Amid The Gloom

Danny Shaw writes:

When the child killer Kyle Bevan was murdered in gruesome fashion in Wakefield Prison, it soon became clear it had been a cunningly planned attack by three men already expecting to spend the rest of their lives in jail for other murders.

The chilling details of Bevan’s murder late last year, set out at a sentencing hearing in June, highlight the growing challenge of containing the threat posed by so-called “sharks” – prisoners with little or no prospect of release, who feel they can act with impunity in a system creaking at the seams.

What kind of extra deterrent or punishment can there be for a person who has been deprived of their liberty for most, if not all, of their remaining years?

It has become a pressing problem, principally because more prisoners are serving long sentences, and long sentences have got longer. That, in turn, has contributed to an acute shortage of prison places, which led the Starmer government to introduce a highly contentious early-release scheme.

Bevan, 33, had been serving a life term for the murder of two-year-old Lola James in 2020. The toddler was found at her home in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, with more than 100 injuries following what police described as a “frenzied” attack on the “helpless” child. Bevan, who had been in a relationship with Lola’s mother, had carried out assaults on the little girl and her two sisters in the months leading up to the murder.

The killer’s background would have been known to his assailants before they launched their fatal attack at the West Yorkshire high-security prison. CCTV footage from a camera on the wing showed the trio laughing and grinning as they waited for Bevan to return to his cell. The prisoners stabbed him 25 times with makeshift weapons, including a piece of metal from a television set that had been shaped into a blade, before tucking his body into bed to make it look as though he was asleep.

Two of those responsible, Mark Fellows and Lee Newell, were serving “whole-life” orders for murdering other men, meaning they had already been locked up without any possibility of ever being granted parole. The third attacker, David Taylor, had been on remand for murdering a woman in Durham in 2022 and attempting to kill a police officer while in prison in 2024. He, too, is now serving a whole-life order.

“You’ve got people with loads and loads of time to do and nothing to lose,” says Pia Sinha, a former governor who now heads the Prison Reform Trust. “And you’ve got a system which is not addressing their basic human needs, so you are going to create a perfect storm that leads either to violence born out of frustration, violence that’s born out of dealing in the illicit economy, or violence born out of boredom.”

Ten per cent of prisoners ‘serving life’

Sinha, who was previously in charge of three prisons, including HMP Liverpool, says the impact of such violence is “devastating”.

“When you’re in a prison where a horrific attack has happened, it signals to everybody else that this place isn’t safe,” she says. “You can get people that isolate themselves and don’t engage, you get people who start making weapons themselves because they think ‘I need to be safe’, you get staff that start withdrawing because they don’t know how to engage with people anymore.”

The hazardous but vital task of dealing with dangerous prisoners who are serving life sentences is made all the more difficult by the wider issue of prison overcrowding that has dominated the news agenda. Last week, the Government was forced to water down plans to release prisoners early, one-third or halfway through their sentences, to free up space in jails that are 98 per cent full.

Just weeks before the measures had been due to take effect, offenders serving fixed-term sentences for rape and certain sexual offences against children were excluded, but those convicted of manslaughter and crimes linked to domestic abuse were not, sparking a wave of protests.

The early release provisions do not apply to life-sentence prisoners, even though the number of lifers has been steadily increasing. The vast majority are given a minimum time period, known as a tariff, that they must spend in custody before they can apply to the Parole Board for release. Even if the Board judges it safe for them to be let out, life-sentence prisoners remain “on licence” until they die and are liable to be sent back to jail if they re-offend, pose a risk to the public or breach the terms of their licence.

At the end of March, there were 7,590 inmates handed life terms (mainly for murder) who had never been freed, plus a further 893 lifers recalled to jail. In total, 10 per cent of the prison population, 8,483, are serving life – an increase of 759 in 10 years, while between 2003 and 2023, the average tariff for murder rose from 13-and-a-half years to 22. More than 40 per cent of life-sentence prisoners now have tariffs of more than 20 years.

A small number of offenders sentenced to life are not given a tariff but a “whole-life” order: they will never be released (except on compassionate grounds, if they are dying). Their number has also risen – from 53 in 2016 to 76 – reflecting a more punitive sentencing regime, where the category of murders qualifying for a whole-life order has expanded. It now includes the premeditated murder of a child, murder with a sexual or sadistic element, and the murder of police, prison or probation officers.

Among those recently added to the list of whole-life prisoners destined to die behind bars are Jamie Varley, who murdered his 13-month-old adoptive son Preston Davey following a campaign of sexual, physical and psychological abuse, and Kyle Clifford, the killer of BBC racing commentator John Hunt’s wife, Carol, and their daughters Louise and Hannah. The last terrorist to be given a whole-life order was Ali Harbi Ali, who fatally stabbed the much-loved Conservative MP David Amess at a constituency surgery in Essex in 2021.

“You’ve got more and more of these guys now wandering around the system,” says the former life-sentence prisoner Steve Gallant, who served more than 16 years for murdering a man outside a pub in Hull in 2005.

‘A much more volatile situation’

Gallant, who has written and given talks on prisons and extremism since his release, says the growth in the lifer population and the extension of tariff lengths has made some jails harder to control. “It’s a much more difficult and much more volatile situation.” 

Last year, there were 3,484 serious assaults in prisons, a near-record rate of 40 per 1,000 inmates. Between April 2025 and March this year, nine prisoners were killed – the highest ever number in a 12-month period (typically, there are between one and three murders per year). 

“When these guys engage in violence, for a lot of them, it’s just a signal to other people: ‘Don’t f--- with me, just leave me alone’,” Gallant says. “They’ll do something extreme, not necessarily because they want to go around acting violent, but because it just keeps people away from them. 

“They want people to think, ‘You know what, if I mess with this guy, he’s in for 40 years, he’s got nothing to lose, he’ll kill me’,” explains Gallant, whose own tariff was reduced after he courageously intervened in 2019 to stop a terrorist attack at Fishmongers’ Hall on London Bridge while on day release. His actions earned him a Royal Prerogative of Mercy (also known as the “royal pardon”) and the Queen’s Gallantry Medal, an award for exemplary acts of bravery. 

As well as Bevan, others killed in jail in the last 12 months include the Soham murderer Ian Huntley, 52, who was struck on the head with a metal bar in a workshop at Frankland Prison, Durham, in February. Anthony Russell, who is serving a whole-life term for three murders and rape, is due to stand trial for Huntley’s killing later this year. 

That incident came four months after the child sex attacker Ian Watkins, the former singer and frontman with the band Lostprophets, was stabbed to death with a makeshift knife in his cell at HMP Wakefield. Two prisoners accused of murdering Watkins, 48, face a re-trial after a jury at their first trial in May was discharged. 

Prof Ben Crewe, from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, says the risks of violence from prisoners, as well as self-harm and suicide, are greatest after they have just been sentenced. 

“People at the start of very long life sentences are very often very angry with the sentence and the system… and often overwhelmed with emotions they can’t contain because they have to cope with the realisation that life is over,” he says. “They can’t see light at the end of the tunnel – the tunnel is just too long.” 

Prof Crewe, who has conducted a study of long-sentence prisoners, says conditions in overcrowded jails have simply made the problem worse. “Prisons are very full, and there’s less purposeful activity so there are fewer avenues for people to build a life that feels meaningful,” he says, arguing that an exodus of experienced prison officers over the last decade has undermined stability even further. 

“If relations between staff and prisoners become more distant… the information flow shuts down. And if there’s more mutual suspicion, it’s less likely a prisoner will have a word with a member of staff and tell them something is bubbling up on the wing.”

Officers fear they ‘could be next’

The dangers posed to prison officers themselves were highlighted in April last year when the Manchester Arena bomb-maker Hashem Abedi allegedly stabbed staff and poured hot cooking oil over them at HMP Frankland. Abedi, who is serving a life sentence for helping his brother Salman Abedi carry out the 2017 atrocity in which 22 people died, is accused of three counts of attempted murder. He is due to go on trial next year. 

Steve Gillan, general secretary of the Prison Officers’ Association, says staff are particularly wary around lifers. “Most prison officers will tell you they’re on high alert,” he says. “These guys who have committed horrific offences against individuals in the community – prison officers will probably be thinking to themselves, ‘I could be next.’ 

“They’ll be looking for any small changes in the individual that may be an indicator that they’re going to be attacked or that they’re planning something…they’ll be on their guard for the whole shift watching these individuals, and that is very stressful.” 

When an officer is attacked, it is “demoralising” for other members of staff, says Gillan, who first walked the landings at Chelmsford jail, in Essex, 36 years ago. “Colleagues will question themselves and say, ‘Could I have done more to stop that from happening? Were there tell-tale signs that I missed?’ It does have a deep-rooted effect.” 

But Prof Crewe points out that, as well as those who resort to violence, a “fair number” of lifers he has interviewed are able to get on with their sentences “quietly”, finding “value and meaning” in their lives in jail. Sinha, a former prison psychologist, says rather than staring into the “abyss” of never-ending incarceration, inmates cope better if they break their sentence down into “chunks”. Some will spend part of their sentence focusing on “therapeutic or educational interventions”, she says, while others while away weeks and months working out in the gym or doing jobs which get them so tired they’re “not tempted to use drugs” or violently lash out against fellow inmates or guards. 

Penal policy experts say in the long term, stability could be restored by reducing the amount of time lifers are required to serve or increasing prison capacity and staffing; neither, for political and financial reasons, look like a realistic possibility. 

The ex-lifer Gallant, though, has a more practical solution to deal with the dangerous offenders serving decades in jail. He thinks they should be treated like terrorists and kept apart from the general prison population. At present, there are three prison separation centres for the convicted terrorists deemed to present the greatest risk of radicalising other inmates. Gallant’s idea would require an expansion of such units with specialist staff monitoring them closely. 

“The only way you can deal with it early is to isolate them from the main population,” he says. “And that’s not just to protect the population – but it’s also to allow rehabilitation to occur.” 

Gallant himself is an example of a long-term convict who turned his life around in spectacular fashion, of course. His actions that day on London Bridge may have been exceptional, but his rehabilitation provides a flicker of hope amid the gloom.