Andrea Albutt penal reform

Outgoing President of the Prison Governors Association (PGA) Andrea Allbutt gave the Parmoor Lecture at the Howard League for Penal Reform at the end of November 2023. It was essentially the same speech as that given at the Annual General Meeting of the All-Party Group on Penal Affairs, held the previous May, but none the less critical for that.

Albutt has been working in the prison system for almost 35 years, and seen Justice Secretaries of all colours come and go. From Ken Clarke (deigned with feint praise) to Dominic Raab (less so), Albutt noted early on that her tenure as president of the PGA had corresponded with thirteen years of Conservative Party rule.

Albutt’s remembrance of her time of running HMP Bristol as a ‘filthy, rat infested Victorian slum’ were piquant, as was her observation that ‘prisons are not calm or decent places’. Echoing her recent interview with HMP The Mount governor Paul Crossey in the Prison Service Journal, there were reflections on the Coronavirus pandemic months/years, where some people in prisons were famously locked in their cells for 23 hours per day. For members of the public unsure as to what prison life is actually like, this was strange new information. Weren’t prisoners always locked in their cells?

There were ideas forward too, in suggesting that ‘a brave government needs to look at alternatives to prison, as when people end up in prison, everything else has failed’. Ben Leapman, Erwin James’ replacement as editor of free prison monthly Inside Time, asked if she had taken legal action against the government for unfulfilled assurances, to which Albutt replied that she hadn’t, after speaking to a KC about the matter. Asked about the impact of her Catholic faith by another inquisitor during the questions segment, despite her ‘no holds barred, I’m leaving with a flourish’ stance, Albutt replied that it wasn’t her job ‘to share my faith with anyone in the room’.

Many of the key problems in the justice system appeared to be beyond her remit, from regularly inaccurate representations in the media to the ‘UN stain’ of the remaining IPP sentenced prisoners, to the ‘believe the victims’ policy creating thousands of new prisoners maintaining innocence (see Andy Malkinson, Brian Buckle and Sean Hogg). The prison service’s dual purpose of punishment and rehabilitation seems as tenuous as ever, as Andrea Albutt heads off to pastures new.