New Prisons Update

 

The government’s stock response to the recent flurry of interest in the state of prisons is that they are in the midst of building 20,000 modern new places which will ease population pressures and raise standards.

Parliament’s Justice Committee will be providing welcome scrutiny to their plans in a new inquiry, which will be asking if the commitment to deliver the new places by the mid-2020s is achievable and sufficient to manage projected demand.

There is certainly progress with HMPs Five Wells and Fosse way up and running and HMP Millsike being built. But the Guardian reports today that the 20,000 new places will not be available until 2030.

Decisions about three proposed new builds are still in the balance.  Earlier this month, Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Michael Gove was due to decide on appeals by the Ministry of Justice against planning refusals in Leicestershire and Buckinghamshire. Inspectors have reportedly given Gove the evidence from their hearings about the proposed new 1,715 place category B prison at Gartree and the 1,468 place category C prison near Grendon. But more time is needed to reach a decision in each case. They are now promised by 8 November.

As for the 1,715 place Category C prison on land next to Garth and Wymott prisons in Lancashire, an inquiry was due to resume on 19 September to consider whether hazards and risks within the local road network had been acceptably addressed. But the planning inspector who oversaw the earlier stages of the inquiry became unavailable for personal reasons, so the timescale has slipped.   

The back up possibility of using the old RAF site at Wethersfield in Essex looks unlikely. The Home Office have got in there first, with 94 asylum seekers held there at the end of August with plans for 1,700.   Braintree District Council in Essex are due to challenge the plans in the High Court on 31 October.

The Justice Committee will be looking not only at proposed new builds but planned expansion in existing prisons, the introduction of Rapid Deployment Cells and the use of Police cells under Operation Safeguard.  

Importantly too they will look at the resources required to manage prisons safely and effectively and the impact of an ageing infrastructure particularly in Victorian prisons.  It’s an important and overdue piece of work.

 

Prisons Post Wandsworth

 

 

When late lamented Lord Ramsbotham was appointed Chief Inspector of Prisons in 1995 he was told “that a good day for the Prison Service was one on which no one escaped, and no one was locked out and held in a police cell for which it had to pay.” 

He was also told that improvements were only made by implementing recommendations made by outsiders following disasters. Could some long term good come from Wednesday’s troubling events in south west London? Prisons are certainly getting some overdue political, public and media attention, for good or ill. 

In the short term we are likely to see heads roll at Wandsworth and possibly in headquarters. Expect too detainees charged with terrorist offences to be placed in (and moved to) top security jails other than in exceptional circumstances. In the medium term, there may be some broader changes to the categorisation framework which has been in place for more than fifty years.

For the longer term, much depends on who Justice Secretary Alex Chalk appoints to lead the independent inquiry into what happened and their terms of reference. We could get something like Lord Woolf’s report after the 1990 Strangeways riot. It roamed widely across the criminal justice terrain and urged a balance between security, control, and fairness in prisons.

Or we could get the narrower focus of the inquiries which followed the escapes of six prisoners from the high-security Whitemoor prison in September 1994 and of three prisoners from Parkhurst four months later.

Highly critical of the ‘yawning gap between the prison service’s ideals and actual practice’, these noted the mixed ideologies within the Prison Service, intent on increasing physical security to prevent escapes but wishing to provide the greater element of care and positive relationships which Woolf wanted to see.

In particular, Sir John Learmont’s comprehensive review of security recommended nationally agreed building standards, together with the installation of up-to-date electronic devices such as CCTV, electronic movement detectors and electronic locks. These were widely implemented across the estate and have arguably contributed to the prison service’s generally good record on escapes since then. But they swallowed high levels of resources during a period of rising imprisonment and put the brakes on the Woolf agenda.

Ramsbotham’s comments were made in a debate in which he proposed a Royal Commission on the state of prisons.  This form of public inquiry which “take minutes and waste years” is out of fashion and would be an indulgence.

But a time limited and wide ranging exercise like Woolf’s is long overdue. All but one of his 12 key recommendations were accepted by the government in 1991.  The one that was not accepted was that no prison should hold more prisoners than its uncrowded capacity, with parliament to be informed if it did. Woolf later came to see overcrowding as a cancer of the system which limited implementation of his comprehensive agenda for reform.  

At the end of last month, the uncrowded capacity was 950 at Wandsworth. It actually held 1,617 men. That is fundamentally why it’s holding one fewer than it should today.