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.  

Improving Fire Safety in Prisons: The Need for Better Scrutiny

 

There’s rightly mounting anger and concern about declining safety in prisons with latest statistics showing increases in self-inflicted deaths, self-harm and serious assaults.  Too often neglected is a further dimension of safety - that which relates to fires.

Data released separately about casualties resulting from fires shows that there was one “fatality” and 105 “non-fatal casualties” in custodial establishments in England in the last financial year.  The fatality was the sixth in a prison fire since 2011-12.

The numbers of non-fatal casualties have shown a welcome fall since 2015-16 but there is no reason  for complacency. As we have known since the summer, Fire and Rescue Services attended 1,012 incidents in English prisons last year up 20% on 2021/22. 21 incidents were also recorded in what are referred to as Young Offender Units, up from 11 the year before.  Many more fires are started without the need for the Fire Service to attend. 

The reduction in casualties may reflect greater attention being given to addressing fire risks by the prison service.  The 2021 Prison Strategy White paper promised to “Build on our work to reduce the harm caused by prisoners starting fires, with the aim of equipping all prison cells with automatic fire alarm systems”. A revised Prison Service Instruction on Fire Safety was introduced in March 2022.

Last year however, the Prison service admitted that 35,000 prison places did not meet fire safety standards. They were aiming to bring 7,000 of these up to standard by March 2023. But according to their 2021 correspondence with the Coroner following the last fire related death in prison (in 2019) the overall improvement programme was not forecast to be finished until 2026-2028. There has been no update on progress that I have seen.

There is clearly a lot of work going on. Lord Chancellor Alex Chalk told MPs in July this year that the reason for about 1,500 cells being out of action was “principally about dealing with our statutory fire obligations.”  It is important that the commitment to meet those obligations is not watered down during a period of intense demand for prison places.  

The body that scrutinises what the Prison service is doing is the Crown Premises Fire Safety Inspectorate (CPFSI). It is a Home Office body responsible for ensuring compliance with the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 in 16,000 government buildings. According to its last Annual Report it has just 12 staff.  It’s little wonder that they have yet to produce an Annual Report for 2021-22 let alone 2022-23.

The CPFSI has a Memorandum of Understanding with HM Inspectorate of Prisons which reads as if its main purpose is to ensure the organisations keep out of each other’s way. 

But maybe now is the time for Charlie Taylor to take over responsibility for assessing fire safety as part of his remit as Chief Inspector of Prisons; and for the MoJ to publish data on fire safety to broaden the way the performance of prisons can be assessed. It's too important to leave out of the picture. 

Postponements or Cancellations?

 

Along with others, I was due to give evidence to the Justice Committee on Tuesday about prison estate capacity. The hearing was called off because the Committee could not muster a quorum of three MPs to take part. It’s not clear if it’s postponed or cancelled.

Most of the committee members probably preferred to enjoy the yah- boo politics that followed the King’s Speech in the main chamber. Conservatives may have thought that a day about pre-election messaging wasn’t the right time for a serious look at what amounts to something of a public policy fiasco. Labour MPs may not have known what line to take. The hearing would have asked whether the government could have done more to prevent the current overcrowding crisis, its consequences for safety, and for mental health and what recently announced measures will do to fix the problem.  

With hindsight, it was daft to schedule the meeting for the first afternoon of the new Parliament, not least because of the raft of relevant measures announced that very morning. But putting off the hearing symbolises how legislators’ seemingly boundless enthusiasm for a greater use of imprisonment often sits alongside a studied indifference to whether and how it is carried out.

It wasn’t the only postponement this week. The decision on whether to grant planning permission for new builds next to existing prisons in Leicestershire and Buckinghamshire were due to be announced by DLUHC on Wednesday.  We’ll seemingly have to wait another month to find out how helpful Michael Gove will be to his old department. It’s a potential further delay or worse to the achievement of the 20,000 new places hitherto deemed necessary to accommodate the estimated growth in the prison population.

Perhaps it’s the recognition on the part of Justice Ministers that the 20,000 target is unachievable which has led them to temper their tough policy with a more twin track approach. The result could well be a revision downward of that projected growth in the number of prisoners.

Yes, perpetrators of the very worst offences will serve longer periods in prison but the numbers are thankfully small. Plans for those convicted of rape to serve every day of their sentence behind bars will affect more. It brings in  for this offence at least the so called “honesty in sentencing” approach first proposed by Michael Howard almost 30 years ago in the Prison Works era.

But for many other categories of offences, extending the range of prisoners who can spend up to the last six months of their sentence at home with an electronic tag and encouraging the suspension of short jail terms will bring down demand for places, maybe substantially. We’ll have to wait for the impact assessments when the Sentencing Bill is published to see what the net outcomes might be.

In the longer term much will depend on whether it's the more punitive response to the most serious offenders which will pull sentencing levels up more widely or if the more lenient approach to less serious ones will push the "going rate" down.   

Despite the short term reduction in demand for prison places, it is likely that continuing concerns about running out of space led to the cancellation of plans floated recently for automatic prison sentences for repeat shoplifters and those convicted of various other crimes. These would almost certainly have wiped out the gains in prison space from tagging and suspension and made the government's penal policy look impossibly incoherent. 

But it's distinctly possible that these measures have merely been postponed until next year’s Conservative election manifesto.

   

 

 

Humane Corrections: What More Can We Do?

 

Lots to learn at this week’s annual conference of the International Corrections and Prisons Association in Belgium- including for me that Anvers and Antwerp are one and the same place. 900 people from 70 countries exchanged knowledge, views and some at least colds in a lively, varied and well organised event.

I’m not sure that Humane Corrections: What more can we do? was the ideal theme for the US exhibitor looking to sell delegates electrical weapons (albeit low voltage) to prevent escapes and assaults. But the conference programme as a whole included many positive and thought provoking experiences from across the globe on how to use prisons less, organise them more compassionately and prevent people going back after release. 

Some of the most impressive involved efforts to overcome huge challenges of congestion and understaffing to improve healthcare and human rights compliance in Africa;  and to keep the system functioning in Ukraine where 11 prisons have been wholly or partly destroyed since the Russian invasion. There were some encouraging signs of innovation in richer and more stable countries too, despite the often populist and punitive political climates, (referred to by Belgium’s brand new Justice Minister in his opening remarks).

So what were my takeaways from the event?

On using prison as a last resort, we were reminded that the expansion of probation and similar services by no means guarantees a reduction in the use of prison; and that community corrections impose burdens on people subject to them which can often be underestimated. Innovative ways of getting legal aid to people in prison who might be eligible for release may be a more direct way to reduce overcrowding in low income countries.

As for prisons themselves, small scale detention houses for young people (in Germany) and adults in Belgium seek to provide a normal living experience for residents, achieving security through staff relationships, resolving conflicts by discussion and promoting community reintegration. Such a model is costly up front but not long term if it prevents recidivism. But do the residents need to be locked up at all? There’s much in common with a halfway house approach although applied at the start rather than the end of a sentence. Promoted by Rescaled, the movement  is well worth watching, not least for its focus on ecology and sustainability.

A similar philosophy lies behind the new Brussels prison at Haren which is trying to create a fairly open regime for a mainstream, non-selected and more difficult population. Small living units of 30 people, a softer approach through personal officers and giving prisoners the regime they can handle as soon as possible mark it out from the three prisons it has replaced.

In neighbouring Netherlands, efforts are underway to humanise even deeper forms of custody by reforming solitary confinement  on the back of  an independent study – an excellent example of open and transparent engagement with research. Impressive too are Dutch efforts to improve the quality of food for prisoners and extending opportunities for them to be involved in preparing it.

There was not such good news about how people come out of prison.  Questions were raised about the proper role of individual risk assessment in determining whether someone should be released early, notwithstanding its crucial role in deciding how best they should be managed once back in the community. Sadly, lack of suitable and stable accommodation all too often undermines successful reintegration efforts, not least in the UK. We can look forward to inspiration on this at next year’s event in Singapore, a global pioneer in second chance programmes involving a wide range of government, civil society and private sector partners.

Such organisations were reasonably well represented in Antwerp, with an impressive keynote from Penal Reform International setting the scene for the deliberations and important contributions from the ICRC, and from a US advocate promoting voting rights for prisoners. It was heartening to see UK NGO One Small Thing win the ICPA President’s award.

But to answer the Conference’s question, more can be done to give a voice to people who have themselves been in prison. Not just of course at an event like this where there was some but perhaps not enough. But in the development of policies, practices and oversight relating to people in conflict with the law.

 

Prison Capacity: Two Oddities

 

Lots of historical precedents for Alex Chalk’s policy manoeuvrings today. William Whitelaw introducing short sharp shock detention centres to offset more generous parole arrangements came to my mind.  And two oddities in Chalk's speech have stuck there.

First his totally false claim that the reason the prison population is nearly double the level it was three decades ago “is not principally because of the growth in the sentenced population”.

The Ministry of Justice wrote three years ago that “virtually all of the prison population increase since 1993 has been due to the increased number of prisoners sentenced to immediate custody.”

I’m genuinely puzzled why Chalk either doesn’t know this or if he does why he would wish to mislead Parliament about it. And why civil servants would allow him to say something which is factually untrue.

Second his wheeze on early release. He told MPs he’s decided to use the power in section 248 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to allow the Prison Service to move some less serious offenders out of prison on to licence up to 18 days before their automatic release date. This section allows the Secretary of State to release a fixed-term prisoner on licence if he is satisfied that exceptional circumstances exist which justify the prisoner’s release on compassionate grounds. Explanatory notes say that the kind of exceptional circumstances are where the prisoner is suffering from a terminal illness.

I wonder if it’s even lawful to use the power in the way he now wants to.

Prison Places : Emergency Measures and Long Term Sustainability

 

I’m currently involved in work on a strategy to prevent and combat prison overcrowding. Its themes are familiar enough - keeping people out of prison through more diversion, less pre-trial detention, and better community based sanctions; encouraging shorter and more consistent sentences; and developing opportunities for safe and, where necessary supervised, early release.  

Yes, there’s a strand on developing the prison estate, but much more focus is on reducing demand for prison places than increasing their supply – and on the need for better planning and coordination across the criminal justice system.  

Needless to say the work is not in the UK but in Eastern Europe. But as England and Wales runs out of prison space, the strategy could be useful closer to home once it’s finalised next month.

None of the short- term options for the government here to deal with the crisis they face are palatable. The one announced so far- delaying sentencing people who have been on bail -must look the least bad and should produce an immediate impact on receptions in prison. If that happens, in some cases it might be possible for the Probation service to use the time to fashion a community based sentence that avoids the need for prison altogether.

What else could be done? About a thousand people a month enter prison serving sentences of six months or less. Suspending more short sentences could reduce demand in local prisons. But many short term prisoners have long histories of offending and have, for whatever reason, not responded well to community supervision.

One reason may be the parlous state of probation which, like the prison service to which it is nowadays organisationally yoked, is lacking staff, and performing poorly.  Electronic tagging too has failed to fulfil its potential and has faced some logistical problems.  Despite this, making yet more prisoners eligible for Home Detention Curfew at the end of their sentence could be on the cards.  

Freeing prisoners a few weeks early would certainly create headroom and Lord Chancellor Alex Chalk may have to announce it when he faces MPs on Monday. But he will be reluctant to reintroduce anything too much like Labour’s End of Custody Licence which from 2007-10 gave prisoners serving less than four years a further 18 days off the length of their sentence. The Conservatives said at the time the scheme  “risks public safety, sends the wrong message to criminals and further undermines confidence in sentencing”. But it freed up 1,200 much needed places.

Other countries use a range of measures to reduce prison pressures, most of which one can’t see working here. The Coronation in May would have been the time for an amnesty of some kind but I dare say it didn’t cross anyone’s mind. In 2012 Brazil gave prisoners the chance to cut their sentence by 48 days if they read 12 works of literature. But administering any schemes which directly reward individual prisoners with time off for work, education or rehabilitation can give rise to unfairness and take up staff time.

Norway used to allow certain prisoners to wait at home before starting to serve their sentence- the so called queuing system. Research found it allowed prisoners to prepare for their imprisonment, but they suffered uncertainty and powerlessness. Political pressure to end the queue led to the deal to rent space abroad which Chalk quoted in last week’s surprise announcement of a similar plan here.   

Whatever steps are taken to get through the immediate crisis, a more sustainable approach is surely needed for the future.

Labour’s answer in 2007 was the Sentencing Council which it hoped “would provide a more effective, integrated and transparent planning mechanism that reconciles prison capacity with criminal justice policy.” That role was effectively removed from its mandate, and it has done little to slow the seemingly inexorable process of sentence inflation. It needs to play a much more leading role in doing so.

Greater sustainability could also be achieved through Justice Reinvestment - a more devolved approach to the organisation and funding of prison and probation which incentivises local agencies and organisations to prevent crime and reduce demand for imprisonment.   The House of Commons Justice Select Committee produced an excellent report on it 2009 which argued that “the prison population could be safely capped at current levels and then reduced over a specified period to a safe and manageable level likely to be about two thirds of the current population.”

Whoever forms the next government should dust it off.

 

 

  

Unfree Movement of People

 

I’m not surprised by much in penal policy but today’s plan to rent prison space abroad is astonishing in many ways.

Politically, the headline “Foreign prison rental to ensure public protection”, appears to make safety contingent on the availability of cells overseas- an odd position for a tough on crime party which its opponents are bound to seize on.  

After all, the commitment is to “enter exploratory discussions with potential partner countries in Europe” about as far as you can get from a done deal. Necessary laws will be passed as soon as parliamentary time allows, usually code for some time /never.

Administratively, negotiating the arrangements will be fiendishly difficult. How will prisoners be chosen, whose laws will apply to their imprisonment, what systems of complaints and inspection will be in place?

If the scheme ever did get off the ground how would host state prisons ensure rehabilitation, prevent linguistic and cultural isolation, and enable contact to be maintained with families? And then there’s the costs.

It smacks of desperation born of planning delays for three proposed new prisons and an unwillingness to contemplate the kind of emergency early release programme which the last Labour government were forced to introduce in 2007. It marks a spectacular failure on the part of the Justice Ministry and arguably of the Sentencing Council whose original purpose was to help align supply and demand for prison places.

A few days after the Chief Inspector called for the closure of one in ten prisons in England and Wales, there will be wry smiles as Europeans read that Brits would be moved to their country’s jails only if they meet British standards. They’ll be asking if they have any poor enough to pass the test.

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.   

 

Fires in Prisons: Latest Data

 

Last month Justice Secretary Alex Chalk told MPs that “One of the last things that a Prisons Minister or Lord Chancellor worth their salt thinks about as they go to bed is fire. It is important that we do what we can on that to bear down on it, quite apart from the fact that there is a statutory requirement on us”.

Latest figures show that Fire and Rescue Services attended 1,012 incidents in English prisons in the last financial year up 20% on 2021/22. 21 incidents were also recorded in what are referred to as Young Offender Units, up from 11 the year before.

The Home Office data is detailed but not as informative as it could be about the seriousness of the incidents. For example, there were 92 fatalities/casualties recorded in the prison data but the category is wide covering “those with injuries requiring hospital attention, those requiring first aid at the scene and those given advice to have precautionary checks (whether they then take that advice or not)”.

In 250 cases there was no fire damage, and in 414 damage was limited to the item first ignited. In 312 incidents fire spread was limited to the room of origin. Yet, in more than 400 incidents more than four vehicles attended suggesting a high level of concern on the part of firefighters.

It goes without saying that in responding to reports of fire it is better to be safe than sorry. The Prison service is undertaking a wide range of much needed work to improve fire safety. The Home Office data reports that in three quarters of prison incidents an alarm was present and raised the alarm. But in the remaining cases an alarm was absent, or present and did not raise the alarm or operate. While expert work is needed to fully understand what this means, we do know that in April  the Crown Premises Fire Safety Inspectorate  reported that  three prisons- two private and one public- had enforcement notices in force, meaning necessary safety improvements of some sort were outstanding.

Fires have claimed many lives in detention facilities around the world and its encouraging to see Chalk take the problem seriously. It is more troubling to read that his cabinet colleague the deputy Prime Minister considers concerns about fire risks in asylum seeker accommodation to be politically motivated.

Prison Plans

 

How is the government doing on its pledge to create 20,000 new prison places by the mid 2020’s? With prison numbers projected to rise from the current 85,000 to between 93,000 and 106,000 by 2027, what’s been touted as the largest prison building programme for 100 years deserves close monitoring.

Prisons Minister Damian Hinds wrote this week that “at least c.6,400 new prison places are anticipated to be delivered by the end of May 2024, rising to c.8,200 by the end of May 2025.”  But in the absence of one published master plan setting out when and where the new cells are expected to come into being, it’s not as easy as it should be to keep track of progress.

In this first of three blogs, I describe where things stand with the largest component of the programme- the building of new prisons. The next one will look at how existing prisons are being expanded and converted to produce more space; and a third will offer some reflections on the process of planning, designing, and constructing additional prison places.

The MoJ are aiming for 9,800 places to be built in six new prisons built from scratch. Of these, HMP Five Wells and HMP Fosse Way, both Category C resettlement prisons are already open.  Five Wells run by G4S, built on the site of the old Wellingborough Prison took its first prisoners early last year. It should have the space to accommodate 1,680 men, though at the end of May 2023, its population was 1,407 and operational capacity 1,420.  

Serco run Fosse Way opened its doors at the end of last month despite “minor construction activity” continuing on what was formerly the Leicestershire site of HMP/YOI Glen Parva. Fosse Way will eventually hold 1,715 men with plans already agreed for a further 250 places to be added.

Further north, construction work is underway on one further Category C men’s prison, HMP Millsike (situated on land opposite the existing HMP Full Sutton in the East Riding of Yorkshire). After it opens in 2025, it will have a capacity of 1,440. 

The three Cat C prisons will add up to 5,085 places to the prison estate. For the MoJ, so far so good.

More problematic is that planning permission for three further new prisons has not yet been granted with the MoJ in the midst of appeals against each of the refusals by the local authorities.    

First, in December 2021, Chorley Council  refused planning permission for a 1,715 place Cat C prison on land next to Garth and Wymott prisons in Lancashire due to the impact it would have on the Green Belt and on road safety.  The local councillors’ decision was made against the advice of their officers, but reflected strongly held concerns of local residents, expressed via the Ulnes and Walton Action Group.   

Following an inquiry in July 2022, the Planning Inspector recommended the MoJ’s appeal be dismissed. But ministers in the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and communities disagreed. The Secretary of State, former Justice Secretary Michael Gove, “is minded to allow the appeal and grant planning permission”, subject to the hazards and risks within the local road network being acceptably addressed.  The inquiry will re-open on 19 September 2023 to consider whether they have been. 

Second, in March 2022, Buckinghamshire Council’s turned down plans for a 1,468 place Category C prison next to HMP Grendon, concerned about limited transport access and adverse impact on the local environment. The MoJ appealed and an inquiry was held in January 2023, with a decision expected by 4 September.

Finally, Harborough Council decided on 7 April 2022 that the proposed 1,715 place Category B prison, south of HMP Gartree in Leicestershire,  was unsustainable by virtue of its location and would have a harmful impact on the character and appearance of the rural surroundings. No decision has been reached following the MoJ appeal and inquiry held in October last year. The Gartree Action Group formed by local residents told the inquiry that the Leicestershire countryside is no place for an industrial scale infrastructure project of this size.

Following Mr Gove’s decision about Chorley, the MoJ is probably fairly confident of a positive outcome there and in all three sites. In all they would provide 4,898 new places.

Should Grendon 2 and Gartree 2 fail to get off the ground, there is one back up possibility in Essex.  Consultations were held in 2021 about the possibility of two new prisons – one Cat B, one Cat C -on the RAF site at Wethersfield.  The result of the consultation does not seem to have been published and no planning application has been submitted to Braintree District Council.  There seems considerable  local opposition.

The option may be off the table since three months ago, the Home Office announced their intention to use the site to house 1,700 asylum seekers, using powers the Crown has in cases of national security and emergencies. The Council’s attempt to obtain an injunction to stop the plan was refused and an outcome of their appeal against that decision is awaited following a hearing this week.  

Beyond that, despite exhaustive searches of central and local government land in 2020 and again in 2022, there look to be no other site options. A search of private sector land in 2020 yielded no real possibilities – presumably as anticipated by the civil service wag that named the exercise Project Emu.

A senior HMPPS official told the Gartree inquiry that “From a planning decision, it would take about 5 years to build the prison”. If he’s right, none of the three sites under appeal will be ready until 2028 at the earliest.  So there may yet be some sleepless nights in Petty France. As another official said to the Chorley Inquiry "the forecast rise in prison population is unprecedented territory for HMPPS."

Crowded House

 

Pressure on the prison system eased a bit this week, with the population falling by 161 from 85,407 last Friday to 85,246 today. It’s because since Tuesday, it’s been possible for prisoners to be released on Home Detention Curfew (HDC) up to 6 months early rather than the previous four-and-a-half months. Because of the initial backlog of people immediately eligible for the revised electronic tagging scheme, the number on HDC this week – 2,059 - is 239 higher than last week.  The Justice Ministry  expects “a spike of up to 400-450 in the estimated HDC population” over the next two months, which will further help to alleviate demand for prison places.

By how much is not clear, however. About a quarter of people on HDC are referred to the Community Accommodation Service , known as CAS-2. Run by NACRO, CAS-2 provides a place to live for defendants on bail and offenders after release from prison if they lack their own housing.  Increased demand for places for people on HDC could reduce availability of beds for bailees, thereby inflating the already high remand population in custody.  It’s important that plans to increase the number of CAS-2 beds from 650 to 850 are implemented this financial year.

On the supply side, HMP Fosse Way, operated by Serco, received its first prisoners on 29 May, although its Operational Capacity seems initially to be just 20.  Numbers will ramp up over the next year until the Category C prison reaches its full capacity of 1,715. Construction of an additional block with 250 more places will start later in the year.

Prison minister Damian Hinds told MPs that “Some minor construction activity continues on site, with no impact on the prison operation.”  According to the prison’s twitter feed construction was approaching completion in early April .

While these developments should help reduce overcrowding, the government expect prisons to be operating close to capacity for some time yet. Former Justice Secretary Dominic Raab informed the Lord Chief Justice in February that “the volume of cases going through the criminal justice system will result in significant pressure for at least the remainder of this year”. Raab hoped that “keeping the judiciary informed of the pressures in prisons will enable judges to take all relevant factors into account in the daily work of the courts”. When doing just that in a case in March which quoted from Raab’s letter, the Court of Appeal remarked that “it will be a matter for government to communicate to the courts when prison conditions have returned to a more normal state”.

We still have some way to go before that is the case.

A Secure Future? STCs and Secure Schools

 

The last of three blogs about Secure Training Centres (STCs) to mark 30 years since they were first announced in March 1993.

30 years after Kenneth Clarke announced to MPs that new Secure Training Centres for child offenders would be “different from anything ever provided before”, we now await the “revolutionary first secure school,” ironically on the site of the first STC at Medway.

After a series of delays, the 49 place Secure School is due to open early next year, ten years after the Coalition government launched and then thankfully scrapped its own plans to “transform” youth custody through a 320 place Secure College in the East Midlands.

While dreaming up better ways of locking up children looks increasingly like the triumph of hope over experience, is there anything to be learned from the history of STCs which might give Secure Schools a fighting chance of success? There are six main areas where things will be done differently.

First the provider. Oasis Restore, part of the Oasis Charitable Trust is a much more values driven organisation than the security companies and prison providers that have run the STC’s. Its status has been controversial, with legislation needed to ensure that operating a Secure School can be a charitable activity at all. The parent charity’s first objective is “the advancement of Christianity”, which has raised eyebrows too. But its ethos, and its experience in running academies, housing and community projects make it well suited both to run a therapeutic establishment which integrates education, health, and care and to reintegrate young people afterwards. 

But, and it’s a big but, it has no experience of having done this in a closed setting. As they admitted when they bid to run the school back in 2018, “none of the Oasis component charities…. have been involved in leading secure provision. We have much to learn.”  

Second the building. Almost £40 million is being spent at Medway to create a “beautiful physical environment for staff and students”: This will comprise 12 flats with up to six bedrooms, a laundry room, living area, small kitchen dining room and staff room, mostly open plan. Each flat will have garden. Careful thought has reportedly gone into the design, furniture, colour schemes, branding, and landscaping.

Much bigger windows than before will let in lots of natural light and students will be able open and close their own bedroom windows through a secure panel, giving a small but important element of control.

When I was a member of the Youth Justice Board efforts were made to soften the harsh environment in the custodial estate, but to limited effect. It's so much better to get it right from the off, so while the costs of remodelling the STC may have rocketed, they should pay dividends.  

Third, the operating model. The bid to run the Secure School submitted in 2018 outlines a detailed multidisciplinary approach and busy daily timetable supervised largely by residential “coaches”. Much of it looks highly promising if at times ambitious- for example the idea of enabling students to practice newly acquired vocational skills in outlets at the school open to the public as customers.  

STCs often struggled with much more basic problems such as finding ways to cope with challenging behaviour. While Oasis founder Steve Chalke has promised “no guards, no uniforms, no clanging keys”, the 2018 bid envisages a role for security officers who will be trained in restraint. The bid outlines a token economy with each student receiving a pay cheque on a Friday reflecting how they have behaved. This can be cashed in for “Oasis Dollars” to buy privileges and to be forfeited in cases of poor behaviour. Similar incentive schemes have had a mixed record in youth custody. In cases where a young person needs to be removed from a classroom or house for their own safety, they will be taken to a Reflection Room, with a coach. How different will this be to the use of separation in STCs?

No doubt the operating model will have developed since 2018, in negotiation with government, following the appointment of the senior management team last year and a public consultation (although no outcome of that appears to have been published). It’s encouraging that Oasis has employed three young people with experience of custody, as “Co-Creation Workers” to help design the regime. As a backstop, the Secure School must accommodate, educate, and care for the children to the standards required by law of a 16 to 19 Academy and a Secure Children’s Home.

Fourth, the children. Asked what had gone wrong with STCs, Ministry of Justice bosses told MPs last year that nowadays the children they took were older and “more difficult to manage” than in the past and had committed far more serious offences. It’s true that the STCs were originally designed for 12-14 year olds but the age range was extended many years ago- as was their role in holding children charged with or convicted of the most serious offences. Of course the welcome fall in the numbers of under 18’s in custody, from 2000 in 2010 to just 450 at the end of March has heightened the concentration of these most challenging children in individual establishments, but they’ve always been there.

The Secure School will take up to 49 children aged 12-18, male and female, on remand and serving sentences. The draft funding agreement says it “shall use its best endeavours” to accept all of those referred to it by the Youth Custody Service. But as with other Secure Children’s Homes, the Secure School will not be required to accept everyone referred to it. This may provide some essential flexibility in respect of its clientele, particularly in its early weeks and months. Particular attention will need to be given to the very small number of girls likely to be there.  

Fifth, the staff: In 2016, Charlie Taylor’s youth justice review   found that many staff working in STCs (and Young Offender Institutions) “do not have the skills and experience to manage the most vulnerable and challenging young people in their care, nor have they had sufficient training to fulfil these difficult roles”. Once it became clear STCs were not a growth area, it’s been harder still to attract and retain highly skilled people to work in them. Short term initiatives to increase the knowledge and skills of staff have had mixed results.

The 2018 Oasis bid sets out a range of initiatives to recruit and retain high quality staff, including impressive looking training and professional development opportunities. The challenge is likely to be much greater in the post Brexit, post Covid world, but it’s the one which will probably determine the success of the programme. Recruitment is underway now, with the site available to staff from the Autumn. There should be indications by then as to whether the Secure School has the people it needs.  

Finally there is the relationship with government. One of Charlie Taylor’s criticisms of STCs was that  “operators can become slaves to the myriad terms of their contract”. The draft funding agreement seems much less prescriptive for the Secure School  than for STCs and all the better for it.

On the other hand, Secure Schools will be accountable to both the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Education (and within the DfE to the two divisions responsible for Academy Trusts and Secure Childrens Homes).  Inspection it seems will be by Ofsted alone rather than jointly with the Prison Inspectorate as was the case with STCs.

Time will tell whether these arrangements prove beneficial.  The Oasis Restore website says that “in most instances, Ofsted will not select new schools for a first inspection until they are in their third year of operation”. This seems much too long to me.

While it is important to allow any new institution to overcome inevitable teething problems, it will be important to form a view about whether the fine words and intentions expressed by the provider are being translated into good practice. I hope they will be.

However, in the light of history, it has to be a case of “Trust but Verify”.