Prisons had been flagged as a possible candidate for the new government’s first crisis. There were rumours that Rishi Sunak’s surprise summer election was motivated in part by the worry that the prison estate in England and Wales was about to run out of space, destroying any trace of Conservative credibility as the party of law and order. In the event, the riots came first – but, naturally, they’ll feed back in to the prisons crisis, as the perpetrators are prosecuted and sentenced.

Yet the prisons emergency, which has always been told in snapshots of single prisons, has already arrived: Wandsworth was beset by scandal anyway, after the tortuous escape and recapture of a terror suspect last year, followed by the video emerging on social media appearing to show an officer having sex with an inmate. It had a catastrophic inspection in May, which led to the resignation of its governor, Katie Price. The report from that inspection has just been published and details numerous failings, from gross overcrowding and squalor to open drug use and emergency cell bells going unheeded. But the most chilling was that seven suicides had been recorded in the preceding year.

Wandsworth has always been a bellwether jail. It’s one of the largest in England and Wales; it’s a category B prison, with a high rate of churn, so behaviour management and training programmes struggle to bed in; and its Victorian design, resistant to modernisation even........

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