Will 2024 be the Year of Prison Reform?

 

 

There’s growing recognition across the political spectrum that radical change is needed in criminal justice. This year’s converts to the cause include John Major who argued in May that “we over-use prison and under value alternative sentences; ” former Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett “struck by the genuine meltdown in the criminal justice system”, and perhaps most surprising of all, leading Brexiteer Lord Frost who recently wrote of a duty to revamp our disgusting prisons.

But how should a new government set about addressing the myriad problems facing the penal system?

Some, like Justice Committee Chair Bob Neill think we need a “proper and honest debate about what prison should be for, who should go there and the costs”. While it might be tempting to try to persuade the public that the approach we’ve been taking for decades is not working, there’s no guarantee what conclusion they’ll reach.   

After all, for Frost, getting a grip on the crime problem means sending more people to prison, not fewer, for short sentences and “minor” crimes. Neill himself supports a proposal from think tank Policy Exchange for mandatory minimum prison terms of at least two years to be imposed on ‘Hyper-Prolific Offenders’  a measure which could overwhelm prisons with people convicted of theft.  There may be little evidence behind Frost’s view that unless people think they might actually end up in prison, there will be no deterrence - but many probably share it .

Instead of a debate, what’s needed is some systemic change to drive and oversee reform. As former Lord Chancellor David Lidington put it, the politics of prison reform “ is horrendously difficult for governments of  any party”, if it means spending more on prisons at expense of other, more popular public services and/or reducing significantly the numbers  we send to prison. 

So, let’s find ways of taking the politics out of it.

One way is to look at New Labour’s post 1997 reforms. They inherited a slow, cumbersome, and inconsistent approach to children in trouble, both in custody and the community.  They set up an expert Task Force to establish priorities, subsequently creating the Youth Justice Board to oversee local multi agency work with offenders and to commission and set standards for secure establishments. 

Outcomes haven’t always been perfect by any means, but it marked a major structural overhaul which remains in place, focusing attention and investment on a neglected area and keeping politicians at arm’s length. The prison and probation service arguably now needs this kind of external supervision and oversight if they are to have any chance of overcoming the current crisis and adopting a genuine rehabilitative agenda.

A new government should immediately commision a Criminal Justice Task Force to establish what changes are most urgently required. In prisons these are likely to involve action on training and recruitment of staff, the development of regimes and improved reintegration. Reducing the 600 people who leave prison each month without a home seems an obvious target.

On the community side, restoring probation’s place as a primarily local agency looks inevitable. While a recent report from the House of Lords Justice committee cautioned against yet more large-scale restructuring in the coming years, it’s call for much stronger links between probation and local treatment and other social services in fact argues for just that.

A new government could also alter the ways funds are made available for criminal justice services in order to create stronger incentives for local agencies to prevent crime and reduce imprisonment.  At a macro level, with two proposed new prisons struggling to get planning permission, some of the funds earmarked for more custodial places could be switched to strengthen capacity in the community – hostels, restorative justice programmes and women’s centres would all benefit from expansion.

At a micro level, if localised multi agency probation services succeed in keeping people out of prison, a proportion of the costs they have saved could be transferred to them. Creating such a virtuous spending cycle would help further enhance the way local communities can safely supervise and reintegrate people outside prison. A new Criminal Justice Board could be set up in law to monitor the system as a whole, working alongside the current inspectorates. 

A further measure would be to revisit the role of the Sentencing Council whose guidelines were in part originally intended to keep a lid on the prison population. It hasn’t achieved that in part because  New Labour backtracked on explicitly linking sentencing levels with available resources, in part because courts have found ways to sentence more and more harshly.  Requiring government to submit its criminal justice proposals for independent scrutiny by the Council could bring down sentence inflation as could a more rigorous obligation on courts to follow the guidelines.  

A College of Policing review published last month found that on average, custodial sanctions increased reoffending compared to noncustodial sanctions. It said that “it is likely that individuals who are in custodial settings are more exposed to risk factors associated with criminal activity and behaviour and have less access to protective factors to protect them from this behaviour”.  

There are strong reasons for looking to drive down the numbers who go to prison and drive up the standards for those who do go. Let’s hope a new government has a plan to make it happen.

A Year in Youth Custody

 

2023 has been yet another dispiriting year for most of the children in custody in Young Offender Institutions (YOI) and the one remaining Secure Training Centre (STC). Prison Inspector Charlie Taylor reported that “many spend most of their sentence locked up alone in their cell with very little human contact. Despite employing hundreds of staff and dozens of managers, most sites are unable to deliver one meaningful conversation with each child a week”. 

In April he found “a complete breakdown of behaviour management” at Cookham Wood YOI to the point where there was widespread weapon making and six months later reported that systems for safeguarding  children at Werrington YOI were in disarray. Over the last 12 months, almost 900 safeguarding referrals have been made about children in custody whose wellbeing has been a cause of concern.  

Parc YOI in South Wales has been an exception to this dismal picture and  Oakhill STC has seen “a tangible change in culture, with children being recognised and treated as children first and foremost”.  But the number of incidents of violence and aggression at Oakhill was still impacting on children’s day-to-day experiences.

Thanks to parliamentary questions by Labour’s energetic new Shadow Minister Janet Daby, we have learned that almost 18% of staff in the youth custody estate have left over the last year– in 2010 the rate was 5%.  This year, the Minister for Prisons, Parole and Probation made only three site visits to youth secure establishments;  the Secretary of State for Justice and the Chief Executive of HMPPS did not make any at all. 

But what about Secure Childrens Homes (SCH) , the third type of closed setting in which young people on remand and under sentence can be held?

As has usually been the case, inspection reports have mostly been good. This year Ofsted found the overall experience of children to be inadequate in one SCH largely because of the inappropriate use of restraint; and requiring improvement in another where all new staff were not always subject to the full range of pre-employment checks such as references. Despite these problems, given the generally more positive performance of SCH’s it's surprising that the number of children placed by the Youth Custody Service (YCS) in secure homes has decreased so much in recent years from 146 on 31 March 2012 to 56 this year. This is despite the YCS commissioning 101 places. Ms Daby should explore why this is the case.

In the spring, after countless delays, the secure estate should be augmented by the 49 place Secure School. The prisons minister told Ms Daby that Secure Schools are a new, innovative approach, and “it is important that we take the time to get it right”.  The government has certainly been doing that as the commitment to develop two Schools was made more than seven years ago.

There’s a good deal of uncertainty about the detail of what Oasis Restore will provide at the Medway site and how much it will cost. HMPPS boss Amy Rees told MPs in March that their funding agreement would be published by Oasis this Autumn, but there is only a draft on their website.

Local authorities may be interested to know how much they will be charged when a child is detained on remand there. This year, (for the first time I think), the cost of a night in a Secure Training Centre (£838) exceeded that in a Secure Childrens Home (£834).

Another issue to probe in the New Year.

Fire Safety In Prisons: Progress or Delay?

 

Finally published is the latest Annual Report of the Crown Premises Fire Safety Inspectorate (CPFSI), which regulates fire safety measures in government buildings including prisons. But it covers not the last financial year but 2021-22, so up to date it isn’t. It’s also not clear how reassuring a picture it provides of fire risk in prisons and the steps being taken to reduce it.

Positively, the report says the data on fires “masks some improvements in fire safety management in the custodial sector which creates a reasonable expectation that fire risk will be driven down if this continues to improve.”

Yet CPFSI also notes that “the rise in injuries is of serious concern therefore even more concerted action is necessary to continue to reduce the numbers of fires.”  

On the face of it, the chart below shows injuries to prisoners and staff have doubled in a year.  

But this is apparently due to the recent inclusion of ‘Precautionary Assessments’ in the data, which cover cases in which no injuries are reported, but a check is made by prison medical staff to confirm this. The breakdown of injuries chart shows that 87% of “injuries” fall into this category. 

CPFSI say that the overwhelming cause of fires in prisons is deliberate ignition. This is driven by a range of factors – "such as status, regime challenge and self-harming".

Beyond the ignition itself, the lack of suitable in cell fire detection has been the biggest cause of injuries, something which the prison service has a major capital programme to address.  

The latest (much timelier) 2022-23 Annual Report by HMPPS noted there were still 26,000 places in need of investment in March this year with a target of meeting fire standards by the end of 2027. An interim solution of placing domestic smoke detectors in or just outside cells has, say CPFSI “proved to be a major managerial challenge for prison staff to prevent tampering and vandalism.”

There are other challenges too – the inadequacy of smoke control systems and fire-fighting equipment; and of course neither the staff nor the prisoners can escape from fire as easily as in other types of buildings. CPFSI have also found that “the smoking ban in prisons has, somewhat surprisingly, negatively altered the nature of fire risk. Whilst opportunistic fire-setting has reduced, we have seen an increase in serious fire injuries linked with substance abuse. The repeating nature of those incidents has raised a fresh challenge for prisons in their duty to safeguard those in custody.”

CPFSI conclude that HMPPS are aware of the problem of the lack of automatic detection at least and “are taking urgent steps to address this problem more quickly.” But are they?

The HMPPS report says that in 2022-23 4,000 cells were upgraded. They’ll need to accelerate this pace of progress considerably if they are to finish by 2027. Troublingly, the HMPPS report also notes how “capacity pressures have restricted our ability to take places out of use for refurbishment and compliance works”.  Moreover, the Custodial Capital Maintenance Programme which pays among other things for fire safety improvement “has undertaken a review of all major maintenance projects across the adult male estate in preparation for potential decisions to halt or defer”.

The Justice Committee should check with HMPPS and with Peter Holland the Chief Inspector of the Crown Premises Fire Safety Inspectorate that fire safety work has not been halted or deferred because of population pressures.