Founded 1980
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Graham Smith
Jan Thompson
Graham Mumby-Croft


Issue No. 77 Autumn 2017

         RIP William "Bill" Brister


Those of you on the E mail register and those of you who read The Guardian, where his obituary compiled by Michael Selby was published, will already be aware that the doyen of Prison Governors, Bill Brister, passed away recently. Those of you who did not know probably thought he was immortal, or at least indestructible. Bob Duncan's regular column contains its’ own warm tribute put together by Brendan O'Friel, ably assisted by Bob himself, and Mr Brister's surviving son and daughter. His death marks the end of an era and it is poignant that his death has occurred at a time in which the ideals he stood for have never been more traduced by government neglect.

I am grateful also to Bob for securing a contribution from Phil Wheatley, former Director General of NOMS, now renamed HMPPS, on the current state of the service. I would guess would that he found it extremely painful to write given the abandonment of the Decency agenda he did so much to promote. Before this issue hits your letterboxes HMPPS will have implemented a service wide smoking ban from 31 August, following on from a pilot project in Wales and the South West. Smoking is a subject about which people have strong views, but many of us will have noted with concern a report from BBC correspondent Danny Shaw on 4 August, that there were only 744 spare places within the system, well short of the comfort zone of 2,000 places that HMPPS likes to have available. It does not take too many wings wrecked as a consequence of an adverse reaction to the smoking ban to throw the system into crisis. The loss of high security places would be a disaster.

This is something of a history edition with pieces on Gartree and Glen Parva as well as a personal memoir from one of our regular contributors, John Ramwell. My thanks to Frank McGilway and John Berry for these contributions which I am sure will be of great interest, particularly to those who served at those establishments. It has been necessary to hold some items over until the next edition in the interests of economy, but there is still space available in the Spring 2018 issue for fresh contributions.

Finally a brief word on the General Election. I can find no precedent for a British election under universal suffrage whereby the two largest parties obtained more than 80% of the vote between them, and a hung parliament still resulted. As a consequence Labour MP's are stuck with a leader they can't get rid of, Conservative MP's are stuck with a leader they daren't get rid of, and Liberal Democrat MP's are stuck with their leader because no-one else wanted the job.

Truly we live in strange times. 

PAUL LAXTON, EDITOR 
Paul Laxton