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Six Private Prisons Facts Chris Grayling Doesn't Want You To Know

Here's 6 Reasons Privatized Prisons Are A Terrible Idea
Asa Bennett
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Embargoed until 0001 Tuesday 30th April. Justice Secretary Chris Grayling during a visit to Pentonville Prison with Prisons Minister Jeremy Wright (not pictured) ahead of announcing the outcome of a review into prison perks.
Anthony Devlin/PA Archive

Justice secretary Chris Grayling loves private-run prisons so much that he singled out HMP Oakwood as his favourite prison, but are they as good as ministers would want you to think?

Grayling's beloved HMP Oakwood was recently found by inspectors to be in urgent need of a rescue plan, with inexperienced prison staff so unwilling to keep inmates under control that it verged on collusion. Inspectors were told "on more than one occasion...that you can get drugs easier than soap."

Shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan promised to re-nationalise failing private prisons, saying: "It's clearly not working at Oakwood. As things stand, it's not delivering what the public should expect of the millions being paid to G4S to run it."

There are now 14 prisons in England and Wales operated under by private companies, which between them hold 13,500 prisoners or 15% of the UK's prison population. Experts praise private-run prisons for seeming to have lower reoffending rates than state-run institutions.

But HuffPostUK has rounded up six awkward facts you should know about why privatized prisons are not as fantastic as they may sound.

Private prisons: What you need to know
They're worse than state prisons(01 of06)
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According to the Ministry of Justice's Prison Performance Assessment Tool (PPAT), private prisons do worse in terms of the number of assaults and escapes, as well as in rehabilitating prisoners.In 2009, they get an average overall score for prisons in the private sector was 2.7, while public sector prisons got on average 2.83.In the following quarter this gap had widened to 2.6 and 2.85, a difference of nearly 10%.
Ashfield - the 'worst' jail in the UK?(02 of06)
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HM Prison Ashfield, which is run by Serco, used to be plagued with serious problems like continued riots and poor management, with it branded in 2003by Martin Narey, then director general of the Prison Service, as the worst prison in England and Wales "by some measure".
Even the first private-run prison failed...(03 of06)
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HMP Wolds was the first private prison in the UK as it opened in 1992 under G4S management. Twenty years later, inspectors found that HMP Wolds had "clear weaknesses" with poor behaviour and high levels of drug use among inmates. This led to G4S being stripped of its contract and the prison returning to public management.
And they could be worse than we think (04 of06)
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Larry O'Callaghan, union representative for the National Offender Management Service, said: "We believe there is a great deal of underreporting of these attacks at private prisons, it is in their interests to keep them quiet.""Public protection is how well prisons protect officers and managers from attackers by prisoners, or prisoner-on-prisoner attacks.
Most poorly-run prisons are private(05 of06)
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Two of the three prisons rated "of serious concern" last year by the Ministry of Justice are private-run. They are G4S-run HMP Oakwood in the West Midlands and Serco-run HMP Thameside in London.
And most haven't been doing too well...(06 of06)
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In 2008, 10 of the 11 private prisons in England and Wales came in the bottom quarter of the Ministry of Justice's prison performance league table.
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