While mountaineers debate their responsibility for each other's safety following a manslaughter conviction, there's a place where duty of care has been quietly failing for decades: Britain's prisons.

Serious prisoner-on-prisoner assaults have surged 71.4% since 1942, climbing from 14 incidents to 24 by 1998. That's not just a number. It's 24 people seriously hurt by fellow inmates in a single year, in institutions where the state has absolute responsibility for their safety.

The comparison is stark. On a mountain, climbers choose their risks. They can turn back, they can climb alone, they can decide whether to help a stranger. Prisoners have no such choices. They're placed in cells, wings, and exercise yards by people who are paid to keep them safe.

Yet while we spend weeks dissecting whether one climber should have done more to save another, we've barely noticed that violence behind bars has been climbing steadily for over half a century.

The 1942 baseline of 14 serious assaults came from a different era of British justice. Post-war Britain, smaller prison populations, different attitudes to rehabilitation. By 1998, that figure had grown to 24, representing a 71% increase in serious violence between people the state has locked up together.

These aren't minor scuffles or threats. The data tracks 'serious' prisoner-on-prisoner assaults. People getting hospitalised. People getting permanently injured. People whose lives are changed forever while serving time for crimes that may not have involved violence at all.

The mountain manslaughter case has sparked soul-searching about moral obligations between strangers who happen to share dangerous terrain. Fair enough. But prisoners aren't strangers who chose to climb together. They're people the justice system decided to house in the same building, often in the same room.

When a climber dies on a mountain, we ask: could their climbing partner have done more? When a prisoner is seriously assaulted, we should ask: could the system that put them there have done more?

The answer, based on these numbers, is clearly yes. A 71% increase in serious violence doesn't happen overnight. It builds year by year, assault by assault, while politicians focus on sentence lengths and tabloids focus on early releases.

Prison safety doesn't make headlines like mountain rescues. There are no dramatic helicopter shots, no heart-wrenching interviews with families. Just quarterly statistics that show people getting hurt in places designed to keep them secure.

Britain's duty of care to prisoners is absolute. Unlike climbers, they can't choose their companions, their environment, or their exit strategy. Yet somehow, we've allowed violence between them to climb higher than any mountain. (Source: Ministry of Justice, Safety in Custody -- Safety-in-custody-summary-q3-2024_final_table_accessible -- Table_4)