party leader Nigel Farage, Reform’s new justice tsar replied: “He might have his own views but he will listen far more than any other party has listened in the past.”
