Population pressures
Today (10 September 2024), Charlie Taylor, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, has published his annual report for 2023/24. The report was ready to be published in June, but could not be issued because the general election campaign was under way. The main findings of the report are well known to regular readers – the combination of chronic under-staffing and an ever-growing prison population means that most establishments are running very impoverished regimes with little opportunity to attend decent work or education classes.
Rather than repeat these grim findings, I have sought to find ten slightly less well-known details from the report in the hope that you will find them of interest.
1 Private providers
Lowdham Grange was the first contracted prison to pass from one provider to another (Serco to Sodexo), but the process was shambolic. Many staff left the jail to work at Serco’s new prison at Fosse Way, and Sodexo failed to recruit enough replacements.
2 Leadership
The Chief Inspector worries about the pipeline of new governors, with some of the most challenging prisons getting very few applicants. There continued to be a lack of professional development for leaders, and a group of custodial managers told inspectors they had received no training for the job, despite some managing up to 20 officers.
3 Deterioration of immigration detention
Inspections of immigration detention found a worrying rise in disturbances as the population grew, a particular concern for an estate that has been mostly calm for the last decade. At Yarl’s Wood, inspectors found increasingly prison-like conditions, and the safety of detainees and their access to activities had deteriorated significantly.
4 Women’s prisons
Inspectors carried out two very positive inspections of the two open prisons, Askham Grange and East Sutton Park, and another reasonably good inspection of Peterborough. Both open prisons were an effective bridge back into the community for women, some of whom were coming to the end of long sentences.
At East Sutton Park, over 80% of women had access to ROTL and many had full-time, paid employment in the community with national companies, which meant that they could transfer to a job near home on final release.
An impressive 60% of the women released into paid employment were still in work six months later. At Askham Grange, over three-quarters of the population were accessing some form of ROTL, and nearly half of the women had an education, skills or work placement in the community, much of which was paid employment.
5 Recruitment
Recruitment continued to be a struggle in some parts of the country. Swaleside and Woodhill were reliant on officers being bussed in from the north of England to be able to run a regime. Even where there were enough officers, they were often very inexperienced and the number of staff who left within the first two years continued to be worryingly high.
6 Deteriorating living conditions
Inspectors raised concerns about living conditions at 16 adult men’s prisons and found a worrying picture of deterioration. Although more predictable at Victorian prisons, there had been a significant decline at several open prisons, as well as at two high security prisons.
A variety of problems had contributed to this decline, but chief among them was a lack of investment in ageing infrastructure and an inability to commission or undertake building work. Far too many buildings and systems needed upgrading, and the continued existence of night sanitation in some prisons was unacceptable.
In too many establishments, leaders had failed to set high enough standards for prisoners and staff. Wings were dirty, cleaning routines had been allowed to lapse and sometimes prisoners did not have easy access to cleaning equipment.
7 Released homeless
Inspectors continued to find prisons struggling to provide accommodation support for prisoners, including some which were releasing prisoners despite not having a resettlement function. For example, Lindholme – not a resettlement prison – had released 86 prisoners during the previous 12 months and Lowdham Grange, with no resettlement function or housing workers on site, had released 80.
At Dovegate, data showed that in the previous 12 months 29% of the sentenced prisoners released had no accommodation. At Bedford, inspectors were concerned to find that 30% of prisoners were released homeless and 42% to unsustainable accommodation.
8 Drift and decline in conditions for children
The most recent figures show the Youth Custody Service spent £197 million caring
for around 500 children – significantly more than £300,000 per child. Yet inspectors often found wasted resources as teachers, health care staff and resettlement caseworkers were unable to access children due to shortages of frontline operational staff or meeting rooms.
There was a lack of accountability for failures, despite large senior teams; for example, at Cookham Wood there were 24 senior leaders in an establishment holding just 77 children.
9 Court Custody
Detainees were largely positive about their treatment in court custody and inspectors noted various improvements this year, including some growing staff confidence in using interpreting services to communicate with non-English speaking detainees.
Provision for neurodivergent detainees, however, needed improvement, and far too few court custody facilities were accessible for those with disabilities.
Despite finding some incongruous and excessive searching and handcuffing, force was used infrequently, was generally low level and de-escalated quickly, and oversight was improving.
The oversight and awareness of safeguarding were also much improved, as was the treatment of most children.
Given that the court custody service was also beset by staff shortages, this is an impressive set of findings.
10 Bucking the trend
Despite the many challenges, inspectors found some prisons that managed to be safe, decent and productive. Inspections this year of seven open prisons revealed a part of the estate that was generally performing well, while reports on Preston, Swansea and Leicester showed that even the most overcrowded Victorian reception prisons can be safe and decent. Prisons holding men convicted of sexual offences were also doing a reasonably good job, although purposeful activity was not good enough in any of them.
Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the image in this post. You can see Andy’s work here
