Mark Fairhurst, the national chair of the Prison Officers’ Association (POA), is nostalgic about his early days working in Britain’s jails. When the Scouser joined the profession in the early Nineties, aged 22, life for him and his fellow prison guards was “fantastic”. “It was really disciplined,” Fairhurst, now 55, told me when we met at the trade union’s north-London office. “We had plenty of staff. Prisoners were disciplined and more respectful… They all had to wear uniforms [not mandatory today] and if they weren’t dressed correctly, they were sent back to their cell to get dressed correctly, and they accepted that.”
“Everyone was proud of the job they did.” Even the burly prison governor would “get round the wings” and make their presence felt. “They used to know you by your first name, and they used to work with you to resolve problems. That’s all deteriorated over time.”
The problems that did exist in prisons at the start of Fairhurst’s career have only grown worse over the decades: contraband is increasingly smuggled in by drones rather than people. And it’s not just limited to drugs: “It’s only a matter of time before [someone] flies a firearm in,” Fairhurst said. The week before we spoke, Fairhurst said, a high-security prison was locked down for three days after intelligence suggested a firearm had been brought in (though none was recovered in the search). Prison officers are also contending with overcrowding, inmate violence, a crumbling estate, little training and stagnant pay.
The prison service’s deterioration is in large part due to austerity. “We’ve never recovered from that,” Fairhurst said. One building programme created only 206 new places – the target was 10,000; its replacement scheme, launched in 2019, has so far built 5,202 out of a proposed 20,000. So neglected is the estate that the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) estimates the cost of repairing all prisons to a “fair” condition at £2.8bn.Staffing has suffered too. More than 7,000 prison officers left the service between 2010 and 2013 after accepting voluntary redundancy via an early-exit scheme. “We lost over 100,000 years’ [worth] of experienced staff,” Fairhurst said, adding: “The cohorts changed, our demographic in staffing has changed… and none of it’s been for the better.”
Also to blame, Fairhurst believes, is the MoJ. Fairhurst wants the prison service to be independent from the department: “If we were a separate entity, working under our own steam, with ministers to report to… I think we could turn it around.” On the day we spoke, the Public Accounts Select Committee released a scathing report highlighting the MoJ’s inability to deal with the backlog of cases in the Crown courts, which is “putting further strain on the capacity of already overcrowded prisons”.
Labour initiated an early-release scheme to solve the problem of overcrowding just six months ago. But in March prisons reached near-maximum capacity again. Police cells are now being used to house prisoners as an emergency stopgap. Since the Conservatives entered government in 2010, £900m has been removed from the prison budget, including “cuts to budgets and staffing levels. But now it’s going to cost a hell of a lot more than that to put it right.” How long might that take? “I don’t think we’ll ever truly get it back.”
Mark Fairhurst was born in Walton, Liverpool, in April 1969. His father was a firefighter and his mother stayed at home. Growing up in the inner city was “tough”; there was “a lot of poverty around and not a lot of work”. After trying to make it as a footballer, Fairhurst worked in construction as a contractor, before joining the prison service in 1992 and being posted to HMP Frankland, a high-security prison in County Durham. He was elected chair of the POA in 2017.
Fairhurst may reflect on the early years of his career fondly, but “of course, there were a lot of bad things”. In 1990, two years before he joined the service, a riot broke out at HMP Strangeways in protest against conditions a public inquiry later deemed “intolerable”. After Strangeways, Fairhurst noted, the government “realised that they needed to invest in the service”.
Today, Fairhurst told me, prison officers face both threats to their safety and a total lack of support. “The violence is at the highest levels that we’ve ever seen. You don’t know what you’re going to walk into; you could open a cell door first thing in the morning and get attacked.” Other than colleagues who volunteer to receive mental health training, there is little in the way of a support network. “Who deals with our trauma?” Fairhurst, a usually stoic figure, stressed during an evidence session on prison culture at the House of Lords in January. “What support do we get when we’re cutting people down; covering up cuts; trying to resuscitate someone who’s tried to take their life? Who looks after us? Who do we offload to? There’s nobody.”
A BBC investigation in 2023 found that the number of prison officers in England and Wales who took sick days for mental health reasons nearly doubled in the five years between 2016-17 and 2021-22. Who does Fairhurst offload to? “I don’t. If you sat me in a room with a psychologist, they would diagnose me with PTSD… You normalise everything you see in a prison.” There are more than eight instances of prisoner-on-guard violence in the UK every day, according to the POA.
Recruitment into prisons is also a pressure point. Zoom, initially brought in during the pandemic, is still used to select most prison officers. Fairhurst has seen people who have failed in their application for an operational-support-grade job – a junior rank that often requires an in-person interview – “then applying online to be a prison officer and getting in”.
The service also recruits foreign nationals remotely. “In countries that are rife with corruption, it’s very easy to get a false identity and pay someone else who can speak perfect English to sit and interview for you online. And then when [recruits] arrive at the gate, the governor suddenly realises [they] can only speak pidgin English and can’t write in English.” Sometimes recruits “have turned up to the [prison] gate with their suitcase and said, ‘Where am I living?’”, expecting accommodation to be provided. “We’ve had people sleeping in their cars,” Fairhurst said. “We’ve had about a dozen people set up camp in a local woods because there’s nowhere for them to live.”
So far, Fairhurst is “disappointed” with the Starmer government’s approach. Prison workers’ right to strike was removed in 1994. “In opposition, a lot of Labour politicians were in favour” of it being restored, Fairhurst said, but this has not yet happened. “They can defend their position in court. We’re all going to head to the European court over that particular issue.” He added: “I think it’s rather embarrassing for a so-called working-class socialist Labour government… to tell one trade union that we’re not going to give you a right to strike back.”
Mark Fairhurst is not prepared to back down – whatever the law says. “[POA members] walked out in 2018 because violence was that high and we had no protection… and that was successful,” he told me of the action, which was called off after union concerns were addressed. Could prison guards stage an illegal “protest action” (the POA isn’t “legally allowed to use the word ‘strike’”) again? “The way it’s going… I would say it’s only a matter of time before we have to protect our members. I do not fear the law, and I will accept the consequences. I will back my members to the hilt, and will not hesitate, should the time and need arise, to walk them out again.”
[See also: Christine Rosen: “If you give people an easy path, they will take it”]
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This article appears in the 26 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Putin’s Endgame