At supermarkets in London, and outside provincial nightclubs, you will see security staff wearing stab vests.
Personal protective equipment has become commonplace in all kinds of jobs where staff must sometimes confront aggressive members of the public.
So it is quite staggering that frontline prison staff working in conditions of far greater peril, regularly called upon to restrain violent and potentially lethal behaviour by offenders, are not issued with stab vests capable of stopping an attack with a bladed weapon.
Essentially, they are sent in to work every day with only a poly-cotton shirt between them and the point of a knife. This is intolerable.
Ten days ago at HMP Frankland, Hashem Abedi, one of the most dangerous prisoners in the country used an improvised stabbing weapon and hot oil to attack three officers. Two were left with life-threatening injuries.
Crisis
I am deeply worried that, unless urgent steps are taken to give prison staff far better protection, as well as ensuring exceptionally dangerous prisoners are confined more securely, an officer is going to be murdered on duty for the first time in living memory.
If and when that happens, the repercussions will be terrible. Not just for the victim and his or her family but the prison service as a whole. It is so close to breaking point that we could see a full-blown crisis erupt.
Year on year, we have seen a 19 per cent increase in serious assaults on prison officers. As a direct result, the incidence of officers taking leave because of stress-related illness is at an all-time high.
Hundreds of thousands of days a year are being lost. This alone ought to be the subject of parliamentary debate.
A knock-on effect of this is a crisis in recruitment and retention. While prison officers are not allowed by law to go on strike, they cannot legally be forced to go to work if they have a reasonable fear their lives are being placed at risk.
It is shocking that, in the face of such an onslaught, a national law enforcement agency apparently cares so little about the safety of its staff that it has dithered for years over giving them adequate protection against lethal attack.
When Abedi launched his apparently premeditated assault in the ‘extremist separation unit’ at Frankland on April 12, the officers he attacked were equipped only with extendable batons and cans of incapacitant spray.
I understand that the spray was deployed but, far from acting as a deterrent to the attacker, the gas emitted in the cramped corridors of the unit may have actually hampered the response of the officers who came to the aid of their stricken colleagues.
Abedi is the younger brother of the suicide bomber who killed 22 people and wounded hundreds more at the Manchester Arena in May 2017. Indeed, it was Hashem Abedi who planned the attack and built the bomb, packing it with shrapnel.
Now serving a minimum 55-year sentence, he is recognised to be one of the most violent extremists in British custody. It beggars belief, not only that he was given the freedom to manufacture weapons and make blistering hot oil, but that officers guarding him had no access to adequate protective gear.
The police would rightly refuse to serve under such conditions. Had a violent criminal carried out a similar attack on police officers outside a prison, I believe they would have been justified in using lethal force to defend themselves.
Abedi should be locked up for at least 23 hours a day, in units designed so that no staff will ever have to come into direct contact with him. He is a resourceful and determined terrorist who, given the opportunity, will attempt to kill again.
That said, Britain must not follow the American model, where guards toting automatic weapons patrol prison wings and marksmen with sniper rifles man the watchtowers.
It would be foolhardy to routinely provide officers with lethal firearms in our prisons. They are currently so disordered that the risk of them falling into the hands of prisoners is too high.
But, as long as the right safeguards are in place, there’s a strong argument for equipping specialist response prison officers with Tasers.
And we must stop kowtowing to the woolly-minded reformers who claim the presence of officers in stab vests would contribute to the ‘militarisation’ of prisons and create an environment that is traumatising for prisoners.
With the clamour for change reaching fever pitch, the Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood needs to respond immediately to the multiple threats facing our prisons and their inmates, not least the increasingly sinister activities of Islamist groups.
Hate
As her opposite number on the Conservative benches, Robert Jenrick, warned in the Mail last week, our prisons are increasingly under the control of religious extremists. Forced conversions are commonplace as prisoners face systematic bullying and assault if they refuse to comply with hardline Islamic laws. Those who defy the Muslim gangs often have to be placed in segregation units for their own safety.
A decade ago, I was arguing for separation units to be set up for the oppressors, not the victims, as a way of taking subversive Islamist hate preachers out of the general population.
That practice has now been effectively reversed, at least in some prisons, as it is apparently those who resist the preachers who have to be segregated. Meanwhile, violent terrorist prisoners such as Abedi, fixated on killing officers, should not be in these units in the first place. They may need to be held in new accommodation, tactical environments designed to eliminate the risk of attacks on staff.
One constant danger, especially in high-security prisons, is the kidnap of staff. If prisoners take an officer hostage, it is imperative that the governor has all the means necessary to effect a quick rescue. This includes the provision of dedicated tactical response teams, available at all times that prisoners are out of their cells.
If terrorists take officers hostage in prison today, it is highly likely their goal will be to murder that member of staff and disseminate the act online. I cannot say with confidence that today’s prisons are equal to preventing such incidents.
Trauma
External forces are also at work. One of my gravest concerns is the prevalence of drones, flown into prisons by outside operators.
At the moment, these are widely used to take drugs and mobile phones to inmates, with the machines hovering outside windows or making drops into exercise yards.
Some drones can carry a payload of 15kg, or nearly three stone. That’s an enormous quantity of cocaine – but they could also be used to airlift guns or even Semtex over the prison walls.
The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Charlie Taylor, has said the lack of defence against drones in high security jails is a national security threat.
The Justice Secretary now has an opportunity to examine the failures that allowed Abedi’s atrocious assault to occur. The focus must be on the rights of public servants to serve in our prisons and go home to their families in one piece, not into a trauma unit.
Failure to act means the prospect that a prison officer will be murdered on duty is sadly inevitable. I do not exaggerate. We are that close.