Interview with Peter Small

Can you briefly summarise your time at the Institute of Criminology?

So, I joined the prison service as an officer when I was 23 years old. I joined in 1990, three months after the Strangeways riot. I didn't finish my A levels. I walked out of school because I wanted to start earning money.

But I always thought that education was something that was unfinished. I joined the prison service and started to realize this was a career for me but never thought that I'd have the opportunity to complete my education in a vocational fashion.

The opportunity to do so, and particularly to go to Cambridge to do it, was a real privilege. It gave me the opportunity to study something that I was actively interested in and gain a qualification that I could be really proud of.

What convinced you to study Criminology?

I was a newly appointed deputy governor at the time, and I wanted to progress as a governor. But I always thought that there was something missing from my knowledge base and my level of confidence. I think those were the two things that impacted me, and I just thought that if I'm going to do this, I'm going to make a proper career of this. I'm going to govern prisons and be able to talk with certainty about the theories behind the operation of an establishment. And I needed some educational grounding behind that.

I'd studied management diplomas in the late 90s as precursors to doing this. But when the opportunity come up to study at Cambridge, I saw it as a privilege.

Why did you decide to come to Cambridge?

The prison service sponsored Cambridge, and at the time I think I was either the second or the third cohort that Cambridge was invited to come along. But it was a national thing, and there were a number of us from across the prison system that were invited to attend. It was the very fact that it was available, it was something I could apply for.

Can you briefly describe your thesis?

So, my study was all about why juveniles don't use the complaint system in the same way as others. At the time, I was at HMP Stoke Heath, looking after both young offenders and juveniles. This was before we had the Youth Justice Board, which is now the Youth Custody Service. Back then, the prison system looked after all juveniles, and we were just starting to understand that they required something different.

A lot of my hypothesis was about the impulsive nature of juveniles; everything had to be done in the moment.  The problem that they had, they couldn't be patient enough to put a paper-based application in and wait patiently for a couple of days for an answer to come back. They go from 0 to 100 and the problem is in front of them, and it needs dealing with, talking through, and deescalating at that time rather than waiting a few days.

So that was my thesis, and that assumption was borne out in the facts, broadly speaking. These findings coincided with lots of things that were already happening inside the prison system. There was a recognition of the need to focus on juveniles very differently, because the prison system up to that point saw juveniles onto a young offender institution.

We had quite a broad-brush structure for managing very young and, in some cases, very vulnerable people. You could have an establishment where 15-year-olds were in the same establishment as a 21-year-old who's ready to be in the adult system. When you look back on it, you see that it seemed inappropriate. You were trying to treat people the same, whereas actually the levels of maturity, comprehension, and problem solving were very different.

What have you gone onto since graduating?

I started to govern prisons in 2003, and from that day to this I have continually governed prisons: Stoke Heath, Stafford, Birmingham, Rye Hill, and Five Wells. I've kept in touch with people like Allison Liebling over the years. I advocate her work to anybody I can get to listen, for the insight and understanding that she brings to how prisons need to operate, about the balance between the need for structure and the need for fairness.

Probably the most successful that we've have been at this to date was at Rye Hill where I spent 7 years. If you look at the most recent HMP tests, where one is the lowest and four is the highest, Rye Hill scored three fours.

I'd also say that the other thing I've done is I've encouraged others that Cambridge and the learning you get from Cambridge is really valuable. So, the person that's took over from me in Rye Hill was my deputy for the best part of seven years. He’s now the director there, has done the same course that I went through, and holds many of the same values.

Can you give some examples of how you have used learning from the course in your career?

My findings were all about thinking differently about juveniles, which coincided with quite a lot of the changes that were happening anyway. But the most valuable things that I learned from Cambridge were some of the theories and concepts that have guided me for over 20 years around the moral performance of an establishment.

After the Strangeways riot, there was a significant inquiry by Lord Wolf, who made a number of recommendations about dealing with prisoners differently. This led to the introduction of a complaint system, the introduction of a prison ombudsman, and ended things like slopping out, locking three people up in cells designed for one, only letting them out for exercise and food, not giving them answers to complaints and so on. And we wondered why there was a reaction.

By the mid-90s, there was a culture change. Some high-profile escapes from Whitemoor and Parkhurst rocked public confidence and led to a battle between the two political parties on the issue. Michael Howard talked about wanting prisons to be decent but austere, and Tony Blair talked about being tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. Meanwhile, the prison population started to rise steeply, from 43,000 in 1991 to where we're at today, with 87,000.

Everything was security-based by the mid-90s.  And then, just around the time that I started to think about studying, along came the decency agenda. There were a whole range of reasons for that being necessary, so prisons became very much focused upon performance. We introduced the notion of performance management into prisons. It was all about key performance targets. If you're running an establishment like a prison, key performance indicators and cost indicators are absolutely necessary, but they don't tell you the full story.

But Cambridge filled a lot of that void for me. It was about things like operating with legitimate authority, how to see a bigger picture, and understanding that you have to have a 360-degree approach to some of those harder-to-measure outcomes, not just a ‘did you do it? Yes, no, tick a box’ approach.

What was the most important thing criminology taught you?

I think one of the things that Cambridge gave me more than anything was confidence. To know what's right and let your instincts guide you towards certain outcomes.  But what you need sometimes is to fall back on the fact that there is also some academic work which supports your own thoughts, which points you towards how things will work one way or another.

And the need for balance between having things like a level of order and control, the need for people to have some level of independence, some level of personal growth and so on. Because as human beings, we all need to have to understand that there is somebody who is in charge, who will apply the rules fairly, consistently, and balance that in a prison setting. And Cambridge really helped me to navigate my way towards that sort of world.

I talk to this day about legitimacy, and the fact that we can turn on a single decision. Those are things that Cambridge really helped me to understand.

April 2025