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Should convicts have the right to vote? Should jails be privatised? Lord Woolf shares his views on the future of British prisons The first time I met Lord Woolf was 20 years ago when he was conducting his famous inquiry into the Strangeways prison riot and I was serving life for murder. My encounter with the former Master of the Rolls and Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales took place in the chapel of Long Lartin high-security prison in Worcestershire. Two days after Strangeways went up, we had our own mini-riot on Long Lartin’s B wing. As soon as it erupted the prison officers vacated the wing and barricades were erected. During the 15-hour siege that followed, the fabric of the wing was destroyed. Cell doors were ripped from their hinges, water pipes were smashed and fires started in the association rooms. My next-door neighbour went berserk. “Let’s burn the nonces!” (sex offenders) he roared, over and over. Already serving life for the murders of five people, he had nothing to lose and would have inflicted serious harm on some vulnerable prisoners had the IRA men on the wing not intervened. The calmer among us managed to re-establish some order among the chaos as the hours passed. But it was a long and uncertain night. In the months following the Strangeways disturbance, rioting and protests were widespread in prisons across the country. Prison life was never more precarious. When Woolf arrived in his sharp pinstripes and starched white cuffs, and spoke to us in a manner that told us he genuinely wanted to listen, he was a comforting visitor. I was just seven years into my sentence, and a long way from being fit to rejoin the civilised world. I was one of those present who did not have the words or the confidence to be able to raise a hand and speak to Lord Woolf. Never would I have imagined that one day he and I would become colleagues. But since he took over as chair of the Prison Reform Trust (PRT), of which I am a trustee, that is what we have become. This time our meeting takes place in a plush room in a whitewashed building off Palace Court, just across the road from the House of Lords. His handshake is warm and firm, his smile encouraging. He wore a judge’s robe from 1979 until 2005, and must have sent thousands of people to prison. I’m interested to know, therefore, why he has agreed to head an organisation that champions prison reform. I assumed judges gave little thought to what happens to offenders once they are escorted from the dock. “I hope I was never in that category,” he says tentatively, “but if I was, then I was cured by doing the Strangeways inquiry. It changed my whole approach to prisons. In those days judges received much less training than they do today before being given the great responsibility of sentencing people. I always thought that you should never send a person to prison for longer than was necessary to protect the public and to try to deter offenders from committing further offences.” It was Lord Woolf, then sitting at the court of appeal, who reduced the life-sentence tariffs of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. The 10-year-old killers of two-year-old James Bulger had had their minimum terms increased to 15 years by the then home secretary Michael Howard. Woolf brought it back to the trial judge’s original term of eight years. I ask him if he ever wondered how the people he sent to prison were getting on. “It has long been my belief that judges should know much more about what happens and the consequence of their sentencing. Of course you wonder what’s happening. Having been involved in Strangeways, you then realise just how important our prison system is to the administration of justice and to the protection of the public. You can either use it in a constructive way, or in a destructive way. During my inquiry into Strangeways I became aware of the terrible waste of resources. I was very conscious that if you treat people badly they don’t respond positively. You’ve got to let them retain a sense of decency, a sense of being a human being. You can’t treat people as though they are animals or they will respond in that way.” So does that mean that rehabilitation is as important as punishment in the sentencing equation? “The punishment is the easy part. There were some really tough prisons, of which Long Lartin was one, where people were broken down. Before you could release anybody you had to rebuild them – so many had lost all ability to look after themselves. Of course it is important that people have access to education and training. Getting people into circumstances after prison in which they are less likely to be involved in crime is very difficult.” With strike action by prison officers over the privatisation of Birmingham prison looming, I ask him if he thinks private prisons are a good thing. “As long as it is only a limited portion of the whole and the majority are run by the public service. I accept that private prisons can be a test bed for alternative practices and stimulate improvement, which is desirable. However, the general principle should be that if the state sends individuals to prisons it has to take direct responsibility for what happens in prison.” And prison officers striking? “That would be terribly unfortunate. Although the officers’ unions have got a very bad reputation, in fact, they can be agencies for good. But you can’t push them too far.” Giving voting rights to prisoners is one of the campaigns currently being fought by the PRT. Since he is now PRT’s chair, it must follow that he supports the enfranchisement of people in prison. “I just can’t understand, quite frankly, the antipathy towards it. What we want to do is make prisoners much more responsible, and giving them the responsibility of voting seems to me wholly consistent with that. I think it is very unfortunate that there is all this hyped up fuss about it. I don’t know how many prisoners would vote, but I think they should have that opportunity.” But our time is up. Woolf is currently in charge of the inquiry into the relationship between the LSE and Libya (a subject that I have been warned he is unable to discuss) and is pressed for time. “I guess you and I chatting like this is a quite potent measure of what it might be possible to achieve in our prison system,” I suggest. He smiles his reassuring smile once more. “Indeed,” he says, “indeed.” UK criminal justice Prisons and probation Erwin James guardian.co.uk