Confidence and Supply

 

Much of the focus on prison reform in recent months has been on managing burgeoning demand for places. The newly formed Justice Select Committee started their examination of Prisons Minister Lord Timpson this week by asking how long the space freed up by the SDS 40 early release scheme might last.

The answer it seems is next Autumn or maybe a bit longer. That’s hoped to be enough time to create longer term sustainability in the system by putting in place whatever legislative changes are recommended by the David Gauke Sentencing Review.

But is that realistic? Even if Gauke manages to report in the Spring, his proposals are likely to be controversial. Getting them on to the statute book and then implemented could easily take another year.

The MoJ handily has a couple of further demand reduction measures up its sleeve- a change to the process of recalling released prisoners to jail in April and extending to a year the period of release on a Home Detention Curfew for eligible prisoners, from June. So they may muddle through.

But what about the supply of new prison places?

MPs heard that the new all electric Millsike Prison in North Yorkshire is on track to open in April, (although like all new prisons will surely need time to reach its full capacity of 1500). A new houseblock at Rye Hill in Warwickshire will also be ready early next year which should add 450 additional places. Timpson also said that HMP Dartmoor - closed in the Summer because of high levels of Radon- will re-open when safe, making more than 600 places available.

Prison Service Chief Amy Rees told the Committee that planning permission had now been granted for 17,000 of the 20,000 proposed new prison places. (The outstanding decision on the one remaining new build prison near Wymott and Garth in Lancashire is due to be made by mid-December).

Planning delays have added between 18 months and 3 years to the original timelines according to Ms Rees. In future, planning for prisons will be treated as Crown development with urgent procedures for reaching decisions and more in the way of permitted development on existing sites.  

On the downside, Timpson revealed that 100 projects in courts and prisons were affected when construction company ISG filed for administration in September. 79 will require re-procurement.

He also acknowledged the significant shortcomings in the physical condition of the existing estate although did not put a financial cost on the backlog of maintenance.  It was £1 billion in 2021.

What we do know is that there are still 23,000 cells which require fire safety upgrades. According to my calculations, the necessary work has been progressing at the rate of about 3,000 cells a year- far too few to meet the commitment to complete the work by 2027.  The latest HMPPS Annual report, published last week but curiously unmentioned in the Select Committee, says reaching the target is “finely balanced in terms of the future headroom position and we are likely to require additional places out of use in future years to achieve this aim.”

More broadly, inspection and monitoring reports have drawn repeated attention to often shocking failings in infrastructure. These aren’t limited to the 25 odd prisons dating from the Victorian era. The HMPPS Annual Report revealed that in May 2024, eight sites were confirmed as containing RAAC.

HMPPS have undertaken a comprehensive survey of conditions in the prisons. I was pleased to hear Ms Rees tell the committee that the report of the survey would be published shortly particularly as the MoJ had refused my FOI request to see it.  

But then according to the HMPPS Annual Report, the Final Report of the Survey was published in June 2024. It wasn’t.  I have asked the Justice Committee to try to clarify the position.

A Secure Future?

 

In 2016, Charlie Taylor’s Review of Youth Justice concluded that “fundamental change is needed to the current youth custody system”. He found children spending too much time in their cells; inadequate education and rehabilitation; and increasing violence both among children and towards staff.

This week Taylor- now Chief Inspector of Prisons-reported that Young Offender Institutions (YOIs) are still “dominated by violence and disorder and weak education”. If anything, eight years on, things are worse.

It’s not surprising that children’s experiences in YOI’s are as dismal as they are given the fundamental unsuitability of prison establishments for their care.

 At Feltham in West London, over the summer two serious incidents of violence led to 34 members of staff being injured.

“Inspectors saw children trying to get to each other through locked gates as they were returning from education.”

But most “simply did not attend enough education to make substantial progress.”

Compare this to a Secure Childrens Home (SCH) in Nottingham where inspectors found a much more positive setting. When children are at risk of hurting themselves or others, staff intervene with physical holds which are used safely, proportionately, and for a short length of time. When children do not get on with each other, appropriate action is taken to prevent potential bullying. Staff work with children to repair relationships whenever possible.  

School attendance is very high. Some children achieve GCSEs in core subjects, others study vocational options in line with their career ambitions.

SCH’s are much smaller facilities than YOIs with better trained staff and a greater ability to choose which children they take. And they cost a lot more.

So while they probably cannot replace YOIs altogether, it’s always puzzled me why Taylor’s Review did not recommend their expansion. They consistently provide high quality care and education, but the numbers of places have reduced substantially in recent years

Instead Taylor arguably overcomplicated matters by inventing a new hybrid institution -the Secure School- which is both a SCH and a 16-19 Academy. After a protracted and expensive development of the old Medway Secure Training Centre, Oasis Restore took its first children in August.

We learned this week that the Secure School’s Principal Director and Responsible Individual, Andrew Willetts will start a new job in January, as Chief Executive Officer at The Orpheus Trust. The Director of Care and Wellbeing left Oasis Restore in June before the first children were even placed there.

I don’t know exactly what lies behind these moves, but it cannot help the stability of any institution if the leader who’s spent three years preparing it to open departs so soon after it does. Despite misgivings about the need for a new model of custody, I hope Oasis Restore proves successful.

In 2016 the government agreed with the Taylor Review’s vision that YOIs and STCs should be replaced in the longer term by smaller secure schools situated in the regions that they serve.  

This week’s bleak inspection reports on youth custody confirm the need for change- but whether by more Secure Schools or Secure Childrens Homes remains open to debate.  

The State of the Estate

 

Inspectors questioning whether cells are safe for human habitation looks like a new low for the prison system. In truth there are many establishments besides Winchester providing what the Prison Governors Association describe as “truly shocking conditions where prisoners are expected to live, and our colleagues work.”

But how many prisons, what kinds of shocking conditions and what will it take to bring them up to acceptable standards? Inspection and Monitoring Reports provide a valuable but only partial picture.  A more comprehensive assessment is surely needed.  

As it happens, last year the Prison Service conducted a survey of conditions in each of the public sector prisons and a sample of the private ones. Earlier this year, the then Prisons Minister told the Justice Committee that the report on the State of the Estate would be completed by the end of that month.  It has not however been made public.

Following a FOI request I made, the MoJ argued that disclosing the survey report would prejudice their commercial interests and impinge on the process of formulating policy. Both seem largely spurious objections which could be met, if necessary, through redaction. But the MoJ have decided the public interest favours withholding the information at this time.  

I had hoped that the new Government might have placed a greater value on transparency and perhaps calculated that - as with Lord Darzi’s report on the NHS- putting the true picture in the public domain would reinforce the difficulty of their inheritance and the need for remedial investment.

The newly formed Justice Committee should press the new Prisons Minister to publish at least a summary of the State of the Estate report not least because the MoJ accept in their FoI response that releasing it “could help inform and further the public debate on this subject matter”.

That’s important because addressing the scale and nature of the problems facing existing prisons should be just as urgent a challenge as the purported need to create future custodial places.   

Food for Thought

 

Complaints about food are “a constant refrain” when Monitors visit HMP Warren Hill in Suffolk according to a Report out today. Prisoners are unhappy with the quality, quantity, choice and food temperature at the small Category C prison in Suffolk. Recent reports on other establishments suggest discontent may be increasingly widespread. They've been published in the months following the hospitalisation of six people at Lewes prison with food poisoning.

Yesterday, His Majesty’s Prison Inspectorate(HMIP)  reported that just 18% of prisoners at HMP Erlestoke said that they got enough to eat, down from 35% at the time of the last inspection.  The small size of the portions was a key- but not a priority -concern for HMIP.  At Belmarsh only a quarter of prisoners said that the food was good and that they got enough to eat. Lunch was served to the prisoner’s door as early as 10.30 in the morning.  

Earlier this year, in a survey conducted by the IMB at HMP Oakwood, more than nine out of ten of the 280 respondents found the overall food quality to be bad or very bad.  68% found they did not have enough to eat at mealtimes, with only 27% feeling they had enough some of the time. This is the prison that the Chief Inspector of Prisons, Charlie Taylor has described as the best in the country.

Oddly Taylor’s latest Annual Report fails to mention food, other than to criticise a filthy food trolley. It’s an omission.

I’m not sure how psychologists view Maslow these days but his argument that survival needs must be satisfied before anyone can address matters higher up the hierarchy still rings true. In prisons, the challenges of offering safety and security, a sense of connection and of individuality will often act as further barriers to reaching self-actualisation. If Maslow’s right, if you’re hungry, you’ll struggle to reach let alone overcome them.

An academic review last year concluded “the potential of food to enhance the prison environment and support improvements in prisoner health and wellbeing is limited when the nutritional content is inadequate and/or where food is served and eaten impacts negatively on human dignity. Prison policy which provides opportunities for cooking and sharing food that better reflects familial and cultural identity has the potential to improve relationships, increase self-esteem, build and maintain life skills needed for reintegration”.

There is great work going on to influence policy and practice in this direction. Charity Food Behind Bars is working to transform the food served in British prisons and researchers at Surrey University have called for an increase in the food budget -as well as publishing a recipe book prepared by women in prison.  £2.70 per prisoner per day was spent on food in 2023–2024, a 25% increase from the previous year's budget of £2.16. I cant find a figure for this financial year.

But the latest glut of reports suggest creating improvements will be an uphill struggle. Communal dining and opportunities to prepare food other than in a microwave seem very much the exception rather than the rule.

With the planned expansion of capacity at several prisons, there’s a risk that pressure on kitchens will increase. At Warren Hill, food is prepared at neighbouring Hollesley Bay a mile away. Unreliable transport results in food going cold and even being tampered with. Monitors hope that a planned expansion of the prison will bring with it a new kitchen. 

Planning permission has recently been obtained for 93 rapid deployment cells, and a servery. But no kitchen that I can see.  I hope I am wrong.

Sentencing Reform - A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action Please

 

 The Howard League deserve credit for persuading five retired senior Judges to argue publicly that the sentence inflation which has brought the prison system to its knees must be brought under control and for a reversal in the trend of keeping people in prison for longer simply to punish them more severely. If implemented, their recommendations would help chart a more sustainable future for prisons and a more effective approach to reducing re-offending.

For me, their warning that without urgent remedial action, “this country will soon experience US-style mass incarceration” is a bit overblown. America’s 1.9 million prisoners represents a rate of imprisonment (531 per 100,000) which is 3.5 higher than ours (146).  

But the four former Chief Justices and one lead judge on criminal justice are surely right to urge a return to more modest proportionate sentences across the board to bring England and Wales into line with Western European norms.

A question nagged away as I read the paper though. While in their various senior roles in the judiciary, could and should the authors not have done more themselves to curb the trends they now decry? Is this not another frustrating example of Post Retirement Enlightenment Syndrome – the phrase originally coined to describe the experience of having politicians “come out” in favour of drug policy reform only after ceasing to occupy positions in which they might have actually carried it out.

The paper lays the blame for sentence inflation firmly at the door of government and the legislature. But can it really be the case that the rise since 2010 in the rate of custodial sentencing from a quarter of the more serious cases to a third; and the increase in the average length of prison terms from 14 to 20 months is down to new laws or the will of parliament?

It’s possible that harsher sentencing reflects more serious offending, or offenders with more previous convictions. But an inconvenient truth may be that the independent judges and magistrates who impose criminal sentences themselves have played a significant role in sentence inflation, whether deliberate or inadvertent.  It may be that it's guideline judgments of the Court of Appeal, rulings on unduly lenient sentences and in particular sentencing guidelines which have served to push up the going rate of punishment- an increase in sentence lengths which means that the people released early from prison this week after serving 40% of their sentence will have on average served two weeks longer in prison than those who served 50% of their sentence in 2014. 

Take the guidelines which are produced by the Sentencing Council, which is fundamentally a judicial body. The sitting Chief Justice is the President of the Council and Lord Justice Leveson, one of the authors of the critique its first Chair. A review of its work in 2017 found that two of its first major guidelines resulted in unexpected increases in sentence severity.

In their Howard League critique, the Judges say the Sentencing Council’s role is to ensure a proportionate structure for sentencing, meaning that the increase in minimum sentences for one crime will necessarily have a knock-on effect across the board. But why should longer sentences for homicide or sexual offences require a harsher approach to theft or burglary?

In fact most sentencing guidelines have sought to maintain the existing practice of the courts rather than toughen it up but the increase in sentence severity for most categories of crime since 2010 suggest that they have in large part failed, too often acting as an accelerator rather than brake on the use of prison. 

I’d like to see current sentencing levels recalibrated downwards on the basis of effectiveness and cost - one of the factors the Council must consider. So too it seems do the retired Judges. But the Council has been unwilling to do it.

Indeed, after a consultation, in 2021 the Council concluded that it was not its role to reverse any observed trends in the prison population. They argued that “were it to seek, artificially and unilaterally, to raise or lower sentence levels without good cause – whether in general or for specific offences – it would rapidly lose the confidence of sentencers, a broad range of public opinion, and no doubt a significant body of opinion within Parliament.” Surely the Judges’ critique lays out a very good cause.

The retired Judges call for “an honest conversation about what custodial sentences can and cannot achieve and their human and financial costs,” mirroring a call by the Justice Committee in the last Parliament who concluded that “public debate on sentencing is stuck in a dysfunctional and reactive cycle”.  In his latest Annual Report, the Chief Inspector of Prisons argued "there is a pressing need for a much bigger conversation about who we are sending to prison, for how long."

This is another area where the Sentencing Council has been found wanting. In 2011, Lord Justice Leveson wrote in its first Annual Report that it had a significant opportunity to contribute … to wider public understanding of issues of sentencing.” He and his co-authors now recognise that 14 years on “the public has a poor understanding of sentencing, receiving most of their information from media reports on individual catastrophic cases”.

A better level of debate is of course needed – and to my mind one that is more adult than simply distinguishing between people we are cross with and those we are scared of, as a former Lord Chancellor frames it.  

But ensuring a constructive and viable way forward requires action, not just words.

 

The Fire Next Time?

 

As wide-ranging collective failures to prioritise fire safety are laid bare in the report into the Grenfell Tower tragedy, what’s being done in a high risk area where central government has sole responsibility- prisons? 

As the Prison Service’s Instruction to its staff makes clear “a  fire occurring anywhere within custodial premises could have serious consequences in terms of life, safety, business continuity and security”.

And many do occur. Latest Home Office data show that in the last financial year, Fire and Rescue Services attended 1,892 incidents in prisons and young offender units in England-an 82% increase on 2022-3.

Trends are broadly consistent with figures released by the Justice Ministry showing that including prisons in Wales, the number of fires in cells rose from 1,410 in 2022 to 2,287 in 2023- up 62%.

While there were only three fire related fatalities in prisons between 2016-17 and 2022-3 (the latest period for which data is available), there were 887 non-fatal casualties over the seven year period. This category comprises a range of cases needing precautionary checks as well as hospital admissions.

Of concern is the fact that the Home Office data show that in more than four out of five incidents attended by Fire Services last year, there was no safety system in place- such as sprinklers or misting.

The Prison Service has embarked on a much needed Fire Safety Improvement Programme to increase detection and fire suppression measures in its establishments. The aim is to bring all prison accommodation up to modern fire safety standards by the end of 2027, a commitment made to the Crown Premises Fire Safety Inspectorate (CPFSI) who enforce the standards in government buildings.

The last HMPPS annual report said 4,000 places were brought up to par in 2022-3, leaving 26,000 to work on. In March this year, 23,500 still lacked automatic fire detection suggesting only 2,500 cells were upgraded in 2023-4.  At that rate of progress, HMPPS will struggle to complete the work by 2030 let alone 2027.

Troublingly, the latest HMPPS annual report also said that “prison capacity pressures have restricted our ability to take places out of use for refurbishment and compliance works”. Pressed by MPs on the Justice Committee, then Prisons Minister Ed Argar denied in March this year that any essential works necessary to address critical risks to life had been paused. But there has been slippage.

The Independent Monitoring Board at HMP Leicester said in their report on the year to January 2024 that “the project to complete the fire safety and other alarm systems has been further delayed and is still not complete after three and a half years”.  The delays may not of course have been to prevent loss of capacity. At HMP Lewes, there were problems relating to “the age of the building and the state of the electrical system, with cost and compatibility issues.” But its not inconceivable that the desperate need for cell space has led to some improvement work being postponed.

So what should the new government do to manage fire risks in prison more effectively?

First and most important is to ensure that the funds are available to maintain the programme of fire safety work to meet the 2027 deadline if at all possible.

Second, they should take a look at the adequacy of the CPFSI, which has a staff of 15 to enforce standards in 16,000 government buildings. The fact that it has only just published its annual report for 2022-23  suggests it may be struggling.

Third, given that prisons pose by far the highest risk among public buildings, should HM Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) look at fire safety issues during their visits to places of detention?. Their report on HMP Chelmsford published in May 2024 fails to mention that the prison was subject to an enforcement notice which was in force at the time of their inspection visit in February, according to the CPFSI register at least.

Three other public prisons and two private ones also had notices in force in February 2024 when the register was last updated. 

Fire safety is something which Ofsted look at in their inspections of Secure Childrens Homes, criticising the obstruction of a fire exit route in one. Why shouldn’t HMIP?

There are practical steps which the prison service and individual prisons should take to reduce risks. Argar promised before the election that an ignition-free Safer Vape Pen will replace the existing product, which is apparently the source of approximately 80 per cent of fires set in prisons. 

But there are structural measures needed as well. The Grenfell report recommends the government bring responsibility for the functions relating to fire safety currently exercised by the Housing Department, the Home Office and the Department for Business and Trade into one department under a single Secretary of State.

Clearer lines of accountability and scrutiny are needed to promote fire safety in prison too.

Capacity Crisis hits Women’s Prisons

 

While the capacity crisis has been most acute in men’s prisons, it’s having a negative impact on women too. The local watchdog at Downview, a closed prison for sentenced women in Surrey report today that while numbers there dipped below 200 during the pandemic, in the year to May 2024 at times they reached the full capacity of 356. The prison has seen increases in assaults, self-harm and use of force, expected with more prisoners but troubling none the less.      

National pressures have reduced the prison’s discretion about who to accept on transfer from other jails creating “a frequently complex mix of women” with significant mental health needs, drug-related issues and problems associating with other prisoners.

Some women arrived with very short sentences left to serve and family based far away. They commented that transferring is as bad as being punished, as they usually lose work or education and, therefore, income, for several weeks.  

Others were acutely mentally unwell and placed in the Segregation Unit where, “staff faced severe aggression and repeated assaults; flooding and destruction of cells and furniture; bodily fluids thrown at them; unrelenting screaming and shouting (including racial abuse aimed at staff and other prisoners); and refusal to eat or wear clothes.”  Some were transferred from prisons that had 24-hour healthcare and a larger mental health team than Downview.

Many of these women should clearly be in a healthcare setting rather than prison. Others do not need to be in prison at all. The IMB report on one woman transferred to Downview on recall for just 12 weeks. The recall was for a failure to attend her probation appointment 20 years ago. She had not committed any further offences in that time and was now a mother, with school-age children and secure employment. What on earth was going on here?