Separate and Silent

 

The prisons inspectorate (HMIP) published its first ever report on Separation Centres for terrorist prisoners today. First established five years ago, there are currently centres at Frankland and Woodhill high security prisons with a mothballed unit at Full Sutton. Their aim is to prevent prisoners with extreme views from radicalising others in the mainstream prison population, planning terrorist acts or disrupting good order in the prison.

Because  the use of the centres “has never fully taken off” , Prison inspectors possibly haven’t thought it worth their while to visit up until now. It's true that there are only 28 places in the three prisons, with only nine prisoners in the functioning units during April’s inspection visit. In fact there have only been 15 held in the centres over the last 5 years, all Muslim men; and only 21 referred for placement between 2017 and the end of last year.  These are much smaller numbers than are held in the longer established Close Supervision Centres (CSC) which hold prisoners posing the highest risks to other prisoners and staff and which HMIP visited in 2015 and 2017. 

But the Separation Centres should really have been inspected sooner, certainly well before the Government decided that they, along with the CSCs, should be more widely used.  Separation Centres also hold some of the most challenging and dangerous prisoners in the system, who are rightly subject to high levels of security and control. These can inevitably raise human rights concerns. Prisoners at Woodhill have in the past made allegations that institutional racism caused the Prison Service to establish such units only for Muslim prisoners.

Not least as the body leading the National Preventive Mechanism (NPM) which focuses attention on practices in detention that could amount to ill-treatment, HMIP should have taken more of an interest. Their inspections are based on international human rights standards, and according to the Ministry of Justice, some prisoners have used the Human Rights Act to frustrate their placement in a Separation Centre. Tellingly however, “the decision to locate a prisoner in one of the centres is part of wider national security and, as such, not within the remit of the Chief Inspector of Prisons to comment on”.

Making it easier for the prison service to use the centres in the future followed recommendations to that effect earlier this year from Jonathan Hall QC, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation (who I was surprised to discover is also a member of the NPM).  Hall’s report on Terrorism in prisons implied the centres were underused, blaming a low referral rate on an undue focus on the damage that separation might cause to the individual’s rehabilitation, with insufficient attention to the wider benefits of removing a radicalising individual from the wing.

As for the centres themselves, Hall was perhaps a little unwise to rely on a 2019  process study, undertaken entirely from a staff perspective, to conclude that regimes were “comprehensive in meeting the needs of the men and ensuring individuals were not disadvantaged by being separated”. In the study, "staff reported working tirelessly to provide a regime comparable to that provided in the main prison.”

Three years on, inspectors paint a more troubling picture. At Frankland “prisoners had collectively decided not to engage with the regime” and Woodhill’s day to day regime was often curtailed by serious staffing shortages. The decision by staff and leaders in both jails to describe the centres as “just another wing” meant that “opportunities were missed to think more creatively about how to work with prisoners”.

It’s encouraging that in today’s report, the inspectorate find outcomes to be good on safety- no violence was recorded in the year to April - and reasonably good on respect. But it’s puzzling that they rate management as reasonably good when “Governors and the separation centre management committee did not have a jointly agreed strategy and action plan, setting out the centres’ specific function that could be understood and acted on by staff”.

Less surprising is that work on “progression” - how prisoners can get back to normal location in the main prison- was not sufficiently good.  Most men refused to take part in formal risk reduction work, which made it difficult to identify any changes in behaviour which would evidence a case for ‘deselection’ from the centre.  

Even with a new policy leading to an increased number in Separation Centres and the likely re-opening of the Full Sutton unit, dispersal will rightly remain the predominant approach, with concentration reserved for the most dangerous few. For as the UN has said, keeping violent extremist prisoners separate from the general prison population can generate as well as reduce risks, elevating their status in their own and other prisoners’ eyes, reinforcing radicalised attitudes and/or enhancing rejection or stigmatization.

Hall is right that public confidence in the criminal justice system is shaken if terrorism occurs in prison or if people enter prison only to come out more dangerous; and the ability of prisons to function is gravely degraded if prison officers fear imminent terrorist attack. Finding the best way to prevent these outcomes must be a priority.

But as the UN has said, there is no one right answer to dealing with terrorist prisoners. What’s needed is more evidence about the effects of the Separation Centres and of other ways of accommodating them in England and Wales. Today’s report makes a welcome if overdue start to collecting it.