Duty of Care

There's been much written about the situation in prisons over the last few days and especially regarding the failure to carry through with supposed plans for executive early releases. We hear of staffing shortages, construction of temporary cell blocks, infections and sadly deaths, but this from Inside Time last week is worth mentioning:-  

Beyond the Call of Duty

Prisoners thank staff

When prisons moved to “lockdown” to curb the spread of coronavirus there were fears that it would lead to riots. Only a fortnight earlier, disturbances in Italian prisons sparked by anti-virus restrictions had left 12 prisoners dead.

But in the first week of UK prisoners being confined to their cells, there was little sign of trouble – and even an unexpected surge in goodwill. At jails across England, some prisoners wrote notes, drew pictures and made signs thanking officers for coming to work in the face of the health risk. At Low Newton, one prisoner put up a handmade sign in her cell window stating simply: “Thanks staff”. The prison posted a photo on social media and commented: “It’s great to see the women of Low Newton showing support for our staff, despite it being difficult and challenging time for them. We will get through this together.”

A handwritten letter from a prisoner at Nottingham, addressed “To all A wing staff”, read: “Now this is something I would never normally do. I’ve always looked at it as cons vs screws. But I give credit when credit is due. And since the restricted regime came in I feel A wing staff have gone above and beyond the call of duty.



“We as prisoners are sometimes very selfish and forget that behind the uniform there is a normal person who worry about there friends and family who risk getting COVID-19 every day they travel to work, but come in to work to look after us. Yes, you hold the keys to my freedom, but it was my own stupid actions that put me here and lost me my freedom. I want to say a big thank you to all A wing staff, even the ones I thought were shit screws, for getting up each morning and despite your own worries and fears, come in to work and help us prisoners to have time out of our cells and keep us updated and for treating us as equals. I have seen prison officers in a new light.”

Governors at the prison were so moved by the letter that they posted it on social media. The prison’s spokesman said “Staff were genuinely touched to receive this from a prisoner,” adding: “Had a little chuckle at the ‘shit screws’ comment.”

Nottingham was not alone. At Lowdham Grange, a prisoner wrote a note stating: “Big thank you officers of Lowdham ‘G’. If it wasn’t for you putting yourselves at risk to come and care for us, we would all be in trouble. You may feel unappreciated, but we appreciate you. So thanks again from K-wing inmates – me especially. God bless!”

And at Dovegate one resident wrote: “You should all be commended and recognised for the respectful and professional way you all have contributed to the smooth as possible running of HMP Dovegate. We recognise the selfless act of putting your own health at risk in the protection of others. Just turning up for duty is heroic and bravery of the highest order, crossed compassion and respect … On behalf of us that see your dedication to the care, safety, security and health of others, we stand to attention and salute you one and all.”

At HMP Humber, a prisoner drew a picture of an officer with the caption “Thank you HMP – stay safe”. The prison commented: “In amongst the clouds came a ray of sunshine. This beautiful picture was received yesterday and brightened our day.”

--oo00oo--

Meanwhile Rob Allen in his latest blog post muses on the whole thorny issue of oversight and accountability during times of crisis like this:- 

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Update on Scrutiny of Criminal Justice in a Time of Crisis

In these extraordinary times, everyone is having to adapt to the requirements of social distancing - not least the institutions that hold the authorities to account. There’s been much talk today of the need for Parliament to resume as soon and as effectively as possible. Although it’s in recess for another week - normally a period in which neither House meets to conduct business - work has continued not least in relation to criminal justice.

Four emergency Statutory Instruments (SIs) came into force last week; to allow prison governors to release prisoners temporarily; to allow those prisoners to be accommodated in Probation hostels and to access means tested benefits during the period of their release. The fourth enables the increased demand for electronic tagging to be met by a new provider – Attenti .

There was no opportunity for MPs to debate the measures – and disappointingly no impact assessments attached to the SI’s despite an assurance in the explanatory memoranda that there would be. The Justice Committee were however able to ask questions of Justice Secretary Robert Buckland and Prison and Probation Chief Jo Farrar on Tuesday. They concentrated on the early release provisions, asking for estimates of the numbers and rates of release, why low risk Category D prisoners were not being prioritised for release, whether all prisoners really need to be tagged.

The session seems to have formed part of a belatedly established inquiry into the impact of Coronavirus on prison probation and courts, announced on 31 March – three weeks after the Home Affairs Committee announced their inquiry into Home Office preparedness for Covid19. But at least the Justice Committee has been able to hold two meetings with Buckland and will question prison and probation minister Lucy Frazer this week.

As well as focusing on how probation is managing to operate in the current climate, Tuesdays’ hearing should also look at three questions that were neglected in last week’s meeting with Buckland.

The first is staffing. Prisons are really struggling with staff either sick or self-isolating. Some staff have been redeployed from HQ into jails and Operation Quickthorn could be activated to allow troops to backfill "non facing" roles . But under what circumstances would the military be involved, what exactly would they do and under whose authority. Could they assist probation as well?

The second question relates to the 500 new prison places being created, how they will be used and what physical conditions they will provide. There’s been concern expressed by reformers that expanding capacity in this way will mean that prisoners eligible for temporary release may be kept in prison instead and that the numbers freed will not reach the estimated 4,000 let alone the 15,000 reportedly recommended by Public Health England.

Third, the Justice Committee should ask about the work of the bodies charged with monitoring prisons and probation. Independent Monitoring Boards are continuing to monitor both prisons and immigration detention during the pandemic, though “much of this will necessarily be remote monitoring”. The Prison and Probation Ombudsman cannot read and reply to letters from prisoners who wish to make complaints. The PPO has also ceased all visits to prisons so their investigation of fatal incidents – including deaths of prisoners from Coronavirus is affected. They “will continue to be informed of all deaths and will open new investigations as normal, but it is likely that we will need to extend our timetables and/or suspend cases until we are able to gather information and investigate safely”.

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons announced this week that they have created – in collaboration with HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) and the Ministry of Justice -an adapted approach for the Coronavirus period, involving short scrutiny visits to prisons. These will focus on core issues such as healthcare, nutrition and hygiene; contact with families, friends and the outside world; legal rights; use of time and the need for meaningful human contact; support for those at risk of self-harm and suicide; and support and risk management for those being released.

What looks like a pragmatic approach from the Inspectorate received short shrift from the Prison Governors Association who consider that the visits are not needed and will put undue pressure on governors and their staff. Somewhat disturbingly, the PGA’s strongly worded response talked of the "fear of inspection"some of their members have, and the likelihood that no tangible benefits will result from any inspection report.

Whatever the Governors say, there is no doubt that some form of monitoring must take place. The UN and WHO have stated that monitoring bodies, should continue to have access to places of detention. The Council of Europe’s (CoE) Committee for the Prevention of Torture has said that monitoring by independent bodies remains an essential safeguard against ill-treatment. The question must be not whether inspection visits take place but how.

The CoE Commissioner for Human Rights argued this week that prisons need a humane and comprehensive crisis plan which should be formulated “in consultation and co-operation with relevant human rights stakeholders, in particular National Preventive Mechanisms, other independent monitoring bodies, national human rights structures and human rights NGOs”.

MPs should ask Miss Frazer whether this is the approach that is being adopted in England and Wales - as a concrete example, are the plans for new build accommodation being discussed in advance with inspectors to check they meet minimum standards?

This would indicate the kind of collaborative approach which is likely to serve the system best during the crisis and protect the health of those involved in it.

Rob Allen

HMPPS and 'Inhumane' Prisons

As the MoJ continues making plans for the future of probation in England and Wales as part of HMPPS, it's worth reminding ourselves that this same employer is responsible for prisons that are 'inhumane'. This press release from Dame Anne Owers, National Chair of IMBs:- 

The prison system is in a state of ‘fragile recovery’ after a lengthy period of staffing problems, increases in drugs and violence, and inadequate rehabilitation opportunities, said a report published today, summarising the findings of prison independent monitoring boards in England and Wales to the end of 2018.

In the report, Dame Anne Owers, National Chair of the IMBs, highlights:

• the damage to regimes caused by insufficient staff, and then the risks resulting from a high proportion of new and inexperienced staff
• the impact of new psychoactive substances on prison safety, with a rise in violence and self-harm
• continuing failings in prison maintenance contracts, with crumbling infrastructure and sometimes degrading conditions
• the over-use of segregation for prisoners with serious mental health concerns or risks of self-harm
• the long-standing inability to manage prisoners’ property effectively; and
• the shortcomings of community rehabilitation companies (CRCs) and housing and benefits problems that undermine successful resettlement.

Dame Anne said that some new initiatives were showing signs of promise, but that it was too early to say whether they would have a sustained impact on outcomes for prisoners. They include:

• staff recruitment drives
• management focus on decent conditions
• the new drug strategy and measures to prevent the entry of drugs
• the roll-out of offender management in custody; and
• revised processes for supporting prisoners at risk of self-harm and reducing violence.

Boards will continue to monitor the impact of these changes.

The report also raised significant concerns about the number of prisoners with serious mental health conditions, or at risk of self-harm, being held for lengthy periods in segregation units, where their condition deteriorates. It points to the need for more appropriate alternative provision, particularly in NHS facilities.

Dame Anne said: “There is no question that IMBs are still reporting some serious and ongoing problems in prisons. The decline in safety, conditions and purposeful activity in prisons over the last few years has seriously hampered their ability to rehabilitate prisoners.

“This will take time to reverse, and will require consistent leadership and management both in the Prison Service and the Ministry of Justice, as new staff, policies and resources bed in.

“This report provides a benchmark against which we will be able to judge progress. IMBs will continue to monitor and report on the new initiatives now being rolled out and their impact on the ground on the conditions and treatment of prisoners and the ability of prisons to turn lives round.”

--oo00oo--

This from the Guardian:-

'Inhumane': damning report on English and Welsh prisons

Prisoners are living in squalid and inhumane conditions in buildings that are unfit for purpose, according to a report that paints a damning picture of prisons in England and Wales. The report, which details the crumbling infrastructure of prisons, summarises the findings of independent monitoring boards in the two countries to the end of 2018.

Boards raised a number of failings that directly affected health and safety, including overflowing toilets and urinals, damp, mould and unheated cells, and a sewage pipe uncapped for months. Four prison boards described conditions as squalid, others as inhumane and unfit for purpose.

In Exeter prisoners were forced to use buckets to flush their toilets since these were blocked, and there was waste and excrement on the floor, and overflowing urinals. At Lincoln prison the health and safety executive is investigating the origin of a legionella outbreak that left one prisoner dead. Half the prisoners at Long Lartin and 400 prisoners at Coldingley were in cells without any integral sanitation; the boards at those prisons described the situation as “inhumane and undignified”.

Dame Anne Owers, chair of the Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs), said the prison system was in a state of “fragile recovery”, pointing to improvements in staff recruitment drives, the new drug strategy and measures to prevent the entry of drugs, as well as revised processes for reducing violence and supporting prisoners at risk of self harm. But she added it was too early to say whether new initiatives would have a sustained impact on prisoners.

Owers said: 

“There is no question that IMBs are still reporting some serious and ongoing problems in prisons. The decline in safety, conditions and purposeful activity in prisons over the last few years has seriously hampered their ability to rehabilitate prisoners. This will take time to reverse, and will require consistent leadership and management both in the Prison Service and the Ministry of Justice, as new staff, policies and resources bed in. Boards across England and Wales continued to raise the issue of two prisoners sharing a cell meant for one – with a toilet, sometimes unscreened, in a cramped space where they also ate their meals, which the report noted, “would not be acceptable in any other publicly owned building”.

The report pointed to failures in maintenance contracts, which exacerbated the problems caused by under investment over many years. One prison had 900 outstanding jobs, another more than 1,300 planned and 1,300 preventive jobs. The mother and baby unit at Eastwood Park, one of only three in the country, was out of use for more than two years because of catastrophic water damage.

The report also highlighted the issue of insufficient and inexperienced staff, the impact of new psychoactive substances on prison safety, the overuse of segregation for prisoners with serious mental health concerns, and shortcomings of community rehabilitation companies, as well as housing and benefits problems that undermined successful resettlement.

Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “As the eyes and ears of the local community, people who volunteer to be independent monitors play a vital role in trying to keep prisons safe. Their reports reveal the enormity of the challenge to transform a failing prison system that has been asked to do too much with too little for too long.”

Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: “This report makes very sobering reading for the new prisons minister, Robert Buckland. There can be no disputing the firsthand, directly observed, evidence of over 51,000 individual visits to prisons. The report describes a catalogue of failure to deliver even the most basic standards of care and a chronic waste of human and physical resources in our prison system.

Buckland said: “I want to thank members of independent monitoring boards across England and Wales for their continued dedication, commitment and hard work. I recognise the board’s concerns and we are tackling the issues raised head on. Over the last year we have invested more than £70m to get more officers on the landings, disrupt organised crime and improve security, and, as the report notes, we are starting to see some positive results.”

A Very Sad Saga

Following his recent magnum opus performance in front of the PAC, some might have been surprised by this tweet from BBC's Danny Shaw:-

Congrats to @ButlerTrust award winners. Recipient of a special prize (and standing ovation) was HM Prisons & Probation Chief Michael Spurr who leaves his post this month. 

Regular readers are of course fully aware of the ongoing omnishambles that Mr Spurr has presided over within the probation part of his HMPPS bailiwick, but this lengthy, forensic FT article from several weeks ago confirms that the prison part has been just as much of a disaster:- 

What went wrong at Britain's prison of the future?

HMP Berwyn was meant to be a blueprint for fixing the penal system. Two years on, it is 40 per cent empty

In the hours before the first inmates arrived at Britain’s newest and biggest prison, governor Russ Trent said he was feeling proud. Nick Dann, the project’s deputy, confessed he had butterflies. They sat in the room that would soon be used for family visits: brightly coloured seats were grouped around low tables, overlooked by giant motivational posters. “Big journeys begin with the small steps”, read one. 

It was February 2017 and reporters were being shown around the empty site under a leaden sky. A group of boxy buildings jazzed up with stripes of red, blue, green and yellow, HMP Berwyn could almost be mistaken for a school from the outside, were it not for the bars on the windows and its location on a windswept industrial estate in North Wales. The two men knew that a lot was riding on HMP Berwyn. The rest of the prison system in England and Wales was spiralling into crisis. Prisoner numbers had almost doubled since the 1990s as a result of tougher sentencing, but prison places had not kept pace, leaving the government to stuff about 85,000 people into buildings originally designed to hold about 65,000. It had become common to cram two people into cells designed for one, sometimes in Victorian jails that were beginning to fall apart.

Between 2010 and 2017, the government cut the number of prison officers by a quarter as part of its post-recession austerity drive. The result of the crowded conditions and low staffing was a surge of violence and despair among inmates. Self-harm rates among prisoners had gone up by two-thirds since 2010; serious assault rates had more than doubled. Almost half of adults leaving custody were reoffending within a year of their release. If those were the problems, the government hoped HMP Berwyn would be the blueprint for the solution. The £220m Category C prison (prisons are ranked from A to D, with A the most secure) would hold 2,100 men, making it one of the biggest in Europe. Its size would bring economies of scale, but it wouldn’t just be a vast warehouse in which to store criminals cheaply. 

Trent, a charismatic former Royal Marine, promised a rehabilitative culture that would turn lives around. Prisoners would be referred to as men, cells as rooms, and wings as communities. Men would have phones, laptops (offering internal services, not the internet) and showers in their rooms. The prison would be run by the public sector, but outsourcing company Interserve would manage workshops to prepare inmates for jobs on release, and education provider Novus Cambria would offer a range of courses. Sarah Payne, then head of the prison service in Wales, told an event in 2015 that the goal was for HMP Berwyn to be “the flagship for the rest of the country [and] England to emulate”.

Two years after it opened, mystery surrounds the government’s prison of the future. As inmates continue to be crowded into older, dilapidated prisons, HMP Berwyn remains 40 per cent empty. Without the planned economies of scale, the prison that was forecast to be one of the cheapest Category C jails to run in England and Wales (at £14,000 per year per place) is currently one of the most expensive, at £36,000 per year per place. The Prison Service says HMP Berwyn is going through a “deliberate phased population increase” and running costs will reduce over time, but its own annual business plans show the original schedule was for it to be “fully populated” nine months ago. 

Julian Le Vay, a former finance director of the Prison Service, now retired, told the FT it was normal to build up a new prison population slowly, “but never this slowly”, particularly when “lives are being put at risk” due to overcrowding elsewhere. “There’s something going on there that they’re not being quite open about.” The Ministry of Justice declined to let the FT visit the prison and refused a request to interview any managers or officials. But information from prisoners’ families, prison officers, contractors and lawyers, together with reports and statistics gathered through Freedom of Information requests and MPs’ written questions to ministers, suggest HMP Berwyn remains half empty because key elements of the project have veered off track. 

When the prison opened, some buildings were either unfinished or unusable. The Interserve workshops, which were meant to provide prison jobs for 520 inmates, are delivering a fraction of what was promised, according to data the FT obtained through an FOI request. Assaults on staff and “use of force” incidents by staff against prisoners are higher at HMP Berwyn than other Category C prisons, according to government data. Since the prison opened, 338 ambulances have been sent there, the police have been called 135 times and the fire service 27 times, the FT’s FOIs show.

Injuries reported to the Health and Safety Executive, also obtained through FOIs, include broken bones, excrement flung in prison officers’ faces, and nurses intoxicated after inhaling second-hand fumes from synthetic drugs such as spice, said to turn people into “zombies”. Reports from the prison’s health team show prisoners have been taken off prescription anti-depressants, anti-psychotics and painkillers without their consent, which some inmates say has driven them to self-medicate with illegal drugs. And Trent was suspended last year in mysterious circumstances. In a letter to MPs, one inmate called HMP Berwyn “the Rolls-Royce of prisons with a Ford Cortina engine under the bonnet”. 

It is not unusual for new prisons to have rocky starts: HMP Oakwood, a vast prison that opened seven years ago, began badly but is now running relatively well. And HMP Berwyn is still functioning far better than many of the UK’s jails. But as the government prepares to build more new prisons, it is worth learning the lessons from this project’s early years. It is a story of good intentions undermined by bad decisions and bungled procurement — and a reminder of how hard it is to do something different when the wider system is on its knees.

When HMP Berwyn opened, the Daily Mail newspaper called it “the cushiest jail in Britain”. The Sun plumped for “Pampered Porridge”. But while the tabloids sneered, prison experts praised ideas such as putting phones in cells to help prisoners maintain relationships with their families, which is linked to lower reoffending. They worried, though, that a series of early decisions would undercut the prison’s rehabilitative intent. Only 30 per cent of the cells were designed for one person; the rest were doubles.

Many prisons were already putting two men in a cell out of desperation, but this was a deliberate choice. There will always be some prisoners who prefer to share a cell — they may benefit from company if they are at risk of suicide, for example. But most people struggle without personal space. The decision contravened the recommendation to eliminate enforced cell-sharing by the UK’s official Mubarek Inquiry of 2006, commissioned after a teenager was clubbed to death by his cellmate. “If people consent to it . . . that’s fine,” said Frances Crook of the penal reform charity The Howard League. “But to build a new prison [that] forces people to share cells . . . even the Victorians didn’t do that.” 

Only 30 per cent of the prison’s cells were designed for one person The double cells at HMP Berwyn have narrow beds on each side, a desk with one chair, and a lidless toilet and shower in the corner with a curtain. Le Vay called it “a major retreat from civilised penal policy”, adding that it had probably been a way to save money. A Prison Service spokesman said the double cells were “purpose-built for double occupancy”, that “many” prisoners preferred to share, and that they spent a lot of time out of their cells. 

Experts also questioned the prison’s size and location. “The current government seems committed to building warehouse-style ‘mega-prisons’, despite a multitude of academic evidence and Inspectorate [of Prisons] reports showing that small prisons are more operationally effective,” wrote Yvonne Jewkes, a criminology professor at the University of Bath, in a journal article in 2017. Local politicians had wanted a smaller prison that could hold men from North Wales fairly close to their homes, which research shows is helpful for rehabilitation. “But it very quickly became evident [the MoJ] wanted to do a Titan, Texas-style prison” that would hold many prisoners from England, Marc Jones, a councillor from the town of Wrexham, told the FT. 

The chosen site was an industrial park 3.5 miles outside Wrexham (£4.50 return from the city centre by bus, £8 each way by taxi), which itself was a long journey for many prisoners’ families, particularly the 75 per cent or so from England. For some, these decisions doomed the project from the start. “There is no way that prison can function effectively ever,” said Crook, citing its size, location and double cells. 

Others believed HMP Berwyn could surmount the challenges. After all, it would have new facilities, plenty of activities and a totally different culture. “Everything we know that works well is [at Berwyn],” Trent told the news site Wrexham.com in 2017. He said every inmate could attend work or education, and would be treated with respect. “If you’ve got trust and respect, it reduces the chance of violence between the men and the people who . . . look after them.” But one by one, these promises started to come unstuck. When the prison health team, supplied by a local health board called the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, gained access to the site in early 2017, it discovered the health facilities “had not been designed or built to the specifications and designs submitted by the Health Board”, according to its own annual report. 

Asked for an explanation, a Prison Service spokesman told the FT that construction company Lendlease had met its obligations and the healthcare facility “was designed to the NHS standard”, but that the health team had “identified amendments that could be made to the specification, to go beyond the NHS standard and deliver an even better quality of service”. The health team’s report painted a different picture. It described a “lack of compliance with infection prevention and control standards, unsuitable and insufficient data and electrical configurations and unsuitable design of facilities”, which made treating patients “unsafe” and “required a complete rebuild of some areas”. That led to delays in providing healthcare for months after the prison opened. In January 2018, 98 men had been waiting more than 14 weeks to see a dentist. 

Those weren’t the only problems. The project, built on the site of an old tyre factory, initially came in £45m under budget thanks in part to “value engineering” decisions such as changing the prison’s layout and mitigating asbestos “on site” rather than paying to remove it. A few months after it opened, Roland Karthaus, director of a firm called Matter Architecture, performed tests and surveyed inmates at HMP Berwyn with the MoJ’s permission for a research project. His final report said that while the building was far better than many older prisons, there were too few areas for staff, no proper ventilation in the house blocks (where the cells are) and problematic noise levels. According to Karthaus, the “reverberation time” for sound in the house blocks was 3.5 seconds. “Above a second, speech becomes virtually unintelligible . . . so you have entirely hard surfaces, everyone is shouting all the time and you can’t escape it, it’s your whole life,” he told the FT. 

Maintenance also became a problem. In January 2018, there was a complete failure of the heating and hot water, which took five days to fix. This winter, the heating broke down again. The prison service was “urgently working” with contractors to fix problems with the heating system, a spokesman said. Then there was the centrepiece of the rehabilitative vision: workshops that were meant to keep 520 prisoners busy, imparting useful skills. Interserve’s winning bid to run them listed five subcontractors including a call centre, a small windmill manufacturer and a recycling company. Interserve’s 2017 annual report, published in April 2018, devoted a special box to the project, saying it “provides employment places for 520 men . . . designed to replicate a normal working environment”. But that wasn’t true when the report was published and it’s still not true today. 

The workshop buildings were not ready when the prison opened, according to multiple sources and FOI requests. They lacked basics like electrical work, fixtures and fittings. “The lack of work spaces has probably been the greatest challenge for everyone who lives and works at Berwyn,” Trent wrote in his anniversary message to staff a year after the prison opened. “The procurement process has not yet gone as we would have hoped or planned [and], consequently, there are too many men left on the communities during the day.” 

Today, two full years after the prison opened, the workshop buildings are still not ready. “There were just so many delays, it was ridiculous,” said Mark Gilbert of recycling company Emerald Trading, one of the original subcontractors, who became fed up of waiting and pulled out. Interserve has been running a pared-down set of workshops inside one of the house blocks. In January this year, it was providing 200 places, with about 150 to 160 prisoners attending on average. Interserve told the FT that the box in its annual report “was intended as an explanation of the project and our contractual obligations, and not performance of the contract”. 

No one admits blame for the workshop mess. Lendlease told the FT: “All of our work was successfully completed to specifications requested by the MoJ.” Interserve told the FT it had been asked by the MoJ in October 2017 (eight months after the prison opened) to provide the mechanical and electrical work required to finish the workshops. That final contract was only signed in October 2018 and the work is not due to be finished until April. A prison service spokesman said Lendlease and Interserve “delivered on the specification requested of them”. He added: “The process of deciding who would ‘fit out’ the workshops was carried out once the detailed functionality of the workshops was known, and there were delays during this process, due to the detailed negotiations required.” 

The workshop debacle helps explain why there are still only about 1,300 inmates in a prison designed to hold 2,100. Prison deputy Nick Dann told MPs last year that the population “ramp-up plan” was linked to the number of activity places available. “It is primary for us and our stability that we have activities for the new men as we receive them each week.” Crook put it more succinctly: “The devil makes work for idle hands.” 

At 4.30 one recent afternoon, prisoners’ ­relatives spilled out of HMP Berwyn into the bitterly cold dusk. Most headed for the car park. Sally Smith, a wriggly baby in her arms, flopped on to a chair in the visitor centre. She had been to see her partner, who was transferred to HMP Berwyn almost a year ago. “They sold him the dream,” Smith (not her real name) sighed. “They said it’s a new prison to help people. But it’s terrible.” It’s not easy to gather a fair impression of life inside a prison from outside the gate. 

No official inspection report for the prison has been published yet and prisoners are banned from communicating with journalists without permission from the governor. Interviews with prisoners’ relatives, friends, lawyers and other representatives paint a mixed picture. Some of those transferred from other prisons found it a vast improvement. “People want to come here — it’s like they’re ­winning if they’re here,” said one young woman whose partner had arrived a month ago. He had started studying maths. Another called it “really good”, especially the education facilities. 

‘They said it’s a new prison to help people. But it’s terrible’ HMP Berwyn’s Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) — a panel of citizen volunteers — wrote in a report last July that men were “treated fairly and with decency” and the MoJ “should be applauded” for supporting a “new progressive regime”. Ian Lucas, the Labour MP for Wrexham, told the FT he had been sceptical initially about the prison’s size, but felt the project had been delivered well overall. It was a good physical environment and everyone he met there was focused on rehabilitation, though he added this had been “undermined to some extent” by the failure to open the workshops. 

Others described a consistent set of problems, starting with the prison’s failure to live up to its own promises. HMP Berwyn staff had gone on “roadshows” to recruit prisoners from other jails. “They had a list of courses and things they could be doing, which is what he wants, he wants to better himself,” said the partner of one prisoner, who did not want to be named. “Now he’s there, they’re like, ‘Oh no, we don’t have the facilities for that.’” Her partner is one of 250 inmates at HMP Berwyn who have asked to be transferred to a different prison, according to data obtained through a ministerial written question. Kelly Coombs, who runs Census Group, a call-centre company that employs inmates in many prisons including HMP Berwyn, said that while the prison’s aspirations were “exactly right”, inmates felt they were “promised this entirely transformative experience, and that hasn’t happened”. 

Drugs have also found their way in. By October 2017, it was clear some men had been “abusing the freedoms in visits” to smuggle in drugs, Trent admitted in his anniversary message; the rules were duly tightened. On March 31 last year, a 22-year-old called Luke Jones died in his cell. The preliminary inquest blamed a heart attack probably caused by spice; a full inquest has still not been held. The IMB wrote in July 2018 that illegal drugs were “readily available” in the flagship jail. But it also warned that some prisoners had been driven to “self-medicate” with drugs because of the prison’s practice of taking some inmates off their prescription medications. 

Smith, sitting with her baby in the visitor centre, said this was one of the first signs of trouble for her partner. He was on mirtazapine for anxiety and depression, but when he was transferred to HMP Berwyn, a prison doctor told him: “We don’t like these here.” Smith added: “They said they’d put him on something else but they never did. He’s basically in withdrawal.” 

 A table contained in the health board’s annual pharmacy report for 2017 provides a snapshot of the number of prisoners with prescriptions on arrival, and the number in November 2017. The number of men on a range of different antidepressants such as mirtazapine had been cut between 65 and 78 per cent (depending on the specific drug in question). Anti-psychotics had been cut between 45 and 63 per cent, hypnotics and anxiolytics between 93 and 100 per cent, and most opiates by between 82 and 100 per cent. Only methadone had increased, by 8 per cent. 

Ian Lucas, the local MP, who has visited the pharmacy at HMP Berwyn, called it a “tough love” approach. “Essentially it’s a deliberate policy to not prescribe them the amount of drugs, because apparently they say that some of them come with a Sainsbury’s bag full of . . . prescribed medication,” he said. “You can imagine that one way of coping with being locked up is just being doped up all the time.” 

In his anniversary message to staff, Trent acknowledged “our policy of optimising medication” had proved “very difficult for men to cope with in their early days” but suggested they felt much better “as they come through it”. But the IMB warned in its July report that men were living in the Care and Separation unit, sometimes known as a segregation unit, because they couldn’t cope without medication that, in some cases, they had been using for a long time. “It would appear to the Board there is a downside to a policy which means that, in effect, a percentage of men are subject to a compulsory detox, which inevitably affects behaviour and adds to the supply and demand issues around illicit drugs in the establishment.” 

Pamela Taylor, chair of the forensic faculty for the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said such an approach was “not unusual” but that HMP Berwyn was “much more structured and . . . committed in the way they [are] trying to do it”. She also said many prisoners and non-prisoners accumulated prescriptions over time that might no longer be appropriate: “[So] many of us would say it is good, but I can also understand why it’s not universally liked by the people on the receiving end.” Ideally, she added, such decisions would be made consensually with patients, drugs would be tapered and patients would be reviewed. “The big question is whether they then get, within a reasonable period of time, a further review to check how they’ve been without that medication, and/or an option to go back to the doctor and say, ‘Look, I feel just dreadful.’” 

Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, which provides healthcare in the prison, told the FT its practice was to give prisoners a “medication review” with a GP on arrival, in accordance with a guideline from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. “Within the prison population, medication is often abused by patients and it therefore may not be appropriate for said medication to be prescribed,” a spokeswoman for the health board said. “At HMP Berwyn we have noted large numbers of patients transferred from other prisons have never had medication reviews that meet the standard of Nice guidelines and therefore their ‘normal medication’ is not deemed as safe and effective to continue.” 

She said an alternative was prescribed where appropriate, and that the objective was always to reach agreement with patients, but that “often, patients do not always agree with prescribing decisions, despite the best efforts of clinicians to explain the reasons.” She also said the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales had not upheld any complaints into the health board’s practices.

Broken promises and drug problems have been compounded by the inexperience of HMP Berwyn’s prison officers. This has been a problem across the prison service: many seasoned officers were lost during the deep cuts between 2010 and 2017. The challenge was magnified at HMP Berwyn because it had to be staffed from scratch. Data obtained through an FOI request shows that, in September 2018, about a fifth of HMP Berwyn’s front-line prison officers had less than a year’s experience, and a further 56 per cent only had between one year and two. More than 40 per cent were still in their twenties. The jobs are advertised at less than £23,000 a year and turnover is high. 

Staff said seasoned prisoners exploited their inexperience. “A lot of them take advantage of the good nature of the system [and] a lot of the staff,” explained one HMP Berwyn prison officer who has now left his job. Another said new staff were “not supporting each other, which makes the wings unsafe. The [prisoners] make the rules and the new staff are too worried to challenge them.” 

Families of prisoners, meanwhile, said the officers dealt with prisoners more aggressively than was typical in other prisons. The latest published statistics for January to September 2018 support both sides of this story. Assault rates at HMP Berwyn are slightly above average for similar establishments, but it is assaults on staff that really stand out: the rates are higher than at any other Category C prison in England and Wales, according to the FT’s analysis. One of these attacks happened the day after Luke Jones died. A prisoner, upset about his death, fractured an officer’s cheek and broke his nose with a single punch, then assaulted a second officer. Other prisoners intervened to help the officers. The first was hospitalised for five days; the second told the court he thought he and his colleague were lucky to escape the wing alive. 

Arfon Jones, the Police and Crime Commissioner for North Wales, told the FT the prison had been a drain on resources. “This year, I have made it perfectly clear, I am not putting any extra money into that prison,” he said.  As for staff violence against prisoners, the government has no recent comparable data on “use of force” at different prisons. But last year, official inspectors criticised HMP Humber, a Category C prison with a similar population size to HMP Berwyn, for 206 “use of force” incidents in the previous six months, “more than at . . . other category C training prisons”. 

In the most recent six months for which data is available for HMP Berwyn (July to December 2018), there were 626 such incidents, which are meant to be used only as a last resort. Injury reports filed to the Health and Safety Executive include several where prison officers fractured bones in their hands during “control and restraint” incidents. The partner of the prisoner seeking a transfer said she thought some young staff had “got a bit of power and it’s gone to their heads”. 

Mark Fairhurst, national chair of the POA, the prison officers’ union, told the FT: “Inexperienced staff tend to use force as a first option, whereas experienced staff will use de-escalation techniques. If you don’t have experienced staff . . . then really you need management grip — and by that I mean: why don’t we have managers on residential units who stay there and guide and coach staff and motivate them?” 

“Management grip” was meant to be governor Russ Trent’s style. “He’s very command-and-­control . . . and he likes to get stuff done,” said Crook. At HMP Berwyn, Trent was determined to instil a different culture. When Faith Spear, a former IMB chair at a different prison, visited the prison last summer at Trent’s invitation, he handed her a pack of cards. Each card represented a different “Berwyn practice”, she explained in a blog post. “Day 1: We recognise achievements and celebrate successes #thankyou.” “Day 2: We actively listen to each other and make eye contact #respect.” 

But multiple sources say some staff clashed with Trent’s style, which they felt gave too much power to prisoners and left them unsupported. At most prisons, inmates earn privileges through good behaviour, but at HMP Berwyn they were given privileges on arrival and had them removed for poor behaviour. Fairhurst said: “That really, in my eyes, has been a social experiment that has gone severely wrong . . . You had management in place, many of whom were newly promoted and wanted to embrace this new culture to the detriment of security, control, order and discipline.” 

Trent seemed undaunted by any internal resistance. In July last year he tweeted: “‘It’s impossible’ said Pride. ‘It’s risky,’ said Experience. ‘It’s pointless,’ said Reason. ‘Give it a try,’ whispered Heart.” A month later, he was abruptly suspended from his job after allegations were made about him; the Prison Service did not specify what they were. Trent did not respond to the FT’s attempt to contact him, but the Prison Service said that, following an investigation, “no formal disciplinary action” had been taken. He has now returned to work in the Prison Service (though not at HMP Berwyn). An interim governor was brought in, and a new permanent one will start next month. 

In response to the figures on violence, drugs and staff inexperience, the Prison Service spokesman said the government was spending an extra £70m to fight drugs across all prisons, training more than 4,000 new prison officers, and rolling out “Pava” incapacitant spray to officers. HMP Berwyn has been given new drug-detection equipment, dogs and a specialist search team. It is also using a new “Challenge, Support and Intervention Plan” to help staff “manage violent prisoners” and a key worker scheme to improve prisoner-staff relationships. 

As dusk fell, Smith gathered up her baby and headed to the car park to meet her cousin who had driven her from England. She wouldn’t have to do this journey much longer: her partner was due out fairly soon and she couldn’t wait. But if there was a plan in place to help him get on his feet, she didn’t know about it. 

Most jails in England and Wales don’t have a great record at helping prisoners transition back to normal life. “I left prison with £46 and PTSD,” said Cody Lachey, a former prisoner (not at HMP Berwyn) who now speaks out about prison reform. The public might like the idea of “brutalising prisoners”, Lachey told the FT, but it ultimately costs society when those people are released back into the community: “People are entering broken, and leaving in bits.” 

The team at HMP Berwyn hoped to show there was a better way, but the prison is tied into a wider probation system that is in disarray. In 2013, then justice secretary Chris Grayling began the part-privatisation of the system across England and Wales: a group of mainly private-sector companies took on contracts to manage low-to-medium-risk offenders, while the public sector continued to deal with high-risk ones. 

In a damning report published last week, the National Audit Office concluded the MoJ had “set itself up to fail” with “rushed” reforms that proved “extremely costly for taxpayers” and had seen the number of people on short sentences recalled to prison “skyrocket”. In Wales, the contract was given to Working Links, a company owned by a German private equity firm. Last month, Working Links collapsed into administration. The government has said that the private probation contracts will end early, but the design of the new system is not yet clear. 

Katie Lomas, national chair of Napo, the trade union for probation officers, said HMP Berwyn had a “really positive aim” to focus on rehabilitation. “But if the structure that you are trying to put that inside of doesn’t help, then you’re at war with yourself before you even start.” Liz Saville Roberts, a North Wales MP from the Plaid Cymru party who has obtained data about HMP Berwyn through ministerial questions, agreed. “The regime itself was, and is, very worthwhile,” she said, “if it was given the means with which it could actually succeed.” Crook of the Howard League, meanwhile, argued the answer was not to build more prisons at all but to reduce the prison population. 

The government’s stance appears to be in flux. Last month, David Gauke, the justice secretary, made a case for abolishing custodial sentences of less than six months and managing those criminals in the community instead. He called for “a national debate about what justice, including punishment, should look like”. But plans for big new prisons continue. In December, the MoJ amended its request for planning permission for a new Category C prison in Yorkshire: having “reviewed the level and distribution of strategic need”, it wanted to up the number of prisoners from 1,017 to 1,440. 

Still, there are signs the MoJ has learnt some lessons. The design for a new prison in Wellingborough states that the majority of cells will be singles, not doubles. The Prison Service spokesman noted that closed floors and bar-less sealed windows there would “help reduce noise levels and create an atmosphere conducive to rehabilitation”. He pointed out the IMB for HMP Berwyn had recognised the “considerable achievement” of opening a big and complex prison, and the “excellent work” of staff who ran a regime “with many examples of good and innovative practice”. 

He added: “As with any new prison there have been planning and implementation issues, which we have worked hard to resolve, and we know there will be more to do as we move towards full occupancy. Lessons learnt from Berwyn, along with our extensive consultation of stakeholders and prison design experts, will shape our approach as we develop an estate that can improve rehabilitation and create safe and secure environments for staff and offenders.” 

Inside the prison fence, not everyone is so optimistic. Shortly after Luke Jones died at HMP Berwyn, an older prisoner wrote a letter to Inside Time, the magazine for people in jail. He wanted to tell Jones’s family how sad and upset everyone was. “An internal investigation . . . will now ensue, and then a message to say ‘Lessons have been learnt’ . . . I’m a middle-aged man now and angered by the sadness I feel at this young man losing his life,” he wrote. “No lessons are ever learnt.” 

Sarah O’Connor and Cynthia O’Murchu are investigations correspondents at the FT. Additional reporting by Helen Warrell. 

More on Prisons and Politics

A lot of people are on holiday and even with dramatic events unfolding daily within the secretive prison world - the BBC is reporting a second Governor has been suspended, this time at HMP Styal in addition to HMP Berwyn - there is a sense of us just 'treading water'. 

But with Quality Street already stacked high in Tesco, Christmas having seemingly started on 1st August, we will soon be into the party political conference season with normal service resuming. Brexit not withstanding, the crisis in all parts of the Criminal Justice System cannot be ignored for much longer and something fundamental has to happen. Here's Rob Allen musing on things and in a double bill highlighting the news manipulation tricks the MoJ regularly engages in:-  

Why we need a new Woolf Inquiry into Prisons

When Lord Woolf inquired into the 1990 Strangeways riot and those which followed, he concluded that prisons need to keep three dimensions in balance - security, control and fairness. The first two requirements had been prioritised at the expense of the third, fuelling the grievances which drove the protests. The report into the 2016 Birmingham riot, finally released yesterday suggests that it was a lack of control which was key. The prison had seen a deterioration in the use of legitimate authority, chronic staff shortages and a corrupted system of violence reduction (VR) reps - prisoners with backgrounds in organised crime serving long sentences who policed disputes not always using peaceful means to keep order.

Lack of control was behind yesterdays’ decision to take HMP Birmingham back into the public realm - albeit temporarily. The ghastly consequences spelled out in graphic and distressing detail by Peter Clarke in his Urgent Notification letter mark a new low in the treatment of prisoners and have secured a day’s headlines at least. But what next?

There are two immediate questions to resolve. First, why did the Ministry of Justice not intervene earlier? Prison Minister Rory Stewart was told by the local independent monitoring board in May that “basic humanity, safety and purposeful activity were simply not being delivered”, and the prison service’s own on site monitor allegedly agreed that prisoners rather than staff, appeared to be controlling many of the wings. We deserve to know whether, as Peter Clarke says, someone was asleep at the wheel or whether as Stewart says yesterday’s forceful action follows an ”intensive period of Ministry of Justice measures to compel improvements”.

Second, how far is this debacle down to privatisation? Unions and Labour apart, the consensus is that the question may be a distraction. I’m puzzled why G4S allowed the prison to descend into chaos and suffer the undoubted reputational damage. There's history of course, with recent scandals at Medway Secure Training Centre and Brook House Immigration Removal Centre (where an independent inquiry is underway).

Apart from the disgusting conditions and unchecked violence at Birmingham, staff locked in their offices, unwilling to tackle drug misuse, and not knowing where their prisoners were at any given time, doesn’t look good for what is at heart a security company. The G4S CEO chairs the International Security Ligue, an association of private security organisations responsible for defining, establishing and maintaining the highest ethical and professional standards of the private security industry worldwide. If nothing else, he will not have been impressed by the arson attack during the week of the inspection that destroyed nine staff vehicles. The assertion by former Justice Minister Phillip Lee that “companies are currently ripping off taxpayers” also needs proper investigation.

Peter Clarke has argued for a thorough and independent assessment of how and why the contract between government and G4S has failed, without which he sees no hope of progress. The independent investigation should arguably cover the broader question about the role of the private sector.

But, like part Two of Woolf’s report, the immediate disaster needs to be a springboard for a wider and searching look at the use and practice of imprisonment in England and Wales. The practical response to the crisis at Birmingham - to reduce prisoner numbers and increase staff – is a clue as to what needs to be done across the system.

Rob Allen

--oo00oo--

Headlines and Deadlines

Prisons Minister Rory Stewart is making headlines by offering to resign if his “Ten Prisons Project” doesn’t succeed in cutting levels of drugs and violence. It certainly seems refreshing to hear a minister put his career on the line in this way although I thought I’d heard him say something similar before. He did. Nearly seven months ago he told MPs on the Justice Committee:

“If I am not able in the next 12 months to achieve some improvements in making these prisons basically clean, with more fixed broken windows and fewer drugs, I am not doing my job, and I would like you to hold me to account for that in 12 months’ time”.

It might seem churlish to ask but when should Mr Stewart expect his performance to be judged? On January 24th, 2019 a year after his parliamentary offer. Or next August as he proposes today. Either way let’s hope that the “new model of excellence” – will start to make a real difference to life on the landings unlike so much of the rhetoric to come out of the Ministry of Justice in the last few years.

Today’s announcement puts more flesh on the bones of the strategy launched by Stewart’s boss last month. David Gauke’s 10 July speech was cleverly timed to overshadow the scathing annual report of the Chief Inspector that followed the next day. Is there something similar about the timing of today’s announcement?

Last Friday 10th August, the Inspectorate confirmed a BBC report that it had decided to issue an Urgent Notification (UN) in relation to HMP Birmingham, following significant concerns raised by their inspection of the G4S run prison. The Inspectorate tweeted that they would not release any further information about the inspection until they had published the Urgent Notification letter they send to the Justice Secretary explaining their concerns.

That letter should be sent within seven calendar days of the end of the inspection on 10th August - so by the 17th of August. The fact that Rory Stewart visited Birmingham on Wednesday 15th as he put it “to follow up on the recent inspection”, suggests it’s been sent. So why hasn’t it been published?

The protocol between the Inspectorate and the MoJ says the Chief Inspector “will publish an urgent notification letter to the SoS and will place this information in the public domain”. The MoJ document about the process says the letter will be published on the "Trigger Day"- the day the letter is sent.

It's the middle of August and people are away so that might explain the delay. I expect the letter will be published on Monday. If not , it will be legitimate to ask questions about whether the first private prison to be subject to the process is being treated differently from the public ones which preceded it.

Rob Allen

Howard League Takes on MoJ

I do love how the Howard League and its indefatigable Frances Crook goes about its campaigning work; it's truly inspirational and dare I suggest, puts other organisations to shame. Whatever happened to NACRO and it's once proud campaigning voice?   

Howard League provides evidence to High Court concerning the state’s failure to monitor practices of private companies in the criminal justice system

Operational note

Case: R (Faulder and others) v Sodexo Limited and the Secretary of State for Justice

Where: Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, London, WC2A 2LL

When: Wednesday 4 July 2018 (listed for two days)

The Howard League for Penal Reform has provided evidence concerning the state’s failure to monitor the practices of private companies in the criminal justice system, in a High Court case scheduled to begin in London tomorrow (Wednesday 4 July).

A witness statement by the charity’s Chief Executive, Frances Crook, has been prepared to assist the court in the case of R (Faulder and others) v Sodexo Limited and the Secretary of State for Justice.

The judicial review claim relates to a series of unlawful strip-searches in a private prison. The case will focus on the failure by the Ministry of Justice to ensure adequate systems were in place in the private prison to prevent breaches of the positive obligations owed to prisoners under Articles 3 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The case raises concerns about the state’s ability to monitor private prisons and hold to account the companies that run them.

Frances Crook, Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “As more and more state functions in the criminal justice sector are delegated to private companies, this important case raises pressing questions about the state’s ability to spot damaging and unlawful practices and stop them happening.

“The consequences of these failures of oversight include serious problems in secure training centres designed to hold vulnerable children, an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office into the management of electronic tagging, privatised probation services that have been criticised by the National Audit Office, and the failure of private companies to adequately maintain prisons.”

The case concerns a series of unlawful strip-searches that took place in Sodexo-run Peterborough prison in July and September last year.

In her witness statement, Frances Crook considers the monitoring of private prisons by Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs), whose members are volunteers, and the official watchdog, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP).

The statement says that IMB reports often do not pick up on pressing issues. The annual IMB reports from Peterborough prison for the last four years do not mention strip-searching at all. Nor do the annual IMB reports from Bronzefield, a prison operated by the same company. IMBs across England and Wales are experiencing difficulties in recruitment. In May this year the government revealed that one-third of IMB posts were vacant.

Frances Crook’s statement outlines two key weaknesses in the system by which HMIP monitors prisons – the watchdog visits prisons infrequently, which means that problems can go unchecked for years at a time; and there is no obligation on the State to implement its recommendations.

All public and private prisons are audited in a three-year cycle by Her Majesty’s Prisons and Probation Service, formerly known as the National Offender Management Service. In her statement, Frances Crook suggests that, without some idea of the criteria prisons are being measured against, it is difficult to have faith in the audit’s positive conclusions.

The statement also considers the role of controllers, who are largely responsible for contractual compliance. Frances Crook suggests that, as they work in private prisons, alongside the employees of the private contractors, controllers may not be best placed to hold their colleagues and the management of the prison to account in a meaningful way.

Frances Crook, Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said:

“In my experience, when effective, these mechanisms can shine a light in dark corners. However, in my view, they are less effective in leading to meaningful and urgent change than is required to safeguard the fundamental rights of prisoners, and ensure that prisons comply with the United Kingdom’s human rights obligations.

“In fact, I can think of no other field where damning findings made by inspectorates are routinely ignored; where the same problems are reported year after year, are still not addressed, and have no repercussions for the prisons.

“It would be unthinkable in the context of health services for the Care Quality Commission to make serious and recurrent findings that go unrectified. However, countless bodies have raised serious and grave concerns about prisons for years that have not resulted in adequate change.”

Politicians - The Problem and Solution

It's clear to all that something has to be done about our burgeoning prison crisis and I noticed this contribution to the Political Quarterly blog that succinctly covers how we got to where we are. Politicians caused the problem and now they have to fix it:-  

Total prison reform will take political bravery, but it's our only option

It is often said that there are no votes in prisons. This, I think, is largely true. Crime and justice has not been a prominent issue during recent elections, but that does not mean that prisons are not political.

Overtly political decisions are made about how people are expected to behave, the rules that they should abide by and what happens when they don’t. Prison is now regarded as the central column of the criminal justice system and not the ultimate sanction available to courts. But surely prison should be a scarce resource?

Soaring incarceration rates in Britain

More than 25 years ago I started working in penal reform when the dark days of the Strangeways riots were seemingly behind us. There was muted optimism following the publication of the Woolf report heralding a more humane, decent and effective prison system.

But the optimism I felt at the time was short lived. The use of prison as a sanction has been on an upward trajectory since the beginning of the twentieth century, yet since the mid-1990s since it has more than doubled with 83,216 men, women and children in prison in mid-April 2018. We have more people in prison than any other state in Western Europe, with an incarceration rate twice as high as Germany.

In the early 1990s, the Home Secretary Michael Howard’s ‘prison works’ mantra was underpinned by Tony Blair, Labour’s shadow, whose rhetoric of ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ has become famous. This is the point at which prison numbers begin to steeply climb.

The political rhetoric and the concomitant use of prison has been shown to mirror public outcry over high profile crimes, not least the murder of James Bulger. I fear that though they cannot be ignored, such events have been co-opted by the political classes to steer the nation on a punitive path that may actually be counterproductive.

New criminal offences

Successive governments have relied on the criminal justice system to deal with a whole panoply of issues. Criminal justice legislation – and increased criminalisation – has until recently has been a regular feature of the parliamentary timetable.

In the Howard League’s evidence to the Justice Select Committee’s Inquiry into the Prison Population 2022 we suggest that between May 2010 and May 2014, 1076 new criminal offences were created in England and Wales, approximately two-thirds of which carry possible custodial penalties.

There has also been an increase in the creation of Acts of Parliament which are law-and-order related. According to our estimates, a mere 11 law-and-order Acts were passed between 1980 and 1989, with another 11 passed between 1990 and 1999. 31 such Acts were then passed between 2000 and 2009, and so far since 2010 there have been 26.

Longer sentences

However, by far the biggest impact is due to the fact that sentences have become longer. Over the past ten years, average sentence lengths, imposed by sentencers, have increased by 24 per cent across the board. For certain offence types the rise in sentence lengths is particularly notable. For example: over the past ten years, average prison sentences for fraud offences have increased by 54 per cent; average prison sentences for miscellaneous crimes against society have increased by 45 per cent; average prison sentences for criminal damage and arson have increased by 118 per cent; and average prison sentences for robbery increased by 51 per cent.

There is an over-representation of young men in from BAME backgrounds in prison, and a preponderance of poor health including high levels of mental health needs and addiction.

A further contributing factor is the use of recall (when an offender has been released on licence or parole and they breach a condition of their release). Since 1995 the number of people in prison due to recall has increased by approximately 4,000 per cent, from about 150 people on any given day in June 1995 to 6,186 people on 30 September 2017.

This statistic is indicative of the greater number of people who now spend a period on licence since the last government’s transforming rehabilitation reforms whereby short sentence prisoners are now liable to a period on licence. But this is only part of the picture as research has shown that recall occurs not because a person has reoffended, but following an administrative breach for instance being late for an appointment or any behaviour that worries an offender manager.

Should prison incapacitate or rehabilitate?

In these circumstances can we rely on prisons not just to incapacitate but to rehabilitate people? The evidence of the recent past makes this assumption at best questionable. The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Peter Clarke, characterised prisons as being as in crisis and chaotic - indeed in recent months he has condemned the leadership at Liverpool prison and nationally, for its “abject failure” to provide a safe, decent and purposeful regime. While at Nottingham prison he triggered, for the first time, the Urgent Notification Protocol because the prison was “fundamentally unsafe.”

The Prisons Inspectorate is just one voice in an ever-louder chorus from Independent Monitoring Boards, charities and academics about the state of prisons. Prisons are dirty and decrepit. And they are full. The most severely overcrowded are Leeds, Wandsworth and Durham prisons each holding around 50 per cent more prisoners than they should safely hold.

Recent research by the Howard League showers that the number of officers fell by as much as 40 per cent when the prison budgets shrank. This means that there are fewer staff to unlock doors, take prisoners to work, education, training or exercise - so they have nothing to do, little purposeful activity and so it is not surprising that tensions will rise.

And violence does appear endemic. Incidents of assault and self-injury are at their highest levels since current recording practices began in 1978. If there is no purposeful activity, prisoners may well look to other ways to make the time pass more quickly; it comes as no surprise that there is evidence of increasing drug use in prison.

The public is not being well served by prisons. A crude measure of effectiveness is reoffending rates with 44 per cent of adults being reconvicted within one year of release. For those serving sentences of less than 12 months this increases to 59 per cent. The National Audit Office estimates that reoffending by all recent ex-prisoners costs the economy between £9.5 and £13 billion annually.

Reduce the number of people in prisons

We cannot build our way out of this mess. Building more jails only causes problems to grow; it does not solve them. The most sensible way to tackle the problem is to reduce the number of people in prison instead. Why is it that other western European democracies do not lock up as many of their citizens? I do not see their communities characterised by endemic crime. And it is not just in Europe, in the US some 35 states cut their prison rates between 2008 and 2016 and reduced their crime rates.

This does not mean that we condone crime. It means we need to think differently and find solutions elsewhere. In Scotland, for instance, the focus is on investment in community sentences. And some of the best solutions are to be found in welfare and social policies like Surestart schemes and public health approaches to knife violence.

If prison has such poor outcomes, surely it is time to take a different approach? The public – whatever that amorphous word means – want to feel safe, so there needs to be clear political leadership rather than the current Justice Secretary merry-go-round.

We need the kind of political leadership that supports people to be active citizens, and diverts them away from the criminal justice system. Politicians need to be brave and look away from prison as the answer.

Anita Dockley is Research Director at the Howard League for Penal Reform

MoJ Screws Up Again

Regular readers will be very familiar with the contract drafting skills and business acumen of the MoJ. The poor physical condition of the prison estate is a regular feature of HMI reports and now we have an admission that the outsourcing of maintenance has gone horribly wrong, just as was predicted. This from the Times 31 July 2017:-

We got our figures wrong, admit prison bosses in £115m bungle

A bungled contract outsourcing prison maintenance will fail to make the promised £115 million savings as managers admit that they got their figures wrong.

Checks on fire equipment and CCTV as well as tests for legionella have not been carried out and broken showers have been left unrepaired for months. Watchdogs have complained for two years that the £500 million contracts to maintain jails in England and Wales were not working efficiently.

The Ministry of Justice has now said that it entered into five-year contracts with Carillion and Geo Amey without full knowledge of the costs. As a result the £115 million savings promised when the contracts were awarded in 2014 will not be met.

A statement in the annual report of the National Offender Management Service, which runs prisons and probation, said: “A contracting exercise exposed that historically the costs of maintenance and services were not clearly understood by the business and consequently planning assumptions have not held true. The contract is therefore underfunded and the declared efficiency savings reduced.”

It is the latest serious contract failure at the ministry following problems with a £3.7 billion semi-privatisation of the probation service and a £130 million tagging system for offenders which is five years behind schedule and has so far delivered no benefits.

Most of the complaints about the maintenance contracts have been about failings by Carillion which in the worst cases led to concerns about fire risks in prisons. An Independent Monitoring Board report on Pentonville prison in north London released on Friday revealed that enforcement notices were issued against the governor and Carillion after a fire in a cell where the detection system failed.

“Two prisoners went to hospital and four staff members were sick from smoke inhalation. The Crown Inspection Group said this could have been avoided if Carillion had properly maintained the equipment,” the report said.

Camilla Poulton, chairman of the monitoring board, said that “maintenance jobs both big and small have repeatedly failed to be completed in timely fashion owing to poor systems for logging and tracking jobs, and Carillion not having the right kind of contractors working on site.”

At Highpoint prison in Suffolk, an monitoring board report this month said there had been no improvement in Carillion’s performance and some statutory maintenance including “testing for legionella” and “checks on fire equipment and CCTV” were not done.

Carillion said: “Carillion has invested in additional resources and people to meet the demands of this contract. We have achieved increased levels of satisfaction which has been recognised both locally by individual prison management and in Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prison reports.”

A prison service spokesman said: “Since these contracts were awarded, there have been a number of unforeseen operational changes which have directly impacted the maintenance of the estate. We are now in discussions with contractors.”

Analysis

Yet again the Ministry of Justice is in the spotlight for a contract that has not delivered (Richard Ford writes).

A £130 million scheme to develop tags to monitor criminals is running five years late, the partial privatisation of the probation service has run into trouble and many prisons are in a dire state, riddled with violence and drugs. Many of the problems have been festering since 2007, when the Department for Constitutional Affairs was given responsibility for the prison and probation services and renamed the Ministry of Justice. However, as one Whitehall observer commented: “The governors, prison officer and senior prison officials only unite in their opposition to ministers wanting to do something to the prison service.”

The speed with which outsourcing and partial privatisation was conducted was risky, and even more so when it involved a prison service that had limited capacity in contractual management and which has been more concerned with the worsening jails crisis.

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Stop press

The Prison Governors Association have weighed-in on the growing prison crisis, as reported this morning by the BBC:- 
Governors 'devastated' by 'complete decline of prison service'

The president of the Prison Governors Association has attacked the government's management of prisons in England and Wales. Andrea Albutt wrote an open letter after recent violence at prisons in Hertfordshire and Wiltshire. She said the unrest was causing "grave concern" - adding that governors faced "unacceptable stress and anxiety".

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said action had been taken to increase prison officer numbers. But Ms Albutt said her members had seen "nothing tangible" from the MoJ to ease population pressures in prison, and the burden on staff. She said recruitment remained in a "critical" condition, with a net increase of just 75 officers in the year 2016/17. Training was "poor" and "unsuitable people" were being selected, she added.

The BBC's home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw said the Prison Governors Association had "traditionally been a voice of moderation". "The criticisms are unlikely to be brushed aside," he said. Data released last week from the MoJ showed a rise in violence in prisons, with 26,643 assaults in the year to March 2017 - 20% more than the previous year. Of these, a record 7,159 were attacks on staff - equivalent to 20 every day. Ms Albutt went on to describe the government's decision earlier this year, to separate operational control of the prison system from responsibility for policy, as "madness".

But an MoJ spokesman said the Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) - which replaced the National Offender Management Service - would "help to create a distinct, professionalised frontline service". The spokesman added: 

"We know that our prisons have faced a number of long-standing challenges, which is why we have taken immediate action to boost prison officer numbers and have created Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service. We need to create calm and ordered environments to help ensure effective rehabilitation, and we continue to work closely with the unions and all staff to help achieve these vital reforms and make prisons places of safety and reform."

In July, the union representing prison workers called for the resignation of prisons' boss Michael Spurr. The general secretary of the Prison Officers Association, Steve Gillan, said his members had "lost patience" and accused the management of HMPPS of trying to "paper over the cracks". This followed the revelation that Mr Spurr had received a bonus of up to £20,000 in 2016-17 on top of his annual salary of around £150,000.

The bonus was "awarded" in the previous year when the chief inspector of prisons said many jails were "unacceptably violent and dangerous".