Hindsight: Is the new Prisons Minister making a Quick Fix or Long term Plan for Youth Custody?

 

Just before Christmas, in a letter from Prisons Minister Damian Hinds to the Justice Committee, the government slipped out their decision that Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre (STC) will not be re-opening, for young people at any rate. The Ministry of Justice has spent the best part of a year deciding what to do with the empty centre since its contract with private provider MTC to run the child jail was terminated in December 2021.

Rainsbrook was the second STC to open, in July 1999. Five years later, 15 year old Gareth Myatt died there in shocking circumstances while being physically restrained by staff. Initial contractor G4S continued to manage the centre and for some time it probably performed the best among the four STCs. But in 2015  inspectors reported on serious incidents of gross misconduct by staff, including managers, with young people subject to degrading treatment, racist comments, and care by personnel under the influence of illegal drugs.

A year later, US company MTC won the contract to run Rainsbrook , but Inspectors raised urgent and significant concerns about treatment and conditions in 2020 and 2021. After being told it was unsafe for residents and staff, then Justice Secretary Robert Buckland removed the 33 children held there in June 2021. A third of these were “decanted” to Young Offender Institutions (YOI), including a small number of girls who were placed at Wetherby YOI. Girls under 18 had not previously been placed in YOIs for many years.

Earlier this year, the National Audit Office (NAO) reported that the MoJ was considering re-opening Rainsbrook STC at reduced capacity and with  increased staff-to-child ratios, possibly under prison service management. This would help meet the expected increase in demand for youth custody places. But now it seems, the capacity is no longer thought to be needed.

Despite projected increases the numbers of children in custody have remained under 500 during the course of this year.  Indeed, occupancy levels remain low enough for Hinds to tell MPs that the Youth Custody Service will keep more young people in the youth estate beyond the age of 18, instead looking  “to transition young people up to their 19th birthday where appropriate”. Girls will once again be held in an STC – Oakhill, the last one operating- although some may stay at Wetherby YOI.

Strangely, annual prison population projections, normally published in November, don’t seem to have been produced this year.  So there’s no update on whether the numbers of juveniles in custody are still likely to rise to 700 by 2025. Given the volatility of the youth custody estate, any increases could put at risk modest improvements in safety and regimes seen recently.  

In the meantime, what will happen to the Rainsbrook site? Hinds wrote that wider work is taking place to determine how best the site can be utilised in the future, and, somewhat delphically, that the decision “will allow us to focus on other areas of our work”. The NAO report suggested that the MoJ had ruled out turning it into a second Secure School because of the costs and delays of doing the necessary building conversion.

Turning Medway into a suitable site for the first Secure School has taken much longer than planned- and Hinds’s letter reveals yet further delays. The Medway school is apparently on track to open in Spring 2024 - later than the November 2023 to February 2024 window officials promised MPs on the Public Accounts Committee in May . It seems odd that no funding agreement has yet been signed with the provider- Oasis Restore- that was selected back in July 2019. No doubt the MoJ will explain when they provide the Committee with an update on progress against the timetable in January 2023.

Perhaps Rainsbrook will be used to provide extra places for the men’s estate which is under so much pressure that police cells have been made available to the Prison Service. It’s close to two prisons and while its design as an STC is not ideal for adults, Medway STC was briefly used for adults during lockdown, (before work got underway to make it more suitable for children).

The Justice Committee will surely want to question Mr Hinds early in the New Year about his planning for custodial capacity both in the childrens’ and adults’ estates.   

Cell Therapy: Could Shortage of Space Inject a Dose of Reality Into Prison Policy?

Wednesday’s announcement by Prisons Minister Damian Hinds that he had requested the use of up to 400 police cells came as something of a surprise. It’s true that last week, his boss Dominic Raab told the Justice Committee that “there is a very significant capacity issue in our prisons.” But nobody followed it up with him.

Maybe that’s because five weeks ago Hinds’ predecessor, Rob Butler had told the Justice Committee

  “ the important thing is for people to know that there is the capacity, if someone is remanded in custody, that there will be a place for them and it will be the right place”.  

Quite why Butler gave such a hostage to fortune isn’t clear – he’s admitted that the sudden growth in the adult male custodial population started during his brief tenure in the Ministry of Justice which ended just two days after his unwise words of reassurance in Parliament.

Hinds tried to convince MPs that this week's statement did not reflect a failure to plan ahead but a response to “a highly unusual acute short-term surge.” He was unable to explain the reasons for the timing of this, other than implausibly blaming the aftermath of the barristers’ strike. 

A good part of the problem lies with supply rather than demand. Hinds said that the additional capacity was needed “to ensure the smooth running of the prison estate”. Given existing pressures in many local jails, a sharply rising population could make prisons unmanageable without some form of safety valve.

Take HMP Bullingdon in Oxfordshire, where 45% of prisoners are on remand. The Independent Monitoring Board who publish their annual report today say the prison continues to be chronically overcrowded, with 521 cells designed for single occupancy, mostly occupied by two prisoners. “Overcrowding also puts great pressure on communal spaces and facilities. It is incompatible with the fair and decent treatment of prisoners”.

The IMB also worry that “chronic staff shortages will begin to have a greater impact on the safety and stability of the prison”. Levels of violence, they say are still far too high and despite the introduction of an airport style scanner, the quantity of drugs coming into the prison remains high. 

So good on Prison Service chiefs for confronting ministers with uncomfortable and no doubt unwelcome truths about the quality as well as quantity of prison capacity and its ability to absorb more and more people at present. Their plans to increase that capacity through more use of “identified contingency spaces” and postponing all non-essential maintenance work are not quite so welcome.

If the crisis continues, Ministers will have to consider more radical measures. They could encourage courts to make greater use of recently introduced GPS tagging to place more defendants on conditional bail rather than in custody. Or introduce an End of Custody Licence along the lines of the scheme that ran from 2007-2010, allowing eligible prisoners serving sentences to be freed up to 18 days before their release date.

More fundamentally still, the Sentencing Council could be asked to look at their guidelines to align the demand for prison places with supply. After all that was its original though long since diluted purpose. 

Moderating sentence lengths wouldn't go down well with former School Standards Minister Jonathan Gullis who is keen to see "scumbags locked up for a longer period of time". Raab too told the Justice Committee last week that he “could fill the prisons 50% higher than they are today".

But Raab went on "the reality is that we cannot keep exponentially increasing the prison population”. Hinds said that for types of crime other than the worst “it is important that we utilise alternatives to custodial sentences”.

Is it possible for some good to come from the current crisis?