Grendon remains a one-off. However, half a dozen prisons now have wings with therapeutic communities. Now the criminal-justice system is looking afresh at Grendon. Last month's Prison Inspectorate report on the institution was complimentary, while there is deep public frustration at the failures of the wider system and concern at unreformed ex-convicts roaming Britain's streets. To tackle the problem, Britain is developing new facilities at Whitemoor, Frankland, Rampton and Broadmoor for prisoners with dangerous and severe personality disorders. Some of these men, having been stabilised in these highly expensive, care-intensive units, will then move on to Grendon.
This is what awaits them. Tuesday morning on D wing, and 40 men (murderers, rapists, arsonists, armed robbers) sit round the edge of a cramped room for their twice-weekly, 90-minute meeting. Between them they have amassed hundreds of years in sentences and committed numerous killings. Most are heavily tattooed skinheads, with huge muscles from years of body-building, a machismo hewn to survive the dangerous world of conventional prisons. But here they discuss their feelings. It's an unpredictable situation. When the meeting starts, says Andrew Downie, one of the prison wing's therapists, "the potential for chaos, for the psychotic anxieties associated with large groups, begins to rise".
First up is Dave, reporting to the wing on his first time out of prison at a probation hostel prior to parole. Reminding colleagues of his long history of heroin use, he describes threats of violence and the widespread use of drugs. It was all so bad, he says, that he had to leave and find another hostel. "You done well, mate," says one prisoner, and others echo the praise and back up his determination not to fall prey to the first temptations. Dave seems relieved to be back among prisoners who understand how tough it is on the outside, when you are quickly caught up with ex-cons who haven't been through the Grendon experience. "I feel like I've left all that behind me, but it's going to be hard when I get out for good," he tells the meeting.
Next comes an apparently innocuous request from Mike, asking the wing to support his application to attend a hospital appointment without handcuffs. "I'm not happy with this," comes a voice from the corner, and the atmosphere suddenly darkens. There are allegations of a scuffle the previous week between Mike, who has a drink problem, and another prisoner. Other men are outraged that the fight had never been discussed at one of the wing's small groups, where the tiniest issues are meant to be aired and resolved. Suddenly a stream of insults pours from John and attention focuses on him, with inmates questioning his aggression. The calmer father figures of the group, many of them black inmates who have been at Grendon for several years, coolly interrogate and challenge the two men on drinking, on violence. It takes almost the full 90 minutes. Only in the final moments does Mike gain grudging support to go without handcuffs. On the ropes, he looks as if he wished he had never asked. Everyone leaves, drained.
The incoming governor, Peter Bennett, has tightened security. Three years ago, three serious offenders escaped after throwing a loose manhole cover through a fence during exercise. Trust that had built up over years collapsed as the entire jail was searched. In the process, the cells were trashed by staff while the prisoners behaved impeccably. Now, contractors are erecting a new barbed-wire perimeter fence.
But there is concern that security considerations are destroying the therapeutic atmosphere that Grendon's proponents claim depends on prisoners feeling responsible and empowered.
Bennett, meanwhile, has his reservations about the traditional psychotherapy that has underpinned Grendon for four decades. He was appointed in 2002 to pull Grendon into the mainstream of the prison system, and speaks unflatteringly of what he found when he arrived. "Grendon reminds me sometimes of a 19th-century Protestant sect. It tends to be inward-looking and exclusivist. The therapeutic community says that the answer to everything lies within the group, so why look beyond? We have had difficulties introducing cognitive-behaviour programmes, drug programmes or anything foreign to the traditional psychodynamic therapy." The therapists argue that the gains made by psychotherapy would be eroded by new, more superficial off-the-shelf cognitive-therapy courses from America.
This cold war continues at the top of the prison. You can tell who is on which side by whether they smile a lot. The smilers, men like Bennett, are thinking about funding, about selling Grendon to a sceptical prison system obsessed with performance indicators and box-ticking, as the new overarching National Offender Management Service creates an "internal market" rather like that introduced into the NHS in the 1990s. The more grim-faced tendency has little time for all this, focused on the fraught minds of men who have committed terrible offences.
The big question everyone asks is: does Grendon work? "It is not a magic wand," says David Jones, who has reviewed the research in his book, Working with Dangerous People. He says that, just as for people on the outside, the first attempt at psychotherapy often does not resolve the problem. Prisoners, he says, come back and try again. About half of all prisoners coming to Grendon leave too early; most return to the system after only a few months in the assessment wing, because they are judged by staff to be unready for full-blown group psychotherapy.
Jones adds: "Many people go on to commit crimes again, but the statistics do not reveal whether these crimes are just shoplifting or as serious as the offences that brought them to Grendon in the first place. The whole prison system needs more sophisticated research, but Grendon is significantly more effective than other prisons at reducing recidivism among sex offenders and lifers, who have usually been sentenced for acts of violence. Grendon finds young tearaways, jailed for drugs and violent offences, a much harder group to treat successfully. We do better with very serious offenders who perhaps have got through the chaotic stage of life of younger men with unmanageable personality disorders."
Research by the Home Office shows that when prisoners stay for longer than 18 months, the reconviction rate of Grendon graduates within seven years of release falls to 61%, compared with 73% for similar men who never reached Grendon. However, there is little effect on reconviction rates for men who stayed less than a year. These are not startling figures, but effective alternatives are difficult to find: the latest Home Office research shows that cognitive-behavioural therapy has even less long-term effect on prisoners. The figures for offences such as assaults on staff or other inmate or drug use are, however, dramatically different at Grendon. Whereas there are annually 120 offences per 100 inmates in other jails, in Grendon the figure is 20, and violent offences are extremely rare.
Grendon is relatively cheap (it costs £35,000 per place per year, compared with £46,000 for high-security, long-term prisons and up to £130,000 for a place in a special hospital such as Broadmoor or Rampton). However, lobbyists representing the victims of crime are scathing about the cost of putting serious offenders through therapy-based programmes, given that the reoffending rate remains high. "In comparison, government funding to charities dedicated to supporting victims of crime amounts to just £18.66 per victim each year," says Clive Elliott of the Victims of Crime Trust. "The most that the family of a homicide victim can hope to receive from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority is £10,000. Yet the government is spending a huge amount of money on remedial help for these perpetrators that often does not work, and we don't believe that stringent-enough tests are done on them before they are released. The type of psychological help that these prisoners are privileged to receive would be a dream for victims, who often have to wait two years for post-traumatic stress disorder counselling."
