When Anne Owers walks into a prison cell, alone, she never knows what kind of criminals she will find, but she knows not to expect a seat.

“One of those prisoners will probably end up sitting on the toilet to eat their meals; the other one’s on the chair,” she said.

Of course, there was a bit of nervousness when she started the job seven years ago – and she always “shoots the bolt, so the door can’t close behind you” – but now, when she’s handed the keys to the jail and enters cells at random, she worries more about the risk that prisoners pose to us on the outside than the risk she faces inside.

It is easy to see why prisoners pour out their heart to her. She is warm, relaxed and cares passionately about what goes on behind locked doors. But why should anyone care?

“Prisons are really good mirrors. They reflect quite faithfully what’s not happening, or what is happening, outside. They will take in all the things that are going wrong out here,” Ms Owers said.

And, it seems, there is a lot going wrong out here. More than ten years after Labour came to office, jails are bursting at the seams. The prison population has increased from 60,000 in 1997 to 80,000 today, and prisons are full, overflowing into police stations. With the highest prison population per capita in Western Europe already, the Government is now planning for an extra 20,000 places at a cost of £3.8 billion – including three gigantic new “superjails” – in the next six years.

Ms Owers is a measured person who sits in an unglamorous corner of the Home Office crammed with dozens of her reports on our jails. Her speech is almost meek, yet her message is stark: the system is in crisis. Ministers are planning to spend more money jailing ever greater numbers in bigger jails, to ill-proven effect – and the public has not thought through the consequences of that.

“Although it’s late – although I think I would have preferred it to happen earlier – I do think we need a Royal Commission or a major public inquiry.”

That’s a pretty big thing to ask and she knows it. But the Chief Inspector thinks that ministers should spend less time worrying about building bigger jails and more time thinking about why so many people end up in them.

“Prisons are kind of soaking up problems outside . . . you have to address these problems upstream. You have to try and work out why.”

Maybe Labour could have started doing something to head off the present crisis ten years ago?

“Well, there is that, yes.” Rather than just build more and more prisons?

“If you build more, you fill more.” The period ahead, she said, will be “very choppy”. The prisons budget is being squeezed, which means “for the first time in most people’s memory” prisoners have less time out of cells – in effect locked in for the entire weekend – “and that’s only the beginning of a series of cuts”.

Our vast numbers of prisoners “certainly says something about our mental health services”, she says, along with the way we deal with drug addicts, people in care and educational failings. According to the latest Home Office figures, two thirds of prisoners offend again within two years of release. Meanwhile, there is the vast prison-building programme whose costs keep increasing.

“My fear is twofold. My fear is that, first of all, [the building programme] will suck money away from the things that can prevent prison. We know that prisons have revolving doors and the reason is because the problems that people had before they went to prison are the same problems they encounter after they leave prison. If you don’t deal with the before and the after, then all you create is a circle,” she said.

“Even though we’re going to spend more money on prisons, we may get worse prisons because there simply won’t be enough money to make prisons that make a difference to the increasingly large number of people we’re putting there.”

Her office is decorated with bleak artworks: one teenager gave her a clay model of himself alone in his Dickensian cell; another painting, entitled Christmas Morning, shows the light falling through the Victorian-style prison bars. Suicides, she said, had gone up 40 per cent in the past year.

One cell she walked into housed an inmate aged 19, with a mental age of 8, who had been cutting his arms. “And his granny had just died and it was his first time in prison. So you’d have to work quite hard to get someone more vulnerable than that.”

He had been arrested in North London, spent his first night in a police cell in Birmingham because there was no room anywhere else, and then ended up in jail in Bedfordshire, far from his family.

“Those are the kind of people bouncing around in the system . . . It’s more like a pinball machine.”

The Government’s recent plans for three “Titan” superjails, housing 2,500 prisoners each, will do nothing to help that. All her evidence showed, she said, that “small local prisons work better than large ones”. Plus, she said, the larger a prison, the harder it was to keep the people in them safe.

“If you start reducing activity, if relationships start to be less personal, then there are risks.”

But why, when the crime rate is pretty stable, is the prison population rising so fast?

“I’m equally puzzled,” she said. All the more reason, she believes, to hold a public inquiry. More and longer prison sentences are being passed, but are they effective?

“Until we pull out and ask it in a wider forum, I feel that we’ll just continue to drift towards something that no one would have planned. I think we are in a crisis to start with. Prison population for the last year has been bumping up against capacity. We have all kinds of emergency short-term measures to look at that.

“We are now planning for a prison population, with luck, of 96,000 – without luck of over 100,000. Now that represents a huge public investment in prisons. As I say, it has the danger of creating more prisons, but worse prisons. It has the danger of pulling resources away from things that could prevent prison, or prevent more prison.

“That seems to me to be a point at which there needs to be an informed public debate about where we are going. Is that where we want to go and is that the best way of investing public money? That’s not a job for me – that is a political choice.

“It’s no good me sitting here and saying, you know, that this is what should happen in prisons. We’ve got to engage the evidence, we’ve got to engage the public, we’ve got to decide, as a society, what spending we want on prisons as opposed to hospitals, for example, but also, what do we want our prisons to do?”

This is where a lot of people switch off; the fate of criminals tends to worry practically nobody.

“That’s true, but as I say, what happens or doesn’t happen to people while they’re in prison has a direct effect on you and your communities.

“When you go into prison you see a parallel world: a world that for most of us only touches us when it harms us. But you see kids that are not going to school, [not] deciding on GCSEs, [not] deciding on A levels and [not] looking at university application forms. Fifty per cent of kids in prison have been in care. They graduate from care too often to a young offender institution, then to an adult prison, with family lives that are very, very fragile.”

She has been disappointed by how ministers have failed to take action on her warnings over the years. They ignore this one at their peril – working at the coal face, she feels that she sees the problems looming before they do.

“The inspectorate is a really good early-warning system for ministers because we see things happening straight away. I don’t think that ministers are as alert as they should be to listening to those warning signs.”

She issued warnings, for instance, about the indeterminate public protection sentences, which ministers have had to rethink this week. And she gave warning of the foreign prisoners scandal that ended the career of the previous Home Secretary, Charles Clarke.

Her contract is due to end this year and she is waiting to see whether it is renewed: aged 60, she “wants to go on for a bit longer”. It will be interesting to see whether the Government shares that ambition.

Ms Owers is no stranger to the hard end of crime. She said that she felt safer walking around inside a jail than she did walking to her local Tube station, and when you hear where she lives, you can understand why: it is a particularly brutal and soulless part of South London. She has been burgled; her children, growing up there, were mugged. Yet when she chats with the prisoners in their cramped cells she feels only frustration.

“What I’m not saying is that we should look at those people and say, ‘Oh, poor things’. I want us to be tough with people who go into prison. But, by tough, I don’t mean that I want to see young men who have committed offences lying on their beds for 23 hours.”

She wants them challenged, educated, forced to take responsibility. You could say the same of ministers. But she didn’t quite say that.

Anne Owers

Born June 23, 1947
Education Washington Grammar School, Co Durham; Girton College, Cambridge (History)
Career teacher and researcher, Zambia 1968-71; general secretary of Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, 1981-92; director of Justice, human rights lobby group, 1999-2001; first female Chief Inspector of Prisons, 2001 to present. CBE, 2001.
Family Two sons and one daughter, divorced and remarried in 2005.
Hobbies theatre, walking

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