Is there room for rioters in Manchester’s overcrowded prisons?

Dear readers — today the government triggered an operation to ease prison overcrowding in the north of England. We look at how the plans, brought in for the second time this year, will affect Greater Manchester’s prisons below. On top of that there’s the usual smorgasbord of reads and recommendations, and we ponder how a Bee Network bus ended up in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Over the weekend, we published an essay by Robert Pegg that questioned why Elizabeth Prout, a Victorian-era nun who dedicated her life to helping Manchester’s poor, hadn’t been commemorated to the same degree as Friedrich Engels. “Yet another brilliant example of The Mill teaching me something about my city that I knew nothing about despite living here for over 70 years,” commented Mill member Mohammed Amin. “Marvellous piece. I hope she gets her sainthood,” said another member. 

Pieces like Robert’s are free for anyone to read, but we wouldn’t be able to fund them without our paying members. If you want to sign up as a member and support our work — essays about the city’s history, investigations into its major players and institutions, coverage of its rich cultural scene — consider taking out a subscription below. It’s cheaper than a round every month, how can you argue with that?

Treat your employees and clients to top-flight tennis at the Davis Cup

From today’s sponsor: With unrivalled drama, big names and an amazing wrap-around hospitality offer, there’s no better event for your business than a trip to the Davis Cup. Taking place at the AO Arena in September, packages include premium seating right next to the action, and complimentary drinks. There’s also a choice of tapas-style food or real luxury with a three-course lunch in the Skyline suite. Reward your employees for their hard work this year, or impress your most important clients with an unforgettable day of drama in the heart of Manchester.

To find out more about the packages, and book your business in for the best VIP tennis experience, click here.

Would you like to sponsor The Mill and reach our highly engaged audience? Find out more and get in touch here.

🌦️This week’s weather

With Bank Holiday weekend ahead, we wish we had better news, but local weatherman Martin Miles comes bearing sad tidings. Expect showers this week, and keep your fingers crossed for an early-September heatwave. 

Tuesday 🌦️ Windy with a mixture of sunny spells and showers. 18°C.

Wednesday 🌦️ Breezy with large amounts of cloud and the odd shower. 19°C.

Thursday 🌧️ Windy with outbreaks of heavy rain. 18°C.

Friday 🌧️ Windy once again with mostly cloudy skies and rain at times. 17°C.

Bank Holiday Weekend 🌦️ Remaining unsettled, although there will be part days where the weather is brighter and drier between weather fronts. Temperatures will be close to average for late summer.

You can find the latest forecast at Manchester Weather on Facebook — daily forecasts are published at 6.15am.

The big story: What Operation Early Dawn means for Manchester’s prisons

Top line: Today the government launched Operation Early Dawn, a plan to reduce prison overcrowding. Part of the plan is to keep prisoners in police station cells for longer, but insiders tell us many of those cells are already under pressure.

Context: Operation Early Dawn is a contingency plan put together by the last government, to respond to prison overcrowding. It has been activated today following an influx of prisoners convicted of crimes relating to the mass unrest seen earlier this month. The government says the pressure on prison capacity has reached a crisis point.

• Operation Early Dawn was last put in place in May, and lasted for a few days. This current phase isn’t expected to last beyond 10 September, reports the Times.

• That’s because a new early release mechanism is planned for then, which will release prisoners early and free up thousands of cells.

Why this matters: Most of those charged for rioting are from the North of England, and the operation has been triggered specifically to ease pressure in that part of the country. Mark Fairhurst, the national chairman of the Prison Officers Association, told Sky News that prisons in the North East and North West were particularly struggling. 

Local picture: Greater Manchester has four prisons: HMP Buckley Hall, HMP Hindley, Forest Bank and HMP Manchester (formerly known as Strangeways). 

• Buckley Hall, in Rochdale, is a small category C prison. 

• Hindley, in Wigan, is a category C prison and youth offender institution.

• Forest Bank, in Salford, is a privately-run “reception prison” that holds prisoners on remand, awaiting release, or serving relatively short sentences.

• Strangeways is a category A and B prison, housing prisoners convicted of serious crimes. In 2020 about a third of its 624 inmates were “serving indeterminate sentences”

In the clink: Each of these prisons have their issues — chief amongst them drugs — but the burden of overcrowding is not equally shared. Strangeways, for example, is part of the prison service’s high security estate, so there is more control of prison numbers from higher up, say insiders. “It’ll be the Forest Banks, the remand prisons, that’ll be feeling it,” says one.

Slammer slammed: That would be the latest challenge facing Forest Bank, the Salford prison that has been found in multiple inspections by watchdogs and investigations by the MEN to be dysfunctional. Last April, the MEN reported that prisoners were “running the wings” and that drug use was rife. The paper recently reported the government is considering stripping the current operator, Sodexo, of its contract to run the prison.

Over in Hindley, in 2022 the prison was earmarked to build new accommodation for 500 more prisoners, based on government predictions the prison population would double. This was met by local opposition, but is expected to be completed by 2027, by which time the national prison population is forecast to surpass 100,000 people. 

Data check: The latest statistics, from before the rioting, showed that three out of the four prisons were already overcrowded, and the only one that wasn’t, HMP Manchester, was very close to being overcrowded.

Source: House of Commons Library. Data for May 2024

Operation Early Dawn’s primary strategy is to house offenders for longer periods in cells within police stations until a prison cell becomes available. But that doesn’t wash right with one local police station representative (who represents individuals detained in GM stations). They said that in many cases stations are “filling up with people who shouldn’t be there,” who by now “should be in prison or on bail”. 

They say when they started in the job a few decades back, there were 24 stations operating 24 hours a day to detain offenders waiting to go to court. Now they say there are eight. There are also concerns about the pressure on police station staff from holding prisoners in police cells for longer periods (the cells are only designed to hold people up to 24 hours).

Bottom line: In Greater Manchester’s prisons, overcrowding is just one issue, along with drugs and violence. Forest Bank is described by former inmates as a “prisoner’s prison”; Hindley was recently subjected to a “tsunami of drugs” according to the chief inspector of prisons. And, Strangeways, according to insiders, isn’t struggling with high prisoner intake as much as prisoners not being rehabilitated enough to ever leave. As well as looking at how to deal with the numbers of people we’re sending into our prisons, we need much more focus on the prisons we’re sending them into.

Your Mill briefing

🚨 A man has been arrested on suspicion of murder after stabbing three people in Gorton, two have been left in life-threatening condition and a third, a 43-year-old woman, has died. Police say the suspect, a 22-year-old man, was known to the victims and that the incident is being treated as isolated. 

🏗️ Work started on the renovation of Touchstones, the Grade-II listed art gallery in Rochdale. The 1884 building is going to be a creative hub, with studio and performance spaces and improved galleries. The renovation is part of a £8.5m investment into the borough’s arts and culture.

🐝 The Bee Network went international over the weekend when its app’s live-tracking system placed the 330 bus (which goes to Stockport via Hyde) in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As one Redditor mused, “you miss one junction”. You just know when it finally did arrive there were another three right behind it too. Typical.

🖱️ We're looking for a front-end developer to help us with some fairly straightforward but important work. If you know someone who has a good mind for design and aesthetics and might be able to help us for an affordable rate, please get in touch with [email protected].

🪩 Coming up this week, we have an exclusive investigation into a much-loved nightclub that is said to be in difficulty. We can’t say much more about this until the story drops, but if you know anything about this organisation, get in touch with Mollie.

🏰 We have also been in conversation with Hurstel Edward Begley, the Ohio-based janitor and part-time musician who wants to make a bloodline claim to Baguley Hall — Greater Manchester’s oldest building and, he believes, his ancestral home. Keep an eye out for that on Wednesday and if you want to become a member to read it, hit the button below.

New feature: Jobs of the Week

Could your dream employee be reading this e-mail?

Next week we’re launching a new feature: Jobs of the Week. Lots of the most interesting and creative people in Greater Manchester read The Mill, so if your business or organisation is looking for someone stellar — why not try here? We've set up a form where you can submit the key details about the opportunity you're hiring for.

The first three people to fill in the form will get in next Monday's briefing, and for next week only we're offering the incredible price of only £125. That gets your job ad out to over 50,000 e-mail subscribers who receive The Mill. (From then on, it'll be £250 a slot — still an absolute bargain). Click here to upload your job details.

Home of the week

This Grade-II listed cottage was built in the 17th century and sits within the beautiful countryside in Marple. It has three bedrooms and an extension with sliding French doors that open to a lovely garden. £625,000.

Our favourite reads

Alan Turing — The Times Literary Supplement

A great letter in the TLS about Alan Turing, the genius codebreaker who helped win the Second World War. Turing was prosecuted for his homosexuality by the Manchester police and the judiciary, but within Britain’s largest intelligence agency, senior officials rallied to protect Turing. At a trial in 1952, Hugh Alexander, head of cryptanalysis, told the court that Turing was a “national asset”, and GCHQ “declined to emulate the sexual vetting that was adopted during the Cold War by the Foreign Office”.

Industry’s Harry Lawtey Sees Robert’s Ambition ‘Through Northern Eyes’ — Vulture

Harry Lawtey, who plays Robert in Industry, a high-stakes drama about young employees working in a ruthless investment bank, describes the show as “a vehicle for discussing notions of class”. In season three, Robert, a senior investment banker from a working-class area of Manchester, strains to fit in among his peers and buys a house he can’t afford to renovate, and is forced to live in its empty shell. “It’s a perfect metaphor, this skeleton around him that is eating him from the outside,” Lawtey says. 

‘Everyone’s come together’: How British Muslims are responding to the riots — Dazed

Two weeks ago, riots broke out in Piccadilly Gardens and outside asylum seeker hotels in Newton Heath and Bredbury, as well as Southport, Rotherham, Sunderland, Middlesborough and Tamworth. “But while these riots were intended to weaken and break the communities targeted, the opposite has unfolded.” Adam Kelwick, the imam of the Abdullah Quilliam mosque in Liverpool, handed out “burgers, drinks and hugs” to rioters and invited them in to talk. “They expressed their regrets and said they would no longer take any part in it,” Kelwick said. “Some of them are influential people within the community who are now using their platforms and are actively online helping to de-escalate matters and extinguish some of the flames.”

Our to do list

Tuesday

📸 There’s a new exhibition at Waterside Arts in Sale by five artists exploring their experiences of being mixed-heritage. It’s free to visit.

🎞️ Bury Art Museum is now showing For God’s Sake, a short film that portrays the South Asian community’s experiences in Bury, with particular focus on the daily rituals of a seamstress who crafts burqas by hand. More here.

Wednesday

🎸 There’s an evening of protest music throughout history at Band on the Wall to raise money for the people of Gaza. Tickets here.

🎭 The King’s Arms in Salford is showing The Invocation, an evening of improvised short horror stories based on the audience’s suggestions, by the Wigan-based theatre group Casino Improv. Tickets here.

Thursday 

🪩 Mefisto Brass, a street band from Milan who play upbeat ska and house music, are performing at Ramona in Ancoats from 8pm. It’s free entry, or pay £7 and get a Margarita as you arrive.

🏳️‍🌈 Tzeli Hadjidimitrio, a queer filmmaker and native of the island of Lesbos, chronicles over 40 years of lesbian love in the birthplace of the ancient Greek poet Sappho in a critically-acclaimed new film, Lesvia. It’s showing at Factory International from 2pm and tickets are £6.

Thanks again to our sponsor, The Davis Cup. If you’d like to sponsor a briefing, get in touch.