June 2005 Issue 86
INDEPENDENT
MONITOR
THE ASSOCIATION OF MEMBERS OF INDEPENDENT MONITORING BOARDS
Mental health guide
Drugs and detox
Anne Owers interviewed
IMBs in the dock
Recalls on the increase
Offender management update
EDITORIAL
CONTENTS
T
A new prisons minister . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 3
IMBs in the dock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 4
Eric Allison
Escapism: prison films . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 5
Sean O’Sullivan
Communicating better . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 6
Angela Clay
AMIMB news and correspondence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 7
Anne Owers interviewed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 8
Mad or bad? The Monitor guide to mental health . . . . . . . . . . .page 10
Prisons ombudsman: getting a taste of canteen culture . . . . . .page 12
Stephen Shaw
The history of AMBoV part 4: Early struggles . . . . . . . . . . . .page 13
Rod Morgan
Detox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 15
David Marteau
The prisoners’ voice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 16
Peter Stewart
IMBspeak on drugs in prison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 17
Books: David Wilson, Bob Turney, Tessa West . . . . . . . . . . . .page 18
Europe’s shame at Ebensee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 20
Vivien Stern
Recalls on the increase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 21
Enver Solomon
HMCIP reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 23
Helen Banks
Offender management roundup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 24
Prison education failing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 26
Election musings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 26
Lou Lockhart-Mummery
Health concerns over immigration detainees . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 27
Sarah Cutler
Intermittent custody, Segregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 27
Last word . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .page 28
he photo shows your
editor masquerading as
the gaolor of Ely in
Cambridgeshire. The prison,
now a museum and well worth a
visit, was closed in 1836 after a
visit from the Inspector of
Prisons. He said I was ‘old,
respectable but physically
incompetent after thirty-four
years of service.’ Sounds right,
and as a result the Bishop of Ely
also lost his authority to act as a
judge.
The Ely cells, and the exercise
yard with its rough brick trough
the only source of water for the
gaol, were stark reminders of
how bad things were. But as
ever, events in our prisons now
warn us how near we are to
barbarism.
Overcrowding, which reminds us that we have replaced
slopping out with making prisoners live in toilets – 16,000 of them
doubled up – is a theme in this issue of the Monitor. The interview
with Anne Owers, and Stephen Shaw’s piece, hint at abuse and
rumours of worse.
We can read here of the many ex-prisoners so failed by the
system that they are recalled to prison while still on licence; of
young people demonised by ASBOs and the language of hate; of
immigration detainees who don’t get proper medical treatment; of
prisoners failed by inadequate educational provision.
But Vivien Stern and Rod Morgan remind us how far we have
come in humanitarian terms. And that returns us to our present
task as independent monitors. One way to prepare for that task is
to arm ourselves with information. The articles about mental
health and detox are examples.
Another salutary lesson is to see ourselves as others see us. You
don’t have to agree with Eric Allison to take seriously his perhaps
jaundiced view of our work. But throughout this Monitor, as well as
the bad, there are examples of good things that we can draw on, that
can inspire us.
Association of Members of Independent Monitoring Boards
Membership of AMIMB is open to serving members of IMBs at prison
establishments in England and Wales. AMIMB represents board members
by presenting their views wherever they need to be known. AMIMB
campaigns for change, both through its own efforts and by liaising with other
groups, including via the Penal Affairs Consortium. Membership of
AMIMB allows board members to have a say in the direction of boards and
penal policy generally. Associate membership is open to anyone interested in
penal affairs.
The annual subscription of £17.50 should be paid to the Treasurer.
PatronThe Right Hon, The Lord Woolf, Lord Chief Justice
President Baroness Vivien Stern
Chair
Don Granger (Hull)
3 Peaseholme, Hessle, E Yorks HU13 0HY
Phone 01482 648170
Email [email protected]
Treasurer
Derek Ainley (Leeds)
1 Savile Heath, Manor Heath Road, Halifax, HX3 0BG
Phone 01422 368233
Email [email protected]
2
Independent Monitor • June 2005
Registered charity number 293384
Independent Monitor Editor
Brian Guthrie (Wayland)
Field House, Thrandeston, Diss, Norfolk IP21 4BU
Phone 01379 783678 Fax 01379 783865 Email [email protected]
Other committee members
David Atkinson (Dovegate) [email protected]
Helen Banks, vice-chair (North Sea Camp) [email protected]
Jenny Budgell (Ashfield) [email protected]
Angela Clay (East Sutton Park) [email protected]
Patricia Kanter (Holloway) [email protected]
Lou Lockhart-Mummery (Portland) [email protected]
John Melton, secretary (Moorland) [email protected]
Norman Simpson (Wayland) [email protected]
David Waters (Long Lartin) [email protected]
Michael Watson (Preston) [email protected]
Views expressed in the Independent Monitor are not necessarily those of
AMIMB
Independent Monitor is designed by BCPublications, and
printed by Micropress Printers Ltd, Halesworth, Suffolk
ISSN 1746–1197
POLITICS
A new prisons minister
Paul Goggins was the sixth prisons minister
in as many years. As he had the job for two
years, the rate of ministerial churn has
slowed a little. For no obvious reason he has
switched, post-election, to work on other
Home Office functions including animal
extremism.
In his place, another Home Office
minister, Fiona Mactaggart, has been given
the criminal justice system (including race,
victims and witnesses, inspection and IT),
criminal law, NOMS casework and restorative justice, criminal injuries compensation,
criminal case review, prostitution - oh, and
prisons. She is working (as parliamentary
under secretary) supporting Baroness
Patricia Scotland who has overall responsibility for, among other things, the National
Offender Management Service (including
prisons and probation).
There seems to be some uncertainty, still,
about the division of labour between the
two over prisons, but we do know that Fiona
Mactaggart is dealing with IMBs:
‘I look forward to working with IMB
members. You have a critical role in
observing, monitoring and understanding
our prisons. As a minister I cannot be in
every prison, yet I must account to parliament for what happens in our prisons. This
is one reason why I am grateful to you for
acting as eyes and ears for me and for the
public in our prison service.
‘The job of prison is to reduce reoffending. The challenge is to do that in a
decent, secure and efficient manner and to
ensure that when alternative approaches
such as a community penalty would work
better, that we use it.’
No surprises there then.
Fiona Mactaggart became MP for
Slough in May 1997. She has a BA in
English from Kings College, a postgraduate
teaching certificate from Goldsmiths
College and an MA in Education.
She was a primary school teacher in
London from 1987 to 1992, and from 1992
to 1997 lectured in primary education at the
HANSARD 23 May 2005
Prison (Rehabilitative Programmes)
11. Barbara Follett (Stevenage) (Lab): What research has his [sic]
Department conducted on the success rates of rehabilitative
programmes in prison?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home
Department (Fiona Mactaggart): Home Office research shows that
a lack of basic skills, drug addiction and poor problem solving are
significant risk factors for reoffending. We have used that research
to inform decisions on investment in prison programmes. Last year,
we increased the number of basic skills awards achieved by prisoners
by 36 per cent., doubled the number of prisoners completing drug
treatment programmes and increased by 13 per cent. the number of
independently accredited offending behaviour programmes. We
are currently conducting a programme of research to use
randomised control trials to evaluate programmes and further
improve the success rates of prison programmes.
Barbara Follett: I thank my hon. Friend for that reply and I am
pleased to hear about the progress that has been made in education
and re-education in prisons. However, like my hon. Friend the
Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman), I believe that more can
be done. In particular, I would like Ministers to examine the way in
which contracts are awarded, administered and fulfilled, because I
believe that if there was a little more flexibility, especially in the
administration of contracts, the success rate would be even higher.
Fiona Mactaggart: Making sure that such programmes work is one
of the challenges that will face the new National Offender
Management Service. The service will consider the way in which we
contract to produce programmes that work for those who are in
London Institute of Education.
She was General Secretary of the Joint
Council for the Welfare of Immigrants from
1982 to 86 and press and public relations
officer for the National Council for
Voluntary organisations in 1981. She
chaired Liberty from 1994 to 1996
She has taken up duties in the Commons
already, as this extract from Hansard
demonstrates.
detention or serving community sentences.
David T.C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con): Does the Minister believe
that the rehabilitation of young people at HMP Prescoed will be
helped by the Government’s decision to start to place sex offenders
in the same unit? Does she also believe that it is high time that the
Minister responsible for prisons honoured the promise made in
writing to me and the people of Usk not to place sex offenders in
that unit if they have more than six months to serve of their
sentence?
Fiona Mactaggart: That programme is under review. We are
determined to ensure that all offenders are kept in a way that is both
safe and rehabilitative. That presents a challenge in an overcrowded
prison system, but it is a challenge that we are determined to meet.
Mr. Neil Gerrard (Walthamstow) (Lab): To what extent is a
prisoner’s success in a rehabilitation programme taken into account
when decisions are being made on moving that prisoner to another
prison? I have come across cases in which someone who has been
doing well in a programme-perhaps a drugs treatment programmeis moved to another prison where the same programme is not
available, with the result that that person is in serious danger of
lapsing.
Fiona Mactaggart: My hon. Friend makes an important point. We
are trying to ensure that we have comparable, and therefore more
transferable, programmes across the prison estate. However, as I
said in reply to the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C.
Davies), the prison estate is overcrowded. As a result, we have to
move offenders, one of the consequences of which can be that
people are unable to complete behavioural programmes. We want
to avoid that wherever possible, but that will continue to be difficult
while our prisons remain as overcrowded as they are now.
Independent Monitor • June 2005
3
COMMENT
IMBs in the dock
Eric Allison has been out of
prison for over five years – his
longest time out for ages.
As the Guardian’s prisons
correspondent, he has recently
criticised IMBs. The Monitor
invited him to expand
It was around 1963 that I first became aware
that prisons had watchdogs to make sure
that prisoners were always treated fully in
accordance with prison rules. In those days,
they were known as the visiting magistrates
and, presumably, were all drawn from the
bench. Although I was a relatively militant
prisoner at that time, my protests were of the
conventional nature of the day: insubordination, refusal to obey orders that I
considered unreasonable, refusing to engage
in mind-numbing tasks, a spot of criminal
damage here and there, and expressing
subversive views to anyone prepared to
listen.
A couple of sentences later, around 1968,
I discovered that the adage ‘the pen is
mightier than the sword’ had more than a
ring of truth about it and switched my
modus operandi accordingly. It was then
that I began to make the acquaintance of
their worships on a regular basis. Sadly, the
relationship seemed doomed from the start.
We would usually meet in a workshop. They
would come in with a senior or principal
officer, who would bellow: ‘anyone for the
magistrates?’ A line – usually small – would
form and we cons would tell our troubles to
those whose duty it was to listen and act
upon said grievances.
And we had some grievances in those
4
Independent Monitor • June 2005
days. To list a few: the block was always
heaving; brutality from staff was an
everyday occurrence; adjudications were a
joke – a 100% conviction rate (no kidding,
nobody was ever acquitted); frequent racist
behaviour from staff who openly wore
National Front badges on their lapels – why
did their worships fail to see them?
I’m afraid that my first meeting with a
magistrate – out of court, as it were – did not
augur well for our future relationship. For a
start, the screw made no move to step out of
earshot and his worship seemed a bit put out
when I asked him to insist on privacy.
Putting my misgivings aside, I trotted out
my grievance. The beak noted my remarks
in his book and assured me that he would
take the matter up and get back to me with
an answer.
Never saw the chap again, despite my
spending the next three years in that particular nick – Strangeways. I quickly learned
that the no show was par for their worships’
course. Next week, or fortnight: a new face
at the workshop door. I played the game for
a while, then tired of giving them credibility.
Down the block
The only other times I came across them
was when I was down the block for being,
allegedly – and no charges were laid against
me – against the good order and discipline
of the prison (and do you know, I’ve just
realised for the first time the irony of that
GOAD). Then they would glance in the
cell, mumble something and exit rapidly,
presumably to sign the authority to keep me
down there a while longer. Of course, our
paths crossed again on a couple of adjudications – when my perceived sins were
considered too serious for the governor
to deal with. They nicked 96 days off me
on one occasion; can’t recall the result
on the other – but it certainly wouldn’t
have been a not guilty.
Criticism of IMBs
In March, following Paul Day’s death in
the Wandsworth seg, Eric Allison had this
to say towards the end of a long Guardian
piece criticising segregation: ‘the boards are
not seen as independent, and they do little
monitoring. A new body must be put in
place that does not owe allegiance to the
Prison Service that it is supposed to
monitor.’ Your views are welcome.
Although I was a serial complainer, I
seldom made a fuss about my own
treatment. As a professional criminal, I was
something of a volunteer of course, and
took the view: ‘if you can’t do the time, don’t
do the crime’. That was far from the position
of most of my fellow travellers though. Even
in those far off days, I was often enraged at
the way staff treated some of those poor
souls. I recall one lad in particular, a difficult
prisoner due to his mental state, who spent a
lot of time down the block. He undoubtedly
created problems for inmates and officers
alike. To take one example, he moaned and
screamed throughout the day and night and
whenever the magistrates were down he
would turn up the volume. I wish I had a
tenner for every time I heard a beak enquire
of an officer: ‘what’s the matter with him?’
He would seem satisfied with a reply along
the lines: ‘oh, he makes a fuss whenever
somebody comes near the door; quiet as a
mouse most of the time’. Then the conversation would turn to gardening, or holidays
and off their worships would toddle, leaving
the wretched soul to his tormented
existence.
Reform?
The years went by. The visiting magistrates
became the board of visitors. The name
change didn’t seem to increase their esteem
in the eyes of prisoners. Of course, you met a
decent one or two along the way, and
prisons were improving generally. But not,
it seemed to me, as a result of pressure from
reformers. I’ve long held the view that
reform usually comes from the bottom.
(The card player holding four aces will
seldom ask for a new deal.)
Then, on April Fools Day1990, came the
Strangeways riot and the Woolf inquiry that
followed. His Lordship, along with much of
public opinion, was appalled to learn of the
dreadful conditions that prisoners endured
in the Manchester jail. The question was
then asked, many times: ‘where were the
watchdogs when all this dreadful abuse was
going on?’
The Woolf Report was published, I
remember, at a time when I was crossing
swords with a particularly inept and most
unobservant board at Brixton.We all
thought that it heralded a new dawn in
penal affairs. (That nice Mr Howard was
soon to put the mockers on that notion.)
Among other suggested reforms, boards
were to lose their powers of adjudication; a
measure which, in fairness, I think few of
them objected to.
As a prisoner, I had little to do with the
new body after that. I did time, including
the last four years of the 1990s, but I spent
most of it in two fairly civilised jails and had
little to complain about. Again, in fairness,
PRISON FILMS
those members of the BoV that I did come
across seemed decent people. But then
again, I met more decent prison officers on
my last two sentences than at any time
during a long penal career. Yet I’m of the
positive opinion that a minority of prison
staff are still abusing prisoners dreadfully and a lot of those decent officers must be
aware of the abuse.
Escapism?
And now?
to explore the significance of
Decent board members must have been
stung by my recent criticism in the
Guardian. I make no apology for my harsh
words, and this is why.
During the last year or so, I have attended
and reported a number of inquests into
deaths in prisons. Juries have heard quite
dreadful accounts of the way that most of
the deceased suffered prior to their deaths. I
have spoken to bereaved mothers, fathers,
sisters and brothers who were rightly
appalled at the circumstances surrounding
the deaths.
They asked the questions and I pass them
on to members now.
■ Where was the board when a 16-yearold boy - whose body was covered in the
scars of self-mutilation - was forced to wear
a ‘suicide garment’ the rough, sack-like state
of which caused jury members to weep
when it was passed around for their inspection?
■ Where was the board when women on
open 2052 self harm forms were put into
segregation units instead of prison
hospitals?
■ Where was the board, at the same jail,
when a former suicide and self-harm coordinator told a jury that many of her
colleagues took the view (and I quote
verbatim): ‘If prisoners want to hang themselves, what right have we to stop them?’ It’s
not about a right; they have a duty, a duty of
care.
■ Where were the boards, at two dispersal
prisons, when prisoners went to the
dreadful extreme of daubing their bodies
and cells with their excrement for weeks on
end? Did they ask those prisoners why they
were going down such an awful road? If they
did, they may have got the same answer that
a County Durham inquest jury heard:
‘That it was to prevent further abuse from
staff.’
I could go on and on. I have attended far
too many inquests.
There is no doubt in my mind that many
boards contain many fine people. My point
is that abuses such as I have listed (and
which successive inquest juries have
endorsed by their verdicts) could not have
taken place if the watchdogs had been
watching and barking.
prison movies. Sean O’Sullivan
The June Monitor introduced the
Prison Film Project – an attempt
brings us up to date
Screenings of prison films, and discussions
of their relevance, have featured such penal
luminaries as Norwich governor Jerry
Knight, ex-prisoner and author Bob Turney,
the Howard League’s Fran Russell, Andrew
Coyle of the International Centre for Prison
Studies, Jamie Bennett (then of Gartree
prison) and Erwin James (prison diarist for
the Guardian).
The reaction of the panellists and the
audience was interesting. Jamie Bennett, a
serving deputy governor, seemed most
sceptical. He felt that the reality of prison
was that there were more successfully
completed programmes to help prisoners
confront their offending behaviour than
there were violent assaults on prisoners –
yet prison films, including Shawshank
Redemption, invariably portray the violence
with less emphasis on the constructive work
prison staff do.
Erwin James provided a different view of
the film and spoke engagingly about how he
had come to watch Shawshank for the first
time as a serving life-sentenced prisoner.
Erwin recalled being ‘blown away’ by the
power of the film. Interestingly members of
the audience who had not seen the film
before reported that they found it
‘upsetting’.
So what?
Of course the sceptic might still ask: ‘What’s
all this got to do with penal reform?’ How, if
at all, might discussions of cinematic prisons
influence people’s understandings of real-
Bad Girls
world incarceration? Recent work done for
the Rethinking Crime and Punishment
initiative has confirmed what has long been
suspected about the extent to which the
general public are misinformed about
prison. Research shows that in part the
demand for more punitive responses to
crime stems from the extent to which the
public overestimates the extent of crime but
also underestimates the severity of current
sentencing practice.There is clearly a need
to correct public misperceptions and to
inform the public about the nature of
offences, the sentences offenders receive and
the costs of various sentencing alternatives.
But, although it can be shown that a more
informed public may be less punitive, information alone is not enough. We need to
influence what people feel about offenders
and offending behaviour if we are to dispel
common myths and build support for alternatives to prison .
It is perhaps here that prison films come
into their own. The prevailing trend in
media representation of crime is towards a
caricature of offenders as callous, remorseless and selfish individuals. Criminals tend
to be reduced to nothing more than the
crimes they have committed. One thinks
here of the iconic representations of Myra
Hindley, the mugshot photos of Thompson
and Venables or media portrayals of Harold
Shipman and Ian Huntley. Offenders are
further caricatured in a whole host of
crime/policing ‘reality’ tv shows which
compete to feature the world’s dumbest
criminals caught on tape.
In contrast, prison film (and also television drama) often portray offenders as
people with a life before and after their
offences, and with the potential to change.
They do raise issues about why people
offend and how, if at all, prison addresses
their offending behaviour. Such dramatic
representations are obviously part of the
imaginative resources available to the public
to help them make sense of prison. Penal
reformers could do more to investigate the
educative potential of these products and to
consider how their latent value could be
activated. Staging film screenings, either to
the general public or within a prison environment, followed by debate with
representation from both sides of the
prisoner/staff divide, could be a novel and
challenging way of investigating differences
in perceptions and attitudes. If a picture
paints a thousand words, remember that a
film runs at 24 frame a second.
Rethinking Crime and Punishment:
www.rethinking.org.uk
The Prison Film Project:
www.theprisonfilmproject.com
jc2m - Prisons and Media - Special Issue www.jc2m.co.uk/Issue3.htm
Independent Monitor • June 2005
5
MONITORING NEWS
Communicating better
The IMB secretariat, at the
bidding of the national council,
has set up a working group to
review communications.
Angela Clay of East Sutton Park,
also on the AMIMB executive
committee, is part of the group.
She sums up progress so far
We are fortunate to have a system which
actively encourages fairness and transparency within our prisons and
immigration removal centres. The UK
IMBs are the envy of many other countries.
It is a fact, though, that within the UK the
majority of the general public have little idea
of who IMBs are and what they do. The
media are not much better informed and
even some who work in prisons don’t really
understand our role.
Many changes have taken place over the
past two years, most noticeably the change
to Independent Monitoring Boards, but
equally important is the amalgamation of
boards monitoring prisons and immigration removal centres. These changes were
the background to the National Council’s
decision to go for a communications review.
The COI conclusions
External consultants, COI Communications, were engaged to carry out initial
Membership
At the beginning of this year IMB
members were invited to apply for places
on the working party. The seven IMB
members selected were chosen to give as
wide a representation as possible:
■ Juliette Bijoux, Tinsley House
■ Paul Tuddenham, Ranby
■ Frank Blake, Wealstun
■ Peter Johnson, Portland
■ Michael Davis, Hindley
■ David Graham, The Mount(National
Council)
■ Angela Clay, East Sutton Park.
Clare Batt (IMB Secretariat Communications Officer) and Norman McLean
(Head of the Secretariat) completed the
team which first met in March. The COI
conclusions were to be addressed.
6
Independent Monitor • June 2005
research. IMB members were involved from
the outset, attending workshops at last year’s
annual conference, completing questionnaires and talking to COI staff. The COI
concluded that the current IMB membership does not reflect the prison population:
1% of members are under 30 and 60% over
60. Only 8% of members are from minority
ethnic groups. Independent monitoring
needs to:
■ establish and project its identity and
image
■ recruit enough volunteers
■ retain volunteers
■ diversify the profile of volunteers.
Our initial objectives
The following objectives were agreed at the
first meeting:
■ raise awareness of the IMB role with the
public and the media
■ improve recruitment and retention
■ raise the profile among prison and IRC
staff
■ promote better understanding among
prisoners and detainees
■ improve
communication
among
existing IMBs.
Some of these would be achieved by
looking at the following areas.
■ Much of the IMB material such as
leaflets and posters is uninspiring; for
example, the dots on the logo are confusing.
Completely new badging would have been a
first choice but realistically this would be too
expensive as it would entail replacing the
high volume of materials currently in use.
But it will be possible to change colours and
wording on some of the leaflets and posters.
It is proposed to design a new leaflet which
would explain clearly who we are and what
we do. The idea would be to encourage
further interest and would be available as a
handout at events, in libraries, council
offices and doctors’ surgeries.
■ Application packs should be more
encouraging and interesting. Possibilities
being considered include an application of
the appointments process (maybe with a
rough timescale) and more information
about what being an IMB member is like on
a day to day basis. New members have been
asked to contribute ideas and comment on
their experiences of the recruitment/
appointments process.
■ An eye catching, easy to understand
poster is a good way to get a message across.
One suggestion was to feature ‘the application’ and show a photograph of prisoner and
Board member with text saying ‘could you
help or ‘what would you do?
■ IMB News needs to be more interactive
with a better mix of articles from Board
Members.
■ 2005 is the Year of The Volunteer and
the IMB could organise a national event,
maybe in October which is the designated
month for community projects. Individual
boards may wish to do something on a local
basis. Using this month as a hook, we hope
to persuade national and local newspapers
to publish features on the work of IMBs. We
hope to do the same in various minority
ethnic publications.
A ‘strap line’ such as Ensuring fairness for
those in custody or Upholding fairness and
humanity for those in custody could
reinforce our identity, bearing in mind that
this would apply to Boards in prisons as well
as IRCs.
Communications amont current IMBs
could be improved by using email where
possible. The number of members who
have access is increasing rapidly. This may,
in time, save a small forest by stopping some
of the duplication of mail posted out from
the Secretariat.
Secure pages on the IMB website would
allow selective downloading of material.
Hitting the target
Who are our target audiences?
■ Members of the public
■ The media
■ Potential recruits
■ Existing Board members
■ Prisoners and detainees
■ Staff
■ Ministers
How can we reach them?
■ Talks to schools and groups within the
community by board members about their
role within the local establishment.
AMIMB has produced a presentation pack
which all boards should have received. This
is a comprehensive guide and model script
together with booking letters. The pack is
just a guide and case studies will give a local
flavour. Speaker training may be available.
MONITORING NEWS
■ Contact local employers as they may be
keen to support their staff in community
projects.
■ Speak to your local radio stations: they
will probably be very pleased for you to talk
about voluntary work that is just a bit
different
■ Send news releases/articles to local newspapers and magazines and if relevant, to
ministers.
■ Organise a road show. This could be a
static display using photos and text touring
local schools, churches and council offices
or conferences and open days. A display
stand is available from the Secretariat but
other arrangements such as hiring or
borrowing from local volunteer bureaux
may be more practical.
■ If your board does not already do so,
invite new staff to attend part of your
monthly Board meeting. Be seen around
your establishment. Prisoners are more
likely to talk to a familiar face. Display your
photographs and names. Personalise IMB
leaflets.
AMIMB success
Dodgy statistics?
Monday 14 March was a big day for
AMIMB. Committee room 3 in the House
of Lords was the venue for the launch of
both our Guide to Monitoring Prisons and
the Presentation Pack. In a splendidly
panelled room overlooking the Thames, a
sprinkling of lords, commoners, penal types
and IMB members reviewed both
documents and discussed related topics. It
was a very useful occasion all round.
Since then the Guide has been particularly well received. A dozen more peers and
two MPs have asked for copies; the visiting
committees for Scotland have bought 25
copies; the governor of a lifer prison asked
for 30 copies; the governor of a high security
prison has distributed them to his fellow
governors; Stephen Shaw wrote (in a letter
to AMIMB chair, Don Granger) that the
Guide ‘will prove very useful in this office
too.’ And most important, individual board
members have already written to say that
they value it and some boards have asked for
additional copies for training.
Dear editor
The August 2004 report of the Prison
Reform Trust (featured in the October
Monitor) stated: ‘In North Yorkshire,
Northallerton Young Offenders prison was
the country’s second most violent prison
with a serious assault rate of 6.24%.’ As
Chairman of the IMB, I found this to be a
shocking piece of information, because if
this was the case then surely we would (a) be
aware of the fact, (b) be investigating these
assaults in some depth and (c) have included
our concerns/findings in our Annual
Report of May 2004.
On investigation I found that in the
period included in the report there were 11
assaults – nine black eyes, one chipped tooth
and one case, though not life threatening,
requiring hospital treatment. The percentage figure was obviously worked out on
our average prison population of 214, when
during that period the prison had 1,691
prisoners through the gates. This gives a
percentage of 0.65%.
While there is absolutely no way that the
Northallerton Board would find any level of
violence acceptable, this particular misinterpretation of facts sent out a thoroughly
erroneous message which local and regional
journalists were quick to seize on.
The governor and I spent quite some
time talking to the media to put the record
straight and preventing a dip in staff moral.
I did, of course, write to Juliet Lyon, the
Director of the PRT, on 20 August
2004.The reply I received, dated 15
December, stated: ‘The figures which are
listed in Appendix A were supplied by the
Prison Service Planning Group, and are
therefore official Prison Service Data.’ No
responsibility there then.
In further correspondence to Ms Lyon,
dated 11 March 2005, I suggested that as it
was their publication, some reponsibility for
the distress and frustration caused to the
Northallerton staff must remain with them
and surely their own credibility must rest on
their accuracy.To date, no reply
On the recommendation of Ms Lyon I
wrote to Ms L Emmanuel, Performance
Analysis Section, Prison Service Planning
Group on 13 March 2005. I enclosed my
original letter to the PRT and asked for
comments regarding the misleading picture
and how any repeat can be avoided. To date,
I have not had the courtesy of a reply.
In the absence of any response from Ms
Emmanuel, one can only asuume that a
repeat cannot be avoided. Northallerton
was the first victim of muddled figures.
Who next? You have been warned.
Jacqueline Wells
Chairman Northallerton YOI IMB
Next
The Communications Review working
group plans to meet on a monthly basis over
the rest of 2005 when it will be decided
whether to continue working together,
change focus or change members. The
viability and cost of having a professional
PR strategy for IMBs at both national and
local level will also be considered.
For further information on the
Communications Review, or to share your
good ideas for straplines and new posters,
please contact Clare Batt at the Secretariat
(phone 0207 0352665, email
[email protected]).
AMIMB Annual conference and AGM
12 October 2005
This year’s conference will be at Holloway prison, the venue for a particularly successful
conference two years ago. This time should be even better, as it will include a tour of the
prison, introduced by the governor. And we have two really excellent speakers.
AMIMB’s president, Baroness Vivien Stern is a past director of NACRO. She has
worked with the UN and many other bodies, has written many books on prisons here and
abroad, and is currently a senior research fellow with the International Centre for Prison
Studies. As readers of the Monitor will know, she can also be a fierce critic of penal policy in
the UK.
Rod Morgan has been chair of the Youth Justice Board for just over a year. Previously he
was HM Chief Inspector for Probation and Professor of Criminal justice at Bristol University (where he remains Professor Emeritus). He has served on any number of penal affairs
bodies as well as the Parole Board, and wrote the definitive Oxford Handbook of Criminology. As Monitor readers will know he is also a founder member of AMBoV.
All that and the opportunity to give AMIMB’s executive committee a hard time in what
has become known as one of the country’s shorter AGMs.
AMIMB members will get formal notification, with times etc, but stick Wednesday 12
October in your diary now.
Independent Monitor • June 2005
7
INTERVIEW
Anne Owers
Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons
Four years into her job, Anne Owers is faced with a government review
that recommends an amalgamation of HMCIP with the inspectorates
of probation, police, courts and crown prosecution service. So Brian
Guthrie first asked for her reaction to this proposal
I’m glad that the review stresses the importance of robust and independent prison
inspection – but the mere fact it’s referred to
it so often and so specifically suggests that it
doesn’t automatically fit into the objectives
of the proposed new inspectorate. I find it
difficult to see how inspecting places of
custody fits in with the rest. I do sympathise
with the desire to look critically at the
criminal justice system as whole. But I
worry about how we would maintain our
very special focus and methodology within a
much bigger organisation with different
and broader over-arching aims. Inspecting
closed custodial settings is different. It’s
about examining in detail the conditions
and the treatment of people held there, with
a focus on rights, safety and decency.
But I gather you trialled a joint approach
with the probation inspectorate and it
worked ok?
Yes, we wanted to look at a model for
inspecting under NOMS. There are two
equally important strands to that – how you
deal with the conditions and treatment of
offenders in custody and under supervision
in the community and then the management of offenders through the system. And
that is a practical combination (though
surprisingly it’s not one of the eight options
listed in the review). But once you start
looking at the others elements within
criminal justice you’re in very different
territory. In any case we will need to link
with the inspection of offender management. But at present people sentenced to
under 12 months have no input from
probation, and other agencies, to do with
housing for example, must be brought into
the picture. As far as prison itself is
concerned, the most important links we
need to have are with the education and
healthcare inspectorates.
My impression reading the review is that
the single inspectorate is a done deal,
driven by what they call value for money.
I don’t think it’s principally driven by
economics – though all public services do
have to show they’re not wasting money. But
8
Independent Monitor • June 2005
how do you put a value on preventing a
suicide or highlighting abuse, or even better
education and training? Ministers have said
that they want to maintain robust and independent prisons inspection. We are seen as
completely independent and with
enormous specialist expertise. For example,
we’ve been asked to look at women’s prisons
in Canada.
The review talks of inspectorates needing
to communicate better with users. What
would this mean in terms of prisons?
We have lots of different users – those who
are incarcerated plus the prison service,
ministers, the public. I’m not entirely sure
what the review has in mind.
The review seems keen on what they call
inspection breaks – ie foregoing inspections where there’s no need. Would that
work with prisons?
Prisons would have to be an exception. Not
that you can’t use intelligence about how
and when to inspect. That already determines how heavy the follow-up inspection
is after the five-yearly full inspections.
Sometimes we simply go back to make sure
our recommendations have been followed.
So I don’t think we have any lessons to learn
on flexibility. But prisons can deteriorate
very rapidly and it isn’t safe to give them
holidays from inspection.
What do you think about the review’s
suggestion that inspection should
operate by the standards of the services
themselves?
That’s not what we do now , and ministers
have backed us on that. We have our own
criteria, developed over the years, which in
most cases support standards and look
behind them to outcomes and quality. They
are specific to custodial inspection. I am
greatly concerned about references in the
review to a unified methodology and
unified assessment systems.
So are you worried that the review betrays
a desire to muzzle the inspectorate?
I don’t believe there’s a plot, although our
findings are occasionally uncomfortable.
However I fear that could be a consequence.
I worry about being linked too closely to
departments’ service delivery objectives.
They may see inspectorates as their frontline agents, their enforcement mechanism.
But already when your reports come out
the prison service say it is already dealing
with your recommendations.
Well of course the prison will have been
debriefed at the end of the inspection, and
will see the reports in draft. I have no
problem about them sorting things out, and
the sooner the better. That’s the purpose of
inspection. And if we find something that’s
really unsafe we want it sorted quickly.
Sometimes things have changed while we’re
still in the prison. In one we found night
staff unaware of emergency procedure. I
wanted that changed within 24 hours – and
so did the governor when he heard about it.
But I see from your annual report that
3% of your recommendations are not
accepted.
They tend to be the ones that prisons can’t
achieve. We will continue to make recommendations we know can’t be managed. For
example, we criticise two prisoners sharing a
cell meant for one with a lavatory – just as
boards do. We will say all prisoners in local
jails should have access to activities.
Otherwise these things become accepted as
part and parcel of prison life.
What if they something manageable isn’t
accepted?
We challenge, but in the end we can only
recommend. If reasonable recommendations were continually rejected I would go
to the Home Secretary. It hasn’t happened so
far.
What about the 30% of recommendations that are accepted but not enacted?
Sometimes it’s simply not a good prison and
they haven’t put the action plan into effect.
Sometimes they say they have and they
haven’t. Sometimes it simply takes longer.
Board members sometimes feel they are
misled by governors. Are you ever? Is it
possible to pull the wool over the
inspector’s eyes?
Yes, we’re not the recording angel. But I
hope that we have not missed anything
fundamental. Often we reckon the
governor doesn’t know what is happening
and is accepting information from people
because everyone wants to believe it. I have
never been involved in an inspection where
we haven’t found something the governor
didn’t know or thought wasn’t the case.
There was a small local prison reporting over
INTERVIEW
But take Highpoint: it has been poor, but
we’ve just been back and the improvement is
enormous: about 95% of prisoners have
activities.
‘I have never
been involved in
an inspection
where we haven’t
found something
the governor didn’t
know or thought
wasn’t the case.’
13 hours a day out of cell per prisoner. We
said this couldn’t possibly be the case. It
turned out it was 7 hours a day but the
prison had nearly twice the number of
prisoners it should have. They were basing
their sums on the smaller figure. Nobody
along the line had questioned it – governor,
area manager, prison service. Sometimes we
do find that there are attempts to mis-direct
us. But the more we dig the more we are
likely to find the truth.
How far will your thematic review of
segregation extend?
We wanted to get a handle on how the new
PSO is working, but looking at segregation
in its most extreme form – in dispersal
prisons, where people have traditionally
been segregated for long periods in prison
after prison. Many prisoners there will have
personality disorders; some will be
dangerous. We were concerned that prettty
well all suicides in high security prisons
happen in segs. We’re also including close
supervision centres.
Do you get any impression of how well
the new PSO is going generally, how it’s
affecting IMBs?
I think it’s a better system if operated
properly. It focuses staff on prisoners’
welfare and on return to normal location.
I’ve had mixed views from boards. A poor
prison may try to freeze out boards;
sometimes by arranging reviews at inconvenient times
Any other thematic reviews in the
pipeline?
Yes: race, foreign nationals, mental health,
joint inspections with other inspectorates.
piloting offender management inspections.
Your annual report says that only 5 of 18
training prisons you inspected had
enough education and training. Can that
really be just be a question of resources?
It is partly resources. Many training prisons
have had to increase numbers in the last year
or two – some from 500 to 1,000. The
prisoners arrive before the resources do.
Others just haven’t yet got organised around
what a training prison should be. But we’re
seeing improvements. In the past we’ve very
often been able to take off the shelf, as it
were, the phrase: ‘this is a training prison in
name only.’ Now we’re finding prisons
pulling in better resources – quality as well
as quantity. Some have been ok for some
time – Wayland, Everthorpe for example.
Two establishments have been in the
news for the wrong reasons recently. Let’s
start with Oakington immigration
removal centre. An undercover tv
reporter filmed abusive staff behaviour.
Yet I think your inspections hadn’t found
anything untoward?
Well, we had expressed concern about the
fact that its scheduled closure in 2006 might
unsettle staff and we said we would return
earlier than usual for an unannounced
inspection. We also expressed considerable
concern about the Detainee Departure Unit
that featured heavily in the tv programme.
But it is very difficult to assess properly the
views of immigration detainees who are so
scared about their case that they may not
want to complain, even in confidence. We
may need to look at other methods.
At Rye Hill prison there was what seems
to have been a suicide and then a murder
a few weeks later, with rumours that they
were connected in some sinister way?
We were concerned about Rye Hill when we
first inspected it. There were issues around
safety – inexperienced staff and inexperienced prisoners. We were assured that
experienced managers would be deployed
on the wings. For that reason, and because
of other intelligence we were getting, we
carried out a full unannounced follow-up
inspection – by coincidence on the week it
happened.
Your people were actually in the prison
when the guy was killed? They must have
been very shocked. Was that a first?
Yes it was, thank goodness.
You’ve had four years as chief inspector. If
a single inspectorate does come, do you
fancy the big job heading it?
The short answer is no. I enormously enjoy
this job. It’s a privilege and I think it’s
important. I don’t have any ambitions to
run a huge inspectorate, especially if it’s to be
focused on procedures.
So would you stay as part of a new
structure?
That depends. The strength of my present
position is that I can speak directly to
ministers and the public about what I have
seen. I don’t think I could relinquish that.
But in any case, my job is a 5-year appointment. What happens to the inspectorate is
more important than what happens to me,
and there will come a time when a fresh pair
of eyes is needed,
Independent Monitor • June 2005
9
AMIMB FOCUS
Mad or bad?
TheIndependent Monitorguide
to custodial mental health
It’s not our job as IMB members to be
experts on mental illness. But a little
knowledge need not be a dangerous thing.
Without some background in the illnesses
that affect so many prisoners, there’s a
danger that we won’t know what the experts
are talking about. We may not even know
when an officer is using a label inappropriately (psycho, schizo). So, this guide.
It’s as simple as possible. We hope it’s
accurate, but even among experts there are
disagreements – so let us know if you
disagree with any of it, or can add to it. And
spend time talking to affected prisoners and
prison mental health professionals.
Understanding mental illness
Experts can disagree about how to classify
mental illness, and about the way different
terms are used to describe the various states.
Then of course diagnosis itself can be
controversial. And various conditions –
paranoia and depression are good examples
– crop up under different headings. But a
useful first distinction to make is between
neurosis, psychosis and personality disorder.
The term neurosis covers a range of
mental disturbances between near
normality and derangement – but the
person involved knows something is wrong
and can still reason. Psychosis (called in the
old days insanity) is characterised by loss of
touch with reality; sufferers do not realise
they are ill. Personality disorders are deeply
ingrained patterns of socially unacceptable
behaviour – of varying degrees of severity.
Mental illness can result from physical
abnormality, injury, illness, congenital
conditions, troubled upbringing, traumatic
events and so on. As well as the overlap
between different conditions, people can
have two quite separate conditions at the
same time. So what follows should be taken
as a rough guide only.
Learning disability
This guide does not cover what used to be
called mental handicap, then learning
difficulty and now usually learning
disability (but sometimes special needs).
People with Down’s syndrome and other
severe forms of learning disability would
not be in prison, but people with dyslexia
or even mild autism can be. And up to
50% of people with learning disability
have a mental illness as well.
10
Independent Monitor • June 2005
Neurosis and anxiety
The most common neurotic condition is
anxiety, and many other neuroses are
usually regarded as forms of anxiety. Biologically, anxiety is the same as fear: the fight or
flight preparedness (increased heart beat,
rapid breathing etc) starts but is maintained
even when there is no threat. So sufferers can
feel shaky, light-headed, nauseous; mentally
they may be tense, fearful, worried. This
distorts how they see the world and as a
result how they behave. Sleep is likely to be
affected.
As well as generalised anxiety disorder
(GAD), anxiety can be expressed through:
■ panic attacks – usually with chest pains
and difficulty in breathing so sufferers think
they are having a heart attack, going mad,
blacking out, dying
■ specific phobias – where anxiety is
focused through excessive fear of things like
animals, planes, heights, illness. Many
phobic people also suffer from depression,
so can be at risk of suicide
■ agoraphobia (fear of leaving the house),
claustrophobia (fear of being trapped),
monophobia (fear of being alone) and social
phobia (fear of socialising). You can have
more than one of these and clearly prison is a
bad place to have any
■ obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) –
where anxiety is kept at bay (though only
fitfully) by irrestistible urges to wash, close
doors, check things etc
■ post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) –
delayed (sometimes substantially) or
protracted response to a genuinely fearful
event.
Depression is sometimes regarded as a
neurotic condition, although it can
accompany other mental illnesses.
Psychosis
During a psychotic experience, the sufferer
tends to hear or see things other can’t, or
hold unusual beliefs others don’t share. This
may include hearing voices, particularly in
schizophrenia; this and manic depression
are the commonest forms of psychosis.
Psychosis associated with physical conditions – eg alcohol intoxication, infections
and certain cancers – can be reversed, so it is
important they are identified.
Schizophrenia
Although this is probably a pattern of
symptoms with various causes, the one that
typifies the illness is the impossibility of
making any emotional impact on the
sufferer. Although schizophrenia does mean
split mind, it does not mean split personality. Rather, it refers to the dissociation
between the sufferer’s thoughts and physical
reality. That split can lead to a variety of
symptoms:
■ delusions – false beliefs about themselves
or others; feelings of extreme importance or
persecution; a conviction that they are
controlled by an outside force or that their
body is malfunctioning or even dead;
completely jumbled ideas
■ voices – to which perhaps one in twenty
of us are subject. But schizophrenics’ voices
are mostly critical or unfriendly and may
encourage them into anti-social behaviour
■ other hallucinations – involving touch,
taste, smell or sight
■ paranoia
■ social withdrawal, demotivation, selfneglect, depression – which may be a
reaction to the other symptoms.
Schizophrenics used to be kept in mental
hospitals. Even if they recovered, they had
often become institutionalised, and
relapsed on release. Now it is accepted that it
is better for most of them to be in the
community. (They are not dangerous to
others, except that their anti-social
behaviour can be problematic.) But if that
community turns out to be a prison, they
are obviously vulnerable, not least to depression and suicide.
Manic depression
(bipolar disorder, sometimes called affective
psychosis)
Sufferers swing from periods of very
profound depression to manic euphoria,
which may include very ambitious ideas.
Depression is the norm, though, with overwhelming despair and worthlessness and
the inablity to look after oneself. There can
be stable times in between, but there may
also be delusions and it carries a high suicide
risk. Sufferers are not dangerous to others.
Schizoaffective disorder
This combines some of the characteristics of
schizophrenia and manic depression. There
is mania (sometimes mild and more or
less productive – hypomania), depression,
hallucinations and delusions.
Personality disorders
This is probably the most controversial
diagnosis in mental health – especially when
criminal justice is involved. For a start, it is
defined only by behaviour unacceptable to
society. Then it is said to be caused by harsh
upbringing; and it has been regarded as
untreatable. Although not all personalitydisordered people are criminals, and not all
AMIMB FOCUS
‘When I’m in a manic phase,
I feel as though I am capable of
anything and everything. This can
be an amazing feeling, but I
sometimes get frustrated and angry
with people. But when I’m depressed,
it’s as if I’m completely crushed and
living in slow motion. I feel capable of
nothing and just want to end it all.’
criminals have personality disorders, the
connection is an awkward one. And prison
is not the best place to deal with the subtle
challenges of dealing with personality
disorder.
Personality disorders are gross exaggerations of quite common patterns of
behaviour. So, things like hostility and selfishness are over-developed; consideration
for others, empathy, rational thinking and
responsibity are under-developed. There
tends to be limited flexibility in learning
from experience and an inability to
maintain relationships. Add to that a
tendency to have other mental health
problems, like depression and phobias, and
it is no surprise that their risk of suicide is
about three times the average.
There are ten types of personality
disorder recognised in the American Psychiatric Association’s authoritative DSM-IV
manual. The first three listed here are the
commonest types found among prisoners.
It is not unusual for prisoners to have more
than one type of personality disorder.
Antisocial personality disorder (APD)
This is the type most closely linked with
adult criminal behaviour; sufferers used to
be called psychopaths. They tend to appear
pleasant, but are impulsively aggressive,
reckless, violent, remorseless and
untruthful; they are very difficult for even
mental health professionals to deal with.
Paranoid personality disorder
This produces a continual and unwarranted
distrust and suspicion of others. They tend
to be preoccupied with justice and rules.
Borderline personality disorder
The name indicates that this condition is
regarded as being on the borderline with
psychosis; sufferers will tend to have beliefs
or experiences not shared by others. They
will also be unreliable, highly reactive,
dependent, self-damaging.
Schizoid, schizotypal, histrionic,
narcissistic, avoidant, dependent,
obsessive-compulsive
These personality disorders are self-explanatory and of less relevance in prison.
Dissociative disorders
These are included here for completeness, as
they’re unlikely to crop up in prison,
although it’s hard to be sure as they’re
difficult to pin down. Where the different
brain functions become disconnected or
don’t register consciously, amnesia, loss of
reality and of identity can result.
On the wing
The signs of clinical anxiety are usually
pretty clear, and anxious prisoners are more
likely to be bullied, or at least fearful of it.
Mania and depression are also obvious,
though the difference between chronic
depression and depressed periods as a result
of specific knockbacks may be more
difficult to spot.
Psychotic prisoners should be the
responsibility of a named member of the
healthcare team (preferably a specialist).
When on normal location, they should be
subject to a multi-disciplinary care plan;
when acutely ill they will have to be in secure
health care somewhere else.
Personality disorder is very hard to cope
with in prison. Even mild cases can divide
staff and others – including IMB members.
In general they require scrupulous attention
to fairness, respect, boundaries, clarity,
calmness, safety, goals etc.
Treatment
There are few specific drug treatments for
mental illness. Instead, there are symptomatic treatments. Anxiety can be treated in
the short term with benzodiazepines
(Librium, Valium etc) whose side effects
and withdrawal symptoms can be worse
than the original symptoms. Anti-depressants can be used for some anxiety states.
When used for depression itself, they have
side effects and withdrawal symptoms even the modern SSRIs like Prozac.
There are specific anti-psychotic drugs,
called major tranquillisers or neuroleptics.
Traditionally things like chlorpromazine
often had the side-effects of lethargy,
shuffling walk and uncontrollable
movements. Newer, so-called ‘atypical’ antipsychotics have fewer neuromuscular side
effects. Lithium is often used to treat the
manic phase of manic depression.
Drug administration can be a bit hit and
miss, especially if transfers from prison to
prison intervene. Weight gain is a common
side-effect, so a programme of physical
activity can be important.
In all cases a better option can be what are
generically called talking treatments –
psychotherapy, counselling and cognitive
behaviour therapy. These are in short supply
in most prisons – even when the illness has
been recognised and acknowledged. But
prisons should have access to psychologists,
psychiatrists, psychotherapists, counsellors
and mental health or psychiatric nurses.
Drugs are not used to treat personality
disorders. There are, within certain highsecurity prisons, special dangerous and
severe personality disorder (DSPD) units.
They attempt to help prisoners through
detailed assessment and then intervention
through support activities, behaviour
therapy and offending behaviour courses.
Substance misuse
Illicit drug use (including alcohol) in prison
complicates the mental health picture.
Many users also have mental illnesses – most
commonly depression, anxiety and personality disorder. This clearly increases the risk
they present to themselves and sometimes
others. If the drug compounds the
symptoms (like alcohol and depression),
then if the drug is withdrawn, the person
may improve.
But if the drug is to some extent helping
them cope, its withdrawal won’t help; it may
even make them worse. In any case, drug
withdrawal can produce symptoms that
mimic those of mental illness, including
self-harm and suicide. So this process needs
to be sensitively managed – not hidden
away in segregation, for example.
This guide acknowledges with gratitude information from MIND and Lynnie Sheers,
Bristol prison’s mental health services manager
and Butler Trust winner. But any mistakes are
entirely ours.
Independent Monitor • June 2005
11
OMBUDSMAN
Getting a taste of
canteen culture
Prisons and Probation Ombudsman Stephen Shaw
asks how board members can dig below the surface
of an establishment’s performance
Undercover reporting can seem more than a
bit sneaky. How many of us would like the
idea of having every unguarded comment
secretly recorded? But there is no doubt that
the BBC programme Detention Undercover:
the real story, broadcast at the beginning of
March, has served a genuine public
purpose. What it revealed was a sub-culture
among some staff at Oakington reception
centre, and among other staff responsible
for escort duties, of racist stereotyping,
contempt for management and for the
Immigration Service, and connivance in
physical abuse.
For the past few months I have been
conducting the government’s inquiry into
the programme’s revelations. But while your
editor would dearly like his scoop, this is not
the place where I will unveil my findings,
conclusions and recommendations. (I will,
though, share the delicious detail that the
BBC – being a bureaucracy to rival any in
Whitehall – actually has a special form to be
completed when a producer wants to
undertake covert activities.)
Who could have known?
What I thought it would be useful to explore
with members of AMIMB is the challenge
12
Independent Monitor • June 2005
presented by the programme. For
Oakington was widely regarded as one of
the most benign places of detention. The
programme’s shaming revelations were at
variance with the impression held by the
Immigration & Nationality Directorate,
and by senior staff of the contractor GSL,
and by the IMB, and by HM Chief
Inspector of Prisons (who had found astonishing levels of satisfaction among
detainees), and – for that matter – by yours
truly. None of us had been aware of a subculture of nastiness; all of us would have
thought Oakington was a healthy establishment. All of us would have been wrong.
Some of the GSL staff I have spoken to
have characterised what the programme
portrayed as ‘rest room banter’. And it is true
that a distinction can be drawn between
macho posturing over a cup of tea at the end
of a shift and the way people actually carry
out their jobs. (It is relevant that in many
hours of secret filming the BBC researchers
actually witnessed only one incident of
physical wrongdoing.) But as we know from
the police, while the incivilities of the
canteen may involve exaggeration and braggadocio. they can also reflect attitudes and
behaviours taken out onto the street – or
onto the wings.
The issue for those of us engaged in
monitoring (and I include senior management in this) is how we can get under the
skin of a closed institution. How do we
know what is really being said when the
managers have gone home and the inspectors have left?
There are no easy answers. The bullies
and the racists operate in the shadows; most
of them are smart enough to keep their
noses clean when they think they might be
observed. Like most men, in my youth I did
all sorts of things of which I am now
ashamed – but I always tried to do them
when my mum was not looking.
Given the pressures and temptations of
institutional life, it is a testament to individual character that so many prison and
immigration staff can demonstrate the
moral resilience that they do. But there is
still a marked disinclination – as in other
operational environments like the army and
the police – to blow the whistle on those
colleagues whose standards are not so high.
Indeed, it takes a very special person to
whistleblow on wrongdoing given what can
happen to those perceived as grasses.
Getting things out in the open
Here, for example, in slightly anonymised
form is an extract from the transcript of a
recent Employment Tribunal decision:
‘In 1999 Officer A was transferred from
one prison to another ... this was because she
had been the victim of serious intimidation,
having given evidence to the police during a
serious discipline and criminal investigation
which had occurred in 1999 arising out of
an assault on a prisoner. Although Officer A
had not been working on the day of the
assault and therefore the evidence she
could give to the police was extremely
limited, she was perceived to have assisted
the police and subsequently she was sent
grass through the post and internal mail,
indicating that she herself was a grass. She
was spat upon by a Prison Officer; her twoyear-old son was spat upon; she had to be
escorted in and out of the prison for nine
months by a Governor to protect her from
further victimisation; and she was obliged to
supervise prisoners in the kitchen for that
period of time because it was not safe for her
to work in the prison generally. Five years
after the assault, two of her former
colleagues were still receiving similar intimidation, to the extent that they were
transferred to a prison in Northern Ireland,
where it was thought that they would be
safer. After her own transfer, it was at least
nine months before some of her new
colleagues would include her when they
made tea for each other at break-time.’
Incidentally, giving evidence at the same
Employment Tribunal hearing, the Deputy
Director General confirmed that such
victimisation was not uncommon.
Clearly you need to be a very brave
person to stand up to that level of intimidation by staff ‘colleagues’. It is no surprise that
whistleblowers are in short supply. And can
you wonder that prisoners – whose methods
of enforcement are even more vicious – are
also so unwilling to inform on one another?
One thing we can all do is lead by
example. I am shocked by the number of
IMB reports I read that still refer to ‘ethnic
prisoners’ or their desire to recruit an ‘ethnic’
member of the Board. I have even seen the
term ‘ethnics’ used as a noun. Yet I wonder
how often the IMB secretariat, or the
national council, or other boards have
pulled them up? Or are we all too polite or
fearful of being seen as interfering?
You cannot criticise staff for their canteen
culture if you turn a blind eye to the saloon
bar prejudices of your fellows. Motes and
beams and all that jazz.
HISTORY OF AMBoV
Early struggles and
contemporary lessons
In the last Monitor, Rod Morgan,
now chair of the Youth Justice
Board, helped with our ongoing
attempt to assemble the history
of AMBoV from its beginnings
in 1980. To deepen our
understanding of the need for
AMBoV, he goes back to 1974. It
gets personal
It may be difficult for IMB members, with
their role uncompromised by having to hear
adjudications or authorise segregation, with
their enhanced training and detailed
guidance, with their own keys with which to
go round prisons, and so on, to imagine the
circumstances that impelled BoV members
like myself to struggle for the creation of
AMBoV in the late 1970s. Let me tell you
how it was at Pucklechurch Remand
Centre, to which I was appointed in 1974.
The young prisoners were typically
locked up for most of the day. If one wanted
to speak to them, one had to go from cell to
cell accompanied by an officer whose
demeanour often suggested that he considered you an intrusive waste of time.
Outmoded terminology was still used. At
Pucklechurch we had a weekly rota for BoV
visits (at other prisons they were less
frequent). First visits were undertaken with
an experienced member, thereafter alone. It
was commonplace for accompanying
officers to stand at the end of each spur
of cells and bellow down the corridor of
locked doors: ‘Visiting magistrate – any
complaints?’ or ‘Anyone want to see him?’
One would have to talk over officers’
shoulders to the prisoners, standing to
attention, sleepy-eyed in the cramped space
beside their bunk beds. If silence prevailed,
which was usually the case, we would move
on.
It was rare for prisoners to give notice that
they wanted to see the BoV. This was unsurprising. The young male remand prisoners,
who typically turned over very rapidly, had
no idea who we were or what we were
supposed to do. They weren’t told. It was not
uncommon for any youth foolish enough to
make a complaint to the BoV to find
himself on report before the member left the
establishment. On the female side, where
we had a few sentenced adults, things were a
bit different. One got to know some women
prisoners, and they us. The attitudes of
some female staff, moreover, were more
accommodating.
Early stirrings
I gradually became more assertive. I would
start visits by explaining to my escort that I
didn’t want him to introduce me to anyone.
I would do it myself. Would he please wait
in the corridor while I engaged with
prisoners. If they were lying on their beds, I
would sit on the bed or chair, and having
explained who I was and what the BoV did,
ask questions. No glass in the window (a
frequent occurrence): had he put it out? No
books or magazines in evidence: did he
know there was a library from which books
could be borrowed? Dressed in remand
uniform: did he realise that the rules
permitted wearing of own clothes? In his
cell: had he asked for a job? How often had
there been exercise and for how long in the
past week? How long on remand? Did he yet
have a trial date?
This approach was resented. Not
insisting that prisoners stood up when
spoken to was undisciplined. Asking
questions provoked complaints. My written
reports were detailed and prompted
questions for the governor at the monthly
meeting. Why was outdoor exercise or
workshop sessions so frequently cancelled?
Could not more prisoner employment be
arranged? Could not the window repair
schedule be speeded up? And, for the board,
were we going to express our concern to this
or that crown court about young prisoners
waiting, on average, for so many months
before being brought to trial?
My BoV colleagues became equally
exercised over many of these issues. But we
made little progress. The situation was not,
we were told, the governor’s fault. There was
insufficient clothing for prisoners. Too
many staff were being abstracted for court
escorts to run the workshops or supervise
exercise. The maintenance schedule was
overstretched because under-resourced.
Our letters to the Department or the Home
Office seldom received either a prompt
response or any remedy. To begin with we
produced no published report on what was
being done at Pucklechurch in the public’s
name.
Two issues, segregation and adjudications, we did determine, though quite
incompatibly with our inspectoral role. For
as long as we had these responsibilities, I
took them seriously. There were perpetual
‘due process’ struggles: these were the day
before judgements established that
prisoners had rights to call witnesses or seek
representation. And at Pucklechurch
seriously mentally disturbed female
prisoners were routinely pronounced fit for
adjudication and punishment.
Sex
In the late 1970s I got a phone call from the
governor on a Sunday afternoon seeking my
approval for the segregation on what was
then Rule 43 of a female prisoner. I said I did
not make such decisions over the phone: I
would come in. The case proved both interesting and complex. The female prisoner
had been born a man, had previously been
imprisoned as a man, but had since had a sex
change and, on this sentence, committed as
a woman. She was not happy at Pucklechurch. She sought a transfer to a male
prison, which had been refused. In protest
she had stopped taking her hormones. Her
female attributes were diminishing and her
male ones re-emerging. Facial hair was
beginning to grow. The governor was not
prepared to have a female with a beard associating on the wing; she had to be placed on
Rule 43.
I interviewed the prisoner. She had
neither a penis or much facial hair. I interviewed the senior officer: there had been no
complaints from other prisoners. I interviewed the medical officer, who explained
the hormonal issues. No one could point to
any palpable risks. I decided that segregation was not warranted. Indeed, I thought
segregation would be difficult to defend: it
would implicitly constitute coercion to take
drugs, failing which the prisoner would
have to remain segregated for the whole of
her sentence. I left the prison.
The governor was furious, first because I
Independent Monitor • June 2005
13
Application for
membership of AMIMB
Name
❏ Mr
❏ Mrs
Title
❏ Other (please specify)
❏ Ms
Address
Postcode
Phone (Home)
Phone (Work)
Email address
Establishment
I enclose my cheque for £
Signature
Date
Membership fees
The subscription year runs from 1 August to
31 July. The annual subscription is £20, or
£10 if joining after January.
Send this form with your cheque, made
payable to AMIMB, to the Treasurer.
If you would like to pay by standing order in
future years tick here ❏
To Treasurer &
Membership Secretary
Derek Ainley
1 Savile Heath
Manor Heath Road
HALIFAX HX3 0BG
AMIMB
The Association of Members of
Independent Monitoring Boards
Patron The Rt Hon The Lord Woolf –
Lord Chief Justice.
President Baroness Vivien Stern.
Obituary
Bryan Baker MBE
Bryan died on the 6th of June. He served on
the Stafford board for over ten years, on the
National Advisory Council throughout its
life, and on the National Council which he
chaired. He was a national tutor, an
AMIMB member and an influential figure
in prison monitoring.
14
Independent Monitor • June 2005
HISTORY OF AMBoV
had not dealt with the matter over the
phone and secondly because I had not
endorsed her decision. Maguire and Vagg,
who researched these BoV issues in the early
1980s, heard of no other case of a BoV
member not endorsing a Rule 43 request.
So much for BoVs’ much vaunted independence.
At the next BoV meeting I found the said
prisoner on Rule 43. How could this be?
Had the governor sought approval from a
fellow BoV member without telling them
that I had been approached and not
approved? Or had a fellow BoV member
deliberately approved the decision without
consulting me? Either way, someone had
behaved unethically. It turned out that they
both had. I was outraged and the row
strained relationships. The saga radicalised
my views about BoV responsibilities. With
others I formed AMBoV. I contributed to
various articles and books calling for
enforceable, statutory, minimum prison
standards and an end to BoVs’ adjudicatory
and other disciplinary functions. On 9 May
1983 The Times published a letter from me
in which I said that prisoners were regularly
punished for minor breaches of the prison
rules while the service routinely breached
the spirit and letter of the rules with
impunity: what could prisoners do but
collectively protest?
Up against the authorities
At the POA’s Annual Conference soon after,
its chair denounced me as a person unfit to
hold public office. On the grounds that the
manner in which I conducted my visits
undermined the good order and authority
of the institution, the Pucklechurch branch
of the POA resolved that members would
no longer escort me. The next occasion I
went to Pucklechurch I was not admitted.
The governor came to the gate. She said that
she could not allow my visit: if she did so, the
officers would walk to the gate. I told her
that: I had been appointed by the Home
Secretary; my duties included inspection; I
intended to carry out my duties; I would
return. I contacted the National Council for
Civil Liberties whose legal officer, Harriet
Harman (more recently Solicitor General),
advised me. I returned to Pucklechurch
with a witness and was again refused
admission. An affidavit was drawn up.
However, on the day that Harriet Harman
was due to apply for a writ of mandamus
against the governor – an application we
were confident would be successful – the
governor was instructed by a member of the
Prison Board personally to escort me
whenever I came to inspect the establishment. I was told that I could resume visits.
From now on, approximately every two
months, it was the governor who had to
stand in the corridor while, for several
hours, I interviewed every Pucklechurch
prisoner.
This unacceptable impasse lasted many
months during which my term of office
came to an end and the governor recommended that I not be reappointed. I wrote
to the Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw,
advising him that if he did not reappoint
me, I would continue regularly to inspect
Pucklechurch, exercising my little known
powers to do so (Justice of the Peace Act
1952) as a magistrate for Bath. The dispute,
I advised him, would not be resolved unless
he also got the Lord Chancellor to dismiss
me as a magistrate. Robert Kilroy Silk,
noted in those days as the MP who singlemindedly pursued penal reform issues,
asked several questions in the House
inquiring how the Home Secretary
proposed to resolve the dispute regarding
Morgan and Pucklechurch.
Victory of sorts
Willie Whitelaw, to his great credit, reappointed me for a further three years. The
principle won, I sent through intermediaries a message to the POA to the effect that
if they called off their boycott, I would, after
a decent interval, resign. It seemed to me
that attitudes had become so entrenched
that no good purpose could be served by my
staying. There were other things I could do,
not least assisting AMBoV at arms length.
The POA called off their boycott and I
resigned. The next time I went to Pucklechurch was in 1990 with Lord Woolf, as
one of his three assessors for the Inquiry into
the Prison Disturbances at Strangeways and
elsewhere of that year. Pucklechurch was by
now a smoking ruin, never to reopen.
There is a heartening coda to this
account. A week after the Woolf Inquiry was
announced, the national Secretary of the
POA (with whom I was on very good
terms) contacted me. Would I, he asked,
assist the POA to prepare their written
evidence for the Inquiry? I said I would be
delighted, but was unfortunately unable to:
I was part of the Inquiry team.
This saga taught me several important
lessons. Times and attitudes change. The
unacceptable eventually becomes the
acceptable. If one has justice on one’s side
and keep plugging away, one can eventually
win through. These prospects inspire me
still. We have too many children in custody.
Juvenile offenders deserve a better quality of
justice and care. These arguments will eventually prevail. Which is why I am keen that
we, the Youth Justice Board, should work as
closely as possibly with those IMBs at YOIs
holding juveniles. The context within
which we work has greatly improved. But
there remains a way to go.
DRUGS
Detox
detoxification each year –
A standard opiate detoxification
programme lasts for ten days, but this is set
to be increased to a minimum of 14 days.
Additional medication is prescribed to
manage residual withdrawal symptoms.
The two largest challenges faced by clinicians in this area of prison work are suicide
in the early phase of custody and fatal
overdose in the first week of release.
a staggering 40% of those sent to
Suicide
prison. That’s 25 times the
The experience of capture and incarceration
can lead to profound regret and anxiety.
When this is coupled with the negative
psychological effects of drug and alcohol
withdrawal, the risk of impulsive selfdestructive action grows. Stimulant
withdrawal (often from crack cocaine) is a
growing part of this problem.
Of the 172 self-inflicted deaths in
prisons in the years 1999-2000, a third were
in the first week of imprisonment. The most
common clinical diagnosis of those who
died was drug dependence. Drugdependent prisoners were at particular risk
of suicide in the first week of imprisonment.
Of the 172 deaths, 46 (32%) had a
secondary mental health problem – socalled dual diagnosis. Prison Health has
drafted a document that gives guidance on
the management of dual diagnosis.
A 2001 Prison Service internal review
recognised this risk:
‘The Prison Service should pay special
attention to the safe management of
prisoners in the early stages of custody in a
prison, with a focus on excellence of care for
all prisoners in reception, first night,
induction and detoxification units.’
Reducing these risks demands good, coordinated services for those entering prison
with a drug problem. These enhanced
services include specialist first night centres,
rapid assessment for drug problems and
referral to residential clinical management
units. These units provide active withdrawal
management prescribing that accords with
national and international best practice, and
a varied range of harm minimisation and
psychosocial interventions for up to and
beyond 28 days. Six prisons are piloting this
safer custody approach – Birmingham,
Eastwood
Park,
Feltham,
Leeds,
Wandsworth and Winchester.
Linking clinical and non-clinical staff to
manage risk is an important element of this
work, involving the prison’s suicide preven-
Almost 60,000 prisoners need
number ten years ago. And it’s
even more for women prisoners.
David Marteau is responsible for
clinical substance abuse
services in Prison Health
Many offenders will have been using a range
of drugs – amphetamines, ecstasy, cocaine,
crack cocaine and cannabis – that don’t
cause marked physical dependence. So the
57,000 detox treatments in 2003/04 were
prescribed to offenders addicted to heroin
or benzodiazepines (tranquillisers such as
Valium), or both of these.
The great majority of clinical substance
misuse work is carried out in the 50 or so
local prisons. Most other prisons operate as
longer-stay secondary establishments,
taking in prisoners by an internal transfer
from a local prison where they have already
been detoxified.
The busier locals such as Leeds,
Pentonville and Holloway each now
provide clinical management to more than
2,500 patients each year. Extended in-depth
assessments may be wholly impractical in a
prison healthcare department that has to
screen, assess and initiate treatment plans
for as many as 20 drug-dependent patients
in a day. Eight of these patients will be
regular injecting drug users, of whom many
will have a complexity of physical, psychological and social needs. Some of these needs
will be substantial (deep vein thromboses,
type 1 diabetes, schizophrenia, special
learning needs, histories of serious self-harm
or withdrawal seizures). The range and
severity of health problems experienced by
drug users mean that the screening, assessment and referral processes must be
extremely efficient, and prisons have
developed systems that are both precise and
brisk.
Assessment
The sooner someone on drugs is properly
assessed the better. Prison clinical assessment begins in the first evening of arrival
into prison custody, helped by any information received from the police or the courts.
No prescribed management of opiate or
benzodiazepine dependence is begun
without a positive result from urine tests etc,
unless there are overt signs of withdrawal
from either substance.
Once an adequate assessment has been
undertaken, prescribed management
begins. Prisons aim to initiate treatment at
the earliest opportunity to restrict the development of withdrawal symptoms. This is a
greater imperative in prisons as supply of
heroin is generally less constant.
Detox begins
There is a frenetic pace to the clinical work
in any local prison. A fast-moving conveyor
belt of faces, files and urgent health
problems makes the loss of vital clinical
information or the confusing of identities a
real risk, with potentially tragic implications. So the first clinical imperative – to do
no harm – is central to the method that each
clinical team must evolve. This safety-first
approach is most clear in the clinical use of
methadone prescribing. Average doses tend
to be lower than those prescribed in the
community. Although all prisoners who
declare a heroin problem are given a test to
establish that they have opiates in their
system, this is not categorical proof of
physical dependence on heroin, so a
cautious response is required, particularly as
the opportunity to monitor any patient is
severely limited by a locked cell door. Stabilisation is undertaken, therefore, at a
conservatively paced dose induction, in
increments of 10 milligrams (mg), with at
least 6 hours between each dose.
The Prison Health Department recommended ceiling dose is 40mg per day – an
amount that would prove inadequate for
the same patient in the community. But
prisoners tend to have a diminished appetite
for heroin.
Independent Monitor • June 2005
15
DRUGS
tion co-ordinator, and the new system for
the management of risk of suicide and selfharm, ACCT (assessment, care in custody
and team work).
Fatal overdose
A Home Office study of 12,438 prisoners
discharged between June and December
1999 recorded 79 drug-related deaths.
Thirteen of these deaths were in the first
week after release – eight times the number
expected for people otherwise similar, and
40 times greater than the mortality rate for
the general population. Loss of tolerance to
opiates following withdrawal in prison
appeared to be a major contributing factor.
Put simply, this means that an injection of
heroin that would barely make an addicted
drug user feel sleepy, can kill that same drug
user if he or she has not used any heroin for
four days or more.
The study’s authors recommended
trying methadone in prison to maintain
tolerance and lower the overdose risk during
post-release celebration. But methadone is
rarely available for this, although there is a
greater use of it in female prisons. New
guidance, however, should allow greater
access to treatments like these.
Alternatively, naltrexone prior to
discharge might help. Naltrexone, which
blocks heroin action, is available in over a
third of prisons in England and Wales.
Many prisoners regard it as a protection
against their susceptibility to dangerous
relapse on release. The drug cannot alone
keep a client safe from further destructive
use, but when used as part of a supportive
resettlement plan involving specialist help,
it represents a useful clinical option for the
days or weeks that precede release.
Location
Traditionally, prisoners undergoing clinical
withdrawal management have usually been
accommodated in cells throughout the
landings and wings. More recently there has
been a move towards the opening of residential withdrawal management units.
These are prison landings of between 10 and
100 cells that have been converted to assist
the safer management of drug-dependent
patients. Withdrawal management units
have a blend of clinical and non-clinical
drug workers and prison officers; many of
these officers work in these extremely busy
units as a matter of personal and professional preference. The staff build up a core of
expertise which has a beneficial effect on
patient care.
Psychosocial programmes
Offenders in all prisons in England and
Wales have access to the CARAT (counselling, assessment, referral, advice and
16
Independent Monitor • June 2005
REPRESENTATION
throughcare) service, which acts as a case
management service, providing entry to a
range of structured treatment interventions.
These services can be summarised as:
■ CARAT support – group work and individual counselling
■ short-duration
intensive treatment
programmes for individuals who are in
prison for a brief time
■ intensive rehabilitation programmes for
those able to participate actively in longerterm abstinence-based treatment
■ close co-ordination with any ongoing
clinical treatment
■ harm minimisation advice prior to
release
■ input to release planning, including
throughcare to criminal justice drug interventions programme services on release, for
clients who require it.
The prisoners’ voice
Peter Stewart of the National
Consumer Council writes
Harnessing the voice of users – tenants,
parents, prisoners, patients etc – to shape
public services is increasingly recognised as a
force for better services. It is estimated that
over three million people are already
involved in shaping their local communities
and public services in some way. But about
80% of the public don’t feel part of the
current debate on the future of public
services. Almost as many think politicians
don’t understand what people want. Potentially there is a vast untapped resource of
people who could be motivated and
mobilised. The challenge is to find ways of
doing that .
Keeping healthy
The greatest health hazard to prisoners in
the middle months or years of their sentence
comes from the sharing of injecting
equipment. It is commonly reported by
injecting drug users that they reduce or
discontinue drug use during their stay in
prison, taking the opportunity to give their
bodies and mind a break from the
punishing effects of maintaining a serious
drug habit. The reasons for this are unclear,
but may be related to the more structured
regime and greater scrutiny of prisons. This
reduction in drug use goes some way to
explaining the very low HIV rate (0.5%)
among injecting drug users in our prisons.
Prison Health has instigated a
programme that will make sterilising tablets
available in all prisons, to help prisoners
clean illicit injecting equipment. Needle
exchange is not currently available in any
prison in England and Wales. In 1996 the
Advisory Council on Drug Misuse
concluded that needle exchange in prisons
was not a practical proposition. The
Council subsequently adjusted its position
by stating:
‘If studies currently underway demonstrate a high rate of hepatitis C transmission
in prison, a fresh initiative may be needed in
this area.’
A hepatitis B vaccination programme,
which began in 2001, was expanded to
include all prisons accepting prisoners
directly from court. Sixty-five prisons are
currently participating in the programme,
with increasing success. Between April 2003
and May 2004, over 16,300 prisoners were
vaccinated and 7,684 of them completed
the programme.
Blood-borne virus testing is also available
in many prisons, either from in-house staff
or by visiting clinics.
Public Service Users Forum
The National Consumer Council has set up
a Public Service Users Forum, to bring
together representatives from key national
organisations with links to real people and
local communities.
The Forum’s inaugural meeting was in
October 2004 (it has met again since in
March 2005), and probably marks the first
time user interest groups from across sectors
have come together in this way. Organisations that have signed up to take part range
from Age Concern, RNID and Time Banks
UK to the Alzheimer’s Society, the Voice of
the Child in Care – and the Prison Reform
Trust.
The forum will also act as a sounding
board for good practice and for promoting a
greater understanding of user involvement
and empowerment.
Prisoners too
Prisoners have different rights and responsibilities to most other service users. However,
service users they are, not only of the prison
system, but of things like health and
education. Research by the Prison Reform
Trust into volunteering and active citizenship initiatives in prisons suggests prisoners
can gain positive benefit from opportunities
to take responsibility and participate in
prisoner councils and prison committees.
Individual prisons that do this effectively
may show the way to others – or even to
services in other sectors. However, there is
no national strategy for prisoner involvement in decision-making. Perhaps there are
lessons to be learned from approaches to
patient, tenant and pupil involvement, for
example, which may inform prisoner
involvement in influencing service delivery.
These are the type of issues our Forum may
seek to address in the future.
A
ddicts like taking drugs. They only land up in prison when
they are caught supplying drugs to others or illegally acquiring
money to purchase drugs from others. Then they know that if they
say the correct words like ‘I want to be free of drugs, they have
ruined my life, please help me’, then the authorities will look
favourably on them. This does not apply to every drug dependent
prisoner, but it does apply to far too many.
Some years ago when I was talking to an addict in the prison, I
asked him what he was addicted to. His answer was simply ‘I take
anything that anyone will give me, just to see what it does to me’.
He added that he would do this even if it killed him.
While we have people who have this attitude to drugs and there
is so much money to be made from importing and distributing
drugs, this country has major problems. We all can recall the
person jailed for drug dealing in the past few weeks, who was
earning £11,000 a day.
We have to take a long hard look at what we are doing, find out
whereabouts in the world authorities are
having success and copy and improve on
what they are doing. There is some work
currently being done which involves
groups that are being run by drug addicts
who are away from the habit and who are
helping others, often just out of prison, to
get onto a drug free path back into society.
How about looking at one or two of these
groups.?
The dealers earning mountains of money will not stop.
Legalising the currently available substances will only introduce
new ones from somewhere else in the world probably even more
toxic and unpredictable than the ones currently in use.
The secret of success seems to me to be in the ability to
distinguish between the drug addict who really wants to beat the
habit, and one who is only thinking of the day that he can get his
next fix.
I would like to see some statistics relating to the work that the
vast niumbers of drugs workers do in our prisons. Look at the
success and failure rates and the re-offending frequency, follow up
prisoners on relase. This is the only way to see if the effort that is
being put into drug treatment in prisons is justified, or is it pie in
the sky: ‘if we throw money at it, we will have a clear conscience’.
Meanwhile this prison recovered last year some £100,000worth of drugs and about 70 mobile phones, many of which are
used in the furtherance of drug deliveries.
From a northern local
I was in the prison recently to be told that at unlock A wing was
spaced out and 11 prisoners had been sent for suspected MDT
testing. No results as yet. Our KPT for drugs has, up to date, been
14% positive. This year we have been as high as 35%, although
recently this percentage has been dropping and last month was as
low as 19%. We now have a new KPT of 19%, which may enable
the prison to achieve 10 points of the assessment scale.
We have recently had about £400,000 for short-term drugs
courses. This includes new portacabins and staff. However, when I
think of all the momey being spent on the drug problem – a
landing with 40+ beds for reception, CARATS and several other
agencies for dealing with drugs – the cost becomes astronomical.
Men may well be detoxed, but drugs are available on this landing as
well. Even with a ‘firm purpose of amendment’, when men go onto
normal location drugs are available. hostels are in very short supply
on the outside and it often takes several months after release to be
able to get a space. Men, on release, are going back to the same environment from which they came with the
inevitable consequences.
Another worry is that, although it cannot
be proved, a few staff are involved in the
traffic. The money side is so great that temptation is almost overwhelming. Recently we
had a prisoner on remand from well known
local family. His father and either one or two
brothers are already inside, and it is estimated
that the family drugs income is an astonishing £100,000 a week.
He told me that there was no way he was going to be found guilty,
although I now hear that there is a contact out on him when he gets
out. He now seems to be doing his best to stay in prison one way or
another and has been transferred to a cat A prison.
From another northern local
‘’
IMBspeak
D
rugs are generally available and some staff would say awash. It
is extremely difficult to stop drugs getting into a local prison.
Even with our reduced population of just over 600 there are about
16,000 movements in and out of the prison to the courts etc per
month. As internal body searching is not now permitted, this leads
to drugs being concealed in the usual place. Once apon a time, a
suspect would be put in an unfurnished cell, but this did not always
lead to a result as the prisoner often, believe it or not, would
swallow the drugs again.
Visitors are being caught not infrequently and the courts are
quite severe. Drug dogs are available only occasionally; the word
gets around quickly when they are and visitors turn away at the
gate. One dodge that worked recently (discovered too late) was a
prisoner going to visits in plimsolls and returning in brown boots.
Fishing lines and rods are used to caste packets over the walls into
the exercise area. When this happens, if prisoners are present, then
they disappear immediately. Another recent ploy was wet toilet
paper tied to a line which was shot over the wall by underpants
elastic. Drugs may well come inside mobile phones. There are
many in the prison including the new photo phones - 68 found
since the beginning of the year.
W
e have prisoners wanting to come to us because we are so
drug free – not completely, but very close. Equally a
number make a real fuss when they discover they can’t get what
they want. We have a passive and an active dog. Closed visits are
used, both for prisoners and visitors, to great effect. One wing is
designated ‘drug free; CARATS do an excellent job.
Liza Grenfell, Stocken
W
e have had to extend the detox programme from 7 days to
14 days due to alternative drugs being used. The drugs
previously used for detox were not accepted by our PCT. We are
waiting to see if this procedure is an improvement on the previous
programme.
We have had great success with our drugs regime, being one of
the best in the country, twice this year recording a zero MDT
result. This had been achieved through very strict sanctions on any
prisoner involved in any way with drugs.
If a prisoner is thought to be involved in drug activities he is
placed on closed visits for three months. Prisoners are aware of this
and it appears to be a great deterrent, together with a strong dog
handling section who target visits, good security and proactive
drug treatment. We always check the evidence for putting
prisoners on closed visits and usually find there is intelligence to
support the closed visits; if not, we query it.
A drug free unit of 80 prisoners has been introduced and this is
always over subscribed. They sign a compact to agree to be drug
free and although they are not removed from the unit if they are
found to be taking drugs, it is not acceptable to other prisoners on
the unit. The listeners and security cleared prisoners all sign a
compact with an agreement to voluntary drug testing and if they
fail they are removed from their positions.
The aggressive targeting of drugs is having the effect of reducing
drug use within the prison.
Margaret Carter, Glen Parva YOI.
Independent Monitor • June 2005
17
BOOKS
Death at the Hands of the State
Prisongate
(Howard League for Penal Reform,
ISBN 0903683784, £12.95)
David Wilson is Professor of Criminology
at Birmingham’s Central England University and pops us pretty regularly on radio
and tv. But between his PhD and present
career, he was a prison governor at the
Scrubs and elsewhere, and governing
governor at Finnamore Wood YOI (now
closed). So he’s been around. His conclusions – and this is not his first book
criticising prisons – are more than hinted at
in the book’s title. He looks at suicide,
deaths in women’s prisons, murder in prison
and the death rates in elderly and ill
prisoners. The critique is a mixture of the
personal and the academic, polemic and
analysis. It’s powerful stuff, and pulls no
punches on the ‘incompetence af prison and
prison staff’.
On suicide, for example, he claims that
the Scottish and Canadian prison services
have got on top of the problem by an effort
of will and organisation that England and
Wales can’t muster. That subject is haunted
by David Blunkett’s infamous words: ‘You
wake up and you receive a phone call telling
(Free Press, ISBN 0743259521, £8.99)
David Ramsbotham’s book, subtitled The
Shocking State of Britain’s Prisons and the
Need for Visionary Change, was published
in 2003 and recently re-issued in paperback
with an additional chapter, Postscript,
written in October 2004.
In it he draws attention to changes which
have taken place since his book was written.
He is heartened by the number of recommendations he and his inspection teams
made which have been adopted by the
Prison Service. Examples cited include the
fact that the NHS is now responsible for
funding prison healthcare.
He welcomes the fact that investigations
of unnatural deaths in prison have been
taken outside the Prison Service although he
thinks that the Prisons and Probation
Ombudsman is ‘the wrong person’ to carry
out these independent inquiries. He
reckons that choosing the PPO was ‘kneejerk’ (although there was actually a five-year
public consultation) and that the Prisons
Inspectorate would have been a better bet
(although it has less experience of investigating cases).
He responds with optimism to Lord
Carter’s recommendation for the setting up
of a new National Offender Management
Service responsible for reducing reoffending. He regrets the speed with which
it was created, the lack of proper consultation, and the shape it has actually taken.
Are the many changes he recommends
visionary? Not a question he answers, but
his view seems quite clear. ‘I wrote Prisongate in the hope that I might encourage
the authorities to take account of the facts
when planning the future. I remain
confident that, if the authorities remember
that prisoners are people and not commodities, the twenty-first century prison system
in England and Wales can be made into a
model for the rest of the world to follow.’
This extract from the introduction
give some idea of the tenor of the
book.
When we sentence offenders to a period of
imprisonment in England and Wales, we
are knowingly sentencing some of them to
death. Despite official hand-wringing and
the setting-up of inquiries and initiatives
when things go wrong - and when this
hidden reality becomes public, neither
government nor society cares. As such, the
criminal justice system has rapidly become
our own secret death penalty. Each year,
hundreds of people who have come into
contact with our criminal justice system
die - whether shot by police officers, or
killed in their prison cells. This book is
concerned with the latter - with all those
prisoners who, in some way or another, die
whilst in prison custody. For a shocking
number that is their fate. For example, on
average, two people per week take their
own lives in prison in England and Wales;
others are murdered by their fellow
inmates at a rate that surpasses the murder
rate in the community; and an increasing
number grow ill, old, or both and then die
in prison. Finally, a large, usually
unreported number kill themselves
shortly after release - often because they are
so poorly equipped to face life on the
outside having served a period in jail.
The vast majority of those we are
sentencing to die should not be in custody
18
Independent Monitor • June 2005
Professor David Wilson
you that Shipman has topped himself, and
you think, is it too early to open a bottle?’
Quite apart from the deaths caused by
custody, David Wilson holds no brief for
prisons – ‘a meaningless, empty, damaging
and negative reality that makes our country
more dangerous rather than more safe’ –
and wants ‘eventual abolition, for all but the
most immediately dangerous offenders’.
at all. Either mentally disordered, drug
addicted or both, any half-decent psychiatrist or social worker could predict that the
sentence imposed on them by the state is
likely to kill them. Yet the courts - at the
behest of government, continue to fill up
the penal production line with social inadequates, without caring whether they
survive incarceration or not. In short, our
government regards the ever-rising prison
population and the casualties that it
spawns, as a price worth paying for
persuading the public that they are being
‘tough on crime’ After all, no one is going
to shout too loudly if yet another prisoner
dies whilst banged-up and some might
secretly regard this unofficial death penalty
as ‘just desserts’ - a way of reducing crime
and the prison population. What better
way exists, they would reason, to save taxes
and at the same time rid the streets of the
undeserving and the disadvantaged? The
right wing commentator, Theodore
Dalrymple, for example, recollects a
conversation with a former Director of the
Prison Service’s Medical Service who
privately admitted that “no one cared if a
prisoner committed suicide; indeed, such
a death was regarded by the public as a net
gain for society.” But other countries have
reduced crime without having to lock up
huge numbers of their citizens and even
those that do don’t remorselessly cull those
that they routinely incarcerate.
Wanted!
(Waterside Press,
ISBN
1904380131,
£14.50)
More from Bob
Turney (following
I’m still standing
and Going straight).
Wanted! finds him
looking
around
from his vantage
point as an ex-con turned probation officer
and media man. His scrutiny falls on such
diverse subjects as the great train robbery,
Lord Longford, restorative justice, a visit to
Number Ten and capital punishment. It’s a
good read.
BOOKS
Novel turn for a governor
Teacher, researcher, author, criminal justice consultant, novelist,
parole board member – and prison governor. The Monitor visited
Tessa West in her Suffolk home
Chapter 1 After work as a primary school
teacher, marriage and four children.
Chapter 2 Back to work, teaching French
at evening classses in Highpoint prison.
‘This choice must have been something to
do with coming from a Quaker background
and wanting to see the good in everyone.’
Chapter 3 In 1981, when a part-time
teacher of adult literacy, she was awarded a
Winston Churchill Fellowship to study illiteracy in prison abroad. This took her to
Scandinavia where she found all prisoners
were literate, and there weren’t many
anyway compared to England. ‘But I
witnessed their prison culture, and how
much more civilised it was compared to
here, and I started to think about prisons as
communities.’
Chapter 4 Hollesley Bay running a prerelease course for young offenders. ‘This was
one of the most interesting experiences I’ve
had. I was full of optimism, but the course I
had carefully prepared simply didn’t work.
The lads subverted the whole thing.’ So she
ripped up her syllabus and started again. She
listed their names on a blackboard and got
them to rate their happiness for that
particular day with a score out of ten. ‘They
started to comment on each others’ scores,
and soon they were discussing those very
issues that they had ridiculed when I had
first suggested them – such as money, work,
trust, families, crime, sex. ‘
Chapter 5 Deputy education officer back
at Highpoint, followed by 5 years as
education officer at the newly-built
Littlehey prison. She had scope, good staff
and a significant opportunity to develop her
ideas and to have some influence beyond the
classroom. During this time she also
managed to fit in a Cropwood Fellowship
and an MA at Cambridge.
Chapter 6 When Littlehey’s governor was
appointed as director of the first contractedout prison, the Wolds, he invited Tessa to
apply for a senior post there. She was
appointed as inmate activities manager (a
governor grade) in a climate hostile to
private prisons. ‘Many contemporaries
found private prisons morally repugnant.’
The job involved challenging
responsibilities in a situation where the
contract demanded a much better regime
than many prisons were delivering at the
time. ‘For example, remand prisoners were
entitled to 14 hours a day out of cell. A great
idea, but the reality of this presented
problems. We trained our new staff (some of
them ex-servicemen) with care but given
their inexperience and the experience the
inmates had in traditional prisons, the early
days were very difficult.’ She was there for 3
years, commuting weekly from Suffolk.
Chapter 7 Ten years ago, a switch to
consultancy work – for Group 4 (diversity
training), the police and the Crime
Prevention and Criminal Justice
Department at the UN in Vienna. These
experiences clarified her philosophy on
prisons and her determination that they
should and could be just, safe and
purposeful for staff and prisoners.
Chapter 8 This philosophy surfaced in her
first book, published by Waterside Press in
1997. Prisons of Promise was commended by
Sir David Ramsbotham: ‘unreservedly...
positive and purposeful.’
Chapter 9 In 1999 Tessa West was
appointed to the Parole Board. Decisions
about parole require a focus on balancing
the needs of the community with the need
to re-integrate offenders. ‘In prison
education departments I had been
fortunate to see prisoners at their best. I had
by then also witnessed destructive and
aggressive behaviour. As an Independent
Member I found myself reading police
reports and judge’s comments and listening
to prisoners describe their offences to me in
detail. In order to assess potential risk, panel
members obviously have to look at the
whole picture. The Parole Board is a
tremendous experience. It’s the only organisation I’ve been in where everyone is solely
and simultaneously focused on the same
thing – the best and safest result.’
She liked interviewing prisoners, reckons
it was a privilege to get so close to people’s
lives. You have to look out for the answer
that betrays a possible risk. ‘You ask
someone with an alcohol problem what’s
going to happen when she walks past her
favourite pub. “I’ll be strong miss” is
worrying. “I won’t walk past it because it’d
be so hard” is a better answer. Or if you ask
what’s going to be the most difficult thing
on release and they say “the traffic” that
indicates they are not alert to the real risks of
release.’
Chapter 10 Since her first book was
published, Tessa West has turned to creative
writing. In 2002 she set up Fox Books, to
publish her own novel, The Estuary, a drama
where relationships are counter-balanced
with elemental forces (notably the 1953
floods), set not far from Hollesley Bay. Her
second novel, The Reed Flute (Fox Books,
ISBN 095436271, £7.99) was published in
2004 and is about Iraqi refugees in Norfolk.
Both novels are concerned with identity and
belonging and how people feel and act when
they are separated from family and home
and on the edge of society.
Chapter 11 Still to be closed, but there’s a
radio play just finished (about a young
offender) and a spell as a writer in residence
in Great Yarmouth. And throughout, a
realistic perspective on criminal justice.
‘There’s one vital part of criminal justice
work that I have little personal experience
of: victims. At the heart of the whole
business is getting people to recognise the
hurt they have inflicted and how to prevent
them from inflicting more hurt, but victims
usually remain marginal. Although it is
good to see increasing attention on
addressing offending behaviour and
promoting victim awareness, my experience
is that many prisoners still count themselves
as the primary victims of their crime and the
sentence it brought them.
‘But when I lost some penalty points
recently I have to acknowledge that my first
thought was about my licence and not
about the danger I might have caused.
When we fear we might lose something that
matters, it’s easy to think of ourselves first,
isn’t it?’
Independent Monitor • June 2005
19
REFLECTIONS
Europe’s shame at Ebensee
Vivien Stern, International
Centre for Prison Studies
On election day, 5 May, I was on a train travelling from Vienna to a small town in
Austria called Ebensee. Ebensee is in the
Salzkammergut, a region of mountains and
lakes where there is skiing in the winter and
water sports in the summer. It has a river
running though it, one hotel, a few restaurants and the remains of a concentration
camp. I was travelling to Ebensee to join a
friend at an event to commemorate the
liberation of the camp. Her father had been
with the US army and had been among the
liberators in 1945. She was writing a book
about him and was seeking to understand
the formative experiences of his life.
The commemoration ceremony took
place in the cemetery which had replaced
the bulldozed camp barracks. The remains
of the crematorium were there. The work of
prisoners at the camp had been to dig deep
tunnels into the mountainside to hide secret
armaments and one of the tunnels had since
been re-opened and turned into a museum.
The ceremony was well-attended. About
a thousand people came from Italy. A large
group of mainly young people came from
Poland and there were groups from Russia,
Ukraine and France. A US sergeant spoke
about his reactions as a young tank
commander driving up to the barbed wire
and finding the camp, seeing through the
fence groups of near-skeletons, standing
ankle-deep in mud and filth and behind
them piles of unburied dead bodies. He did
not know what to do and sat in the tank,
unable to comprehend what he was seeing.
Some survivors, all men over 80, spoke
about working in the camp, eleven hours a
20
Independent Monitor • June 2005
day without a break in all kinds of weather,
and the short life span of the workers
surviving on 250 grams a day of bread,
cabbage or carrot soup. The most moving
contribution came from a survivor who
spoke of leaving the camp with nowhere to
go. A couple in Ebensee who had lost their
only son in the last few days of the war took
him in. They wanted to adopt him. His view
of the world thereafter had been coloured by
that gesture of reconciliation.
For years the people of Ebensee had a
problem facing up to what had happened in
their town. For decades they preferred not
to mention the concentration camp and not
to ask themselves what they could and
should have done about it. It was only in the
late 1980s that discussions began to take
place about building a museum and a
memorial, and it is still controversial.
Each of the contributors at the
commemoration made the same point at
the end. We must make sure that such a
thing never happens again. And in our
reflections on the event afterwards that issue
dominated. What have we done since to
make sure that such a thing never happens
again, that measures are taken to ensure that
the potential in human beings to do hideous
wrongs to others is curbed? Are we sure that
the possibility of governments using that
potential for political ends is not allowed to
take hold?
Lessons for us in our work
From 1945 that message was taken on
board in many countries. Groups of
dedicated people, many of them British,
worked tirelessly to put in place an international human rights framework that went
above and beyond the scope of authority of
individual governments and required them
to accept and implement universal
standards and rules on the treatment of
those fleeing from persecution and seeking
refuge, on a commitment to the rule of law
in dealing with all citizens, and on a
commitment to proper treatment of all
those deprived of their liberty.
The international human rights
framework is a great legacy of the terrible
events whose 60th anniversary was remembered at the beginning of May. Much of that
framework is not concerned with events of
such horror and magnitude as the concentration camp at Ebensee. It is concerned
with prevention. It is concerned to ensure
that we do not sink so low again. So it is
based on an analysis of how seemingly
civilised people from nice families with a
good education were able to carry out such
deeds. And it is grounded in an understanding of how certain groups of people
become demonised and dehumanised so
that normal standards do not apply, so that
treating them badly is somehow sanctioned
and acceptable.
That is the context in which we should
from time to time look at what happens in
prisons and evaluate how well we are doing.
And when we do that we can see that the
lessons have been learnt. We do not assume
that when one group of people has total
power over another group, they will always
use that power well. We do not assume that
the authorities will always put respect for the
individual and the duty of care for the individual above convenience or cost. We do not
take the view that prisons should be secret
places from where rumours emerge of bad
things going on but no-one really knows for
certain.
So in this country we now have a number
of mechanisms to ensure that the standards
to which we subscribe are implemented in
prisons. Among them is the system of Independent Monitoring Boards for each
prison. Board members are in their prisons
often, always looking below the surface to
check that abuses are not taking place. In
addition, local coroners will inquire into
every death in custody and will report all
findings in public, even when the conclusions are highly critical of the prison
authorities. And in recent months they have
indeed been highly critical as the inquests on
the deaths of six women in Styal prison
within one year have been taking place. The
coroner said it was a tragedy that it had
taken six deaths before life-saving reforms
were introduced at Styal.
Torture in our prisons?
The government has supported wholeheartedly the work of the European
Committee for the Prevention of Torture, a
committee of the Council of Europe, even
though the committee in its latest report
was very critical of some aspects of government policy. The committee visited
Liverpool, Pentonville and Winchester
prisons and commented very unfavourably
on abuses of their authority by staff at
Pentonville. They highlighted prison overcrowding and the use of ‘operational
capacity’ as a benchmark, which meant that
two people were permitted to share a cell of
6.5 square metres. The committee regarded
8.5 square metres as the minimum space for
one person. The committee expects
prisoners to be given their entitlement of at
least one hour of outdoor exercise every day.
In this country, ‘not normally less than half
LIFE ON LICENCE
Recalls on the increase
Enver Solomon on a Prison
Reform Trust study of the
8,000 people recalled to prison
MARIAVLOTIDES
each year
an hour’ is acceptable. The committee was
very critical of this.
It is a strength of our democracy and
adherence to the rule of law that we have
such openness and that so much information about prison conditions is in the public
domain. Perhaps this is the background
against which we should all have considered
our responses to the consultation document
published about the absorption of the
Prisons Inspectorate into an Inspectorate for
Justice and Community Safety. On 19
January the proposed amalgamation was
discussed in the House of Lords. Lord
Corbett of Castle Vale, a Labour peer who
chairs the Parliamentary All-Party Penal
Affairs Group, opposed the change. He said
that the aim of the Prisons Inspectorate was
‘to ensure the human rights of prisoners and
that they are treated with decency and
dignity. That responsibility is more than
enough for a separate and independent
prisons inspector given the appalling levels
of overcrowding in most prisons’.
The proposal to amalgamate the Prisons
Inspectorate may not seem a great threat to
our system of protecting human rights. But
I do not think we can feel so sure that all is
well in our prisons that we can afford to
weaken our oversight mechanisms. I hope
the government can be persuaded that the
Inspectorate should be left alone.
Record prison numbers and overcrowded
jails are nothing new. But less well known is
the startling rise in the number of prisoners
recalled to custody, which is a hidden factor
behind the rising prison population. The
number of offenders returned to prison after
being released on licence in the community
has more than trebled in the last five years to
more than 8,100 and it is set to increase
further. In some local prisons recalled
prisoners make up nearly ten per cent of the
jail’s population.
The rise in prison recalls is not due to
offenders committing further crimes while
on licence but is a result of tougher enforcement by the probation service. The majority
of those who are recalled to prison have
failed to comply with licence requirements,
such as attending probation appointments.
The past decade has seen a greater emphasis
from the probation service on tighter
management and tougher enforcement.
National standards have curtailed
probation officers’ discretion about when to
breach offenders and how to respond to
failures to attend appointments. They are
under strict instructions to commence recall
action on or before a third unacceptable
failure to comply with the licence conditions and each probation area has strict
overall targets.
Offenders who are returned to custody
face a range of problems and there are also
particular challenges for the local prisons,
already under considerable pressure, which
receive them. A major concern is that
offenders can often be recalled to prison but
left uninformed about the reasons. Basic
information is not passed to the prisoner or
the prison authorities leaving prisoners frustrated and angry – creating problems for
prison staff and independent monitoring
boards. Delays in notifying prisoners and
transferring recall papers and sentence
planning documents have been highlighted
in a number of cases dealt with by PRT’s
advice and information service. Prisoners
have expressed frustration and anxiety
about being left in a state of limbo.
If information is not passed on without
delay, offenders are unable to make prompt
representations against the decision to recall
them to custody. Prison staff are overstretched and struggle to provide
appropriate legal advice and support. One
prisoner recently wrote to PRT expressing
real concern about the problems he had
faced.
‘I have really had a difficult time getting
my recall papers and finding how and who
to appeal to. The stress of finding out I could
be doing four more years really pushed me
close to the edge and losing everything I had
built up in the 18 months of time between
release and recall’.
Set to fail
Research by Alison Liebling at the University of Cambridge has found that every time
a person enters prison they can experience
high levels of distress even if it is not their
first time in custody. For those being
recalled, the return to custody is likely to be
destabilising and unsettling, especially if
they are not aware of the reasons for their
recall, yet offenders are not going through
proper induction procedures. Furthermore,
in many establishments recalled prisoners
are not subject to sentence planning to
enable them to make constructive use of
their return to custody.
The numbers being returned to prison is
expected to continue rising steeply with the
new provisions in the Criminal Justice Act
2003, introduced in April, which mean that
many prisoners will be released from jail
after serving half their sentence and will
then remain on licence under supervision in
the community for the rest of the sentence
(see Release on licence, next page). There is
Independent Monitor • June 2005
21
LIFE ON LICENCE
now a real danger that an increasing number
of ex-prisoners will be recycled through a
revolving prison door – further pushing up
the overall prison population.
It is critical that prisoners are not set up to
fail on release. Improvements are needed
across the prison estate so that resettlement
work is more effective. At present there are
some shining examples of good practice but
there are also far too many inspectorate
reports on prisons that continue to
highlight a failure in resettlement work.
The National Offender Management
Service (NOMS) needs to consider
carefully the implications of a rise in the
number of recalled prisoners. Regimes must
be flexible to meet their needs so that they
do not remain outside of the sentence
planning and resettlement process. And
recalled prisoners need to be given clear and
prompt explanations for the reasons for
their recall and then be able to access an
efficient appeals process. If NOMS does not
take appropriate action, local prisons could
be left struggling to cope, unable to do
much more than warehouse recalled
offenders in overcrowded conditions.
Release on licence
All offenders sentenced to 12 months or
more are subject to statutory supervision on
release from prison. They remain on licence
from the prison or Parole Board for a fixed
period of time. This requires the offender to
have regular contact with the supervising
probation officer and submit to certain
restrictions on movement and behaviour.
Offenders are subject to standard licence
conditions about good behaviour, seeing
their probation officer, having a permanent
address, doing only approved work and not
leaving the UK.
Probation officers can also recommend
additional licence conditions such as not
living or working at the same address as
children; participating in programmes that
address offending behaviour, or not making
contact with specified people or visiting
specified locations. The court can also make
recommendations for additional conditions
at the sentence stage.
sion of the Probation Service. At any time an
offender could be recalled to prison if they
committed a further offence or breached
their licence conditions.
If parole was not granted then automatic
release happened at the two-thirds point of
the sentence (or at a subsequent parole
review if earlier). As with the parole licence,
there was supervision by the Probation
Service up to three-quarters of the way
through the original sentence. This is
sometimes known as a non parole licence.
The Criminal Justice Act 2003 changed
these arrangements also. For offences
committed after 4 April 2005, release will be
at the half way point of the sentence and
supervision on will continue for the second
half of the sentence. Those serving extended
sentences will be eligible to apply to the
Parole Board for discretionary release at the
half way point of the custodial term and
annually thereafter.
Automatic conditional release
Life licence
This applies to offenders serving sentences
of between 12 months and four years and
happens half way through the original
sentence length. From release up to three
quarters of the way through the original
sentence, they have been under the direct
supervision of the Probation Service. At any
time offenders could be recalled to prison if
they committed a further offence or
breached the licence conditions.
The Criminal Justice Act 2003 changed
these arrangements. For offences
committed after 4 April 2005, the offender
will be on licence under probation supervision from their release half way through
their sentence until the end of the sentence.
Offenders serving life sentences are eligible
for discretionary release on licence after
serving minimum terms (also known as
tariffs). The only exception to this is the very
small group of prisoners serving whole life
tariffs. If granted release they have to live
under the basic licence conditions and other
extra conditions until a decision by the
Home Office rules otherwise. For the rest of
their life they are liable to be returned to
prison to continue their sentence if they
breach their licence conditions.
Discretionary conditional release
This applies to offenders serving four years
or more but not life. They have been eligible
for release at any time between half and two
thirds of the way through their sentence.
The decision has been made by the Parole
Board. From release up to three quarters of
the way through the original sentence, the
offender has been under the direct supervi22
Independent Monitor • June 2005
Public protection sentences
Since 4 April 2005 a new sentence of Public
Protection has been available to the courts.
If an offender is convicted of a serious sexual
or violent offence, where the maximum
penalty is over 10 years, they may be
sentenced to an indeterminate sentence of
Public Protection. The court will set a
specified part of the sentence (commonly
known as the tariff), after which release will
be at the discretion of the Parole Board.
Once released, offenders will be subject to
supervision on licence but, in contrast to life
licensees, they can apply to the Parole Board
to have their licence cancelled after 10 years
and at yearly intervals thereafter.
A warning from our patron
Lord Chief Justice Woolf on the new
offence
The key to this sentence is a requirement
that there should be ‘a significant risk to
the members of the public of serious
harm occasioned by the commission of
further specified offences.’ Courts will
have to evaluate whether there is such a
risk. Such a sentence is highly
controversial and if it is to accord with
acceptable principles the courts must
restrict its use to cases where there really is
such a risk. In doing this courts will be
assisted by reports from the probation
service. Those reports already as a matter
of course give the opinion of the
probation officer as to whether there is
such a risk. However, the probation
officer’s assessment is not an assessment
necessarily based upon his or her
personal knowledge of the offender.
Home detention curfew
Prisoners serving a sentence of between
three months and four years who pass a risk
assessment are eligible for release up to 135
days early under electronically monitored
curfew.
Prisoners must be curfewed for a
minimum of nine hours per day, although
most curfews run overnight for 12 hours.
HDC is not available to sex offenders, fine
defaulters, those awaiting deportation and
those breached for failing to comply with an
electronically monitored curfew order or
who have already breached a HDC. The
point at which prisoners actually become
eligible for HDC is graduated according to
the length of their sentence. Prisoners are
subject to a detailed risk assessment by
prison and probation officers and checks are
made to ensure their home circumstances
are suitable. The final authorisation is given
by the prison governor.
PRISON INSPECTIONS
HMCIP reports
■ Overall, a very positive inspection.
Despite a very large expansion, Highpoint
had risen to the challenges they faced and
had delivered a significantly improved
prison.
Sumarised by Helen Banks, North Sea Camp IMB
Full reports on www.homeoffice.gov.uk/justice/prisons/inspprisons
Ashwell (Semi-open Training)
Ashwell seeks to offer a relaxed and open
regime for medium-risk prisoners within a
secure perimeter but is holding a wide of cat
Cs without the robust systems and procedures that are expected.
■ There were weaknesses in purposeful
activity which inhibited its effectiveness as a
training prison.
■ The number of weaknesses could be
remedied by vigorous management and a
clear sense of strategic direction and it could
move towards becoming a high performing
training prison.
■
Holloway (Women)
■ Holloway had undoubtedly progressed
since the last inspection but not to the extent
that managers had hoped and the inspection team had expected.
■ It still did not meet standards for safety or
respect.
■ Women at Holloway felt noticeably less
safe than those in other women’s prisons.
■ Black and minority ethnic and foreign
nationals felt particularly vulnerable.
■ The prison had identified women’s needs
and was providing good crisis intervention.
■ Management should be assisted to make
further progress by further reduction in the
population pressure, and catchment area,
now that Bronzefield is open; and also by
removal of girls from the prison.
Guys Marsh (Cat C and YOI)
It has made considerable improvements.
■ It has nearly doubled in size since it
became a closed prison.
■ It was, in general, a safe and respectful
environment, liked by prisoners and staff
alike.
■ Although there was virtually full employment, its quality was poor and education
provision was unsatisfactory.
■ Since Guys Marsh was receiving more
■
AMIMB
statement
of purpose
challenging, and sometimes more vulnerable prisoners, evidence was not apparent
that policies, procedures and staff attitudes
had adapted satisfactorily. These weaknesses
should be relatively easy to remedy.
High Down (Local)
■ Has lost its Cat A status and operates as a
normal local.
■ Work in suicide, self-harm, healthcare
and resettlement showed improvement;
reception, first night and detoxification
work need it.
■ High Down needs to focus on its current
role, and to maximise the opportunities for
prisoners to engage in activities and to
acquire meaningful skills, drawing on best
practice in the prison at present.
Highpoint (Cat C)
■ The inactivity and boredom of prisoners
had been addressed since the last inspection
and this contributed to ensuring a largely
safe, respectful and purposeful establishment.
All inspection reports carry a summary of
the conditions and treatment of
prisoners, based on the four tests of a
healthy prison that were first introduced
in the Inspectorate’s thematic review,
Suicide is everyone’s concern, published in
1999.
The criteria are:
■ Safety – prisoners are held in safety
■ Respect – prisoners are treated with
respect as individuals
■ Purposeful Activity – prisoners are
fully and purposefully employed
■ Resettlement – prisoners are prepared
for release and resettlement into the
community with the aim of reducing the
likelihood of their reoffending
Brockhill (Women)
■ The only women’s prison in the West
Midlands.
■ Decision to re-role has been deferred
pending a full strategic review of the female
estate.
■ It is unacceptable that the prison may
close to women without a suitable alternative in the West Midlands.
■ Two suicides in 2004 and 390 recorded
incidents of self-harm. The prison was
struggling to provide a safe environment in
the face of these levels of distress.
■ Staff/prisoner relations were generally
good as was reception, access to listeners,
purposeful activity and resettlement.
■ Automatic night sanitation system was
grossly inadequate and healthcare struggled
to deliver a decent service in what was effectively a building site.
■ Although it may not be required if the
prison re-roles to become a resettlement
prison, the Prison Service has announced
intentions to invest in a model detox and
healthcare centre for women.
Winchester (Local)
■ Like many other locals, Winchester is
50% overcrowded.
■ Successful
resettlement work has
continued but managers need to pay
attention to protecting the most vulnerable
prisoners.
■ Like other local prisons, Winchester
is struggling to find sufficient activity for
its expanded population. Inflating or
massaging the statistics to disguise the
shortfall was not helpful.
Exeter (Local)
■ Improvements noted in 2001 have been
sustained.
■ Exeter is largely a safe prison with resettlement among the best seen in the local
estate
■ Healthcare, criticised in the past, had
improved significantly.
■ Slopping-out continues on D wing.
■ The prison must improve the extent and
quality of activity for prisoners.
AMIMB works to maximise the effectiveness of its members by providing:
■ encouragement in the robust and efficient performance of their duties
■ training support
■ best practice advice on the treatment of prisoners and the administration of prisons
■ information on relevant developments in penal affairs
■ support for members who seek advice in times of difficulty.
AMIMB also helps to enhance public awareness of the work of Independent Monitoring Boards.
Independent Monitor • June 2005
23
OFFENDER MANAGEMENT
Two months in the life of
NOMS and contestability
Thoughts after
the election
Just a few months ago, there
David Faulkner of Oxford
was some excitement about
what NOMS might bring. The
comes to the contest for the prisons in the
Isle of Sheppey but I think I can say some
things with certainty. Whoever does will be
able to demonstrate strong leadership.
voluntary sector was
anticipating the opportunity to
bid for plum services – even, in
principle, the possibility of
running a prison (if they could
afford the £100,000 it would cost
to make the bid). What next?
22 March 2005
NOMS press release - Raising
standards through contestability:
competition to operate three
prisons announced
A competition to operate a cluster of prisons
was today announced by Prisons and
Probation Minister Paul Goggins. As part of
its contestability agenda, the National
Offender Management Service (NOMS)
will shortly invite bids from all sectors to
manage the three public-sector operated
prisons on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent: HM
Prisons Elmley, Standford Hill and
Swaleside. The process is aimed at driving
up standards and encouraging imaginative
approaches to managing offenders in
custody and developing links with interventions in the community.
11 April 2005
Christine Knott (NOMS manager) at
annual NOMS conference
To people in the public sector contestability
is often perceived as a threat.To people in the
private sector and voluntary sector it may be
perceived as an opportunity. If it is a threat
for you now, how can you turn that into an
opportunity? It is not privatisation.The
judgements will be about quality of delivery.
We have got protection for the workforces
through the two tier agreement. The other
thing is that there are big increases in work
coming that would be very difficult for the
public sector to deliver in its entirety. We
already know there is to be a contest in a very
different way for three prisons on the Isle of
Sheppey during the course of this year and
we are beginning to work up some options
in terms of contestability for some aspects of
probation during this year with a view to a
contract being in let in April 2006. None of
us know who is going to win the bid when it
24
Independent Monitor • June 2005
University’s Centre for
Criminology on how NOMS
should proceed – and what it
12 April 2005
Question and answer session,
NOMS conference
Why has NOMS introduced a market test
of the Isle of Sheppey cluster when the three
establishments involved have performed
well, obtaining high marks within their
recent audits?
Market testing is not a punishment for
poor performance, but it is a way to free up
ways of working to improve outcomes in
reducing re-offending. The record of public
sector prisons is strong in these market tests
and the decisions that have resulted reflect
this.
might mean for IMBs
For many people, it must have been a relief
that prisons did not feature prominently in
the election campaign, and that no policies
or initiatives were announced that were not
already familiar and under discussion. The
way should now be clear to move more
confidently forward with the development
of the National Offender Management
Service, and to resolve the difficult issues
that are still outstanding.
NOMS has not had a good press, and
serious concerns remain about the early lack
of consultation, the uncertain future of the
19 May 2005
Home Office statement
Following discussions with the Prison
Officers’ Association and Prison Service
management, the Home Secretary has
agreed that if the three prisons on the Isle of
Sheppey earmarked for market testing next
year, prove by September that they can
provide the required level of innovation,
effectiveness and offending reduction, the
prisons will remain in public hands. If the
desired outcome is not achieved, the market
test will be restarted.
The agreement in principle reached
between the Prison Service and the POA
negotiators represents a milestone in public
service partnership.
The POA is committed to working with
management in a rigorous process of
performance assessment and improvement.
This includes the possibility of contracting
out in the event that internal processes do
not deliver the desired outcomes for a
prison. The POA’s commitment also
extends to working towards a new pay deal,
the development of a new job evaluation
tool, and a new approach to training and
development embracing accreditation and
progression through NVQs. This provides a
sound basis for long term partnership
between the POA, ministers, NOMS and
the Prison Service.
7 June 2005
Independent Monitor
Would love to have been a fly on the wall in
those discussions with the POA.
Respect for
young people
The Howard League recently
called for ASBOs to be abolished
for children, warning against
whipping up resentment of
‘already marginalised groups
just for electoral advantage’.
This is an extract from their
report
We fear that current legislation has the effect
of widening the net of the criminal justice
system, by criminalizing naughty children
and their parents, the mentally ill and those
in social housing. Anti-social behaviour
legislation relies on a low burden of proof. It
does not rely on an objective test of
behaviour but on the reaction to that
behaviour by others. Yet anti-social
behaviour legislation uses the criminal
justice system if the original order is
breached. There is a blurring of the boundaries between civil and criminal law which
serious implications for due process and the
rights of the child.
OFFENDER MANAGEMENT
Probation Service, and some of the detail
such as the structure below regional level
and the role, responsibilities and authority
of offender managers. Rumours that the
government is preparing to abandon the
whole enterprise are probably unfounded,
and the bill to consolidate the new service
has found its (rather unobtrusive) place in
the Queen’s Speech. Despite concerns over
the detail, it would be a tragedy to lose the
opportunity to transform the treatment of
offenders, and the relationship with courts
and local services and communities, which
NOMS represents. The task is to get it right,
not to retreat.
The Prison Service has sometimes given
the impression that it expects to go on much
as before, building its capacity up to 80,000
places and adjusting its regimes to the new
sentences, but keeping its centralised
command structure and its top-down style
of management. Others will argue that a
more devolved structure for the whole of the
penal system will be an inevitable consequence of the separation of ‘commissioning’
from ‘providing’, and with it of ‘policy’ from
‘operations’. Some would go on to argue
that the structure and style of the Prison
It is our view that the current approach is
punitive and is likely to exacerbate social
exclusion, which, in turn, is likely to
compound problems of anti-social
behaviour rather than resolve them. People
with difficult and chaotic lives need support
not exclusion in order to be helped to
change their lives. ASBOs are used exclusively against working class children.
It is reported that Hassockfield Secure
Training Centre holds 17% of its boys and
33% of its girls for breaching an ASBO
(Donovan 2004). Involvement in activities
that have only merited a civil sanction now
lead to the use of the most severe sanction of
the criminal justice system.
Service are not suited to the functions which
NOMS will perform outside prisons, and
perhaps not even to a modern public service
of any kind. In particular, they might say
that NOMS should be more closely integrated with local services and communities
than the Prison Service has ever been; that it
should have greater scope for local discretion and flexibility; and that local citizens
Rod Morgan (chair of the Youth
Justice Board) challenges the
language of the public debate
It is clear that there is to be a debate about
youth crime and anti-social behaviour. If the
words respect, feral and yob are going to
figure in it, we should contemplate what
these words signify.
Respect is a property of a relationship. It
involves one person honouring another.
Respect, as opposed to submission or
compliance, has to be earned. It cannot be
coerced or bought. It results from acknowledgement that the ‘other’ has intrinsic value,
moral worth.
The word feral has not previously been
applied to humans. It concerns cultivated
plants or domesticated animals, gone wild.
To call children feral is to deny their
humanity and disavow any relationship
with them. It signifies mutual disrespect, as
does the popular term yob.
There is nothing new about youth
showing some disrespect for their elders.
But labelling children feral yobs suggests a
new low for serious policy analysis. It
implies that the subjects are no longer part
of a human relationship. Or that the
analysts have no responsibility for whatever
relationship has gone awry. It’s not a sensible
starting point from which to find solutions
to the very real problem of youth crime. So,
where do we start?
and communities should have a powerful
voice in the way in which the new combined
service operates. All that is consistent with
other aspects of government policy - on the
integration of the criminal justice system,
on the local governance of public services,
and on civil renewal.
A vision of that kind would have implications for independent monitoring boards.
In particular, they would have the opportunity to become more representative of their
prison’s local communities, perhaps with a
recognised non-executive role in its
management, although with difficult
questions about what that might mean in
practice. They might also develop links with
probation boards, or their successors.
Further questions will arise if the government proceeds with its proposal to merge
the prisons inspectorate into a single organisation which would inevitably have a
different orientation and focus – on efficiency and on delivering the government’s
policies, rather than prisoners’ treatment,
decency and human rights.
IMBs would be wise to assemble their
own thoughts on questions of this kind
before the questions are answered for them.
We have allowed some neighbourhoods
to become zones of hopelessness. We have
failed to engage many children in our
schools and have seriously neglected their
health. We have permitted the exploitation
of children through the media. On reaching
adolescence we have allowed our young
people, slumped in front of TVs, to fall prey
to the drinks industry. We have criminalised
and locked up increasing numbers of them.
Finally, instead of talking and listening to
them we have employed others to watch
them through the largest concentration of
CCTV cameras in the world. This was not
the best way to cultivate respect.
The Youth Justice Board believes that we
have to rebuild relationships with troubled
and troublesome young people from the
bottom up. That means all the mainstream
services – education, health, housing, etc –
taking crime prevention seriously. It means
identifying children at risk and working
with them and their parents. It means
breathing new life into run-down neighbourhoods. It means resuscitating youth
services. It means making a reality of neighbourhood policing. It means ending our
obsession with locking young people up and
instead using our stretched budgets for
more early prevention work and more
intensive supervision of serious young
offenders in the community.
Effort invested in this way may earn
mutual respect.
Independent Monitor • June 2005
25
EDUCATION
Marked down
While the authorities agonise about whether prisoners
should have access to email and the opportunties that
brings, basic prison education languishes – according to a
House of Commons report
The report from the Education & Skills Select Committee, follows a year-long
inquiry into prison education in which the committee visited prisons in the Isle
of Wight, Reading and overseas. In January, the Committee took evidence from
prisoners at Feltham YOI.
While acknowledging some limited improvements in recent years, the
Committee reports that:
■ less than a third of prisoners have access to education
■ the concentration on basic skills in prison education is based on ‘little more
than a hunch’ and not on any real evidence of its need or effects
■ the ‘totally inadequate’ induction processes when prisoners arrive at prison are
hampering the delivery of quality education
■ implementation of Individual Learning Plans, linked to Sentence Plans,
should be a priority, to end the present ‘haphazard’ state
■ transfer of records across prisons is a ‘disgrace’; overcrowding and the
movement of prisoners around the prison estate is ‘no excuse’
■ the newly created role of the Head of Learning & Skills is welcome, but ‘they
have not been able to fill their intended role’
■ targets should be value-added and based on the individual prisoner, rather
than set by establishment
■ 60% of education provision in prisons is judged inadequate by the Adult
Learning Inspectorate
■ all prisoners should be paid the same, whether in work or in education.
Commenting on the report, Steve Taylor, Director of the Forum on Prisoner
Education said: ‘The Committee have produced an excellent report that
consigns all the government bluster to the dustbin. We have long said that the
unremitting diet of basic skills we currently see in prison education is based not
on any real measure of individual need. We’re pleased to see that the Committee
has agreed with us and has reinforced the value of education for its own sake.
‘The time has come for us to overhaul education for offenders to ensure that
they are offered the same quality and level of education as learners in the
community. Education is a human right for all, and one that’s breached daily for
too many prisoners.’
The Committee also recommended that supervised internet access be
provided to prisoners, echoing the evidence given by the Forum on Prisoner
Education. The Forum is currently conducting research into internet access.
Libraries poor too
Prisoners in England and Wales suffer the worst libraries in the country,
according to figures from the Forum on Prisoner Education. Annual budgets
for prison libraries vary from £2.16 per prisoner (Edmunds Hill) to £449.17
(New Hall). The average is £59.75. Spending under £30 per head: Featherstone, Grendon, Hollesley Bay, Liverpool, Risley, Stafford, Styal and Thorn
Cross. Over £100: Blantyre House, Dorchester, Foston Hall, Manchester,
Northallerton, Reading (of course), Warren Hill and Wandsworth.
Libraries can engage prisoners whose previous experience of education has
been so awful that they don’t like the idea of formal learning. They also allow
prisoners to maintain connection with their children and to gain information
essential to their resettlement.
Local authorities are responsible for providing library services in prisons.
Prison librarians have complained at the lack of resources and support from
prison managers.
26
Independent Monitor • June 2005
Election musings
Lou Lockhart-Mummery
of Portland IMB
I am a floating voter, registered to vote in a
constituency whose political complexion expressed
in the ballot box is so certain that the dilemmas of the
floater are irrelevant. This time round I should have
loved to place my mark in a box marked none of the
above.
I remember the 1997 election. I was entranced by
what I perceived to be one of Labour’s commitments
– to an inclusive society, linked by rights and
responsibilities. I assumed that in relation to prisons
and prisoners inclusive meant the beginnings of an
erosion of the divide between them and us. I also
assumed that the rehabilitative objects of
imprisonment would no longer have unrealistic
targets – within the compass of a sentence, often
short, to change people many of whom arrived in
prison with a life experience of deprivation, lack of
education, and no family stability, who would mostly
return to exactly the same environment upon release.
On the Friday afternoon after polling day I went
into Scrubs. I thought we were on the cusp of
something new. I wondered what impact the
election, and the huge Labour majority, had had
inside the walls. I took my usual route past a school,
the tube line, a hospital, some indifferent housing
and then walked through the gate. It felt to me as if I
had landed upon the other side of the moon.
Silly of me to have expected something different. I
had arrived as usual in a place geographically part of a
west London community but actually totally apart and in many respects rightly so. The men to whom I
spoke about the election had not received their newspapers yet, and those who had tv had not been
watching the results or hanging on the opinions of
the political commentators. They did not see that
what went on outside affected them. And as we
found out, it didn’t much, after all.
Election 2005
This time round I received a letter from one of the
candidates. A standard letter but addressed to me
personally. One of his reasons for soliciting my
support was that: ‘Mr Blair is letting criminals out of
prison early’. I would not have voted for him anyway.
I still think our access to prisons and prisoners is a
huge privilege, and the challenge of effective
monitoring enormous. I also still fret about our
corporate insularity. We look at how they fare inside
the walls but as a group do not at all engage with the
environment and life experiences that bring them
within the walls in the first place, or the environment
to which they will return upon release. Yes, the focus
of IMB work must be inside the walls, but does that
focus not give us a particular insight into the wider
social issues? Why are we as a group, silent? Why so
reluctant to contribute to public debate here?
I was once told that if I was that fussed about what
happens before someone lands up in prison for the
first time I should resign Board membership and join
a penal affairs lobby. Would you?
Health concerns
over detainees
Sarah Cutler of Bail for
Immigration Detainees (BID)
on why ill people in prisons and
Immigration Removal Centres
should be a concern for
independent monitors
A new report from BID is based on the cases
of 13 adults and 3 children with health
needs, held in UK prisons and Immigration
Removal Centres for periods ranging from
40 to 720 days. It includes findings of a
report on the health and medical needs of
immigration detainees by the independent
humanitarian medical agency Médecins
Sans Frontières (MSF).
The detainees, who had sought asylum
in the UK from countries such as
Afghanistan, Cameroon, Iraq, Nigeria,
Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Somalia,
reported traumatic experiences in their
home countries, including being imprisoned, raped, burnt with cigarettes,
subjected to electrical torture and
witnessing the murder of family members.
All 16 were medically assessed while in UK
detention in 2004 by a general medical
doctor employed by MSF, at the request of
BID. The reports of these assessments were
used by BID to seek release from detention.
The report shows that vulnerable people
are facing obstacles in exercising their legal
rights. In three cases, there was no independent review of detention at any stage,
and in several other cases adjudicators in bail
hearings appeared to ignore or disregard
health status. In all but three cases,
detention did not result in removal from the
UK and the majority of those released
stayed in contact with the immigration
authorities, which BID believes calls into
question the need to detain them in the first
place.
It was the opinion of the doctor that the
health of the detainees had deteriorated in
detention, considerably in the majority of
cases. MSF felt that the continued
detention of these individuals would be
likely to result in further deterioration of
health, particularly mental health. Despite
this, long periods of detention elapsed
between medical assessment and release –
168 days in one case.
The MSF report also notes:
■ a lack of a systematic process in place to
ensure that seriously ill individuals are identified and detained only in exceptional
circumstances, as specified in official
detention guidelines
■ failure in some cases to identify torture
victims
■ cases of disrupted treatment for mental
health problems, unidentified health needs
among detainees, and lack of follow-up and
referrals for urgent medical concerns
■ poor continuity of health care and a lack
of complete medical notes for detainees who
are frequently moved between centres and a
lack of interpreting services to enable
detainees to communicate appropriately
with medical staff.
Fit to be Detained? Challenging the detention
of asylum seekers and migrants with health
needs’ by Bail for Immigration Detainees,
published on 18 May 2005, can be
downloaded in full from www.biduk.org. An
Executive Summary of the report is also be
available online.
Too few part-timers
News on intermittent custody part 1
Home Office press release, 7 March: ‘An
innovative new sentence allowing offenders
to spend part of their time in prison and part
under supervision in the community is to be
expanded. The expansion begins today with
an increase in the number of courts able to
impose the Intermittent Custody sentence.
The number of courts able to impose the
sentence in the catchment area serving
HMP Kirkham in Lancashire (male
prisoners) will increase from nine to 27, and
the number of courts serving Morton Hall
in Lincolnshire (female) from 44 to 81.
News on intermittent custody part 2
(which may explain part 1). News report, 3
June: HMCIP reports that Kirkham had
just one prisoner during their December
inspection (in a wing built for 39). The
problem is that prisoners are not able to
claim unemployment benefit if they’re not
available during the week – so weekend
custody is preferred.
Will widening the catchment area solve
the problem, or is the Prison Reform Trust
right to say intermittent custody should be
dropped in favour of more effective
community sentences? Maybe they should
just lift the weekend benefits ban.
Segregation
On 22 March boards were sent the results of
the national council’s review of PSO 1700
Only just over half of boards had replied to
the questionnaire. How reassuring were the
results? Well, if you tend to think of your
glass as half-empty, around a third of boards
said:
■ they were not told about segregated
prisoners within 24 hours
■ there were no set times, adhered to, for
segregation review boards
■ healthcare wasn’t always represented at
reviews
■ their seg was not more progreesive as a
result of the changes.
The covering letter spoke of discussions
with the DG about ‘inconsistencies’ in PSO
1700. Sheila Royle, the national council
member responsible for this area, told the
Monitor this referred, rather crucially, to
what board members were actually there for
in the review. Paragraph 7 says we have to
satisfy ourselves that the procedure has been
followed, and that the decision is reasonable. But paragraph 8 (and the form we’re
asked to sign at the end of the review) talks
about our agreeing or disagreeing with the
decision to continue segregation. There’s a
real difference there (and a particularly
meaningful one should something go
wrong and legal proceedings result). So the
Prison Service needs to sort it out very
quickly. Prison Health is trying to improve
healthcare attendance at reviews.
This is all clearly still a live issue, and
Sheila Royle welcomes feedback from
boards on progress in this most critical
board duty.
Independent Monitor • June 2005
27
LAST WORD
Busy doing nothing
About 40 prisoners in a very busy local recently complained that
when they go to work or sometimes to education there is absolutely
nothing for them to do when they get there except sit and look at a
blank wall. No instructor. However, for the compilation of Prison
Service statistics they are engaged in purposeful activity and the KPT
is satisfied. So that’s alright then.
Gongs
Carp has fielded grumbles from board members sensitive to loss of
status. Apparently when IMB members are honoured these days it’s
with OBEs rather than the traditional MBE. And expenses for things
like travel haven’t matched inflation – unlike those for ministers, who
say how much they value us.
Ombudsman delays
Since Stephen Shaw’s arrival, the prisons omudsman’s office has
made tremendous strides in reducing delays while dealing with an
increasing number of cases. But just recently, as some IMB members
have noticed, a backlog has appeared. Preliminary figures indicate
that this year’s annual report will show that 61% of complaints were
completed on time (against 66% last year and a target of 70%). The
upside, though, is 15% more complaints dealt with.
Drugs
Amid all the concern about different aspects of the illicit drug
problem in prisons, it is hard to understand why the Prison Service
allows some Cat C prisons to be starved of drugs and others to be
relatively well supplied. And if such differences can exist in the same
area, what are the area managers doing about it?
Hospital alert
Prisoners are not normally given details of their hospital appointments, in case they arrange a nasty surprise for their escorts. But
relatives in at least one area have been ringing the hospital and
finding out when their loved ones are coming. No escapes so far, but
it’s no thanks to the hospital which claims it can’t change its systems
to prevent it.
Wayne Reid was found dead, apparently of chest injuries, and three
people were arrested. A week later there were reports of an officer
arrested and six more suspended. Rye Hill is run by Global Solutions
Ltd (GSL, formerly Group 4). They also run Yarl’s Wood and
Oakington IRC, featured in an undercover tv exposée recently, but
also Altcourse – widely regarded as a model prison.
As our interview with Anne Owers on page 8 reveals, her inspectors were actually in the prison when the second death happened,
and one can assume that the prisons ombudsman as well as the police
are investigating both deaths. Amid rumours of the most damaging
kind about Rye Hill, we must hope that the facts are settled soon.
Internal investigations
Prisons don’t seem to be required to notify boards of internal investigations which impinge on the treatment of prisoners. Surely boards
need to know about these, and their findings.
In possession?
There seems to be some confusion about how prisons assign responsibility for prisoners’ belongings. There is general agreement that
stuff held by prisoners in their cells is ‘in possession’ – ie the responsibility of the prisoner. But if a prisoner is moved to another cell
suddenly, accidentally leaving something behind, and that object is
subsequently retrieved by an officer but then lost – who is responsible? The prison said he was, common sense says the prison. What
will the ombudsman say?
Lincoln riots: now the story can be told
The latest Prison Service News devotes seven pages to the inside story
of how specialist C&R people got the country’s worst prison riot
since Strangeways under control. Now the various court cases have
concluded (resulting in 96 added years), the fascinated saga is no
longer sub judice. Read the IMB’s version of event in next time’s
Monitor.
Rye Hill alert
What on earth has been going on at Rye Hill prison? On 26 March
Michael Bailey, doing four years for drug offences, was found hanged
in his segregation cell. He had been on suicide watch. On 13 April
Ratings latest
For those that follow these things, since the last Monitor, seven
prisons have changed status. Haverigg, Highdown and Wakefield
have been demoted from level 3 to level 2; Drake Hall from 4 to 3.
Brixton, Ford and Rochester have moved up from level 2 to 3.
Prison numbers
When we reported in June, the prison population seemed stable at
around 73,500. Since then, it has risen again, just topping 76,000
last month (75,873 on 3 June). As 76,000 was the 2007 target for the
‘low’ estimate in the last Home Office projections, one must assume
that 80,000 won’t be far off unless something is done. Meanwhile,
the emphasis on prison accommodation in two-man toilets is
consolidating. Over 16,000 men live like that. The ten most overcrowded prisons are Leicester, Preston, Dorchester, Exeter, Swansea,
Shrewsbury, Usk, Leeds, Lincoln and Lancaster.
Open questions
Finally, a couple of questions put to the Secretariat recently, and to
which we are still waiting answers. 1 Are board members still being
encouraged to switch boards as a way of refreshing their work? 2
Given that the necessary security checks etc are ok, by what process
and in what circumstances is a board choice rejected; similarly how
can a candidate not recommended by a board be selected? Answers
next time, we hope.
by Carp