Oral evidence: Prisons: planning and policies, HC 309Tuesday 14 October 2014
Oral evidence, 14 October 2014.
Witnesses
Dr Kimmett Edgar, Prison Reform Trust, Andrew Neilson, Howard League for Penal Reform, and Imtiaz Amin, Zahid Mubarek Trust, gave evidence.
Chair
Welcome. Mr Amin, you are the chief executive of the Zahid Mubarek Trust, which you were involved in setting up in commemoration of your sadly lost family member. Dr Edgar is from the Prison Reform Trust and Mr Neilson is from the Howard League. We are very glad to have your help. As I did in the previous session, could I start by establishing how differently you would design the prison estate if you had a blank sheet of paper?
Andrew Neilson
That is very difficult. We do not have a blank sheet of paper; we have the existing estate and a situation where currently there is not the political will to look at the size of the prison population particularly. The emphasis is on finding cuts to the system without reducing demand on the system, but we are getting to the point where that will not be tenable in the future. Certainly on the other side of a general election, if we are looking at the Ministry of Justice facing more cuts, we will have to look at the size of the population. Even if we look at the system as it is right now, I would agree with Mr Wheatley in the previous session that governors and managers have done a pretty good job of managing a very difficult situation and not having really serious disturbances and incidents break out, although we have seen some disturbances and lots of problems. If we are not looking at radical sentencing reform, there are a couple of things that we could be looking at right now. One is making it easier for people to achieve release. We have a lot of people on indeterminate sentences lingering over-tariff in the system. Other prisoners are finding it hard to progress through their sentences, because in the end some of the cuts are falling on their ability to complete courses—the things they need to do to progress. The Parole Board needs more resources. A lot more is going to be asked of it, but not necessarily with more resources to do that. The other thing that could be done, which does not cost anything, is to look at political rhetoric. Of late we have seen a ratcheting-up of punitive rhetoric about prisoners and the criminal justice system. That comes with a cost, because it influences the behaviour of the courts, prison governors and prison officers in adjudications. They take a steer from the top of the Ministry of Justice. If the steer is that they should be punitive, that is what they will do. Recently we published some research on remand. It was quite interesting, because in the LASPO Act we saw various measures taken by the Ministry of Justice to try to reduce the use of unnecessary remand. The Ministry of Justice brought in the “no real prospect” test, but when we looked at the figures for the use of remand we found that it is now above pre-LASPO levels. Remand has not gone down. A directive can be made from the centre in legislation, but the day-to-day rhetoric from the top is much more important. These are ways we could be trying to address the size of the prison population, before we even get to radical questions about who we are sending to prison and why.
Dr Edgar
As Andrew was saying, the start of the solution really has to be to look at how people go there and to apply the lessons we have from the reduction in the youth population to short-sentence prisoners and to women prisoners, in particular. Andrew mentioned remand and the “no real prospect” test. That is a great help in reducing the unnecessary use of custody for remands, but there are still too many people who either get a non-custodial sentence or whose cases are thrown out. There is room for further improvement on that. Taking you seriously about the blank page, for prison to work well you would start with much smaller prisons, much closer to home and with a much better staff-to-prisoner ratio than we have right now. The Committee’s report on the role of the prison officer made clear how central prison officers are to rehabilitation. We have seen the breakdown of rehabilitation where prison staff numbers have been cut to the extent that the prison cannot work efficiently. Those would be some of the pointers.
Chair
Are you confident of the evidence base for the first of the characteristics you describe—that is, smaller being better? That was questioned earlier this morning.
Dr Edgar
Yes. I appreciate that there is a position from the Treasury and a position from a prison management point of view. I did a little digging prior to coming here, looking at inspection reports and prisoner surveys. If we take five large, new prisons and five small prisons, in almost everything that matters it is very obvious that prisoners are worse off in large prisons. On safety, something like 22%—I can give you the exact figures—felt unsafe compared with 15% in smaller prisons. In terms of knowing who to approach for help with accommodation and employment, again smaller prisons were clearly providing a better experience for prisoners. It may well be that there are advantages from a budgetary point of view—
Chair
My question was not really about the budgetary point of view, but about whether the evidence base was sound.
Andrew Neilson
I agree with Kimmett that if you look at the inspection reports you can glean that small is better. In fact, the inspectorate did a report in 2009 that looked through its findings in generality and came to that conclusion. But it is difficult to find hard and fast evidence, partly because we have not built any small prisons recently in this country; therefore any comparison you are making is not just about large versus small but large and brand spanking new versus small, old and deteriorating Victorian estate. That is not a fair comparison.
Chair
We know from evidence that newly built large prisons experience a range of problems in the initial stages anyway, as Mr Llwyd pointed out by comparison with Parc.
Dr Edgar
But some of those problems are the consequence of a large institution that is unmanageable. I will give you a couple of points. A large catchment area inevitably means that families are further away. The inspectorate report on resettlement made clear how central families are to resettlement. If families have to travel further, it creates a greater impediment to their being involved in the resettlement of their loved ones. In general, a large establishment means that people feel depersonalised and anonymised. As I said, survey evidence indicates that they do not know who to turn to for help because they feel anonymous and forgotten. Lastly, a really important but general point is the dominance of prisoner culture. As a manager, if you have a prison of 400 you can imprint that culture a lot more effectively because staff know their prisoners, and prisoners know the staff who are looking after them. In a large prison, the economies come about by moving staff all over the place; consequently, there is not the continuity of personal relationship that John Podmore spoke about in your earlier session.
John Howell
How do you respond to the Secretary of State’s suggestion that there is no pattern to the rise in self-inflicted deaths?
Andrew Neilson
I was at the session where he gave evidence on this in the inquiry into the role of the Lord Chancellor. I heard him say that there was a parallel rise in suicides in the community. If there had been a rise of almost 70% in suicides in the community in the space of a year, it would be on the front page of every newspaper, so I do not think that is something that can really stand up. We have seen a really shocking and very sudden reversal, after years of progress on suicide reduction in prisons. Given that it has taken place at the same time as we have seen the impact of 30% staffing cuts, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is some kind of link.
Dr Edgar
I would also point to the concern about changes to the IEP system. We know that the first period of custody is a high-risk time for suicide and self-harm. There is consistent evidence on that. Logically, making that period of adjustment more difficult for people would put them at greater risk, so there is concern about the way people are received into custody.
John Howell
To take it up a level, how can self-harm, suicide and violence prevention in prisons be improved?
Dr Edgar
The first thing is please keep those separate. The factors behind suicide are different from those behind self-harm, and the factors behind both of those are very different from the concern about prison violence. Perhaps I should talk first about prison violence. Here again, I cannot over-emphasise the importance of prison staff. If you appreciate that currently there are more people dealing drugs on wings than there are prison officers, you can understand that there is potential for wings to become criminogenic—to become areas in which crime flourishes. Where prisoners are not protected from theft, exploitation and intimidation, they turn to more defensive means of protecting themselves, by which I mean weapons and a greater willingness to fight to protect their interests. Officers are the first line of defence against that kind of atmosphere of trench warfare, if you will. For officers to be effective, they need to be present in sufficient numbers. If an officer hears two people arguing, hears threats and intervenes, that may—in fact, probably will—prevent a fight. I remind you that that fight will mean that officers are called away from duties in rehabilitation. Later they will have to testify at an adjudication in front of the governor. Almost certainly, the police will be called in to investigate the circumstances, and it may sit in front of an independent adjudicator—a judge. I am just drawing your attention to the fact that that one violent incident costs a lot of money. If we are looking to save money, it would make more sense to bring in more officers, so that they could be better prepared or better equipped to prevent violence. Going back to that officer, if they are the only officer on the wing who is in direct contact with prisoners, it is really difficult to expect them to go down and challenge the two people who are shouting at each other. It is far more likely that they will look after their welfare, as the only person operating on that wing, and step away until there is a fight they need to respond to. I really hope we are not moving towards a prison in which people feel they need weapons in order to look after their safety, or in which prisoners feel that staff will not look after their interests.
Imtiaz Amin
Kimmett rightly talks about the differences between the violence that occurs and the suicides that happen; they require a different approach. The one thing that should bring all of these together is having robust enough means of reporting any issues that arise. In most of the complaints we view, there is a small percentage in which the complainant talks about feeling that they have suicidal tendencies. Going back to what Kimmett said, there is simply nobody who is equipped to deal with a lot of the issues that are facing the offender at the time. A robust complaints system is another means of doing that.
John Howell
Mr Amin, the inspectorate found that a number of establishments had violence reduction strategies. To what extent have those become standard practice?
Imtiaz Amin
We see very little effect on the ground, to be honest. The policies are there, but there is very little happening on the ground in terms of their being followed through. Nowadays there is a reliance on technology, which very few understand. Training itself has become online, so there is very little monitoring of who is doing the training and, therefore, who is equipped with the knowledge to deal with any issues of violence that occur, or the variations of violence. That is pretty much what we have seen in our experience.
Dr Edgar
I agree that it is mixed. Some prisons have appreciated the need to protect all prisoners from antisocial behaviour and aggression. Others take an approach that leads staff simply to look out for the worst offenders. I was in a prison with about 1,200 prisoners. In any given month, there would probably be about 100 assaults, as an estimate. They had four people on an anti-bullying programme. You can see from the numbers that there is no way that identifying four individuals was having an important impact on the assaults that were happening on the wings. Where violence reduction is effective, it is through consultation with prisoners and involving prisoners as violence reduction reps. I was in Bullingdon prison, which had violence reduction reps who were known on each wing, just as the listeners are. Any prisoner could go to the violence reduction rep and discuss their problems with them. But there is a huge range in the way violence reduction reps are trained or made use of. I go back to saying that it is not consistent across the piece.
Andrew Neilson
There are also signs that the cuts to staffing are having an impact on what progress has been made. Just today the inspectorate published a report on Cookham Wood young offenders institution. It says that the inspectorate saw very good violence reduction strategies and procedures in place in the prison in previous inspections, but those seem to have fallen away in the most recent inspection. Indeed, the main finding of the report is the prevalence of violence and the problems that are arising.
John McDonnell
Coming on to working prisons, how is current prison work fundamentally different from the Howard League’s concept of real wages for real work? To what do you put down the slow progress of the roll-out of working prisons?
Andrew Neilson
It is very different from our original conception of real work in prison, which was unashamedly radical. We were talking about prisoners being employed by businesses on the outside, more or less full time, being paid the going rate for the job in the community and paying tax and national insurance. We achieved that for a brief period in a project of our own at Coldingley prison—a graphic design studio called Barbed. We did a lot of work on this issue with the Conservative shadow Bench in opposition, and it was reflected in the Conservative manifesto. We also did a lot of work on the issue with the Ministry of Justice in the early days of the coalition. It foundered on a number of things. The biggest thing it foundered on was the reality of funding. I am sorry to go back to it, but we had a situation where the Department had to make cuts. In the end, the decision was made that the cuts would be on regime and staffing, rather than on trying to reduce the size of the prison population. Straight away that started to make it very difficult just to get prisoners out of cells, before we even got to conversations about how you got businesses in and paying the going rate, and how you worked that in terms of competition with the community. We did a lot of work on that and published a report called “Business behind bars” looking at all of those issues. They are all very difficult issues in and of themselves, but when you say right at the beginning, “We are looking to cut staff,” you cannot get the guys out of the cells to do that kind of work. We are struggling to get prisoners out to do even what work is going on in prison. I can go into great detail—I can certainly write to the Committee to go through all the other issues—but that was the problem front and centre. Even if we were going to come to some kind of compromise on what real work means—whether a working prison was going to be the Howard League’s ideal or some kind of more pragmatic Ministry of Justice version—we just saw a shift in priority. Working prisons were seen as a priority. Then about two years ago, we stopped hearing about working prisons and started to hear about transforming rehabilitation. The focus moved to through-the-gate and resettlement, and not what happens when people are actually spending years inside. We have seen that reflected in inspectorate reports, where purposeful activity measures have just bottomed out. That is very disappointing, given that the Conservative party in opposition published a report called “Prisons with a Purpose.” Purposeful activity is not something that is happening now in our prisons.
Dr Edgar
Picking up on Andrew’s point about purposeful activity, I think it is important that, given the current concerns about funding and so forth, prisons look to other ways of employing prisoners, by which I mean prisoners as volunteers. There are options in some prisons for prisoners to work as volunteers. Listeners are an example I have used before. There is Toe by Toe mentoring, and there are prisoner representatives on various committees. There is a huge range of ways that prisoners can be involved actively in the running of their prison and can contribute to the prison community. They are not being fully exploited by prisons, by which I mean that sometimes I have been speaking to a prisoner and have found out that he is the diversity rep, the listener, a drug treatment mentor and, at the same time, a tutor on another programme. That means that he is lucky to be doing four, but there are three prisoners sitting in their cells who could have been doing that. I will make one last point. This is a lesson that I took away from Brixton prison; I hope it is to the point. It is about ROTL. When ROTL is decided strictly on risk grounds, you will almost never let anybody out the door. What Brixton was doing was interviewing the prisoners who were interested in ROTL about what their interests were. In that way, they got placements that matched the person’s own enthusiasm and interests and the things that motivated them. If I was going out to a job painting railings, I would not look at that as a long-term career, but if I had an interest in antique books and got a placement in a bookshop, I might just stay with it because the activity that was provided engaged with my interests. That is something we need to look at more. Broadening purposeful activity to include voluntary activities can do that.
John McDonnell
Is there any evidence that the changes with regard to release on temporary licence have had any detrimental effect on release and resettlement?
Dr Edgar
The interesting thing about release on temporary licence is how amazingly successful it is. Prisoners who have been institutionalised—I can talk for a long time about what that means—come out still more dependent than they were when they went in. This is the one way that they can gradually acquire the skills that we all take for granted. In effect, it is working really well. I say that knowing that there were three high-profile disasters, but, overall, the overwhelming proportion of releases on temporary licence are successful. It certainly does not need the heavy security measures of tagging or anything like that. As John said in the earlier session, what it needs is personal contact to make sure that the person is supported in their time out.
John McDonnell
Have the changes had an impact?
Andrew Neilson
Yes, I think they have. I do not want to make light of what happened over the summer, but if the particular high-profile case had not had a nickname, we might not have seen half the amount of media coverage that we did; “skull cracker” was very media friendly. That is unfortunate, because it clouded totally the overall trend that we see, which is that the number of absconds has gone down. It is not the problem that it would appear to be if you were reading about just those high-profile cases. The Ministry of Justice was under a lot of pressure, and I can understand why they felt the need to act, but one problem that is happening is that if you are a high-risk prisoner in closed conditions, for example, you cannot get ROTL now. That creates a kind of Catch-22 position, because the assessment of your high risk will have been done earlier, and you may no longer be high risk. At least, there should be some way you can challenge that. My understanding is that even when governors want to look at putting a high-risk prisoner out on ROTL, when they talk to the probation service it is not interested in reassessing the risk. The probation service will do that only once they are in the community and under probation supervision, at which point probation feel they can assess the risk. That creates a Catch-22, because if you are a high-risk prisoner in closed conditions you cannot get ROTL, which may be important in terms of moving you towards release. You can see the problem that starts to develop.
Mr Llwyd
I should declare an interest—I am a member of the Howard League and have previously advised on an inquiry. How should prison officer training be adapted to accommodate recent changes in prison policies?
Dr Edgar
I would point to two areas where, again and again, prison officers tell me they would benefit. One is mental health. I say that with reservations, because currently far too many people with mental health problems unnecessarily go to prison when diversion could be improved. Having said that, we are never going to get away from the world in which people in prison have mental health problems. Officers are not at all well equipped to deal with them. They do an amazing job, but they are not trained well to work with people with mental health problems. There is a programme called mental health first aid. Its aim is to enable somebody without specialism to recognise somebody who needs to be considered by somebody with specialist knowledge—a psychiatrist or psychologist—so there are programmes out there. That is the first issue. The second is conflict resolution. Quite a few prison officers talk to me about conflict resolution and say that in their work on the wings it would be invaluable if they knew a bit more about the basic principles of working with conflict. I should add that one of the main areas in which race relations are complicated is that a prisoner may perceive that the officer is racist, which creates a conflict that neither side knows how to resolve or work through, certainly not within the current systems.
Andrew Neilson
I will be a little bit more radical, just to remind us of the Norwegian model that Mr Podmore mentioned in the last session. I was in Norway earlier this year, for the second time. Basically, what we see in Norway very much emphasises the rightness of the Committee’s previous recommendations about the role of the prison officer. I understand what Mr Wheatley said about a review perhaps being an unnecessary delay, but there needs to be some kind of fundamental look at the role. In Norway, there is effectively a prison officer college to which all staff go. It is a two-year degree, one year theoretical and one year practical. When I was there this year, there was talk of lengthening the degree by another year. Talking to any officer, wherever they are, in a Norwegian prison, you certainly see the impact it has in terms of confidence and knowledge, and the difference that it makes for them.
Imtiaz Amin
There needs to be some training around social awareness, or the prison officer needs to demonstrate some relationship in a previous job to a social awareness role. Understanding the offenders you are looking after and some of the backgrounds they come from is crucial to developing a level of respect between the two, which is a key to success.
Mr Llwyd
That begs my next question, Mr Amin. Do you support the suggestion that prison officers should receive more training focused on Islamic beliefs, as opposed to diversity per se?
Imtiaz Amin
Prison officers need to be trained across the board on equalities. There is a concern around Muslim offenders and lack of understanding of them, but it is as much about resources within the prison. Many of the complaints that we get are deemed racism by the complainant, but on the other hand they are very much a resource issue—not being able to manage the population properly because there is not enough room. For example, what do you do if the room for Friday prayer can hold only 300 but you have 500 who want to go to prayers? They are then told to pray in their cells, and a plethora of complaints are submitted: “Because I am Muslim, I am not allowed to go to prayers.” We see a similar lack of understanding around disabilities. One case that comes to mind is a complaint about disability that was submitted through the discrimination incident report form. It was referred back to the health care centre with the comment, “This has got nothing to do with us.” I would say that it is an issue across the board.
Andrew Neilson
We are also seeing a detrimental step that relates both to that question and to the last one. Because of staff shortages, particularly in the south-east of England, where they are finding it difficult to recruit, we are seeing a massive increase in the use of detached duty. You see staff being parachuted into prisons for a week. If they are new staff from the north coming down to the south-east, there are often lots of issues. One is that it has an impact on staff-prisoner relations, because they are not really of the prison for very long—it is all very temporary. There may also be issues with white, northern, working-class young men being sent down briefly to staff prisons that are very different in terms of their ethnic mix. There is an issue of whether they will necessarily be very able—particularly because they are only there for a week—to get themselves into the right mindset to interact properly with those prisoners.
Mr Llwyd
I have one brief, specific question for Dr Edgar. What evidence is there to support your view that succession planning, training and the development of leadership and management skills in the Prison Service are not as strong as they once were?
Dr Edgar
Good question. Our concern with succession and so forth is that the management structure is such that prison governors move on far too quickly and, therefore, what is good practice in the prison does not get embedded. Frankly, if I were an officer working in a prison and the governor brought in measures I didn’t approve of, I would outwait him; he is only going to be there for a little while and then he is off again. That is too frequent a problem with managing prisons. We have statistics that I can send in about the turnover of managers in senior positions, but it points to a problem if the tone of an establishment comes from the top and it keeps changing. In the last couple of weeks, I was in a prison where the deputy governor and governor had changed twice in the last year, and there is a current acting governor who will not be permanent. When that happens, the prison as a whole has to run rather like an orchestra without a conductor; it does not have that lead from the top. That is our concern.
Mr Llwyd
That chimes with what the previous panel said in their evidence. How effectively does the prisoner complaints system operate? Does the operation require a possible rethink in the light of restrictions to prisoners’ ability to report because legal aid is no longer available?
Andrew Neilson
I would agree with the views of the Joint Committee on Human Rights when they looked at this in the light of the legal aid proposals and said that the complaints mechanism was overstretched and inadequate. That is sadly the case. The prisons and probation ombudsman has a massive case backlog. One assumes that more will be expected of the PPO because of the legal aid changes, but there is no evidence that they are getting any additional resources to deal with that. Beyond that, there are prisoners who cannot easily engage with a complaints process because of their vulnerabilities. Children in secure custody are meant to have advocates, but our understanding is that advocates see a child only for something like three minutes a week, so there is not a lot of time to get to the bottom of any issues. Prisoners with mental health problems—even prisoners just with literacy problems—may find it difficult to engage with the existing complaints mechanisms. Then there is the problem of its being overstretched and there being a backlog, which brings up the issue of timing. It may take months or even years to resolve a complaint. If your complaint is about re-categorisation, or challenging something that happened to you in terms of unlawful use of force or being asked to move from closed to open conditions, and it is going to take months or years to resolve, you are starting to move into the area of its being academic by the time you finally get some kind of decision. There is a real danger that in the end the complaints system, by its very nature, cannot offer immediate remedy for some people who need it.
Chair
I turn to a final point. In 2011 NOMS reported that Muslim chaplains were beginning to deliver faith awareness courses. Have you had the opportunity to assess whether they have had an impact and whether they have assisted in dealing with radicalisation issues? Mr Amin? No? There is no collective knowledge here on this. We will look for it from another source. Thank you very much indeed for your help this morning. We are very grateful. Oral evidence: Prisons: planning and policies, HC 309 4