Twenty five years ago next month , Manchester’s Strangeway’s Prison was leading the news agenda after inmates took control in twenty five days of riots.
Now Lord Wolff, who ran the inquiry into the riot that left two dead hundreds injured and the building in ruins claims that conditions in British prisons are returning to those that were behind the riot in 1990,
He told BBC Inside Out North West: “There are things that are better now than then but I fear we’ve allowed ourselves to go backwards and we’re back where we were at the time of Strangeways… Unfortunately prisoners are again being kept in conditions that we should not tolerate.”
The disturbances at Strangways which began on April Fool’s day, saw inmates in control of five wings, burning down the gymnasium and raid the hospital for drugs.
In the terror of the flames and the violence, most had surrendered by the 6th April but a group of twenty held out for a further twenty days,
The governor, who had warned of trouble brewing, wanted the prison stormed but was overruled by the Home Office.
Lord Woolf’s report made twelve radical recommendations including the ending of slopping out and converting the overloaded system into a network of community prisons containing no more than seventy inmates, to encourage better relations between prisoners and officers.
Prisoners in Strangeways, many on remand and yet to be convicted of a crimewere being held three to a cell for twenty two hours a day with no sanitation and one shower and change of underwear per week.
They learned that harassment and intimidation, threats and beatings were normal everyday occurrences and an accepted method of maintaining control.
