Prison governor has skull smashed in by inmate

Telegraph

11 hours ago

A prison governor has suffered a fractured skull after an inmate attacked them in the latest assault in Britain's overcrowded jails.
The governor is understood to have been attending a celebratory event held on one of the wings at HMP Ranby in Retford, Nottinghamshire, when he was attacked on May 16.
It is rare for a governor to suffer such an assault and he is said to have been so seriously injured that he is still recovering in hospital nearly three weeks after the attack.
It has sparked calls by Tom Wheatley, the head of the Prison Governors' Association, for the Government to consider US 'supermax-style' regimes within prisons for the most violent and dangerous offenders.
Supermax units in the US see inmates confined for most of the day in single cells with facilities made of poured, reinforced concrete to deter self-harm. They have few privileges and are kept under 24-hour supervision, with high staff–inmate ratios.
Violent assaults
His call follows a series of violent assaults over the past month which have seen prison officers stabbed and seriously injured.
Hashem Abedi, a plotter of the Manchester Arena bombing, attacked and injured three officers in a separation unit in the high security Frankland jail in County Durham. Abedi, who is serving life, threw hot cooking oil over them and stabbed them with two makeshift knives he had fashioned from baking trays in the kitchen.
Police are also investigating an attack by Axel Rudakubana, the Southport killer, a who is alleged to have thrown scalding hot water from his kettle over a prison officer at HMP Belmarsh high-security jail in south London.
A prison officer was seriously injured this month when he was stabbed in an unprovoked attack by an inmate with a knife believed to have been flown into HMP Long Lartin high-security jail in Worcestershire by a drone.
Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, has ordered a review of separation centres used for dangerous Islamist terrorists, which could see them expanded.
This week she also announced front-line prison officers overseeing separation centres and other segregation units in high-security jails will be given stab vests. A trial is also planned for staff to carry Tasers.
However, Mr Wheatley said the attack on the governor at HMP Ranby, a category C training prison, showed that serious violence was not restricted to only high-security prisons.
'These attacks are not about the method of the assault, it is about the intent. What we need to change is something about the environment that deals with the intent of people to cause our staff harm,' he told The Telegraph.
'What we need to carefully consider are different regimes for prisoners who exhibit that level of violence. Every prison currently has a segregation unit and these violent prisoners can expect to be segregated.
'They may get an additional sentence [as a result of the assault] but if you are serving a life sentence like Abedi, that is not going to make a difference.
'We need to consider things like administrative segregation regimes, like in America, which are about keeping people without very many possessions away from everybody else because they have been violent. There should be proper consideration of that. I am not supporting it but we need to think about it.'
Mr Wheatley acknowledged there would be resource implications. It would require extra exercise yard space in prisons as each isolated prisoner would have to get their supervised daily exercise hour on their own – or a change to the requirement for every inmate to have at least an hour every day of fresh air.
Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terror legislation, has been appointed by Ms Mahmood to review separation units. He has said he will consider the 'human consequences' of segregating prisoners in such a way that it reduces the risk of violence to 'near zero', including super-max regimes.
Some 10,605 assaults on staff in male and female jails were recorded in 2024, up from 9,204 in 2023 and nearly three times the 3,640 in 2014.