Prison Report

Peter Clarke, the out-going HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, published his final Annual Report yesterday and the following are highlights from the introduction:-

Introduction 

Despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on prisons, we must not forget what we had already seen during inspections earlier in the year. The challenges faced by many prisons, and the systemic weaknesses that we identified in some key areas, will not have gone away because of the health emergency. When the immediate crisis is over, there will still be an urgent need to address the serious issues that adversely affect the safety and decency of our prisons, the opportunity they offer for rehabilitation and their contribution to reducing reoffending. 

Grounds for cautious optimism? 

HM Inspectorate of Prisons often refers to the impact of leadership and good management on the outcomes experienced by prisoners. I have frequently pointed out the benefits of local initiatives and clear, focused leadership. In 2017, HMP Liverpool was the subject of one of the most damning inspection reports in recent years, and at the time I commented publicly on how there had been a failure of leadership at local, regional and national levels. A new governor was appointed and the process of recovery began. When I returned to Liverpool in September 2019, the prison was almost unrecognisable. The filth and vermin had gone, and prisoners were no longer being held in degrading, squalid conditions. Staff and prisoners alike had contributed to the change. Some cynics have tried to persuade me that any jail could have achieved this with the resources that had been made available to HMP Liverpool. This is quite wrong and diminishes what has been achieved. The transformation came about because of leadership, teamwork and collaborative working between managers and staff. The tears and applause that greeted our positive feedback at the end of the 2019 inspection was, quite simply, an expression of pride in what had been achieved. This year it was also reassuring, during our Independent Reviews of Progress (IRPs), to see the positive impact that effective leadership had at other prisons that had suffered from poor performance, such as at Lewes and Channings Wood. However, we have also seen how poor or inconsistent leadership can and does lead to appalling failure, as was the case this year at HMYOI Feltham A. 

In the past I have pointed out the correlation between the achievement of our recommendations and the performance of a prison. While we do not give prizes for following recommendations, as a general proposition it is true to say that better outcomes tend to occur where establishments have taken our recommendations seriously and done their best to implement them. For the past three years, a greater number of our recommendations have not been achieved than achieved. Therefore, it is good to see that this year, for the first time since 2015–16, a slightly higher proportion of our recommendations have been achieved than not. I hope this sets a pattern for the future as it is clear the correlation applies to all types of prison. For instance, Cardiff is a local prison that has faced many challenges, so it was particularly pleasing to see strong improvement there in 2019. The fact that Cardiff had fully achieved more than half of the recommendations made at the previous inspection was surely no coincidence. Similarly, Hatfield, an open prison where 24 out of 29 recommendations had been fully achieved, scored the highest grades in all our tests. In contrast, at Hewell we found that only 14 out of 57 recommendations had been achieved, that performance had declined in the closed part of the prison and that the open prison had ceased to deliver its most basic functions. Overall, I have seen enough during the year to make me cautiously optimistic for the future, but only if the early signs of focus and momentum that we saw in some prisons can be replicated elsewhere, and survive the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For many years safety and decency in prisons has been undermined by the prevalence of illicit drugs and the impact they have in generating debts, bullying and violence. The prison service was far too slow to respond to the impact of so-called new psychoactive substances, often referred to as Spice, when they began to ravage many jails over the course of the last decade. Far too slowly, technology that has been available for many years in other sectors has begun to be introduced into some prisons. For instance, scanners that can detect internally concealed drugs are now being introduced. My experience in those prisons where I have seen them operating is that they are warmly welcomed by staff, who feel safer. I have been given many examples of the deterrent and disruptive effect they have on the drugs trade in prisons. It is incumbent on HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) to make sure that this technology, and others, are now used to their full potential.

Serious concerns remain 

As a result of the 2017 inspection of HMP Liverpool, and a subsequent recommendation from the parliamentary Justice Select Committee, HMI Prisons was funded to carry out a new form of scrutiny called Independent Reviews of Progress (IRPs). These are not inspections, and are fundamentally different from our usual work in that we do not look so much at outcomes but rather what efforts management has put into responding to our recommendations from previous inspections. The IRPs have been carried out at establishments where there has either been an Urgent Notification to the Secretary of State or because there were other important issues that we felt needed to be reviewed earlier than would be the case during the normal inspection programme.

It was therefore disappointing to find that progress had too often been disappointingly slow. In several cases, it had been many months before there had been any meaningful progress. I have seen so-called action plans where there had been little action, and responses to Urgent Notifications where the element of urgency was completely lacking. For instance, at HMP Pentonville in January 2020 we found that little had been done to respond to a very poor inspection report in 2019 until a few days before the IRP itself. However, as if to prove that effective leadership produces results, very real progress had been made at HMP Birmingham after it had been subject to an Urgent Notification following some of the worst inspection findings we had ever seen in 2018. Similarly, at Lewes we found a prison with a renewed sense of purpose and direction, that had made good or reasonably good progress in three-quarters of the recommendations we reviewed, and had shaken off the shackles of years of ineffective ‘special measures’. Overall, IRPs carried out during the year found varying progress (see Appendix seven). IRPs can be an effective driver of improvement, especially when prison leaders respond to serious concerns as soon as possible after an inspection or Urgent Notification, and do not wait for months before acting. That we found good or satisfactory progress in half of the recommendations we reviewed shows what is possible. It is vital that HMPPS both demands and enables a rapid response to concerning inspection findings. 

As well as the concern about the pace of progress following poor inspection reports, it was particularly worrying that IRPs found widespread poor performance in the area of purposeful activity. Purposeful activity sits at the heart of whether a prison can offer a safe, decent and rehabilitative environment. We found that no meaningful progress or insufficient progress had been made against 12 of the 15 recommendations we reviewed in this area. Our partners from Ofsted reviewed progress on a thematic basis, and found no significant progress against any theme they reviewed.

Time spent in purposeful activity is key to prisoners’ sense of well-being, to their mental and physical health, to their ability to acquire skills and to prepare for release. Our findings make for depressing reading. A mere 24% of our previous main recommendations had been achieved. Only five prisons had improved in this area – fewer than in any other test. There were far too often shortfalls in the number of jobs or education places available for prisoners, even in training prisons. Allocation to activities was too often haphazard, and the activities themselves mundane, offering little incentive for prisoners to attend.

Systemic failure in offender management 

The ability of prisoners to rehabilitate and progress towards a safe and purposeful release back into the community is, in most cases, critically dependant on a process known as the Offender Assessment System (OASys). For several years we have found that this system is failing. We have found prisons where many hundreds of prisoners either have no documentation at all, or where it is hopelessly out of date. Over the years I have been repeatedly assured that all will be well when new staff become available, or when new ways of working are introduced. However, nobody at any level of HMPPS can tell me how many eligible prisoners do not have a current OASys. At local level it is not unusual for us to find that the prison themselves have little or no idea what the shortfall is. The system is broken, and there are indications that, during the COVID-19 lockdown, it has ceased to function at all in some places. An important part of the recovery plan after the pandemic recedes must be to take a strategic decision to either repair the broken system, or replace it with something new that serves the needs of prisoners and public alike. The following is an excerpt from my introduction to the HMP Wealstun inspection report: 

OASys is supposed to provide the basis for managing risk, informing sentence planning, making re-categorisation decisions and planning for release. However, we found that 75% of prisoners who were arriving at Wealstun were doing so without an assessment, and more than a quarter had one that had not been updated for more than a year. There had been some creditable work carried out locally to try to devise sentence plans, but two-thirds of these were missing in the cases we looked at, and where they did exist they were ineffective. The widespread shortcomings of OASys comprise in my view a strategic failure that undermines so much good work that we see being carried out at a local level, and demands a more coordinated and serious response from HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) than has been the case to date. 

Peter Clarke

HM Chief Inspector of Prisons