Growing up in the city, I remember my mother speaking about the Royal with a sense of pride. Not the pride, mind, of someone who could afford to stay there — but of someone who wanted her city to have places like it. You could walk in through the front doors and out through the back, right onto the platform at the train station. As for the building itself, it hosted weddings and conferences, and the occasional wake. The Royal, in short, was as much a part of Hull as its cream phone boxes: visible, familiar, unavoidable.

Yet by the time of Hull’s disorder — and as Hobman’s comment so vividly implies — the Royal had become something different, darker. In part, certainly, it was targeted because of who stayed there now: not tipsy aunts and mourners, but asylum seekers. Yet if the perhaps 200 people huddling inside the hotel were one of the targets, they were ultimately mere ciphers for a much broader malaise. 

Speaking with several of those present that day, alongside others from across Hull, it’s clear that what largely underpinned the violence was not a coherent ideological project, still less organized extremism. Rather, it represented a belief that electoral promises were no longer translating into policy reality. That resulting anger was often messy, contradictory — and shameful. Some perpetrators were undoubtedly racist. But beyond the fires and the bricks lay something more structural: a sense that democratic accountability had thinned, and that decisions taken in Westminster were drifting beyond the reach of those dealing with the consequences.

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Opened in 1849 as the Station Hotel, right beside Hull’s main rail terminus, the Royal stood at the literal gateway to the city. Given its current name in 1854, after a stay from Queen Victoria, it’s a regal endorsement that’s endured war, fire, rebuilding and reinvention. In its heyday, the hotel was a statement of Victorian confidence, with its imposing Italianate façade in warm stone, facing right onto Paragon Square. Things were just as impressive inside, all sweeping staircases and chandeliers. Not that everyone was charmed. Philip Larkin, who for years worked at Hull’s university library, and never one for romanticizing his surroundings, found the Royal rather gloomy. Yet that note of austerity only reinforced its presence: a grand, slightly worn institution that anchored the city, whether you stayed there or not.

Perhaps that’s why, when asylum seekers were housed there under Home Office contracts in 2019, Hull was always going to react. What was initially described as contingency accommodation turned into something more permanent. There was no local vote, no real consultation, only a visible change imposed in the symbolic heart of the city. As for residents, many saw the transformation as further evidence that Hull’s future was being shaped elsewhere, by people who neither knew the town nor cared what happened next.

By the end of September 2025, official Home Office data showed that 777 asylum seekers were receiving state support in Kingston upon Hull. A city of 275,401, that’s about 28 per 10,000. Of these, 257 were in what was called hotel-based contingency housing — in other words places like the Royal. These figures may appear modest on paper. But to understand why they mattered, you must also grasp what Hull had already lost: and what came afterwards.

Almost everyone I spoke to in the city could trace their family stories back to the docks. Hull is a port city with a long memory. From the Fifties to the mid-Seventies, its fishing fleet ranged as far as the freezing North Atlantic, with trawlers away for weeks at a time. Some never returned — fishing was and is one of the most dangerous professions on Earth — but at the industry’s peak the dangers somehow felt worth it. Home to some 350 ships, Hull’s docks were crowded, its fortunes tied to waters thousands of miles away. That reach translated into something tangible at home: steady wages, full pubs, busy streets, and a sense that Hull mattered. Places like the Royal reflected that confidence.

Then it all unraveled — the Cod Wars, geopolitical shocks, rising costs and economic mismanagement are all to blame. By the early 2000s, Hull had one of the weakest local economies in the country, with large areas ranking among the most deprived in England. In 2001, around 38% of working-age adults had no formal qualifications, and earnings lagged well behind the British average. Yet this collapse was about more than unemployment; it eroded the pride that came from Hull’s place in a global industry. Boarded-up shops, low-paid work and a growing drugs trade reshaped the city’s texture. Regeneration did come, slowly and unevenly. But amid the retail developments and public investment, the push into renewables and, in 2017, the UK City of Culture, what was lost never truly returned. 

Mass immigration arrived later. By the 2021 census, 13.1% of Hull’s population was born outside the UK, an increase of 4.6 percentage points since 2011. This demographic change soon became visible. New shops and services appeared, which some long-standing residents felt weren’t built with them in mind. Eastern European supermarkets; Asian takeaways; Turkish barbers — all these became more common, while many older fixtures of working-class life, from pubs to cafés, continued to vanish. Some of that loss merely reflected economic decline and changing habits. But set alongside immigration, the effect felt sharper.

Little wonder that Hull went heavily for Brexit, with many hoping their votes would help regain control over Britain’s borders. We know what happened next: the Boriswave, and more mistrust in the powers-that-be. That was especially true in a tight-knit, working-class city like Hull. Higher arrivals, legal and illegal alike, translated into pressure on housing and local services. Stories circulated of local families spending years on waiting lists, while newly arrived migrants were seen to be housed more quickly. Some, no doubt, were mere rumors. But it’s also true that council housing is governed by a points-based system putting need over nationality. In practice, that often reinforced a deep sense of unfairness among long-time residents.

Change, then, was not encountered in spreadsheets. It was encountered in kitchens, at school gates, in the way public spaces were used — and in how secure people felt in their own city. Several women tell me that young girls no longer feel safe walking past the Royal, day or night. “Nobody even wants to go anywhere near it,” is how one puts it, a woman in her forties with tied-back hair and a steady manner. Others speak of groups of men congregating outside, approaching young girls, and creating an atmosphere they describe as intimidating. Nothing, they say, was ever done about it.

Those fears did not appear in a vacuum. Hull had already been shadowed by longstanding claims grooming gangs operated in the city. Earlier this month, Humberside Police closed their investigation without charges, disappointing some alleged victims. Meanwhile, concerns about women’s safety in the city center were embedded in the local conversation. Once again, many of these assertions were hard to verify. But they circulated persistently, reinforcing a sense of warnings ignored.

So when disorder came, it didn’t emerge from nothing. The Southport murders were merely the spark — even if online rumors and disinformation doubtless spread the flames. As riots erupted across England, a group of protesters gathered at Victoria Square, roughly 500 yards from the Royal. One of the organizers was John Francis, a broad-shouldered middle-aged man with a cockney accent who walks with the aid of a crutch. He says he moved to Hull in 1989, “and I’ve been here ever since”. 

Francis is blunt, emotionally invested in his patch, and unafraid to say what he thinks. Through a Facebook group called Hull Patriotic Protesters, Francis had planned what he calls a “flash demo” focused on “winter fuel payments, illegal immigration, pensioners being shafted”. The group frames itself as patriotic, explicitly rejecting racism and extremism. Yet its rhetoric, particularly around illegal immigration, is often blunt and sometimes inflammatory. Francis, for his part, also acknowledged in a Sky News interview that he was once a member of the now-defunct English Defence League.

That history matters, placing Francis in a harder-edged tradition of street mobilization. Yet nor does it fully explain the composition or mood of the crowd that August day. Watching violence unfold elsewhere, even Francis seems to have been cautious, claiming he tried to turn the march into a vigil, asking people to “bring flowers and teddy bears”. 

Hobman, who saw a Facebook post advertising the protest, was among those who turned up. “People that love the country, basically,” he says, “we’re going to pay our respects.” He arranged childcare for his son and went into town. “Someone needs to do something.” At Victoria Square, a broad pedestrian space centered on a statue of the eponymous monarch, where protests are traditionally held, both John and Francis recall a heavy police presence and a small counter-protest. The interaction seemed to harden the mood. Then, as Hobman puts it, “everybody went there” — by which he means the Royal Hotel. By the time the crowd arrived, there were “about 3,000 people” outside.

What followed resembled scenes elsewhere: widespread disorder involving criminal damage and looting. Violence spread across much of Hull’s city center and continued on into the evening. Hobman, who had been drinking, threw a beer can at a police shield. Three weeks later, he was arrested and sentenced to eight months in jail. “If I could turn back time,” he says, “I wouldn’t go.”

In the days that followed, the Prime Minister described the riots as “far-Right thuggery”. The phrase stuck, and to an extent for good reason. Some rioters in Hull and beyond directed hostility at “foreigners”, real or perceived, with reports of anti-immigrant and, at times, racist chanting. At one point in Hull, a breakaway group surrounded a car of Romanians, kicking and striking the vehicle and punching one of the occupants through a window. 

But to describe the entire crowd as “far-Right” was rhetorically effective but analytically unhelpful, blurring the distinction between thugs and bystanders, racists and concerned citizens, extremists and criminal opportunists. When I ask Hobman what he understood by the phrase “far Right”, his answer is more nuanced than you might expect. “I don’t care if you’re black, blue, orange. I don’t want illegal immigrants here.” Francis, who says he left as events escalated and wasn’t involved in the disorder, draws a similar line, emphasizing the importance of legality and integration. Both men, like everyone I speak to, invoke less the language of racial hierarchy than that of grievance — about borders, consent and perceived unfairness. 

But when those two positions are treated as indistinguishable, political language loses precision. This dynamic isn’t new: recall, again, the way Brexiteers were too often equated with ignorance or worse. The political risk for Labour is now similar, even among those totally uninvolved in the violence. One woman I interview, who attended the initial protest, “absolutely hated” what happened outside the Royal. The vandalism, she says, was “stupid and self-defeating”. Yet she still thinks immigration policy has been handled recklessly — and there’s not much evidence the Government is doing much about it.

After all, though the current plan is to end hotel use by 2029, redistribution is hardly resolution, with migrants likely to end up scattered across HMOs or disused army barracks. That, of course, leaves the underlying questions of consent and mandate unanswered, to say nothing of the wider system that allowed migrants to enter Britain to start with. 

Even so, and despite believing that promises made at the ballot box haven’t translated into policy, no one I speak to proposes dumping politics altogether. “They may not listen to me,” says one Hull mother with two young children, “but they’ll see my vote on the ballot.” Hobman is more blunt: “I will vote Reform.” Francis, who is standing as an independent in the May local elections, says that if he were not running himself, he too would back a Reform candidate. 

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Either way, this is hardly the language of anti-democratic withdrawal, reflecting instead a hard-headed electoral repositioning on the part of Hull and its people. The city’s recent political shifts reflect that turn. Luke Campbell, a local former Olympic boxer, won the mayoralty under the Reform banner last year, while the party is contesting all 19 seats in the upcoming local elections. With Nigel Farage recently visiting to drum up support, Reform will be hoping to convert that momentum into tangible gains.

None of this guarantees a lasting political realignment, but it does point to a growing willingness among voters to look past Labour. In this, Hull’s politics have long been more fluid than its industrial past might imply. While Labour dominated for decades, the city equally sustains a strong Liberal Democrat presence, one framed by a decent ground game and a focus on things like potholes. To that extent, Reform’s rise feels more radical, especially as it centers not on local gripes, but on immigration and indeed the direction of the country at large.

Nor is Hull exceptional. Across England and Wales, post-industrial communities are facing vast rapid demographic change without commensurate investment. And when locals are then told that concerns about pace or scale are morally suspect, the effect is combustible. All the same, Hull’s story also shows that migration is merely the razor edge of discontent. Even if Reform gains support on stopping the boats, say, it’ll ultimately be judged on something deeper: whether it can offer a credible economic settlement for Hull and places like it. Beyond border control, that’ll require sustained investment in jobs, skills and infrastructure; a housing system that feels fair; and a model of growth that restores a sense of stability. Without that, the underlying conditions that produced the riots will remain. As for the Royal, it may yet return to what it once was, a place for tipsy aunts and mourners. But Hull has a long memory.

Yet allowing all this anger, all this hatred, to shape the logic of the prison system is a mistake. However satisfying it may feel to some observers, Huntley’s bloody death, and the rising chaos in cellblocks right across the country, erodes the very authority that keeps these institutions working. And if that’s bad news for prison discipline, to say nothing of inmates themselves, Huntley’s fate, and that of people like him, ultimately makes life less safe for everyone — both in jail and out.

HMP Frankland, the County Durham prison where Huntley was attacked with a spiked metal pole last month, is one of the most secure in the country. It holds Category A prisoners, men assessed as posing the highest risk to the public and national security. But that underplays the system’s sophistication, for Frankland actually operates under several distinct “regimes”.

The main population houses many of the country’s most dangerous offenders, alongside a unit for prisoners with dangerous personality disorders. There is also a so-called “separation center”: a closed unit used for the most ideologically challenging inmates in the system, including Islamist extremists. It was here that Hashem Abedi, the brother of the Manchester Arena bomber Salman, attacked three prison officers with hot oil and improvised weapons. Separate from all these is the “protection estate”, where prisoners at risk from the general population are segregated for their own safety. It was here that Huntley was serving his sentence, and where he was attacked.

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Unsurprisingly — and as I learned firsthand over the years I spent at Frankland serving a life sentence — these varied units can only function by tightly controlling the movements of prisoners. When inmates move between areas, from a wing to the gym or the clinic, they pass through multiple checkpoints designed to prevent the transfer of weapons, drugs or other contraband. Wands, sniffer dogs and airport-style body scanners are common. I myself remember standing in a queue waiting to pass through security, not unlike the slow shuffle through customs after a flight. If someone was ever stopped with contraband, the entire line was held up as staff investigated.

Prisoners only mix with others on their own regime, and even then interactions are monitored by staff and security cameras. Workshops are supervised, with tools like hammers and screwdrivers issued individually and tracked through meticulous tagging systems. Even visits and healthcare are held separately, effectively creating parallel systems within the same prison.

Regimes and movements are structured precisely to reduce opportunities for escape, the passing of contraband — or violence. Yet even in such controlled environments, human instincts endure. Where the social restraints of ordinary life fall away, prisoners organize themselves into informal hierarchies that soon shape the culture of prison life. A prisoner’s perceived morality, and the nature of their offense, inform where they sit within a jail’s unwritten order.

Within this hierarchy, crimes against women and children are the most despised. Other prisoners frequently regard their perpetrators as legitimate targets, something that remains true even within protection units. Child killers remain at the very bottom, while other murderers — like men who kill their wives — enjoy a marginally higher status.

It is not yet possible to know the precise motivations behind the attack on Huntley. Within prison culture, however, acts of violence are often shaped by these same reputational dynamics. A prisoner who attacks someone occupying the lowest rung of the moral hierarchy may be seen as enforcing a twisted kind of justice.

Anthony Russell, the man suspected of killing Huntley, is himself serving life for the rape and murder of one woman and the murder of another. On paper, then, Russell is near the bottom of the moral hierarchy too; by allegedly murdering Huntley, he may have hoped to alter his position. I often witnessed this dynamic during my own years in custody. Attackers received no rewards, no privileges, no tangible benefits. What changed was their reputations. A prisoner seen as willing to inflict extreme violence on a fellow inmate — especially one at the bottom of the moral food chain — is likely to enjoy boosted respect from some inmates: and simply be feared by others. And for someone like Russell, unlikely to ever be released, that shift in reputation may serve him for the rest of his life.

As for Huntley himself, he mostly seems to have avoided provoking other inmates, though there are some suggestions that he wore a red top in jail, apparently mocking the Manchester United jerseys of his victims. Either way, prisoners like him normally keep their heads down. Before this last and fatal assault, after all, he had already survived two earlier attacks, including one in which another inmate slit his throat.

Yet if all this savagery is obviously a problem in itself, especially when prisoner-on-prisoner assaults jumped by 11% in 2024, the real challenge is again hierarchical. Once violence becomes entwined with the informal dynamics of the prison population, it becomes the mechanism through which status is asserted and reputations built.

At that point, anyway, the authority of the institution starts to weaken, as control shifts from formal rules to the unwritten codes of the wing. And if prisoners are permanently pushed to the margins — denied any possibility of engagement — they rarely move beyond that position. Isolation hardens identity. Resentment grows. The space to confront one’s demons narrows, and the willingness to engage with psychologists or teachers lessens.

This matters because most prisoners will eventually return to society. The only question is: what will they be like when they do?

As comments under stories of Huntley’s death vividly show, many people imagine that brutality behind bars is a deterrent: make prisons frightening enough and crime will stop. In truth, though, deterrence rarely works so directly. Most offenders don’t commit crimes expecting to be caught. Many crimes, particularly sexual offenses, emerge from deep-seated psychological patterns, distorted thinking and long-term behavioral problems that can’t be corrected simply by the threat of punishment.

Addressing those patterns requires long-term psychological treatment. It also requires structured programs, professional engagement and sustained effort over many years. For all this to happen, the prison environment must be stable, something fatally undermined by vicious acts of violence.

When assaults are rife, after all, prisoners are focused not on rehabilitation, but instead on mere survival. Even worse, safety often means getting protection from organized criminals: whether drug gangs or Islamists. I again witnessed this dynamic first-hand during my time in custody, with Islamist networks deploying a particularly strong reputation for collective retaliation. For vulnerable prisoners, aligning with such groups meant safety from bullying or worse. But protection always came at a price. Loyalty was expected, and ideological pressure soon followed.

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None of this is easily solved. The only way to eliminate violence in prison altogether would be to keep everyone permanently locked away. But a prison run on that basis ceases to function. Education classes stop. Workshops close. Healthcare, gym sessions and social interaction disappear. The very activities meant to stabilize behavior and prepare prisoners for release are the ones that require movement, contact and trust. Shut those down and you don’t create safety. You create stagnation, resentment — and men who leave prison more dangerous than when they arrived.

Better, then, to tighten security. Stronger intelligence gathering among staff; closer supervision within workshops and protection units; stricter control over tools and materials — all this would reduce opportunities for violence. Some prisoners, those with particular reputations or vulnerabilities, may also need tighter movement restrictions within protection units. To reiterate, none of these measures will remove the risk entirely. But well-staffed wings, experienced officers who understand prisoner dynamics, and tighter control of potential weapons, will make attacks far less likely. In prisons, as in any complex system, safety does not come from eliminating human interaction. It comes from managing it carefully.

In short, it’s clear that Huntley’s death isn’t merely the story of one notorious inmate, or even of a single prison in crisis. Rather, it goes right to the heart of what kind of penal system our society wants: one that quietly tolerates violence, or one that maintains disciplined authority over even the most hated of prisoners. The first might satisfy our anger — but it’s the second that’ll keep us safe.

Despite today’s headlines about officers being sacked or jailed for illicit relationships with prisoners, none of the underlying dynamics are new. Across the 16 years I spent in custody, I saw it all first-hand, from furtive tenderness to outright corruption. But if base human impulse will endure until our jails turn to dust, the prison environment has changed. With austerity undermining the workplace structures that once controlled interactions between inmate and guard, hormones — and self-interested cynicism — are now far harder to constrain.

A recent surge in misconduct cases has dragged prison romance into public view. The media focus has fixed largely on women, partly because several cases have been unusually sensational, from the explicit footage to relationships that fused emotional dependency with criminal compromise. The HMP Wandsworth case, where an officer was jailed after being filmed having sex with a prisoner, illustrated how quickly fantasy, contraband and security failure can collapse into public scandal.

The figures reflect this trend. In the year to June 2024, a record 165 prison staff in England and Wales were dismissed for misconduct, a 34% rise on the previous year. The offenses ranged from inappropriate relationships to smuggling phones and drugs. Across the wider Ministry of Justice and its agencies, dismissals for misconduct have more than doubled since 2022. Increased detection doubtless plays a role here, but so do the cumulative effects of structural degradation. Ironically, the very contraband used to sustain secrecy — mobile phones — has helped expose wrongdoing so publicly that the state has been forced to respond.

In truth, though, this is about far more than a smuggled iPhone. There was a time, after all, when such relationships were contained by experience. Older officers understood prisoner behavior instinctively. They spotted manipulation early. They knew when a conversation lingered too long, when grooming had begun, when a colleague needed to be rotated off a wing. Their presence acted as the prison service’s immune system. I remember one senior officer who ran the wing I lived on. He was firm, sometimes abrasive, but effective. “It’s his train set,” a fellow prisoner once joked, and in a sense it was. He understood the environment and how to keep it stable.

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That authority wasn’t abstract. One officer I knew, who become involved in an intimate relationship with a prisoner, was working under exactly this kind of robust leadership. Once the early signs were identified, there was no slow drift, no tolerated ambiguity. She was removed from the wing and marched off-site within hours. As it was relayed to us later, a superior told her simply: “This job is not for you.”

These protections were stripped away after 2012, when ministers replaced a planned privatization drive with “public sector benchmarking”: doing more work with fewer staff. From 2011 to 2017, frontline officer numbers fell by roughly 30%, and the service has never recovered.

When that senior officer I knew took redundancy, some were glad. Within a year, though, the cost was obvious. The atmosphere loosened. Boundaries blurred, and with them the everyday authority that had kept the wings stable. What followed was a power vacuum, one swiftly filled by violent criminals, organized gangs and Islamists. Authority, in other words, isn’t withdrawn from the landings, nor does it disappear. Rather, it’s ceded: to those most willing to impose it, arbitrarily and often violently.

And for every experienced prison guard who retires, their replacement is almost invariably worse. I saw this first hand, as landings were filled with inexperienced recruits, some barely out of college, and all with minimal training and weak supervision. A vicious circle soon followed, as staff with little life experience were dumped into some of the most brutal environments in the country. I witnessed this shift personally, when a new female recruit arrived on my wing. She was keen and professional, but inexperienced in reading her surroundings. That is not a criticism of her; it’s an obvious risk when 22 year olds are stationed on wings holding around 100 men, and where they’re routinely left to patrol landings alone. High on the third floor, the guard was dragged into a cell by a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder, with no colleagues to assist her. Intervention came only after other prisoners heard her screams.

By late 2023, the scale of this collective inexperience was stark. 41% of prison officers had fewer than three years on the job, compared to just 2% a decade earlier. Meanwhile, the proportion with over 10 years’ experience had fallen from two thirds to less than a quarter. Knowledge that once passed informally between generations of staff — how to read a wing, how to set boundaries — had largely disappeared.

As my memories from HMP Gartree imply, secret relationships between inmates and guards have always existed. Falling in love is human nature, more so in the cramped psychological conditions of prison. Jail distorts ordinary emotional patterns. It compresses isolation and allows human instincts to slip their usual restraints. All this is doubly true for prisoners, starved of intimacy and connection, with deprivation turning small acts of kindness into oxygen.

Yet seasoned criminals hardly forget their methods at the prison gate. They cultivate familiarity, test boundaries — and wait. Once a line is crossed, leverage follows. A favor today becomes expectation tomorrow. Then exception becomes routine, and emotional access hardens into material extraction: contraband, prohibited communications, the “one-off” that last for years.

For officers, particularly young women placed on volatile landings with predatory men, environment and emotional reflex combine with dangerous force. There is the urge to nurture, easily triggered by displays of distress or vulnerability. There is the pull of charismatic alpha males who command status among dangerous peers. And there is flattery, the illusion of being uniquely trusted, understood or “liked”. Some slip into the role without quite knowing when the ground gave way. Others exploit it knowingly, sometimes for financial gain.

Whatever the reason, falling into crime, especially when your duty is to maintain professional boundaries and protect the public, is a choice. Yet when these forces collide with inadequate supervision, thin staffing and relentless exposure, they harden into risk — and the consequences can be severe. Intelligence leaks. Contraband circulates more freely. Debt and violence intensify. Informal power shifts. I have known officers disclose offenses, identify informants or pass on sensitive information, sometimes to ingratiate themselves, sometimes out of hatred for a particular crime. The consequences were predictable: prisoners attacked; debts enforced through beatings; men removed from rehabilitative pathways because trust, once broken, could not be restored.

Of course, not every case crosses the threshold into criminality. Some drift into genuine emotional partnerships. A small number of staff resign to continue relationships openly once prisoners are transferred. In lower-category prisons, this drift has sometimes been rationalized rather than challenged. At HMP Warren Hill, where I was held for over two years, one such relationship involving a charity worker was tolerated on the basis that it acted as a “protective factor” ahead of release, provided it remained “non-intimate”.

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Still, just like in the real world, many of these staff-inmate relationships founder, and when they do, officers tend to suffer more. If the breach involves improper contact but no contraband, the (often female) officer is removed, barred and sometimes shamed in the press. The prisoner, however, may face little consequence beyond a file note. When criminality is involved, the imbalance widens further. Messages, footage, and entry logs usually sit with the officer. When it collapses, it does so brutally: prosecution, reputational ruin, shattered families and the realization that the promise of love was often as empty as the cell she now occupies. He, practiced in the art of concealment, may simply continue serving his sentence, his network and status enhanced.

His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service has acknowledged part of this reality, expanding its Counter Corruption Unit from 2019 to detect and disrupt wrongdoing. The rise in dismissals reflects that effort. But enforcement alone cannot repair a degraded system. This, too, reflects a wider failure across Britain’s criminal justice system: risk is managed procedurally rather than structurally. Scandals are treated as isolated lapses rather than symptoms of institutional weakening. Responsibility is pushed downwards onto individuals, while the conditions that made failure predictable remain largely untouched.

Honest reform would begin by honestly diagnosing the problem. This is not just a morality tale about individual weakness, but the predictable result of stripped-out experience, supervision and authority. From there, the authorities must re-professionalize the job. That means restoring experienced staff on wings, and ensuring training addresses the ethical and psychological hazards of prison work, all while rotating staff off high-risk landings. The watchword here should be prevention — not punishment.

Aligning incentives with reality is crucial here. Stabilizing violent, drug-saturated prisons is skilled, risky work. Until pay and progression reflect that, the service will continue recruiting for numbers and losing experience. And finally, the Ministry of Justice should improve design and culture, not just detection. Better sightlines and smarter CCTV both matter here, as do schedules that discourage isolation.

Ultimately, this is not about romance or scandal. It is about safety. Yet until prisons are rebuilt as safety-critical institutions — properly staffed and properly supervised — the same quiet patterns will persist: the light footsteps on the landing, the whispers at the door, the lines crossed just out of sight. And the consequences will not remain inside.

The prisoner sprawled on the floor was no ordinary inmate. In 2003, during a counter-terrorism raid in Manchester, Bourgass stabbed four police officers; Detective Constable Stephen Oake later died of his wounds. Convicted of murder and given a life sentence with a minimum term of 22 years, he was later handed another 17-year sentence for his part in the so-called “ricin plot”. He was, in every sense, a defining figure of that early wave of al-Qaeda-linked offenders.

Two decades later, Bourgass is reported to be on the cusp of his first full parole review. The precise timings are unclear, but the decision may already have been made; Bourgass might walk out of prison as early as this month. The Parole Board’s role is not to punish retrospective horror, but to weigh current risk: it must assess the man before them, not the man he was. And yet, as Bourgass’s minimum tariff is now expiring, the country is left with a more uncomfortable question: what does “rehabilitation” really mean when the beliefs behind the violence are so hard to change?

I pose that question not as a distant commentator, but as someone who spent 17 years inching through every category of the prison system, after being convicted of murder in 2005. Along the way, I lived alongside some of the most dangerous men in the country and, eventually, sat before a stern-faced parole panel myself.

The Parole Board is one of the few parts of the justice system that still works with forensic calm. It takes nobody’s word for “change”. Before any file reaches a panel, the Public Protection Casework Section (PPCS), inside His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS), manages the referral and compiles the core dossier, coordinating the required reports from prison and probation. The Board then conducts a first-stage review of that dossier, and decides whether the case can be settled on the papers alone or needs an oral hearing, with witnesses called and challenged.

But terrorism cases expose the profound limitations of this process. Everything is documented, but not everything is meaningful. The ERG22+ risk tool, for instance, measures behavioral and psychological indicators linked to extremism — factors such as grievance, identity needs, susceptibility to influence and capability for violence. It can, therefore, help flag patterns, but can never reveal what someone truly believes. The Healthy Identity Intervention (HII), meanwhile, is designed to challenge extremist thinking and help offenders build up a non-violent identity. Yet its success depends entirely on honesty, while ideologically committed prisoners can learn the jargon without ever changing their core beliefs. And that is the central difficulty: the system is designed to reward behavioral compliance, not to test ideology’s durability. The file may glow; the risk may remain.

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I saw early signs of that tension when Bourgass first entered Frankland. Days after he was felled in that dinner line, he went looking to settle scores and picked the wrong target — a 21-year-old who had once been kept in a cage used for Charlie Bronson. As he made his move, the younger man clamped his hands around Bourgass’s head and bit his face. Bourgass was quickly moved to the wing next door, but the atmosphere remained tense.

Months later, Bourgass’s cell was set ablaze after claims that he and a handful of fellow Islamists had boasted they would “run the wing” once enough of “the brothers” arrived. What followed was sharp and ugly: a white prisoner was slashed across the face, followed by a small riot that left several prisoners and staff injured, one officer with a broken arm.

Those early years should have been a moment of clarity. Instead, the danger was consistently downplayed, and a new dynamic took root. With similar flare-ups happening across Category A prisons, there soon emerged what prisoners called “the brotherhood”: less an organization than a network, one fusing Islamist extremism and grievance with the gang discipline of existing prisoner groups.

In practice, these Islamist groups came to operate with a subtle but unmistakable authority, their days revolving around small acts of domination. They often isolated themselves from non-Muslim inmates, for instance, deciding who cooks in a jail’s communal kitchen. Pressure often arrived as a “friendly chat”, an offer of protection, a meal placed on a new arrival’s bed or even a copy of the Quran — gestures that looked charitable but carried an unspoken price. Refusal meant isolation, threats, or the quiet sense of eyes following you around the wing, sometimes ending in violence.

For some men it was easier to blend into the group — to “convert” for safety — than stand outside it. Their routines blended the swagger of a jailhouse thug with the absolutism of jihadist doctrine: instilling the most literal interpretations of scripture, holding cell sermons, debating conflicts in the Middle East, always framed as proof that the West was at war with Islam. The impressionable gravitated toward this intensity; the harder cases used it to justify enforcing discipline. Ideology gave the violence meaning; violence gave the ideology weight. In the dark corners of a prison cell, simple grievances hardened into hate.

And that ideology didn’t stay contained on a single wing. The brotherhood’s strength lay in its reach — often vengeful. A slight against a brotherhood-aligned prisoner in one jail might be “answered” months later in another, by different hands of the same network. I witnessed the results of that cold logic when the man who had floored Bourgass arrived at HMP Long Lartin. A decoy question at his door — “Where you from, mate?” — before a brutal rush from behind. He woke with stab wounds dotted across his face. “I was lucky not to lose an eye,” he told me later.

To anyone who hasn’t lived it, this sounds like exaggeration. It isn’t. In 2016, former prison governor Ian Acheson, in his report on prisons, told ministers to separate the most dangerous ideological influencers — men who radicalized others or used violence to enforce Islamist discipline — into dedicated units. Jonathan Hall KC’s 2022 review went further. He found that the service had long under-appreciated Islamist gang-type activity and the “perverse esteem” enjoyed by terrorist prisoners, noting how “brotherhood” groupings dominated wings and exerted coercive control. Both Acheson and Hall urged governors to take clear ownership of terrorist risk.

The uncomfortable reality is this: poorly managed prisons can entrench ideology more readily than they can challenge it. When a group holds authority and the cultural high ground on a particular wing — through numbers, status, and a ready-made sense of belonging — the incentive to change almost inevitably vanishes. Hall’s point, and Acheson’s before him, is that treating this as mere “prison culture” is how control is lost — and how the rest of us inherit the risk.

Bourgass himself later spent months in segregation at HMP Whitemoor amid concerns about his influence over others. In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that parts of his extended segregation had been unlawful on procedural grounds: decisions to keep him isolated beyond the initial 72-hour limit had been repeatedly renewed by prison managers rather than the Secretary of State, as the law requires, while he had also not been given enough information to meaningfully challenge these decisions. They might sound arcane, but these details matter: it shows how long the service has wrestled with the question of what to do with ideological leaders who make already-violent places more dangerous. That tension now sits at the center of Bourgass’s parole bid.

A case like this rarely reaches a parole hearing without formal evidence of risk reduction. As always, PPCS coordinates the referral and dossier; on life sentences, the Parole Board review begins as the minimum tariff nears, and considers whether the case should go to an oral hearing. Yet terrorism cases unsurprisingly don’t sit in a silo: counter-terrorism police and MI5 both contribute, and any release plan runs through what’s known as a “Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangement”. Parole management, for its part, falls to the Probation Service’s National Security Division — a specialist unit created to handle the most complex, high-risk cases — if the Board agrees to release a convicted terrorist.

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Paperwork, though, is not certainty. I learned that on my first day out of prison, when I helped restrain Usman Khan on London Bridge, an act for which I received a Royal Prerogative of Mercy and later a Queen’s Gallantry Medal. Khan, too, had “done his rehabilitation work”, had sat on a de-radicalization program in custody, and was under tight license conditions. But none of this was enough to prevent the murders of Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones. As the coroner’s subsequent report lays out, a man can look “compliant” yet remain ideologically primed.

That is the paradox the Parole Board now faces with Bourgass, if it hasn’t faced it already. Ideology disrupts the usual calculus. A stable workplace, supportive housing, a curfew, an electronic tag, a conscientious probation officer — these are all important. But they do not neutralize an extremist belief system. HII may genuinely shift thinking for some, but for the most committed, it becomes a vocabulary lesson, a guide on what to say, not a mechanism for change. The Board knows that and will probe it.

When Bourgass is ultimately released, the next question becomes whether the state can safely manage him outside. Probation will model scenarios; police will develop contingencies; MI5 will again contribute its view. But someone must ultimately sign a license and believe it will hold. Risk can be managed or mismanaged; it cannot be eliminated. And even if release were judged manageable, the question of deportation introduces a different kind of difficulty. Terrorist offenders like Bourgass, who entered the UK unlawfully, cannot simply be removed at the end of their sentence. Deportation requires the receiving state’s agreement, and a court must be satisfied there is no real risk of torture or degrading treatment on their return. Algeria has repeatedly resisted forced returns, and British courts scrutinize diplomatic assurances with caution, often finding them insufficient.

My hunch? Bourgass is unlikely to be freed on his first attempt. The Parole Board tends to be more conservative in cases where ideology intersects with violence, and where deportation complications muddy the supervision picture. But whether now or the next time, his return to public life is no longer a distant abstraction. It is approaching.

And that is where the deeper national problem lies. For years, parts of the high-security prison estate have served as incubators, raising up the most committed ideologues and silencing more moderate Muslim voices. The brotherhood, for its part, understood this dynamic long before the institution recognized what was happening. Until we confront that internal culture — not with euphemism, but with honesty about who commands influence on prison landings — we will keep returning to cases like Bourgass: underplaying the risks, and hoping they don’t spill back onto the streets.

In 2005, the author of this piece was convicted of murder, and sentenced to 17 years in prison. In 2019, he was was involved in stopping the London Bridge terror attack, and is now a writer and speaker.