Attack on officers raises questions about separation centres at jails in England

The Guardian

15-04-2025

With its high, ugly, grey concrete perimeter walls HMP Frankland looks as grim from the outside as you would expect for a place nicknamed 'Monster Mansion'.
Since it was opened in 1983 on the leafy outskirts of Durham – near a 13th-century priory used for centuries as a holiday retreat for Benedictine monks – its inmates have included Peter Sutcliffe, Harold Shipman and Charles Bronson.
It is not the sort of place to ever get favourable reviews. Bronson, one of the UK's longest-serving prisoners, wrote in his autobiography: 'It was too intense, too closed in and claustrophobic.'
Frankland is in the news after an attack on prison guards by Hashem Abedi, a terrorist involved in the Manchester Arena bombing serving at least 55 years.
Its inmates are understood to include the Soham murderer Ian Huntley, the serial killer Levi Bellfield, the Soho nailbomber David Copeland and Wayne Couzens, the Metropolitan police officer who raped and murdered Sarah Everard in 2021. Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president sentenced to 50 years for war crimes, is reportedly another Frankland prisoner.
Former prisoners describe how someone engraved 'welcome to hell' inside the holding cell at the prison's reception.
Inside the category A maximum security jail with more than 800 inmates, it is all fences, gates and keys, say people who know it. And inside all of that, on a narrow corridor, is a separation centre where the attack took place.
The separation centre at Frankland is one of three introduced into the England and Wales prison estate by Theresa May's government in 2017, the others being at the high security prisons HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes and HMP Full Sutton near York.
The intention was to tackle extremism in prisons, 'holding up to 28 of the most subversive offenders, preventing their influence over others'. That 'influence' primarily refers to the ability to radicalise fellow inmates, which could prove a risk to national security or disrupt order in the jail.
But do these separation centres work? Are they fit for purpose? How did a man who in 2022 was found guilty of a 'vicious attack' on a prison guard at Belmarsh manage to allegedly attack again?
A 2022 report by the chief inspector of prisons, Charlie Taylor, into separation centres at Frankland and Woodhill (Full Sutton was closed at the time) found that even though the centres were designed for prisoners from any political or religious standpoint, 'so far, they have only been used for Muslim men'.
It described the unit as having a small room for association and an area for prisoners to cook and prepare food. 'With no facilities on the wing, staff arranged for prisoners to visit the main prison gym and they could also be taken off the unit for education, but no prisoner was taking up this offer at the time of the inspection.'
The inspection described the unit as well-maintained, with the small number of inmates living in 'safe, reasonable conditions'. It continued: 'They had good access to healthcare, including mental health services, as well as visits and phone calls.'
The prisoners in the unit had collectively decided not to engage with the regime, leaving officers 'often underemployed'.
That lack of engagement with prison staff showed separation units were clearly not working as they should, John Podmore, a former governor of Belmarsh and an honorary professor at Durham University, told the Guardian.
Sign up to Headlines UK
Get the day's headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning
after newsletter promotion
Having access to a kitchen appears to have enabled the attack on prison officers. Abedi is understood to have thrown a pan of hot cooking oil at officers and used weapons made from a tray to stab them.
Podmore said it was clearly a 'gross misjudgement' to have self-catering facilities for the inmates there. If prisoners were not engaging with staff, then 'don't give them kitchens', he said.
'There is probably some poor bugger at a cat C [prison] like Wandsworth locked up 23 hours a day and getting food shoved under the door going: 'Hang on a minute, I didn't massacre children and try to kill prison officers, why can't I have a kitchen?' It is that stupid. On what basis were they given a kitchen?' he asked.
'I'm not an advocate of concrete coffins and I have set up self-catering facilities … but they are something to be earned, something to be worked towards, not something to be given, as appears here, by way of appeasement.'
Podmore said he recalled the implementation of the separation centres being 'done very reluctantly' by the Prison Service. 'It was very half-hearted, they didn't really want to do it but they didn't have a lot of choice … the Prison Service does not like being told what to do.'
The Ministry of Justice has said there would be a full review of how the incident was allowed to happen.
'The government will do whatever it takes to keep our hardworking staff safe and our thoughts remain with the two prison officers still in hospital as they recover,' a spokesperson said.
'We've already taken immediate action to suspend access to kitchens in separation and close supervision centres. We will also launch a full independent review into how this attack was able to happen and will set out the terms and scope of this review in the coming days.'