An Inspector Calls

The death was reported today of actor Sam Kelly who played a relatively minor role in TV sitcom Porridge; (the slow and gullible “Bunny” Warren). The show may well have provided the great majority of people in my generation who have never been near a prison, an idea of what life inside is like. It’s misleading of course in all sorts of ways, not least in underplaying the pains of imprisonment – it is a comedy after all. But the sketchy knowledge that the public have about places of detention make it all the more important that we have access to a true and honest picture of the reality of what goes on inside them.

Fortunately we have such a picture in the detailed findings from the Chief Inspector of Prisons, currently Nick Hardwick, who regularly visits and reports on all of our prisons. And we are lucky too that we have a government, which according to its website at any rate attaches great importance to the Chief Inspector’s role “in order to provide the public, parliament and government with an objective and authoritative assessment of the conditions in prisons”.  

There our luck runs out. This morning, Radio 4 Today programme listeners were treated to a cavalier dismissal of Nick Hardwick’s views by the Justice Secretary. Chris Grayling went on to make highly misleading statements about the degree of overcrowding in the prison system and the extent to which it provides work opportunities for prisoners.   Grayling then sought to blame any shortfall in resources on prison governors and staff who he suggested happily offered up the cuts in staffing when faced with mass privatisation.

While there may be no votes in prisons, Grayling has a duty of care to prisoners and the very least we can expect from him is what he expects from us- honesty.  The truth is that he has been far too ready to make spending cuts without wanting to cut prison numbers. Thank goodness Nick Hardwick had the courage to say so and  let’s hope he sticks to his guns when he’s hauled in by Grayling on Monday morning and asked to clarify his remarks.

Are the wheels finally coming off at the Ministry of Justice?

Like the Spanish football team, is this the week the wheels came off the coalition administration? It’s one thing for Cabinet ministers to bicker publicly about who is to blame for extremism , another for their departments to fail to carry out their basic responsibilities whether it is monitoring what happens in schools , providing passports or benefits with a modicum of efficiency.

But it may be the Ministry of Justice where things are starting to go wrong most seriously. Litigants no longer able to obtain legal aid are causing problems for the courts, probation officers are struggling to operate a new twin track service and today it is reported that 40 jails , many already overcrowded,  are being required to take yet more prisoners to cope with what we are told is an unexpected surge in numbers.

Just as it seems the Home Office knew full well that passport applications in the UK would rise once   overseas processing centres were shut, so the Ministry of Justice were warned that closing thirteen of its more costly prisons over the last three years could leave it short of capacity. Today’s confirmation that it has done is not only embarrassing for Chris Grayling. The Public Accounts Committee recently concluded that the management of the prison estate is a best practice case example in achieving cost reductions, which HM Treasury should ensure is disseminated widely across Government. Perhaps the other departments’ failings flow from following Margaret Hodge’s foolhardy lesson that you can cut costs without incurring consequences.

The consequences in prisons may be far more dangerous than a missed holiday. The establishments being forced to increase capacity include three which have recently been inspected; at Durham inspectors found virtually every cell holding more prisoners than it should, at Wandsworth too many prisoners required to share a cell and at Leicester a degree of overcrowding they considered unacceptable. These and other prisons are having to face increasing demands while making yet more cuts. The governor told an inquest this week that reduced staffing levels are compromising the safety of prisoners at Woodhill. The Coroner will be writing to Chris Grayling asking him to review those levels in order to prevent further deaths.

“Good luck with that” one is tempted to think.  Grayling has long been committed to making prisons cheaper not smaller and is now more bullish still, making "no apology that we are sending more criminals to prison" because "that's what the public want". Public attitudes are actually a good deal less punitive than he makes out and there is surely in any event more to being a Justice Secretary than acceding to populist demands. Providing the resources for the prison system to be run in a safe and constructive way for a start.

Goodnight Probation or Au Revoir?

 Despite the predictions of many (myself included) that the ill thought out and high risk reforms to the probation service would collapse under the weight of their internal contradictions, so far they have not. This week they moved to a new stage with the splitting of the service into two. The majority of staff find themselves working for Community Rehabilitation Companies which are in the process of being sold off. Is the headlong rush to privatised rehabilitation services now a done deal?

Not necessarily. Labour have hinted that that they will undo the changes if they can afford to. But Chris Grayling will be as keen to get the new contracts with private providers signed as soon as he can as was Michael Howard with the controversial Secure Training Centres in the run up to 1997. There are rules about entering commitments too close to an election but if the Coalition stays the course, Grayling probably has nothing to fear.

Except perhaps from his own civil servants. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) managed to get the Permanent Secretary at the MoJ to commit “to only proceed at each stage of the {TR} programme if it is satisfied it is safe to do so and that value for money will not be jeopardized.” The PAC need to hold the mandarins feet to the fire on this.

They can start on Thursday when they see the Head of the Major Projects Authority. This is the body that oversees high risk governemnt initiatives and periodically publishes a "Delivery Confidence Assessment" (DCA). In its latest report published last month, 19 Ministry of Justice projects are described. Four are rated amber/red which means that “successful delivery of the project is in doubt, with major risks or issues apparent in a number of key areas. Urgent action is needed to ensure these are addressed, and whether resolution is feasible”.

Given what the PAC and Justice Committee have said about the risks in the Probation reforms, one might have expected Transforming Rehabilitation to be one of these. It is not. TR is exempt from a DCA because of possible prejudice to commercial interests. The test for this is the Freedom of Information Act which allows exemptions  if disclosure   would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of any person (including the public authority holding the information). Guidance from the Major Projects Authority says that exemption can include time sensitive instances where disclosure would undermine the confidence that investors or suppliers may have in the project or threaten the ability of the government to attract market finance. But exemptions should be made sparingly and reviewed periodically.

It looks very convenient to prevent us knowing what a body designed to reduce financial risk to the taxpayer makes of Grayling’s reforms. After all some basic questions have been raised about their affordability. And if I were a director under an obligation to promote the success of my company, wouldn’t I want to know about the risks too?

Is jailing drug addicts really the way to strengthen community sentences?

I remember many years ago hearing ex prisoner turned probation officer Bob Turney explain the difference in the response to missed probation appointments in the UK and US. In the States, he said, a probation officer would go armed to their errant client’s home and arrest him. In England and Wales, he’d send him a letter. The caricature summed up how probation here was about keeping people out of prisons while in the US it was about getting people into them. 

While dealing with breach has become a lot tougher since then, the British Government is being urged to go further down the American road. Today’s Centre for Social Justice report is the latest to favour a more robust approach to those who fail to comply with community sentences. Threatening Americans on probation with immediate short spells in prison has apparently reduced the numbers not only of those who miss appointments but also who fail drug tests and who re-offend. The mantra of swift and certain punishment is becoming a new orthodoxy in probation, promising to make community sentences both more effective and more credible. As our friends across the pond might say, “What’s not to like?”

Three things actually. First, those with long memories will recall how the fruits of North American research have been touted as the saviour of probation once before. The overblown claims made by proponents of accredited programmes in the early 1990’s took community based supervision down a psychology dominated  road that many have come to regret.  At the very least some British pilots are needed to see whether the admittedly impressive results reported in Hawaii are replicated here and whether it is in fact the deterrent threat of prison which makes the key difference.  

Second in the UK putting people into prison for short periods is generally agreed to be a problem not a solution. This is partly for practical reasons. Intermittent custody was quietly abandoned in 2006 in part because courts were reluctant to use it and in part because the prison service could not manage it. Today’s report seems to envisage failing probationers being held in police cells for several days at a time, a role for which many police stations are simply not equipped.
  
Finally the automatic unleashing of custodial sanctions on people who fail to comply offends both the values and evidence base for probation. It’s true that the European Probation Rules say that where offenders fail to comply with conditions, probation staff should respond actively and promptly. But they go on that “the response shall take full account of the circumstances of the failure to comply”. Swift and certain imprisonment comes close to violating this requirement as well as the rule that in gaining the offenders’ co-operation, probation staff should not rely solely on the prospect of sanctions for non-compliance.

Moreover swift and certain punishment seems to fly in the face of the growing acceptance that giving up drugs and going straight involve a process of desistance. In encouraging desistance, using authority is a crucial part of a probation officer’s role; but effective supervision demands very much more than the policing function envisaged in the simplistic and punitive approach put forward by CSJ.

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times. A Tale of Two Prison Services

 As the Prison service prepares to make more deep cuts in its budget, two sharply contrasting views have emerged about whether the 146 prisons in England and Wales are in a fit state to shed more staff and reduce what they are able to provide for prisoners. Last month, Chief Inspector Nick Hardwick condemned Brinsford Young Offender Institution as the worst prison he has visited since taking up the role in 2010, adding to a growing list of jails unable to provide basic levels of decency and safety. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) meanwhile proposed that the government’s management of prisons over the last four years should be disseminated across Whitehall as an example of best practice. Who is right?

Of course not all prisons contain the squalid cells and enforced idleness found at Brinsford. But a range of other prisons have come in for heavy criticism in recent reports – whether for the dilapidated state of the buildings at Pentonville and Winchester, the high levels of violence at Feltham , or the restricted  regimes provided at  the newly opened  private prisons Oakwood and Thameside.

The limitations of these two private prisons feature too in the report by Margaret Hodge and her colleagues which despite noting their poor performance is however a generally positive one. The PAC welcomed the fact that the prison service has achieved significant savings in running costs (which is certainly true) and also reported that improvements are being made in the way offenders' needs are met, allowing more of them to work and stay closer to their homes.

This is a far more questionable claim. In addition to criticising the two new private prisons, the PAC itself quotes Hardwick's findings that the quality and quantity of work, education and training across the prison system had 'plummeted' over the year 2012-3.  What they do not say is that the cost cutting on which they lavish praise is in large part the cause of the poor performance they decry. 

If the PAC had looked at the Brinsford report they would have seen the negative consequences of staff reductions; too many evening and weekend recreational sessions cancelled because officers were redeployed to other areas; inadequate supervision in the health care unit; and significantly in the light of Chris Grayling’s assurances that prisoners do not need books to be sent in to them, inadequate access to the library because of the lack of available prison staff.

The PAC make the point that  additional cost savings could be made if the prison service provided more offender behaviour programmes to help prisoners serving indeterminate sentences to be released at the earliest opportunity. Such savings would be even more substantial if the experience of imprisonment for all prisoners better equipped them for a life back in the community so that they are less likely to end back inside.

But rehabilitation programmes have an upfront cost which the PAC are unwilling to acknowledge. Instead by prioritising economy and efficiency over effectiveness, they are encouraging a further round of cuts rather than sounding a warning siren. Their investigations into the costs of Oakwood prison in particular have been cursory. The prison’s claim to be able to deliver the same regime as other Category C prisons at less than half the average cost has always seemed fanciful. As this level of economy is now being held up as an example for the rest of the prison service to follow, the case for it to be properly scrutinised is overwhelming.

 Earlier in the year the PAC recommended far greater visibility about the private sector’s performance, costs, revenues and profits. The Committee should put the private sector to the test and take a much closer look at whether the much lower budgets in their prisons are genuinely delivering what is required.  Alongside this the Prisons Inspectorate should look much more systematically at the impact of staffing and resource levels on what is happening in the prisons they visit.  These two assessments would help answer the question of whether prisons can sustain any more cutbacks

25 Years to Life: Why the Need for Penal Reform International is as Great as Ever

  This week,  Penal Reform International (PRI) celebrates 25 years of work to improve prisons around the world, an unfashionable cause if ever there was one, but as in need of attention today as it was back in 1989.

I first worked with the international ngo in 1994, to deliver training to prison staff in one of the Baltic States on human rights and resettlement. Such was the enthusiasm of the participants that they took photos of the acetates as we placed them on the overhead projector so that the information could be quickly disseminated beyond the classroom. This was not so much down to the quality of the material as to the keen desire – shared by many who work in prisons the world over- to learn from international standards and experience in order to improve the way they do their jobs.  Encouraging a professional and positive ethos within prisons has been one of the staples of PRI’s work, whether through staff training, the development of rehabilitation projects or working with civil society to increase oversight of places of detention.

Sadly the capacity to make improvements is all too often frustrated by chronic under resourcing, gross overcrowding and crumbling infrastructure.  If, as they reported this week, inspectors in the UK can find cells in a young offender institution not fit for occupation, it’s hardly surprising that in lower income countries conditions are often far more squalid and even life threatening. 

In 2000 I helped PRI assess prison conditions in the Middle East. What we saw shocked even the most experienced members of the team. In one establishment, the overflowing mass of humanity packed into rooms scarcely larger than store cupboards, stood in barbaric counterpoint to the elegant exterior of the Levantine villa which housed them.  The adverse physical and mental consequences of such congestion weigh particularly heavily on women, children and other vulnerable groups, for whom PRI has always attached a particular priority.

As PRI has always recognised, the answers to most of the problems within prisons lie beyond their walls. Developing diversion programmes for juveniles and para legal programmes to reduce unnecessary pre-trial detention have been notable successes which have been emulated in many countries by both government and non-government organisations. More challenging has been the creation of meaningful and sustainable alternatives to prison sentences for petty offenders.

The work that I’ve been involved in most recently has been to strengthen the community service programmes in East Africa which PRI originally helped bring into being in the 1990’s. Despite initial impact, courts have sometimes been reluctant to impose non-custodial orders, probation services ill -equipped to implement them and the public uncertain about supporting them. PRI is testing how best to turn the tide, with promising results. 

 PRI has always been keen to promote such results from its work with a range of global and regional bodies concerned with human rights and with criminal justice. The UN’s 2012 Principles and Guidelines on Access to Legal Aid owe much to the organisation’s work and the current initiative to update and improve the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners was really set in train by PRI. But unlike some organisations, success for PRI is not measured simply by impact in Geneva, Vienna or New York but through practical improvement on the ground. Similarly, PRI’s campaigning to end the death penalty does not stop with abolition but includes work to develop humane alternatives to put in its place.

AS PRI enters its second quarter century, there may be some encouraging signs. The global prison population rate looks stable, the USA may be finally edging away from mass incarceration, and the war on drugs if not coming to an end is entering a less violent phase. But there are threats too not least to some of the human rights standards that underpin PRI’s approach. Mapping the trends and challenges facing prison systems across the globe is one of the projects underway in its anniversary year in readiness for next year’s UN Crime Congress in Qatar.

In the meantime, in most of the world, prisons continue to be humanitarian disasters, comprising a complex set of problems to which the world too often turns a blind eye. We need PRI both to keep these problems high on the agenda, and to develop just and sustainable ways to address them.

The Worst Prison Inspection in Four Years - Does Anyone Care?

Chief Inspector of Prisons Nick Hardwick says today’s report on Brinsford Young Offender Institution is the worst since he took over in 2010. That’s saying something since he’s made   damning criticisms of among others, Pentonville, Feltham and Oakwood.  The Brinsford findings are indeed shocking, more so since for the first time the report contains some photographs of the squalid conditions. But the report has received relatively little media attention, drowned out it seems by coverage of Cardiff University’s violence study. Whether or not a fall in numbers showing up at A and E is a good indicator for levels of violence in society, it’s almost certainly not for violence in prisons. More than 10% of the young people surveyed by the Inspectors said they had been hit, kicked or assaulted at Brinsford compared to 8% in the last inspection in 2011. 

I visited Brinsford in November 2012 with colleagues from the T2A Alliance when I was preparing a report on young adults in custody. I noted that the buildings were scruffy “but that atmosphere in the prison was calm and positive. Young men were moving to their activities in an orderly but relaxed way, with staff engaging positively.”  It looks like things have gone downhill.  Why might that be?

By coincidence on the day we visited, the results of the competitions for the running of nine prisons were announced by the MoJ. Governors at Brinsford had been fearing industrial action by the POA should the establishment have been chosen to be part of a future round of competition. As it was, they told us they would have to make cuts but without the threat of privatisation.

MoJ figures show that the cost per place had already fallen by almost 8% between 2010-11 and 2012-13; we will not have figures for the last financial year until the autumn. But it seems certain that that resources were further reduced and that when the Inspectors visited in November last year there were fewer staff on the landings.

Today’s report spells out the consequences. Too many evening and weekend recreational sessions were cancelled because officers were redeployed to other areas; nurses reported that prison officers were not always available to provide supervision during medication administration times;  the inconsistent allocation of custody officers to the inpatient unit meant that most patients were spending only a few hours out of their cell each day; and , significantly in the light of Chris Grayling’s assurances that prisoners don’t need books to be sent in to them , the young men  had inadequate access to the library because of the lack of available prison officers. Library staff were frequently unable to run activities they had planned.

Many will say that prisons must cut their costs along with every other part of government. The problem is that even before any cuts prisons like Brinsford were unable to meet required standards. Back in 2005 Inspectors found an establishment that was struggling to provide appropriate levels of safety, respect and even basic cleanliness.  Two years later despite the critical 2005 report, managers had failed to remedy many of the deficits in safety and respect that inspectors considered were within their control. In 2009 Brinsford was not able to provide a sufficiently safe and purposeful environment for young adults and in 2011 this was still the case.  

Given its history how could a cut in resources produce anything but the catalogue of failure reported today?