Whatever the complexion of the government or the public mood, the rehabilitative ideal within a carceral setting still survives, sometimes wilting, sometimes reviving, but always showing persistence and tenacity in the face of adversity. Challenging but rewarding, it motivates staff as much as inmates. It is always under threat from gross overcrowding, longer and longer sentences for more and more people, budgetary constraints, overworked staff, anachronistic buildings, and an ever-increasing emphasis on security.

In the 1980s Aylesbury Young Offender Institution held around three hundred male offenders aged between eighteen and twenty-one serving from five years’ imprisonment to detention for life, for serious offences including armed robbery, aggravated burglary, rape, and murder. It was, and still is, the only YOI able to house those considered to be the most dangerous in their peer group. These were officially known as ‘restricted status’, the equivalent of Category A, an anodyne term which would not alarm local residents. It was not, however, part of the dispersal system, and managed to avoid the worst restraints of that system.

It had undergone a turbulent few years. Serious disturbances and escapes had taken place, officers and inmates had been assaulted, and many youngsters had been isolated for their own protection. Then a new governor, John Dring, arrived in the late 1980s and everything changed. It was a propitious time as prisoner numbers began to drop dramatically and Aylesbury was soon well below capacity. The 1991 Criminal Justice Act would reduce numbers further; the Woolf Report would encourage better relationships. It was an opportunity for a fresh start, an opportunity already enhanced by a reorganisation that had been introduced in 1987, aptly called ‘Fresh Start’. Intended to simplify the labyrinthine complexity of staff working arrangements, increase job satisfaction and improve the relationship between prison officers and management, it involved a fundamental reorganisation of those arrangements and structures.