Liz Truss is right – we should look to ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ when reforming the UK’s prisons

Truss recently told a startled Commons that barking dogs could be deployed to prevent drones flying drugs into prisons. It’s genius because drones are known for two things: acute hearing and a phobia of dogs. Have you ever encountered one hovering above an Alsatian?

Liz Truss on The Andrew Marr Show

Every Cabinet has its share of ministers who were appointed because the Prime Minister regards them as “a safe pair of hands”. But hats off to Theresa May for seasoning hers with people who can only be there because they have their hands on a safe.

What else explains Jeremy Hunt’s survival as Health Secretary than compromising information about Theresa May he keeps in his safe (probably from one of those acid parties that plagued the Conservative associations of Surrey in the early nineties).

Until recently, the NHS’s precipitous decline established Hunt as this group’s champion. But now he has a challenger in Liz Truss, whose presence as Lord Chancellor / Injustice Secretary became an even deeper mystery during today’s stupendously clueless interview with Andrew Marr.

A few years ago, Truss’s rise would have been curious enough due to her lack of legal training. But David Cameron normalised that by appointing two non-lawyers, Chris Grayling and Michael Gove, before her.

We’re all sick to the eye teeth with experts, as Gove observed, and Truss’s ignorance of her duty to protect the judiciary from political pressure was a huge advantage when the tabloids attacked the Article 50 judges. After taking days to understand it was her job to defend them, she only did so with robotic churlishness.

Not content to rest on that laurel, she turns her mind to penal reform. Last year, prisoner suicides reached a record level and assaults rose by more than 30 per cent. Shameful understaffing and overcrowding are giving rise to rioting of the kind seen in Birmingham in December. The system, she conceded during her mesmerisingly clueless appearance on The Andrew Marr Show, is in chaos.

But be not afeared, because Truss has an ingenious solution to the crisis. She wishes our nicks to capture the spirit of her favourite prison movie, The Shawshank Redemption. “It shows prisons can be very difficult places,” she tells The Sun. “But they can also be places of hope where people decide to do things differently.”

While this choice of role model is certainly inspiring, she doesn’t specify which aspects of the plot qualify Shawshank as “a place of hope”. Perhaps she’d glance at the following and get back to us on this.

On Andy Dufresne’s first night, a fellow newbie is beaten to death by a guard for crying. Dufresne is regularly gang raped. He launders money for a corrupt governor who rents out inmates as slave labour, and orders the killing of a young prisoner with the evidence to clear Dufresne of the murders for which he was wrongly convicted.

If none of the above qualify on the hope front, is she thinking of Brooks, the old lifer who is so completely institutionalised that he hangs himself soon after being paroled?

Or does she see the trail to redemption as the one blazed by Morgan Freeman’s Red? Find yourself a mate like Dufresne, in other words, who will spend decades using a tiny rock hammer to tunnel out of the cell; crawl through 300 yards of sewerage to freedom; and leave instructions about how to find him on a Mexican beach underneath a rock in a field on the off chance that one day you’ll be paroled?

When it’s put like that, it does look ridiculously simple. On the other hand, how many of Britain’s 85,000 prisoners have the gumption and endurance to replicate Dufresne’s escape?

In Truss’s defence, infusing British nicks with that progressive Shawshank spirit isn’t her only brainwave. Apart from recruiting 2,500 more guards (less than half the number who have left since 2010), she wants to implement a “tough but fair” regime, which is nice if vague.

Best of all, as she recently told a startled Commons, barking dogs could be deployed to prevent drones flying drugs into prisons. It’s genius because drones are known for two things: acute hearing and a phobia of dogs. Have you ever encountered one hovering above an Alsatian? You can smell the fear.

More conventional penal reformers favour other methods to resolve the long simmering crisis which her ineptness has brought to the boil. They might cite a radical change in sentencing policy and the early release of non-violent prisoners as ways to release steam from the pressure cooker of overcrowding.

Ken Clarke was all for such Scandinavian tactics as Cameron’s first Lord Chancellor. But he was fired for the dual offences of a) being an experienced lawyer who understood the legal and penal systems, and b) offending the delicate sensibilities of The Sun and Daily Mail.

Liz Truss is wholly innocent on both counts. That is to her credit, though if she thinks innocence is enough to keep out of trouble, she should rewatch her favourite film to remind herself that Andy Dufresne was innocent too.

She might even care to watch it more carefully than before, and reconsider whether a story about a wickedly inhumane system that confuses people with battery hens is the ideal template for penal reform.

If she decides it isn’t, she could always try another. Papillon, perhaps, or Escape From Alcatraz, or even Cool Hand Luke in which Paul Newman is cleverly steered away from reoffending by the simple expedient of being shot dead. A line from the latter will resonate with those who heard Liz Truss’s her inarticulate blustering at Andrew Marr.

What we have here, Lord Chancellor, among your other inadequacies, is a failure to communicate.