'We need a reasoned, evidence-based debate about what actually works with prisons'

What were the skies like when you were young?

Wow, that's an amazing question! In India, in Bombay when I was there, probably not quite as polluted as they are now. You could see a blue sky every now and again, and powerful sunshine. But one of the first things I noticed when our family came from India to London was the sky. We landed at Heathrow on the summer solstice. In India, because it's close to the equator, the sun roughly rose and set about the same time, around seven. We got to Heathrow at about 10 at night. I was freaked out by the fact that it was still light! Just how clear and blue the sky was, but also the smell. Even though it was London, it didn't have the same pollution, sound, heaviness. It just suddenly felt fragrant.

So you were 14 then, right? How did those childhood years in India shape your subsequent career in prison service as a psychologist?

A lot of this analysis is a bit post hoc… you piece together things, and sometimes you form a narrative. But I grew up in a family as the youngest child. Ours was a very sociable family, there was always someone visiting, some highfalutin conversation going on. As a child, I didn't feel able to contribute to that conversation, but was fascinated by it nonetheless. So my position became, from a very early age, to be a listener, an observer, intrigued by interpersonal relationships and dynamics. I found myself drawn to people's stories, and observing behaviour. Now that I find myself in a career that's so intrinsically about people, that's probably where the interest stemmed from.

Is it unusual to be a listener and an observer in the prison service? Don't you come across colleagues who think the prisoners' stories aren't the most important part of the job at hand?

There are people like that, which is why it became so important in my roles – whether that was as a psychologist or as prison governor – to represent that, in a way. Unless you hear the voices of the people whose care is in your hands, how do you know whether what you're doing is the right thing?

The moral compass becomes a vital thing when you're running prisons. Otherwise, it becomes very easy to dehumanise people in prison, to judge them, to see them as 'other'. Unless you have someone holding up the board for their views, their experiences, their lives, how do you get the empathy to be able to enact change, to change their lives?

I've heard a few stories from your working life. When you took over at HMP Liverpool, literally every window was broken. You realised that you had 1,000 men with all sorts of practical skills, locked up in their cells 23 hours a day, who just wanted to get out and be useful. You said that putting those things together 'seemed like a no-brainer' to you. But I suspect it didn't seem like a no-brainer to everyone else there at the time?

It did once you mentioned it! This is what happens. People might think things, but there's something about the system that conditions you to not say what's obvious. The culture can be so formidable that for someone to have a view that can be seen as 'pro-prisoner'… people sometimes censor those thoughts and views because they don't know how they're going to be received. They don't want to stand out as someone who's seen as soft – we have these preconceived notions.

So one of the enabling things as a prison leader who comes from a psychology background is to be able to say those things with courage, and conviction. Then other people who are thinking it suddenly feel empowered and emboldened to say those things. You tap into why people may have been interested in a career in the prison service in the first place. Not everyone who joins the prison service is interested in power and control. Actually, people join the prison service because they want to make a difference. Allowing those voices to come to the fore is a really important role.

Power and control… the thought that sparks in my mind is that prisons have got a bit of a bad rap in psychology historically. Zimbardo's Prison Experiment has been reassessed in recent years, but it's been one of our foundational studies and it associates prisons with control and authority and domination over another person, I guess.

Yes, and I think there is a movement away from seeing it in that way – away from power and control towards rehabilitation and redemption and justice. Those schemas are probably becoming more discussed in a way that they perhaps weren't when I started. The ease with which you can have those conversations in prison has changed quite a lot. You have governors, psychologists, prison officers, talking with much greater comfort about things like kindness, compassion and being trauma-informed. Not everyone knows what it means, but at least the language has evolved a bit, whereas before it may have been taboo. It's about noticing what is happening and making the most of it.

My own thinking around prisons changed a lot due to a quote from a predecessor of yours, actually, Juliet Lyon. 'People are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment'.

Yes, that's quite a fundamental shift, isn't it? When I started work as a psychologist in Holloway in 1999, psychology in prisons used to be predominantly forensic, and the distinction was made that a forensic psychologist's client is the public, not the individual. The focus was around public protection. The work that they did was about lowering risk. But at Holloway, there was a shift. I was told that the reason they were taking on counselling psychologists was a realisation that coming into custody was an incredibly traumatic time. 

Unless you were able to work with the individual on getting their head around the fact that they were in this space, and being able to lower their levels of anxiety and crisis, you wouldn't actually have them in the right mental state to engage in any other kind of work. Those green shoots were beginning to see and recognise that just coming into prison is a punishment – the loss of your liberty, and all the rest of it. Creating environments with more punishment was disproportionate to what was going on.

Even if the client is the public and protection is the main goal, that shouldn't lead you away from rehabilitation and reform as the central goal… it's obviously in the interest of victims of crime that people are rehabilitated, and presumably, you don't rehabilitate people by keeping them locked up 23 hours a day?

Well, absolutely. I have often argued this. The victims' lobby is strong, and quite rightly so. We cannot and must not lose sight of what purpose prisons perform in relation to getting justice for victims. But if the route to creating less victims is through rehabilitation, then you need to create the right conditions in the prison environment where rehabilitation can happen. You just go back to basic principles of Maslow: you can't get someone to engage in anything that is vaguely rehabilitative, if they feel that their basic needs and concerns around safety and decency, and the sense of belonging, are not met.

You took on this role as Director of The Prison Reform Trust last year, and at that time you said prison reform is 'in your DNA'. What did you mean by that?

As a psychologist, everything that I was aiming to do from the moment I joined the service was about reform. Perhaps it started by focusing on enabling reform to happen at that individual level of a person's journey; and then moving on to prison leadership, looking at the organisation as your client, and how you engage and enact reform at the establishment level; and then moving up to the service level; and now moving out of that service. 

Everything that feels engaging about the work that I've done in the last 25 years has been with the aim of reform for the end user in the system. That's what motivates me. And in a way that explains why, when I felt I wasn't actually getting too much reform in my position as a senior civil servant, I needed to occupy a different space, because that space was closing up for me.

And now that you're out of that prison service, have you got a lot of pent-up emotions and criticism that start to come out?

Well, ironically, no, now that I'm not butting my head against the system from the inside, I'm able to see it more empathically. Right-thinking people, whether they're governors or officers or senior civil servants, they fundamentally don't believe in a harsh punitive system. They want the right things to happen. But it's a very political environment, being a civil servant… you're unable to speak your truth to power. Coming out of the system, I'm able to give voice to those who think perhaps the same way as me, but are unable to speak with honesty and be activists in the way that I can. I can represent that.

Also, having been inside the system, what I didn't need from charities like the Prison Reform Trust was a finger wagging, critical voice. You know what you're doing wrong. With the knowledge base that we have, the access that we have, we can dock back into practitioners so that they can make use of that. I know what levers to pull, how to influence officials in a way that they're more likely to listen to me, rather than close the doors on me. So it's integrating my experience of being both inside and outside the system, and orienting it towards change.

You've said a few times about speaking truth to power. How does that translate into how you hold yourself in a prison environment? You've said before that prisons can be 'places of pain', and that you have to 'put your mask on', but also that people can sniff you out if you're not authentically you. How do you juggle that?

The mask bit, for sure, it's about self-preservation.

It makes it easier for you to walk in, day in, day out. You have to start ignoring some of the painful cues in order to be able to continue to do the work that you do. Otherwise, you would just turn around and walk away, and a lot of people do that: people know quite early on whether prison is for them or not. So it's almost an adaptive skill in order to fulfil a higher purpose: unless I dial down my fear, my pain, my anger, my frustration, I won't be able to operate in this environment in an effective way. 

That holds you, sustains you, gives you your resilience… the fact that you're optimistic you can bring some light in those dark places through the work you do. I don't want this to sound trite, because it's not always like that… but you have to remind yourself of your higher mission. You've got to put your big girl pants on, and face those challenges, in order to be able to bring light into those dark spaces.

So it sounds like you can dial down, turn off or mask bits that perhaps aren't central to your integrity, but those core values and that mission, you're not going to compromise on that.

That's right. And also, when you are inside, and you are able to influence change in quite a direct way, you can have a greater impact on all those painful things. You almost have to go through them in order to soften and humanise the place.

You can't fully do it though. I do prison visits as part of my role now, and some of that mask, some of that armour, has slipped because I've not been in a prison for a while. Walking into a prison now jars me, has an emotional impact on me in a way that I probably put aside when I was working in the system. It takes me a lot longer to recover from a prison visit now. Did I just stop seeing stuff? Did it become airbrushed out of my consciousness in order to survive the actual awfulness of it?

And are you actually quite glad that you feel it more now because that suggests some kind of recovery? Because there have been times when you have been quite traumatised by the work, I believe?

That's right. After five years of working in Holloway, I was actually going to leave the service. I thought it's not healthy. But I was persuaded to stay and that's when I made the decision to work with men, to look at the other side of the coin in a way.

Are women in prison psychologically distinctive? What are the differences between working with women and working with men?

Well, my experience was that women in prison tend to have a way of describing their emotional world that is quite immediate, quite accessible to them. You'll get to the heart of the story very quickly: they have a lexicon to express themselves, and they're not scared and shy of it. With men, I found that it was a much more useful strategy to talk around things, that a session needed to feel less intense. It took a while, you needed to be quite light in your approach, whereas women you didn't need to worry about that because it was on the table quite immediately.

You were the first Asian woman to run a prison in England: did that have any impact on how you were treated?

Not as much as people think it would have… not as much as I may have thought it would have. Sometimes, I forget that I'm a woman of colour. Having worked in the prison service for such a long time, it's home. There's a warmth to it. I didn't get 'othered' because I was already part of this group of people who had started quite early on in their careers, worked in some pretty gnarly jails and done some tough work. In the prison world, that feels more important: that you have done your time, that you come from a place of experience and that you are part of that world. Plus I am a very adaptable person, I didn't stick out, so I was quite readily accepted.

That's presumably by colleagues. What about the prisoners?

Oh, prisoners are much, much less judgmental than staff! Prisoners are a community of misfits, the marginalised, and other marginalised individuals are welcomed into the fold in a much more meaningful way than with staff. I never had any issues with prisoners, both male and female.

OK. There are around 90,000 people in prison, rising all the time. You've said 'Britain has a love affair with sending people to prison'. What's the future, what would you do?

If the future carries on with the same trajectory, it feels quite bleak. We've got into this auction between the parties around a 'tough on crime' narrative, and that has come from overly politicising things that shouldn't be politicised, and the structure of the way that the Ministry of Justice interacts with the operational line. There's misinformation around what happens in prisons, partly because prisons are closed to the public. 

Rory Stewart, the former prisons minister, points out that 90 per cent of the public will have some experience in institutions such as schools and hospitals. If something wasn't going well in a school or hospital, the walls are quite permeable, and public awareness helps in managing the system in an appropriate way. With prisons, the public are disinterested in what happens inside them. That allows political games to be played, whilst there's no confirmation about what's true or not. 

Myths can be created and perpetuated in the narrative about what happens in prisons… being a 'holiday camp', all of that nonsense is allowed to surface. The public enjoys that punitive element, for some reason, and it's fuelled massively by the media. Then politicians think this is the way to win votes.

We need a sensible, reasoned, evidence-based debate about what actually works with prisons. We need to take emotion out of it and say that even if you look at it from an economic point of view, how is it that we've got the largest prison population in Western Europe, but also the least effective rate of reducing reoffending? If prison was the answer, and sending more people to prison for longer was something that worked, then the expense would be worth it. But we're spending huge amounts of money per prisoner every year, and we're not reducing reoffending.

You said earlier about the transition into prison; I guess the transition out of prison is equally important, and often in TV dramas that's depicted as particularly problematic. People go back to the same living conditions and social groups that potentially got them in trouble in the first place.

Our purpose is to shine a light on exactly those issues… to inform the public on the research, the data, the voice of lived experience. It's our moral responsibility to inform the public of facts with the aim of changing policy, changing practice, improving conditions. The Prison Reform Trust doesn't take any government funding at all: we want to maintain our neutrality so that we can speak truth to power in terms of those issues such as short sentences.

They are the least rehabilitative sentences around. What drifts people into custody? At the heart of it all is poverty, social exclusion, and people operating in a complete counterculture to what's going on, hidden away from mainstream society. That often leads to poor mental health, substance misuse, etc, etc. Even those people that are anchored to a home, a family or a job, once they have their short stint in prison, they lose all of those anchors. They're spat out at the other end in a worse position than they were when they came in. The only people that will welcome them back into the fold, are those they were part of in the first place. There's no cycle getting broken here.

I used to say to the women in Holloway when they came in, at their lowest point, 'wouldn't it be interesting to view this time that you have in prison as an opportunity for a fresh chapter? Everything that's happened in the past, let's close the chapter on that. You have this space to look at what you want to do for your future, because that's not written. Let's look at what you would want included in that future.' That is the opportunity of prison. There are people who need to come to prison: I'm not an abolitionist. But if that space of time is not used as a meaningful reset of what had happened before, then it's an absolute waste of an opportunity, isn't it?

In that example, it sounds like you're drawing on your psychology background. In your current role, does psychology still come up with the solutions you need on a daily basis?

It a million per cent does. Once you're a psychologist, you're always a psychologist. It does meet with eye-rolling every now and again: 'Pia, that's such a Psychologist thing to say'! But I say that reform is in my DNA, but actually, more importantly, psychology is in my DNA. It's not just a training that you do for your job, it's actually something that you become, as a person. 

The contribution that I make in whatever job I've gone into, whether that was as a prison governor, or a senior civil servant, or, and now as the Chief Exec of the Prison Reform Trust, I think I'm bringing that psychology lens, which allows you to really analyse what might be going on. It's not just about people… psychology teaches you to maintain the emotional content of something while still being able to rationally analyse what's going on at the same time. That's a really important skill that not many people have.

You've said before, that you take on 'challenging, stretching projects'. What's the next challenge for you?

Gosh, there's so much work to be done. I've probably not even got to the start of it. But my ambition in The Prison Reform Trust is to become much more useful. I have a fixation – your work effort needs to lead to something concrete, to be useful, because otherwise, what's the point? I don't want to just talk in my echo chamber, to others who would agree with my worldview of the criminal justice system, I need to reach out to spaces and places where people's hearts and minds need to be changed. But also whatever work we're doing needs to enact reform for the people who are in the criminal justice system. 

And the key to that is reaching into practitioners. There are thousands of prison staff, thousands of probation staff, and thousands of people in the voluntary sector working with the criminal justice system. If we can put fire in their belly in terms of working differently, reform gets multiplied by a factor of thousands. Reform becomes not just in the book that you read, and the ideas that you get from talking to each other, but also through the wider group of individuals that you want change to happen for.