The surveys

Surveys take place at the start of the first week of an inspection. The inspectorate’s own  professionally accredited independent researchers use the prison’s population list to select a random representative sample to whom they personally distribute the survey.  Prison staff  do not decide or know which prisoners take part in the survey. Copies of the survey are available in different languages and the researchers will assist prisoners who have difficulty completing it.  Surveys are collected by the researchers by the end of the day and analysed so the results are ready for inspectors to use in the second week of the inspection.  Information about the inspectorate’s current surveys and methodology is attached to each full inspection report on HMIP’s website.

Mass participation

There is a phenomenal 75% response rate in closed prisons which I think demonstrates prisoners’ trust in the process – and their desire to tell their story. I have always been moved by the care and effort prisoners make to complete the survey and when I was Chief Inspector I would see them sometimes – sitting in their cells and obviously taking care as they laboriously worked through every question in the lengthy survey. It was striking when we were testing prisoners’ attitudes to making the survey results available as part of an initial feasibility study, prisoners they told us forcibly that they wanted their voices as expressed in the surveys to be heard as widely as possible. I hope the availability of the survey data will now allow this to happen.

New research

The occasion that prompted this blog was the publication in The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice of a (Open Access) paper by Professor Rosie Meek, Dr Kim Reising and me of a paper on safety in men’s prisons which used the survey data from 2000 to the start of Covid in 2020 to examine the experiences of the 33,476 (39.7% of total respondents in this period) men who answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Have you ever felt unsafe here?’ and the 13,025 (18.5%) who between 2006 and 2020 answered ‘Yes” to the question ‘Do you feel unsafe now?’. Of course, what prisoners mean by ‘feeling unsafe’ may be open to interpretation but the year-by-year rise and fall in the data closely follows the prison service’s own data about the rise and fall in the number of assault incidents. We should not allow this finding to become normalised – it’s almost one in five prisoners telling us, with good reason, that on that day they felt scared. 

Feeling unsafe

The paper tracks how feelings of unsafety relate to wider trends in the prison system such as the loss of experienced staff and overcrowding, types of prison, the demographics of those least likely to feel safe, and men’s experience in prison – particularly early days.   I won’t repeat the findings here – there is a link to the paper at the end of this blog – it provides solid evidence for some long-standing concerns but also challenges some assumptions that are often made.

This paper is example of how the surveys can be used. Other uses include, for example tracking how many and which prisoners use prison libraries for an Arts Council inquiry, investigating alcohol use by prisoners and examining prisoners’ health needs and experiences. 

Endless possibilities

When I was Chief Inspector of Prisons I thought a prisoner survey did not necessarily provide answers – but it did strongly indicate what questions we should be asking.  So it is with the survey data as a whole. When we were writing our prison safety paper I was constantly side-tracked by what else the data could tell us. The experience of women prisoners is the most obvious example – the data is there to do that.  I wanted to track the experience of young adults and the impact of moving many of them from YOIs to adult prisons. We could track the impact of other major policy changes too – and match the data to the periods in office of key ministers.

The data was large enough to get meaningful results about proportionately small groups of prisoners – some faith groups for example, or the patterns of prisoners who stated they had been sexually assaulted by other prisoners or staff. Unsurprisingly we found  that reported early days experience had a very significant correlation with prisoners who said they felt unsafe. I wanted to dig into that more – what distinguished the prisoners who had a poor early days experience and who said they felt unsafe from those who also reported a poor early days experience but did not then subsequently report feeling unsafe? I wanted to look at what had happened to some individual prisons that had had repeated surveys – could we compare the survey data with data from the prison service and inspection reports about that individual prison to understand its history better? It would be interesting to compare prisoner experience in different types of prison, comparing the size or age of the establishment for instance.  The list is endless really and I hope others will want to follow up some of these questions. 

Potential of the data

It will be obvious I think that I am enthusiastic about the potential of the data. That potential is not yet fully realised – HMIP also carries out surveys as part of its inspections of juvenile establishments, immigration detention and military detention.   We did not look at this so we don’t know what is in the archive – and the ethical issues involved in accessing the data for these types of inspections may be insurmountable but I think this needs to be examined.

Making the data available

Making this data available and using it has been a ten-year project. I am grateful to my successors as Chief Inspector of Prisons, Peter Clarke and Charlie Taylor, and their research teams for supporting the project. We received funding first from Royal Holloway University of London to carry out a feasibility study and then from the ESRC for the main project. Anthony Quinn, Janet Bowstead, Rosie Meek and Kim Reising actually did most of the work and right from the start we were supported and encouraged by the late and much missed David Denney.

A continuing resource?

The scale of the effort is a cause for gratitude but also for concern. The data needs to be continually updated and made available as new surveys are done. There is still data from other inspection types to be assessed. Charlie Taylor’s term as Chief Inspector is soon coming to an end and there is no guarantee that all his successors will maintain his commitment or indeed that the inspectorate and inspections will carry on in the same form in years to come.  There is a real risk I think that at some point this huge archive and the stories it tells will lie forgotten and unused in the UK Data Service and its potential lost. So I hope there will be other institutions and funders who will want to work with HMIP to make sure this does not happen and ensure the window the surveys provide on prisoners’ experience in the first quarter of the 21st century – and hopefully beyond – will remain open.

The report ‘Exploring Prison Safety: Insights From Two Decades of HM Inspectorate of Prisons Surveys in England and Wales’  by Nick Hardwick, Kim Reising and Rosie Meek is available here

Information about how to access the data is available here.

Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the header image in this post. You can see Andy’s work here