Life inside a therapeutic prison: ‘Look, we’ve done some terrible things ...’

At HMP Grendon, psychology professionals aim to ‘re-child’ a group of Britain’s most serious offenders in relatively relaxed conditions. Does the treatment work?

As you go through the gates of Grendon prison in Buckinghamshire, past the raised garden – whose intricacy is still discernible in November – towards the main block, there’s a foundation stone laid by Rab Butler from when building commenced in 1960. “As home secretary, he wanted two things: to improve understanding of crime, and its treatment,” Simon Shepherd, head of the Butler Trust, a charity celebrating exemplary work by prison staff, tells me. “So he got the funding for the Cambridge Institute of Criminology. And he also got the funding for Grendon, the world’s first dedicated psychotherapeutic prison.”

The idea, radical in the 60s, and still radical when it’s applied to criminals, is that you re-child people, re-educate them. “Childhood is where you learn the skills to manage life. If you have a personality disorder, that is essentially because you didn’t get those skills in childhood. So you put somebody into a really intensive environment where they learn how to manage themselves and deal with people,” Shepherd says. The NHS reports that 60 to 70% of prisoners in the UK have a personality disorder; I’ve heard numerous forensic professionals put the figure as high as 80%.