A prisoner at HMP Birmingham wakes up knowing there's a 1-in-40 chance someone in his wing will be seriously assaulted today. Not by guards. By another inmate.

That's the reality of Britain's prisons in 2023, where 24.4 serious prisoner-on-prisoner assaults happen for every 1,000 inmates. While Keir Starmer faces criticism for allegedly appeasing big tech firms over online safety, the physical safety crisis behind bars has exploded.

The numbers are staggering. Serious assaults between prisoners surged 91% in just one year, jumping from 12.8 per 1,000 inmates in 2022 to 24.4 in 2023. (Source: Ministry of Justice, Safety in Custody -- safety-in-custody-assaults-dec-23 -- 3_1_Summary_assault_statistics)

Put another way: in a typical 400-bed prison, nearly 10 inmates will suffer serious violence from fellow prisoners this year. That's almost one attack every five weeks in a single facility.

This isn't petty squabbling. These are assaults serious enough to require medical attention or cause lasting injury. The kind that leave prisoners permanently damaged, mentally and physically.

The timing couldn't be worse. Britain's prisons are already at breaking point, with overcrowding forcing early releases and emergency measures. Now, as more people are crammed into the same spaces, violence is spiralling out of control.

Compare this to the online safety debate dominating Westminster. MPs spend hours arguing about social media algorithms while the most vulnerable people in society face a doubling of serious violence in spaces the state controls completely.

The scale of this crisis becomes clear when you consider Britain's prison population. With around 85,000 people behind bars, these assault rates suggest over 2,000 serious prisoner-on-prisoner attacks happened in 2023. That's six every day.

For context, this level of violence would be front-page news in any other setting. If office workers or students faced a 91% surge in serious assaults, there would be inquiries, resignations, emergency funding.

But prisoners don't vote. They don't have lobbyists or campaign groups with access to Number 10. So while politicians debate whether tech executives are being treated firmly enough, the people locked up by the state are beating each other senseless at record rates.

The government controls every aspect of prison life: who goes where, what resources are available, how many staff are on duty. Unlike online platforms or energy companies, there are no market forces, no consumer choice, no regulatory ambiguity.

This is a crisis entirely within the state's power to fix. The question is whether anyone in Westminster is paying attention.