‘I can’t stop being angry’ (From The Northern Echo)

‘I can’t stop being angry’

9:16am Tuesday 12th February 2008 in Leader

The Chief Inspector of Prisons, brought up in a North-East mining community, tells Ruth Campbell how her campaigning zeal was fired in her childhood and how both she and her children have been victims of crime

IAM initially taken aback when the Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers - in the news again recently for her harsh criticism of the Government - reveals she once performed on stage with rock star Bryan Ferry.

The pair, it emerges, were at school together.

Then known as Anne Spark, she played Maria to the young Ferry's Malvolio in Washington Grammar's production of Twelfth Night. "He was a year older than me, we weren't close friends," she confesses.

Those who knew the young, gifted and driven Anne Spark, brought up in a two-bedroom terraced house in the mining community of Boldon, back then, will hardly have been surprised to see her all over the television, radio and newspapers yet again.

She and Ferry, who went on to reach the peak of their very different professions, both stood out at their County Durham school. Teacher David Oliver, who produced the play, says they were two of the brightest pupils he ever taught.

Renowned for her calm, no-nonsense approach, Owers, in her fiercest attack yet on the Government's prisons policy, blames successive Labour home secretaries for the overcrowding crisis in our jails which, she says, are close to breaking point.

Our prison population - the highest per capita in Western Europe - has increased from 60,000 in 1997 to 80,000 today and prisons are full and overflowing into police stations.

She argues the crisis was "predicted and predictable, fuelled by legislation and policies which ignored consequences, cost or effectiveness, together with an absence of coherent strategic direction."

It is a subject she has been persistently hounding the Government about during her six and a half years as Chief Inspector of Prisons. Little wonder that her appointment, in 2001, was regarded as a brave one.

It is not just that she was the first woman in the post and did not come from the usual establishment background. As the former director of the all-party pressure group Justice - which campaigns over issues like immigration law and sentencing - she had been a thorn in the side of the Home Office since Labour came into power.

It was her working class upbringing in Boldon, she says, that made her aware of injustice, and eventually drove her to become a human rights campaigner. As the daughter of a colliery joiner and an office worker, who were both well read, talented and intelligent but unable to fulfil their true potential, she was aware how easily whole sections of society were written off.

Anne, now 60, read history at Cambridge and was the first of her family to go to university. Two of her cousins also went on to study for degrees. "It wasn't that we were brighter than our parents, we just had the opportunities they never had," she says.

"Whole groups of people were being treated as if they were of no account, their skills were not being used. When people are written off by society, society loses out."

SHE feels that what goes on inside prisons reflects what is happening in the outside world.

"Prisons are really good mirrors, they are kind of soaking up problems," she says, pointing to the absence of proper mental heathcare, drugs problems, family breakdown and children being excluded from school. It would be more effective, she says, to spend public money on mental health care and drug rehabilitation than on more prison places.

She is often left feeling angry and frustrated by what she discovers inside. She recalls one particularly vulnerable 19-year-old with a mental age of eight who had been cutting his arms. "His grandmother had just died and he had spent his first night in a police cell because there was no room anywhere." He ended up in a jail 200 miles away from his family.

It shouldn't happen, she says. "He was a casualty of the overcrowding crisis. It makes prison staff angry too."

Many prisons are old and overcrowded. "You will have two men who may spend 23 hours in a cell which is meant for one and one sits on the toilet to eat meals. That in itself is shocking. We shouldn't accept that in the 21st Century in this country."

The mother-of-three stresses she doesn't believe in being "soft" with criminals. Living in inner city London, she herself has been burgled and her children were mugged growing up there. She doesn't fear going into prisons to meet the perpetrators of such crimes, arguing she runs more risk walking to her local Tube station. "I don't feel frightened. We walk in the streets and are passing these people all the time and we don't know it," she says.

"It makes me more determined to want to get to the root of it," she says. "If we just recycle people, we are using prisons as containers. If we send them out with the same problems they will reoffend. I don't want better prisons because I think we should be nice to prisoners, but because I want to see a better society."

She is heartened by those who have turned their lives around. "You do see some fantastic work being done with people the rest of society want to forget about. You see young people gaining qualifications for the first time in their lives."

In spite of her efforts, the overcrowding crisis is worsening. But she isn't discouraged. Around 95 per cent of her inspectorate's recommendations have been accepted and 75 per cent implemented by prisons.

"That's a pretty good hit rate. The big things just take longer," she says.

She is inspired by the artwork she owns which has been created by prisoners. One painting shows a view of Durham Castle. She misses the open countryside of the north of England, where she and her husband, a magazine journalist, often go walking.

It takes her back to her roots. "I miss the kind of open spaces I used to enjoy when I was growing up and went for long walks with my grandfather. You have to go to the north of England to get proper scenery," she says.

One particular sculpture, created by an 18 year old, shows the view through the bars of a cell window on Christmas morning. It is a perfect, three-dimensional version of a cell and she finds it moving.

Prisoners are never far from her thoughts. People must be treated decently, she says. "If you don't attend to small things you can slide very quickly towards not thinking about people as being people. If I stopped being angry about some of the things I see in prisons I should leave my job."