A Risky Business

The news that two female prison officers at HMP Bullingdon needed urgent hospital treatment after having a 'brew' on the enhanced prisoners wing not only made me think about my own strategy regarding accepting tea on home visits, but also the whole issue of risk. There is a strong suspicion that the officers were poisoned. Bullingdon is a Cat 'C' training prison which means there should only be low to medium risk prisoners there. For as long as there's been prisons, there's been 'trustee's' or 'red band' prisoners who have been allowed to make prison officers their tea and undertake many other tasks from the admin block, right through to the visits area. Establishments couldn't run without their input and there's an old saying that prisons only run because the prisoners co-operate.

Now I am assuming that the OASys assessments on all the 'trustees' concerned will have recorded them as being low risk and they must have been of good behaviour to have earned 'enhanced' status anyway. So this incident serves to confirm firstly, my long held conviction that risk assessment can never be a science and secondly, the folly of relying on any bueaucratic process such as OASys. It's only a form - an extremely long one it has to be admitted (it can easily take up to three hours to complete) but can only be as good as the person filling it in. In prison, OASys assessments are undertaken by prison officers, typically following only a basic training course.

In my view, assessing risk should be a dynamic process, ideally undertaken only by those who have developed appropriate skills in understanding people and their motivations. This doesn't necessarily come from training alone, but rather an old-fashioned concept called experience. At various times in my career I have been on the receiving end of threats to kill me. Never a pleasant experience, but invariably one not be shared with management, but rather trusted colleagues instead. In the end judgements have to be made about any such threat and the degree of risk it might pose. I don't think any form could ever help me in such situations, but discussion, support and differing viewpoints from other experienced officers certainly does. Working with offenders is a risky business and always will be - OASys won't help one little bit, but will waste millions of man hours and lull everyone into a false sense of security.