Metro, Friday 10 July 2026
Metro reports that inmates at HMP Chelmsford say they were "tortured" rather than punished during June's heatwave, locked in cells reaching 35.6C for up to 22 hours a day with no ventilation and only an extra 330ml bottle of water, which they also had to use for washing since the showers ran only hot water. One mother said cooler clothes she dropped off for her son were not passed to him until after the heatwave had ended, because staff told her it was "too hot for the sniffer dogs to work." A 2021 inspection had already described the prison as being in a "state of near collapse," with staff frequently failing to respond to basic requests.
A working dog's welfare rule, that it shouldn't be made to work in extreme heat, was applied without apparent difficulty. The same institution failed to apply the equivalent standard of care to the human beings in its custody, some held well beyond their expected stay in a higher-category prison than intended, for weeks longer than planned. Nobody had to decide, in a single dramatic moment, that prisoners mattered less than dogs; the two decisions were made separately, by different parts of the same system, and the gap between them opened up simply because nobody was required to notice it as a single pattern.
That is closer to how the book's account of discretion actually works than a story of deliberate cruelty would be. The rule protecting the dogs was followed because it was clear, specific, and easy to apply. The rule protecting prisoners from inhumane conditions is vaguer, harder to enforce, and depends on staff who, according to the mother quoted, showed "only limited empathy and care" for people they were nonetheless responsible for. An institution already flagged four years earlier as being in a state of near collapse does not need new intent to keep producing outcomes like this; it only needs the existing gap between clear rules and vague ones to keep being resolved the same way, in favour of whichever obligation is easiest to discharge.