What is driving differing prison performance ?
Published last Friday 7 March, Inside England and Wales’s prisons crisis is the first in a new Institute for Government series – funded by the Nuffield Foundation – on public service performance at the local level, and lays bare the shockingly high levels of violence, protests and self-harm and severely limited work and education opportunities for prisoners.
Gap between best and worst prisons is growing
The new report, which combines statistical analysis of published data, interviews with experts and two prison visits, argues that widespread systemic problems like overcrowding and a lack of purposeful activity for prisoners – more than widespread failures by individual prison governors or particularly challenging prisoner cohorts – are causing severe and sustained decline. The report also shows how open prisons consistently outperform other categories of prison on a range of measures.
Declining performance is not universal across prisons. But it is widespread, with rates of violence, protesting behaviours and self-harm all rising in a clear majority of prisons. These measures all began rising sharply from around 2014, fell to varying degrees in response to the pandemic, then began climbing again and are now nearing or surpassing their pre-Covid peaks.
Assaults
This pattern is reflected across the system, with prisons across the whole range of performance now having higher rates of violence than they did 10 years ago. In 2013, nearly two thirds of prisons had fewer than 100 prisoner-on-prisoner assaults per 1,000 prisoners. By 2023, less than a quarter could say the same.
Self-harm
Self-harm rates show a similar picture, though with a much smaller decline during the pandemic. The median has increased fivefold, from 123 incidents per 1,000 prisoners in 2004 to 642 in 2023. Some of this may be down to improved recording practices, but interviewees suggested it reflects a real and sustained increase.
Protests
The trend is even more pronounced for ‘incidents at height’, the most common form of protest in prisons. This includes things like climbing on netting or roofs and is sometimes used by prisoners to get an opportunity to speak directly with prison officers, as it typically means they will be taken to segregation afterwards. Incidents at height have dramatically increased since 2012/13 in almost all prisons. Then, 13 incidents per 1,000 prisoners would have put a prison in the worst 20% of prisons. In 2023/24, the same rate would put it in the best performing 20%.
Variability
The gap between the better and worse performers has grown in absolute terms. For example, in 2003, the worst 25% of prisons had more than 138 prisoner-on-prisoner assaults per 1,000 prisoners. This was 61 higher than the median prison. In 2023, the rate for the worst 25% of prisons had risen to 324, some 115 above the median. In relative terms the increase has been bigger at the middle: the median assault rate has risen 171% in that time, while the third quartile has risen 134%. Similar patterns apply to incidents at height and self-harm.
Restricted regimes
Prisoner participation in ‘purposeful activity’ – including education, employment, offending behaviour programmes and vocational qualifications – has also dropped sharply over the last 14 years. There is limited available data on this at prison level, particularly before 2023/24,* though the prisons inspectorate and Independent Monitoring Boards have repeatedly raised concerns about the lack of activity in prisons. Interviewees also highlighted that this is a widespread problem, with many prisons offering at best a ‘part-time’ regime where prisoners may have just two half-day sessions of activity a week.
Violence and protests linked to overcrowding
A higher proportion of prisoners in crowded accommodation is associated with higher rates of violence and protesting behaviour (see chart reproduced above). For assaults on staff, a 1 percentage point increase in the proportion of prisoners in crowded accommodation implies around 1.3 additional assaults on staff per 1,000 prisoners. The median prison has 11% of prisoners in crowded accommodation. Moving from this point to the 75th percentile, with 34% in crowded accommodation, implies an additional 32 staff assaults per 1,000 prisoners – an increase of more than a third. Incidents at height show a very similar pattern, with the same increase in crowding rates implying almost a 50% increase in the number of incidents at height per 1,000 prisoners (92 vs 62).
Purposeful activity linked to safety
Conversely, purposeful activity has an even stronger relationship with violence rates, with prisoner-on-prisoner and staff assaults both lower when more prisoners are engaged in it. Each percentage point more prisoners (10 per 1,000) engaged in purposeful activity implies around four fewer prisoner-on-prisoner assaults and 2.5 fewer staff assaults per 1,000 prisoners. A prison with 80% of prisoners engaged in purposeful activity (the rate at the 75th percentile) will have an estimated 26% fewer prisoner-on-prisoner assaults and 17% fewer staff assaults than the median prison (where 67% of prisoners are engaged in purposeful activity). Incidents at height may also be less common where more prisoners are engaged in purposeful activity, though this effect is not statistically significant.
Recommendations
The IfG report makes four key recommendations concludes that there are very serious problems but these are not insurmountable; it makes four primary recommendations:
- Establish a ‘minimum regime’ across prisons – adequately funded and with targets on purposeful activity. Levels of purposeful activity are currently very low, which limits rehabilitation and may be contributing to violence and drug use. Establishing a minimum regime for each prison category would increase the focus on purposeful activity and hopefully improve conditions. This should be accompanied by the funding realistically needed to allow prisons to deliver this activity.
- Explore options for expanding access to open prisons. Open prisons have much better conditions and outcomes than other prison types, in addition to being cheaper to run.13 While this is clearly partly due to the prisoners they hold, it may be possible to expand access to open prisons safely. The government should conduct a thorough evaluation of the temporary presumptive recategorisation scheme, introduced in 2023 to move more prisoners into open conditions earlier in their sentence. This could lower overall violence, save money and improve outcomes.
- Identify elements of the open prison model that could be applied to other prisons. Naturally, not all prisoners will be suitable for open conditions, but there may be aspects of the regime in those prisons – such as more purposeful activity and greater responsibility around the site – that could be beneficially applied to closed prisons as well.
- Build on recent successes targeting employment after release. There have been real successes in recent years in improving prison outcomes, especially around employment. This has the potential to help reduce reoffending rates and facilitate productive rehabilitation, and should continue to be a focus in future.
Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the header image in this post. You can see Andy’s work here
