Island Life Magazine Ltd October/November 2014 | Page 17

INTERVIEW Beyond those walls of the Island prison By Peter White F rom the outside it looks one of the most inhospitable buildings on the Island. Its drab, grey walls loom large as you drive from Newport towards Cowes, but strangely it remains something of a tourist attraction. Locals and visitors alike invariably glance across, perhaps wondering what life is really like inside the Island’s famous prison. Andy Lattimore became Governor of HMP Isle of Wight in January last year, and he invited me to venture beyond the walls to be given an intriguing insight into life behind bars. Of course there have been many changes since the original Parkhurst Prison opened in the 1830s . Camp Hill followed in 1912, and finally came Albany in the mid 1960s. Five years ago the three prisons merged to become HMP IW, and then the Camp Hill site became a casualty in March 2013 when it closed its doors for the last time as part of overall prison reorganisation. Andy joined the Prison Service in 1988, and worked in several mainland prisons, including Gartree in Leicester; Winson Green in Birmingham; and Pentonville and Holloway, and was then Governor at Winchester Prison and Bullingdon in Oxfordshire before moving here. He said: “Prisons have changed. When I joined the Prison Service, prisons were unpleasant places in terms of basic sanitation for example. These days it is not cushy in any way - I am not running a hotel - but it is about providing a basic, decent environment where we can do our work with prisoners. It is where we challenge prisoners to change, and achieve things that will help them return to society as law abiding citizens. That is our objective.” HMP IW houses just over 1,100 prisoners, the majority sex offenders . They are looked after by a staff of 580, including around 200 prison officers. So just how does HMP IW function, and what is a typical day in the life of a prisoner? Andy explained: “One thing we do is provide the remand facility for the Island, so anyone remanded into custody from Island courts will come here. But on conviction they would move to the mainland. Otherwise we are a Category B training prison, taking prisoners from all over the country. There are only a small handful of Islanders in prison here. “Our job is to protect the public and rehabilitate prisoners. We have a focus on sex offenders and offending behaviour programmes to specifically address sex offending. Most of our prisoners are serving at least four years, and once we have done what we can, subject to an assessment, if prisoners have reduced www.visitilife.com 17