Fire Alarm

 

One of the most troubling findings in today’s Independent Monitoring Report (IMB) on HMP Lowdham Grange is the huge increase in cell fires started by prisoners. In the 12 months to February 2024, 162 were recorded, compared to just 21 in the preceding 12 months.

As the local watchdog says

In-cell fires put the prisoner, staff and other prisoners at significant risk of harm, and cause damage to cells, which is expensive to repair. The Board understands that each fire requires the Fire Service to attend as an emergency, and this increase has placed considerable pressure on local resources.

The report notes that on one occasion last summer, “25 prisoners refused to lock up to allow fire officers to enter the wing where a fire had been set”. This was symptomatic of a loss of control at the Category B Nottinghamshire prison where in September prisoners returned to their cells only after the ‘Riot Act’ was read to them on two successive nights.

Rising violence, self- harm and drug use – by the end of the year more than half of mandatory drug tests were positive- have reflected in part changes in the management of the prison. Sodexo took over the running of the prison from Serco in February 2023 but were unable to do so safely. The public prison service (HMPPS) stepped in in December and has been running it since.

The Prison Inspectorate  found early evidence in January that “actions taken since step-in had begun to improve safety and reduce protesting behaviour”. When HMPPS took over, they found the largest number of weapons ever recorded in one lock down search.

As for fires, although there were none recorded in December 2023, today’s report notes that in January 2024 – the month after the step in- there were 21.

Data released in May shows that Lowdham Grange had the most fires of all the prisons in England and Wales in the last calendar year.  Across the prison estate, 2,287 fires were recorded in 2023, 62% more than in 2022.

Then Prison Minister Ed Argar wrote that  

the overwhelming majority of the cell fires in prisons are classified as small and are quickly dealt with by staff. All prisons have an Arson Reduction Strategy which includes measures for managing prisoners who are known to present a risk of fire setting: these measures include strategic cell location, and control of access to ignition sources and combustible materials.

Current pressures on prison capacity are likely to impact the opportunities of strategic cell location. As for combustible materials , the IMB in another prison, Hindley, whose annual report was published this week, expressed concern that:

whilst the misting/sprinkler system deployed in the cell has been successful to date, it is only effective if the volume of combustible items within the cell are controlled. The Board have been aware of examples this year where prohibited items such as extra mattresses, electrical items (i.e. microwave and a heater) have been found in cells. In addition, some cells have a build-up of litter and other combustible materials deposited in the window grills. Much of this is plastic which if ignited will potentially produce dangerous gases with associated risk outcomes.

Argar promised in May that during this financial year the prison service will introduce an ignition-free Safer Vape Pen to replace the existing product, which is the source of approximately 80 per cent of fires set. While his successor James Timpson has a lot on his plate, he should ensure that this is done as a priority. Both the Inspectorate of Prisons and the IMB’s should also routinely scrutinise the data on fires in the prisons they monitor along with the measures in place to reduce and respond to them.

Intermediate Treatment

 

Not surprisingly, we’re seeing a plethora of proposals for new Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood about how to solve the prison crisis. If I was in her job, I’d be particularly attracted to the Howard League’s idea of returning responsibility for prisons and probation to the Home Office. But I think that’s unlikely and undesirable. Peter Hennessey rightly described the Home Office as the graveyard of liberal thinking since the days of Lord Sidmouth.

Most of the suggestions being floated by think tanks, charities and experts focus on reducing demand for prison places in the short term through early release. Implicit in many proposals is the notion that when the 20,000 new prison places are up and running in a few years’ time, some sort of equilibrium will be restored between supply and demand.

I’ve argued that a new way of developing policy about  who should go to prison and for how long, distanced from party political competition, might reverse the sharp rises in the custodial sentencing rate and length of prison terms we’ve seen in the last 14 years.

In addition we need to diversify the range of options that can be used as alternatives to prison.

Some of these are institutional alternatives. Many people in prison should be in hospital but thresholds for transfer and waiting times are both too high. The Justice Select Committee asked then Prisons minister Ed Argar about the number of available secure hospital beds for prisoners but doesn’t seem to have received a reply. There are simply not enough. 

Other prisoners could potentially be transferred to residential treatment facilities which are being expanded as part of the 10 year Drug Strategy.   

Other options include hostels and other supervised accommodation. From 2019 to 2023 the Approved Premise Expansion Programme delivered 169 additional beds, including opening 4 new Independent Approved Premises (83 beds) and 51 additional beds in dedicated premises for women.  But there’s a case for a much more ambitious increase in half way houses. It could be paid for by paring back the prison building plans to say 15,000.

Back in 2001, the sentencing review carried out by senior Civil Servant John Halliday recommended that the Home Office- they were responsible back then- should

“establish a review of the existing “intermediate estate” for accommodating and managing offenders in the community, with the aim of developing a strategic plan for its future use, staffing, management and development. The review should embrace all types of accommodation, whether owned by the prison or probation services, or the independent and voluntary sectors, and whether used for prisoners on temporary release; prisoners on conditional release; offenders serving community sentences; or ex-offenders receiving support voluntarily”.

I am not sure such a review was ever done – but it’s certainly needed now.

Three years after Halliday’s review, then Home Secretary David Blunkett announced that “satellite tracking technology could provide the basis for a 'prison without bars', potentially cutting prison overcrowding, and expensive accommodation”.  

Progress with electronic monitoring has been chequered during the intervening years. But the review should look at whether the role its currently playing is optimal or whether it can serve to manage security risks for people placed in non-secure accommodation- what Halliday called “containment in the community”.

 As well as the where of alternatives to prison, there’s a need to look at the how.

Back in 1979, I started work as a volunteer in IT- not computers (there weren’t many back then) -but Intermediate Treatment. With mixed results, I spent most of the next ten years trying to keep young people out of residential care homes, detention centres, Borstals and their institutional successors.

A generous description of the approach might be “eclectic”- camping trips, sports and drama sessions as much as counselling and groupwork. One troubled young man was placed on a ship in the Caribbean for several months, and an IT officer in a neighbouring area allegedly entered a crew into the Henley Regatta.

Quirky some of it might have been, but with relatively small caseloads, we were able to fashion a wide-ranging  package of therapeutic and constructive activities for each individual which would help give them the best chance of staying at home, at school or work and out of trouble. 

Of course there are resonances with the best of the approach in youth justice and even parts of probation today.  Theres a growing recognition that relationship based practice is a key to successful supervision and desistance from crime.

Practitioners need to have the opportunity and training to put that into practice so that more offenders can serve their sentences in the community and those that leave prison don’t go back. By enabling that to happen alongside a wider range of treatment and accommodation options, Ms Mahmood may be able not only to find a solution to the immediate crisis but chart a more positive long-term course.   She will need to work with her colleagues responsible for health and local government to make it happen.  Let's hope she does.  

Taking the Politics Out of Punishment

 

If the new government’s most urgent task on prisons is to navigate an immediate way through the current population crisis, they should also be considering ways to avoid a repetition in the future.

When last in power, Labour ministers reviewed how to improve the balance between the supply of prison places and demand for them.  Despite the 2007 recommendation for an effective, integrated and transparent planning mechanism that reconciles penal capacity with criminal justice policy, the institution which emerged after three years of wrangling – the Sentencing Council - has not been willing or able to fulfil that role.

Since then, Parliament and the courts have been busy willing the ends of more and longer prison sentences but not the means of enforcing them. Hence the recent flurry of measures to release prisoners early which Labour accepts it will have to keep in place in the short term if they form an administration. 

In the long term they should consider two options. First, the modest idea recommended by Parliament’s Justice Committee that policy proposals on sentencing should be subject to independent evaluation, so that the resourcing implications are recognised before they are enacted.  

When it’s introduced, most but not all criminal legislation is already accompanied by an impact assessment which estimates any need for additional prison or probation resources to implement it. The future prison population is projected annually.  So legislators know what’s coming. But knowledge of impending pressures in prisons have not stopped governments adding to them, rendering them unmanageable over the last year.

So something more is needed.  

Ten years ago, the British Academy argued that penal policy needs to be insulated from the short-term political and media pressures which so often prioritise populist initiatives over a principled and sustainable approach.  A Presumption against Imprisonment  recommended the creation of a Penal Policy Committee (PPC), accountable to Parliament, comprising wide representation and expertise. Distanced from party political competition, the PPC would develop and formulate the approach to who should go to prison and for how long.

Such an approach would take full account of the financial, social and ethical costs of prison as well as its practical availability.  The British Academy suggested that the Sentencing Council, working to a revised remit, would then be able to implement the policies on sentencing outlined by the PPC.

The Sentencing Council currently takes the view that “absent an explicit statutory remit” were it to seek, artificially and unilaterally, to raise or lower sentence levels without good cause it would rapidly lose the confidence of sentencers, the public and MPs.   Arguably within its current remit, the lack of prison places provides a good enough cause to lower sentence levels. But a new mandate would certainly be helpful    

Is this an idea whose time has come?

Within a week of winning the 1997 election, new Chancellor Gordon Brown announced the transfer of the task of setting interest rates to an independent body of experts in the Bank of England. Few now question the role of the Monetary Policy Committee. If such a body can determine fiscal policy, why not something similar in criminal justice? It should certainly be explored in Labour’s promised sentencing review.