Prisons: too much noise, too little knowledge

Prisons are all over the news. Just today, I came into my office, made myself a cup of coffee and opened the Guardian. One of the first stories, amidst the usual noise of Brexit and Trump, was 'British justice is in flames. The MoJ’s fiddling is criminal'.

It's difficult not to feel overwhelmed by the barrage of negative news: from prison riots, to prison violence and self-harm being at record-high levels, to the new prisons minister, Rory Stewart, stating that he'd quite like prisons without rats and broken toilets. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who watches a few minutes of news a day or reads a newspaper regularly.

Yet yesterday I delivered a lecture on the prison crisis, and spoke about all of these issues. There were quite a few shocked faces. These are bright, informed students who are well aware of current affairs - and yet few were aware about the numerous problems our prisons are facing. In fact, almost none knew that smoking was being completely phased out of prisons in the UK.

This is intriguing and worrying. Have people - outside those specifically interested in prisons - become completely desensitized to these issues? Has Brexit completely taken over the public imagination? Are students simply lazy (unlikely, as our discussions have consistently shown many do read the newspapers).

Despite numerous prison riots making the news, prisons appear to be making news without really capturing anyone's attention. Tellingly, today's news story about the criminal justice system only has 113 comments (at the time of writing), compared to over 700 comments on a story about a nymph painting being removed from a gallery. We seem to care more about a painting than about human lives lost and the suffering inherent in our prison system.