A Dystopian Nightmare

Seeing as it's been referenced, ('more wanky shyte') we might as well cover the latest Probation Service Change Bulletin. I have to say I find it paints a particularly depressing and emotionless picture of bureaucratic-speak, utterly devoid of any soul and in somewhat stark contrast to all the fluffy bullshit associated with 'Probation Day' at the other end of the spectrum.

Of course, as we know, the centre of the practice spectrum is characterised by widespread low morale, departures and crisis, but hey ho, this is what happens when you have the vast civil service bureaucracy running things and, as has been highlighted, the perfect recipe for more breaches; more offences; more imprisonment. But then HM Prison Service is increasingly driving things. What a dystopian nightmare we are steadily creating.  

1. Foreword

Welcome to the bi-monthly Probation Service Change Bulletin – keeping you updated on what is happening across the Probation Service. I’m Ian Barrow and I’ll be hosting this month’s bulletin. I’m the Executive Director of the Probation Workforce Programme.

A lot has happened since the last bulletin in July. We have seen significant changes in Government and His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS). We welcome back Dominic Raab as the Deputy Prime Minister, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice.

There have also been changes within our own leadership team. Amy Rees was appointed Director General CEO for HMPPS and Phil Copple appointed Director General Operations, further information on these changes can been see in our recent update.

Amy and Phil are leading our plans to reshape the agency, with their joint focus being a continuing and greater focus on the operational front line. Their aim is to make sure the frontline has the right support and that we remove any obstacles that stop us being more efficient and effective, ensuring that Prison, Probation and the Youth Custody Service are support to enhance the vital services they provide.

Jo Farrar continues to have oversight for HMPPS alongside her wider Second Permanent Secretary responsibilities overseeing the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA), Legal Aid Agency, Office of the Public Guardian, and leadership of the service delivery transformation portfolios. Amy and Phil’s appointments signal the start of an exciting journey for HMPPS.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to pay tribute to Sonia Flynn, Chief Probation Officer, who after 35 years of working in Probation will be making a change of career direction and taking up a part time role within the Probation Workforce Programme as of February 2023. Sonia will be leading on the development and setting up of the new professional register, an area of work I know she is particularly passionate about. It will be great to still have her wealth of experience and knowledge within probation.

2. Reform Programme Closure

The probation reform programme will close as planned at the end of the year. We have delivered a big, very complex Government programme on time, to budget, much of it in a global pandemic. In June 2021 we welcomed over 7,000 probation professionals, either directly into probation services or employed by one of the organisations delivering commissioned rehabilitative services. We have completed 47 delivery priorities out of 69 based on the target operating model. Highlights this month include the launch of the new resettlement framework and enhancements to the Victims Contact Management System.

Since unification, our focus has been on ensuring a smooth transition phase and embedding some of the changes we have made. Once the programme does close, we will continue to implement the reforms set out in our Target Operating Model. In the December issue we will be updating further on all that has been achieved since the programme commenced.

3. Reducing Reoffending

This summer (July) we marked the one-year anniversary of the launch of our prison leaver accommodation service (Community Accommodation Service – Tier 3, or CAS3), a temporary accommodation service which aims to ensure no individual subject to probation supervision is released from prison into homelessness.

CAS3 provides up to 84 nights of temporary accommodation and support for all adult offenders released from prison or leaving an Approved Premises or BASS (Bail Accommodation and Support Service) residence who would otherwise have nowhere to go upon release. Hear from Probation Officer Lindsay as she explains how CAS3 supports safe reintegration back into society.

3.1 Stable Accommodation

Prison leavers who do not have access to stable accommodation on release are almost 50% more likely to reoffend. In creating a stable environment through accommodation, CAS3 gives people on probation the opportunity to address aspects of their behaviour linked to their risk of reoffending, including substance misuse issues and unemployment. CAS3 also supports pathways into settled accommodation, working with local authorities to increase access to private rental properties for prison leavers at risk of becoming homeless.

3.2 One Year On

CAS3 was launched in July 2021, initially in the North West, Greater Manchester, Yorkshire and the Humber, East of England, and Kent, Surrey, and Sussex probation regions. Since then, 2,396 individuals have been successfully placed into temporary accommodation. Roll out in Wales has now begun, and the programme team are in the process of competing contracts for the remaining probation regions.

3.3 Mandatory Drug Testing

People on probation recently released from custody residing within Approved Premises will now be randomly tested for 14 different types of drugs as part of a £1.2 million initiative to reduce reoffending. Read more about how this will help to reduce drug-fuelled crime.

4. Electronic Monitoring

We highlighted in the last bulletin the publication of the electronic monitoring strategy, setting out our clear vision for electronic monitoring. One of the key aspects of the strategy is the integration of electronic monitoring into Offender Management.

As we continue to expand electronic monitoring capabilities and its use, we will continue to ensure that our electronic monitoring structures are more closely integrated to offender management, building on the advantages of the Probation Reform Programme, ensuring electronic monitoring can provide the greatest effect for both those on probation in terms of rehabilitation and from a safety perspective for wider society.

The latest electronic monitoring statistics were recently published, with figures showing that the number of individuals actively monitored has increased in the last year, with 14,996 individuals actively monitored at 30 September 2022.

This is the first quarterly publication that has been produced and contains details of the number of individuals in England and Wales with an active electronic tag fitted, the number of new notification orders and the number of completed orders. It also contains details of the number of individuals with an alcohol monitoring tag and the number monitored under the acquisitive crime pilot.

We continue to expand electronic monitoring capabilities and Wednesday 26 October saw the expansion of the eligibility criteria for the compulsory GPS tagging of people on probation convicted of specific acquisitive crimes.

The project will now see the eligibility cohort expanded to those who are serving standard determinate sentences of 90 days and over – previously only those serving 12 months or over were eligible – who are released or re-released to reside within one of the 19 in-scope police force areas: Avon & Somerset, Cheshire, Gloucestershire, Gwent, Humberside, West Midlands, Bedfordshire, City of London, Cumbria, Derbyshire, Durham, Essex, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Metropolitan, North Wales, Nottinghamshire and Sussex.

5. Grant Scheme

A grant scheme launched by the Probation Service is encouraging applications from charities and not-for-profit organisations. The scheme is to assist people with shared characteristics or shared experiences, and to provide support for people on probation with their desistance and rehabilitation. Grants are being funded through the Probation Service’s Regional Outcomes and Innovation Fund and aim to cover most activities regions would wish to grant fund.

Organisations interested in applying for a grant from this scheme should register through the Probation Grants Application Portal.

Once registered on the Ministry of Justice Sourcing Portal, organisations should go to PQQ open to all suppliers and click on Probation grants Application Process to complete their registration. The first round of grants will be for people from ethnic minority groups. Organisations successful registered on the Portal can submit a funding application for the first round until 2pm on 2 November.

6. Unpaid Work

People on probation on Community Payback are cleaning up the coastline in South Wales as part of the Marine Conservation Society’s annual Great British Beach Clean. The groups will be bagging up broken glass, plastic, and litter from beaches in Ogmore and Aberavon to support the green drive and pay back to the communities they have harmed. The rubbish they recover will be logged and the data then used by the charity to pinpoint the main pollutants and campaign for change.

The coastline clean-up marks the beginning of a new partnership between the Probation Service and Marine Conservation Society that will eventually see hundreds of people on probation on Community Payback cleaning beaches across England and Wales.

It follows a similar partnership with the Canal & River Trust with offenders on Community Payback helping to maintain the country’s waterways and is part of the government’s £93 million investment to increase unpaid work carried out by offenders up to eight million hours a year. The public can nominate Community Payback projects in their local area via the nominations page.

Predictable, Populist, Confused

Does this sound familiar?

"But the solutions proposed are politically driven catchphrase-based policy making"

It's a statement that could be applied to any number of probation-related issues over the last few years and it's regarding a topic we've not covered for some time : drugs. Of course it's a well known fact politicians talk nonsense on the subject and the latest headline-grabbing government initiative is no different. I can't be bothered to read it, but I notice Transform have and the quote is from their recently published analysis:-  

REVIEWING THE GOVERNMENT’S NEW ‘TOUGH’ CONSEQUENCES FOR DRUG POSSESSION

The Home Office has set out its plans to reduce the current levels of recreational drug use across the UK in its new White Paper Swift, Certain, Tough: new consequences for drug possession. The paper follows on from the Government’s most recent drug strategy; it was promised at the time to address the objective of ‘demand reduction’- reducing use - which the drug strategy mostly overlooked in its focus on service provision.

The White Paper’s demand reduction strategy for ‘so-called recreational users’ proposes a model for public consultation (to be piloted in three locations) for how drug possession offences would be dealt with, summarised in this graphic:

Some elements of the proposals appear relatively promising. At first glance, there seems to be a desire to try and avoid the tens of thousands of people caught committing minor possession offences from being drawn into the criminal justice system. Implicit is an acknowledgement that criminalisation of minor possession is both expensive and counterproductive; there is no evidence that blanket punitive sanctions are an effective deterrent and there is substantive evidence that they fuel stigma, create obstacles to proven public health interventions, and undermine the life chances, particularly of people from socially and economically marginalised communities.

This is why ending criminalisation of people who use drugs is recommended best practice from the Government’s own expert advisers (the ACMD), all 31 lead agencies of the UN including The World Health Organisation and UN Office on Drugs and Crime, as well as the Royal College of Physicians, the UK Faculty of Public health, the Royal Society for Public Health - and many other authoritative voices.

Moves in this direction are already underway in 14 police authorities - a range of ‘drug diversion schemes’ where people caught in possession are ‘diverted’ into health interventions rather than the criminal justice system and prosecution. While the law criminalising the act remains in place (often lurking as a threat behind some of the diversion programs), perhaps the best we can say is that diversion represents a form of partial or de facto decriminalisation. Transform has a dedicated page of information and resources about these initiatives.

Notably, the schemes have been lauded by the Drugs Minister, Kit Malthouse, recommended by the Government’s own recent expert review from Dame Carol Black, and are prominently flagged in last year’s new Government drug strategy. So the idea in principle is not a new one.

The White Paper, however, makes no mention of either decriminalisation or diversion schemes (although it does refer to ‘diversionary cautions’, see below). Instead, it promotes language around ‘swift certain and tough’ consequences - proposing the escalating tiers of sanctions described above. The first tier looks a lot like many existing diversion programmes but, worryingly, with a series of financial penalties as well as an offender-paid drug awareness course, which most diversion schemes do not implement. Tiers 2 and 3 move increasingly far away from emerging best practice and, indeed, the entire underlying conceptual thinking around diversion/decriminalisation relating to avoidance of harmful engagement with the criminal justice system, criminal records, stigma, and so on.

Before critiquing some of the details (where the devil inevitably resides), it is worth noting that we can all agree that there should not be a ‘postcode lottery’ for how police deal with drug offences. Currently, you can get very different treatment responses to possession offences depending on where you are caught - ranging from a life-impacting prosecution, to an informal telling-off. This variation is obviously problematic; equality before the law is a fundamental part of the rule of law and the aspiration in the White Paper to address this problem is welcome.

But the White Paper proposals, even acknowledging the vague nod towards diversionary pragmatism, are a step backwards from the best practice lessons emerging around the country. We should not pursue national consistency at the cost of entrenching bad practices more widely and undermining the positive work already being done throughout the UK. Equality should be about equally good policy, not equally bad. If rolled out these proposals would, in many areas, represent a form of levelling down (the proposals have already been rejected by the Scottish Drugs Minister - as a regressive step backwards from their existing diversion program).

We are all too familiar with problems created by drug prohibition - such as the empowerment of organised crime and related violence and exploitation - being blamed on the drugs or people who use them. These problems of punitive enforcement are then routinely used to justify even more punitive enforcement. But with this White Paper, the Government seems to be tacitly acknowledging the harms of criminalisation and the benefits of reform - but showing a pathological inability to make the case for such reforms, show leadership, and call them what they are. It is so invested in the drug war narratives that it seems unable to perceive reform as anything other than weakness or surrender. The result is this strange and confused mess of proposals.

A key problem of the White Paper is that it confuses, or deliberately conflates, issues relating to people who use drugs recreationally with issues relating to people with drug dependencies or problematic use. The paper, including its prominent ‘Swift, Certain, Tough’ title, draws heavily on the US literature on 'swift, certain and fair’ (SCF) sanctions. But while this scholarship on SCF has explored maintaining abstinence amongst drug-dependent offenders (enforced with drug testing - and sanctions, such as 48 hours of immediate custody, for positive results) the focus of the White Paper is specifically on ‘so-called recreational users’ who are not the focus of the SCF literature. Hawaii’s HOPE programme is referenced twice and appears to have been a big influence, but it is a programme for people with histories of dependence in probation-mandated treatment having left prison. None of that is relevant to recreational users - most of whom will not have criminal records, and none of whom, by definition, need treatment.

The White Paper has also pointedly replaced the ‘fair’ element of ‘swift, certain and fair’, with ‘tough’ - a reframing symptomatic of the performative ‘tough on drugs’ populism that runs through the whole paper and its accompanying media messaging. Even for the drug awareness courses mandated in Tier 1 (not dissimilar to the diversion programme in place in Avon and Somerset for example), there is a proposal to not just make the offenders pay for the course but for them to pay more than the cost of the course - an overtly punitive element thrown in for good measure.

The second tier, for those caught in possession a second time, includes what is called a ‘diversionary caution’. This is a formal police record that would appear on certain forms of background checks - in other words, a criminal record. It also involves random drug testing (presumably supervised urine samples - with all the indignities and human rights issues this entails) over a three-month period. A formal charge will be brought in the event of a positive test. So, far from progressive reform, this would de facto criminalise ‘internal possession’ and use (i.e. a positive test) in a way that only a small number of countries, such as Sweden, do at present.

Seemingly drawing on the disastrous and discredited ‘three strikes you’re out’ US policy from the 90s, third-time offenders would not only be automatically charged and receive a criminal record but would additionally be subject to a range of new, non-coincidentally headline-grabbing, punitive sanctions that include:

• Exclusion orders - Preventing access to certain ‘night time economy’ venues. The paper acknowledges there’s no evidence these would work, and it’s not clear how they would be enforced.

• Drug tagging - Remote monitoring of drug use with technology that they concede does not exist yet.

• Passport and driving licence confiscation - Ideas seemingly borrowed from some EU countries (such as Italy - which is unable to show they were effective), these seem particularly disproportionate, having the potential to devastate someone’s life or career - for a possession offence as minor as being caught smoking a joint.

And who is likely to move beyond tier 1, be criminalised, urine-tested, and subject to an additional raft of draconian new punishments? It is not going to be the ‘middle-class drug users’ that the Government seems so keen to single out, but whose drug use tends to take place with the protection that private space and privilege offers. In reality, it will be people who are already most exposed to drug policing and the glaring disproportionality in stop and search; those from economically and socially marginalised communities, and urban black youth in particular. These are also people less able to pay punitive fines or course fees, and therefore more likely to default and end up with a criminal record regardless, even from tier 1. It will be regressive in its impact on the poor and institutionalise the criminalisation of poverty. Yet more levelling down.

It is appropriate to welcome some elements of this White Paper - the acknowledgement of rising use and some of the problems with criminalisation and postcode lotteries, and the commitments to support problematic users. But the solutions proposed are politically driven catchphrase-based policy making, which ignore existing best practice. The proven diversion/decriminalisation approaches that the paper seems to want to benefit from, by their nature require a paradigm shift away from punitive enforcement. That’s the whole point. But the Government's obsession with maintaining its ‘tough on drugs’ posturing has perversely led to proposals that will be incredibly expensive, and are likely to lead to increased criminalisation and harms for the most vulnerable in society - with few, if any, corollary benefits.

Transform will be submitting a more detailed response to the consultation, and we encourage others with relevant personal or professional experience to do the same.

Don't Tell Tory Voters!

Oh look, the government are about to launch a new drug policy, accepting it's a health condition not a criminal justice problem, but really hope voters, especially Tory ones, don't notice. This from the BBC:-

Government to overhaul drug policy to focus on getting users healthcare

The government will announce a new drugs strategy on Monday overhauling the drug recovery and treatment system, the BBC has learned. The announcement is expected to pledge £700m over three years to tackle problem drug use. Measures will include a large focus on diversion, a tactic designed to remove drug users from the criminal justice system and get them into healthcare. Ministers are also set to announce investment to tackle drug gangs.

The overhaul has been drawn together by at least six government departments, the BBC understands. It will form part of a wider week of law and order announcements for the government, which a source involved in the drug strategy said had frustrated some of those who worked on it - who wanted to make clear these measures would lead to fewer crime-focused drug policies. The government has been asked to comment.

The diversion strategy is expected to be twofold - short prison sentences for drug use will be largely replaced with court orders putting users into recovery programmes and there will be less emphasis on prosecuting people caught with substances. 

In Scotland, prosecutors can refer people accused of drugs offences for "diversion" and their Lord Advocate said people caught with Class A drugs could be given a police warning instead of facing prosecution - a move the Conservatives had previously said amounted to "de facto decriminalisation."

'Chronic health condition'

In his party conference speech, Boris Johnson accused Labour of "decriminalising" hard drugs after the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said Scotland's decision was "probably the right thing to do" but was an "independent decision." 

It is understood there will also be more emphasis in the strategy on helping drug users leaving prison to find work and safe housing. The Times newspaper has reported drug treatment courses could be offered to those whose offending was fuelled by drugs, giving people the option of changing their behaviour or facing tougher punishments. 

One source heavily involved in forming the review told the BBC "ministers have now accepted this [problem drug use] is a chronic health condition". However, they added that because of concerns over how that would be viewed by the public and Conservative voters, it was unlikely the government would want it to be the focus of the announcement. The Home Office have been asked to comment.

As well as an overhauling of drug treatment plans, ministers are expected to outline more investment to tackle county lines drug gangs - urban drug dealers who sell to customers in more rural areas via dedicated phone lines.

The strategy has been drawn up as a response to the Dame Carol Black review of drugs, which reported in the summer and made 32 recommendations. The BBC understands the government has accepted at least 31 of these. The Times also reported the government was seeking to amend its Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill to give judges extra powers to order drug testing of anyone serving a community sentence. It said drug testing could be required on arrest for all crimes, and the government could outline plans to use drug dealers' phones to identify and support addicts - and warn people they were not anonymous when buying drugs.

The BBC has been told there will be no announcements on heroin-assisted treatment or drug consumption rooms. Politicians in Scotland have been pushing for the latter to be introduced but a source involved in forming the drugs strategy said Number 10 and the Home Office were "very against" them and a move in that direction may have needed a change to the Misuse of Drugs Act. Both departments have been asked to comment. 

Those drawing up the drug strategy were instructed to find ways of introducing new policies without having to make major change to legislation. It's also understood there will likely be no specific funding in this strategy for prisons to replace methadone with "abstinence-based rehab", a plan reported by The Telegraph newspaper earlier this week. However, Dominic Raab, the justice secretary, is expected to publish a separate strategy on problem drug use in prisons in a government White Paper.

A government source told the BBC this would allow governors in prison to be more empowered to take action against drug use. The Times reported it could also involve further "airport-style" security in prisons for visitors and staff to prevent drug smuggling.

Police Talking Sense on Drugs

Preamble

A week on, the AGM blog post continues to attract attention with total site traffic yesterday exceeding 3,100 hits. What it means is always an imprecise science, but I suspect something not unconnected to the long-standing Napo tradition of not saying very much about difficult issues. Whatever happened to the General Secretary's Blog?

Talking of difficult issues, politicians have always found drugs firmly in that category and best avoided. William Haigh raised the subject "Decriminalising drugs is the only way forward" back in August because it seems the topic can only be raised when your political career is over. Fortunately, the continuing independence of Chief Constables who hold office under the Crown, despite all the elected PCC nonsense, often can and do speak up on such matters whilst in post, as here in the Guardian:-

As a chief constable, I’ve seen enough: it’s time to end the ‘war on drugs’

I know addicts can commit odious acts. But treating drug use as a criminal justice problem causes thousands of needless deaths

When I first met Andy, I got the sense that he hadn’t been born at all but rather quarried out of a mountainside: a big man with a warm smile who, as we spoke, was injecting medical-grade heroin into a line in his lower leg. As a serving chief constable, this was one of the more unusual introductions I’ve made with a member of the community.

Andy must have sensed my confusion at his apparent health and physical stature for a person on the heroin-assisted treatment programme in Middlesbrough, the first of its kind in England and Wales. “Heroin doesn’t make you skinny,” he said. “It’s just that heroin comes first and last and there’s never any money left for food. That’s why addicts are thin.”

If the “war on drugs”, first declared a full 50 years ago, has an established fighting front, it’s Andy’s home town of Middlesbrough. The latest statistics from 2020 show that 123 people died from drug-related deaths on Teesside – the highest number since figures have been collated, and one of the highest rates in the country. Across England and Wales, there were more than 4,500 drug-related deaths in the same 12 months.

The vast majority of those deaths would have been entirely preventable. In 21 years of police service I have slowly, perhaps too slowly, come to the conclusion that framing this crisis as a criminal justice problem has not simply been unhelpful, but counterproductive. This nationwide epidemic is a public health crisis.

Having said that, if it’s to be labelled as a problem, perhaps it’s best characterised as a political one. It must be recognised how hard it is for mainstream parties to initiate a conversation on drugs policy reform when votes are often won by being “tough on crime”. I agree with the sentiment, but there are different ways of achieving this. Some early advocates for reform do exist across the political divide, including MPs Crispin Blunt (Conservative) and Jeff Smith (Labour), but there is a growing appetite beyond Westminster to fundamentally reconsider our response.

In my time as Cleveland’s chief constable, we have increased the number of stop and searches and seen a large increase in the amount of illicit drugs seized – I’m proud of this. Stop and search can have an impact and ensure that vulnerable people are safeguarded. Likewise, closing cannabis farms can work: not only are drugs seized and gang members jailed, we safeguard those left to “farm” the cannabis who are often trafficked into the UK.

However, working alone as a single agency has had little impact on the problem as a whole. The production of heroin in Afghanistan, and cocaine in South America, has increased; organised crime activity and violence is at an historic high; and deaths continue to rise.

If we are to be serious about tackling this crisis, a fundamental change of approach is required. The government’s response to Carol Black’s independent drugs review proposes a cross-departmental drugs unit and reinvestment in treatment services that were cut during the years of austerity. The reinvestment is a particularly welcome recommendation and is a prerequisite to reducing deaths.

Most of us have allowed the message on drugs being bad (which they clearly are) to be conflated with addicts themselves being bad simply for using drugs. Let me be clear: some of the most odious and evil acts I’ve encountered in my police service have been perpetrated by drug addicts; but this is not universally true. Many, like Andy in Middlesbrough, have made bad choices in their lives – but by helping people like him, we help ourselves.

Andy is now on the path to stabilisation, supported by Danny Ahmed, a visionary who runs the treatment programme in the town. Danny explains that it required a brave set of people two years ago to sign off on his plan to give “heroin” to addicts. But viewing drug dependency as a chronic health condition, as Danny does, allows us to view the problem through a different prism: we would not hesitate to help patients manage other conditions that require ongoing medication.

As Danny explains, the patients are given diamorphine, the same drug that pregnant women often receive during labour to manage pain. Most people feel differently about his programme when this is explained. While watching Andy’s syringe being prepared (during which time he’s not allowed to be in the room) I asked the nurse what would happen to me if I took the diamorphine. So high is the dosage, I’m told it would probably kill me.

Andy chats happily as he prepares to self-administer the diamorphine in what amounts to a doctor’s surgery. He doesn’t fall back in a stupor on to a dirty mattress, as depicted in Hollywood movies, nor does he lose consciousness. At all points he’s lucid and talkative. Andy and the others on the programme do this twice a day, every day of the year: a phenomenal commitment for people who are used to living chaotic lives.

Andy invites me to stay for a cup of tea. He talks about a difficult upbringing in one of the poorest towns in England but acknowledges that not all those who have a difficult start in life end up abusing heroin. The ruinous path to addiction started as a means to “fit in” and fill a void in his life.

The programme has meant his life has stabilised, he’s rebuilding relationships with family members, and can look with confidence to the future. “I understand that you’ve got a job to do,” he almost pitifully suggests, before tailing off from the sentence – with the futility of the police’s work to stamp out drug abuse all too evident.

The heroin-assisted treatment programme offers hope, if scaled up on a national level, that demand for heroin can be cut. When the state offers a meaningful alternative to the street drugs that can be bought from organised crime groups, the demand for them decreases. What remains to be seen is how organised crime groups will adapt to plug a huge drop in profits.

Middlesbrough, a town so often discussed as a “problematic” area with “problematic” people, could possibly represent the beginning of the end for the “war on drugs” that has already taken too many lives.

Richard Lewis is chief constable of Cleveland police

--oo00oo--

It's worth bearing in mind that, unlike the Police, as civil servants the Probation Service at any level is now completely silenced in terms of making any contribution towards social policy discussions, despite having an unparalleled wealth of experience and insight into such matters. Increasingly, it's the Police Service as de facto community social workers that we must look to for enlightened social policy making, a role once very firmly in probation's bailiwick.    

Reality Behind Love-in

Blimey. Someone at Napo has torn themselves away from the week-long self-congratulatory probation love-in, that hard-pressed staff have no time for, and issue a response to that HMI report on drugs. I can't help but notice publication didn't interrupt the endless chirpy upbeat stuff on the official Twitter feed though and it was instead emailed to all members this afternoon:- 

Napo’s response to the HMIP Thematic Report on Drugs

Napo members will be frustrated to read this report detailing the many failings of the failed experiment in probation privatisation that was Transforming Rehabilitation (TR). This report is released just weeks after Dame Carol Black has issues her Review of Drugs part two making recommendations for multi-agency, whole system partnership approach with ring-fenced funding.

Declining service provision before and through TR

Many Napo members will recall the former Drug Intervention Programme (DIP) which operated up to 2013. This offered a genuine multi-agency approach to supporting those leaving prison who had drug misuse issues. DIP reduced acquisitive crime by a third but ended in 2013 and even though there were some local attempts to replace it these largely ended in 2014-15 because of TR.

TR brought with it a wholesale disinvestment in provision of probation services. This applied across the CRCs and the NPS. The NPS had to invest early on in infrastructure and was always behind in achieving the appropriate staffing levels. Almost every year since 2014 when the NPS was created Trade Unions were told that staffing would reach steady state in the next 2 years but that steady state was never achieved. Some CRCs made staff redundant early on, some left it until later in their contracts, others relied on not replacing the huge numbers of staff who left. Across all employers there was an increase in retirements and an increase in turnover generally. In 2014-15 there was a TR related baby boom as many women staff timed their plans to take maternity leave to give them respite from the chaos in the workplace. The loss of skilled and experienced staff from the probation system will take many years to recover from and unification is not the answer some might think it is. We are now losing staff who just cannot cope with more organisational change, and also staff who cannot tolerate the excessive workloads and are disappointed to find that the new unified service just brings all of the staffing issues together – it resolves nothing.

Courts and Pre Sentence Reports

Drug treatment requirements have become more difficult for Probation staff working in Courts to arrange. This is because the staff working in Courts are employed by the National Probation Service and up to unification the CRCs were responsible for delivering the requirements. Added to this the push for ever speedier justice means that adjournments for pre-sentence report enquiries are rare. Adjournments are generally needed to allow for proper assessments for treatment requirements but for lower risk cases it can be a huge challenge for Court staff to persuade sentencers to have any type of pre-sentence report, never mind one which will require an adjournment for a few days. The HMIP report highlights the number of people sentenced without any pre-sentence report and this is a real concern, no one can be sentenced to a treatment requirement without a pre-sentence report so they should be mandatory in cases where drug misuse is a factor.

Drug review Courts have also disappeared in most cases and these should be reintroduced to support sentence confidence in treatment requirements as well as to promote engagement and progress for those subject to the requirements. There is real value in sentencers seeing the progress made, sharing in the discussion of challenges being faced and the work done to motivate and support clients to make positive changes to their lives. There is also huge value for clients in participating in this dialogue and feeling themselves to be an active participant with equal stake in the process post-sentence. Much is made of developing social capital and attending drug review Court hearings is a very real way of doing this.

Specific interventions and sentence management

Prior to TR most Probation Trusts operated with specialist teams to work with clients subject to Drug Rehabilitation Requirements and other relevant sentences. These teams were often co-located with the partner agencies who provided the treatment and wrap around services. It is encouraging that a return to this model is recommended and we hope this can be achieved however there will need to be further and significant investment into the system to replace what has been lost. In particular the mantra of resource following risk will be a barrier, most of the cases that are covered by this report will not have been assessed as high risk so will not attract the level of resource that is required to achieve some of the goals.

The report details the need to address some of the underlying issues relating to drug use such as trauma but such work takes time and skill. Contrast this with staff carrying workloads measured at 150% or more of their capacity and the lack of specialist training available to them and the scale of the problem becomes clearer. The Government response that they are recruiting 1000’s of additional Probation Officers is of little use when many of the cases being discussed will be managed by PSO staff. In any case increased recruitment will take some time to make a genuine difference due to the significant loss of staff over the last seven to ten years. The report also highlights the importance of co-ordinating treatment and interventions and supporting and motivating engagement with them. This again is work that required time and skill, and the development of a positive working relationship which is especially challenging when staff have 70 or more clients to work with at any one time.

Some of the recommendations in Dame Carol Black’s review of drugs will support recommendations in the HMIP report however it is difficult to see how staff so overworked and facing significant organisational change as a result of unification of probation will be able to capitalise on this. Training is one way to ensure that probation staff develop and maintain skills in this work but the current focus is solely on system and process based and mandatory training for the staff recently transferred to the Probation Service from other employers and in the professional qualification for trainee Probation Officers. Career development training and the ability to focus on specialism or semi-specialisms seems very far away for most Probation staff at the moment and it will take an estimated 18 months to reach the intended operating model for the unified Probation Service.

Unified Probation Service Operating Model

A search of the unified service operating model reveals only one reference to drugs, in the section describing the limited work of the Community Sentence Treatment Requirement (CSTR) programme. This began in 2017 but has yet to expand to cover all areas. The HMIP report notes that where it exists there are positive improvements but the lack of focus on work with people whose drug misuse is related to their offending in the operating model is very concerning.

Genuinely local multi-agency arrangements need to be reinstated. These must take into account local needs and priorities and will necessarily be different in different areas. This is tricky to do with a centralised model for operations and contracting. The promised improvements to contracting via the dynamic framework of Commissioned Rehabilitation Services (CRS) will not necessarily be the panacea imagined as contracts are awarded centrally and regions can only purchase services or not in the early years, with innovations funds restricted to activities not concerned with delivering the order of the court. This gives little opportunity for local collaboration to meet specific needs.

Napo HQ

Rain Falls on Probation Parade

It doesn't look like HMI Justin Russell got the HMPPS memo about this being a celebratory week for probation:- 

Probation services – ‘disappointing’ work with drug users ‘lacks focus and funding’

Probation services are responding poorly to drugs misuse and addiction cases, according to inspectors.

Probation services across England and Wales supervise nearly 156,000 people in the community. HM Inspectorate of Probation estimates that almost 75,000 of these individuals have a drugs problem, yet fewer than 3,000 people were referred by probation services to specialist drug misuse treatment in 2019/2020.

HM Inspectorate of Probation partnered with the Care Quality Commission to examine how probation services supervise this cohort.

Inspectors found:

• too few people on probation receive help to tackle drugs misuse – and when referrals are made, the quality of services is often not good enough
• funding for treatment has reduced and criminal justice programmes to identify and refer people for treatment have “withered on the vine”
• very few drug users on probation are being tested for drug use – just one in six of the inspected sample of known users
• key information is missing, not captured properly or used to commission services. Probation services were unable to tell inspectors how many Class A drug users were on their caseload or how many were in treatment
• six out of 10 magistrates that the Inspectorate surveyed said they were not confident probation was delivering the necessary treatment.

Chief Inspector of Probation Justin Russell said: 

“Drug-related crime causes widespread misery and costs the public purse more than £9bn a year. Yet there is a lack of focus and funding across the whole criminal justice system to tackle drug use and supply. The current system is not working well and the findings of this inspection were very disappointing.”

In the inspected areas, two-thirds of prison leavers received treatment for drugs misuse while in custody but did not continue to receive help on release. Inspectors were concerned to see poor follow-up arrangements in the community, with the situation considerably worse in England and better in Wales.

For several years, HM Inspectorate of Probation has reported on heavy workloads in parts of the probation service. Some probation officers managed upwards of 70 cases, which affected the overall quality of their work.

The findings in this inspection were consistent with the overall picture, with probation services often overstretched. Practitioners did not always have the time to examine individuals’ back stories and identify factors that could help support them into recovery, stay safe and move away from drug-related offending. Probation court teams made too few recommendations for treatment.

Two-thirds of the practitioners interviewed during this inspection felt they needed more training on the impact of drugs and how to support individuals with trauma and recovery. At the time of the inspection, probation services were delivered by the National Probation Service and privately-owned Community Rehabilitation Companies. Major reforms took place at the end of June and probation services are now unified into one public-sector service.

The Inspectorate has made 14 recommendations in its report to improve the quality of supervision including more drug rehabilitation court orders, greater use of testing, and increased funding for treatment.

Mr Russell said: 

“Probation services have an important role to play in supporting positive change for individuals caught up in drugs and their supply. The new Probation Service must strengthen every aspect of its work with drug users. It needs to build a comprehensive picture of this crime-generating cohort and commission the right services to reduce their drug use. Justice and health organisations must work more closely together, for example to ensure continuity of support for prison leavers.”

Mr Russell added: 

“Earlier this year, the government provided additional funding to improve drugs treatment. While the announcement was welcome, the money is for just one year – we need sustained commitment to fund drug treatment and recovery for people on probation. I welcome Dame Carol Black’s recent call for additional ring-fenced government funding for substance misuse treatment. People on probation should be an urgent priority for any future increase in investment, which would cut crime, save lives and more than pay for itself in the long run.”

Dr Rosie Benneyworth from the Care Quality Commission said: 

“Where services were available and people could access them, we found dedicated health workers providing good quality care for people in need of substance misuse services. However, the vital holistic support provided around this can vary greatly and be a barrier to keeping people engaged and on their recovery journey. Concerns around the availability of these services, along with concerns around continuing engagement with people as they move from one part of the system to another, means that as it stands the right care is not reaching everybody that it should.”

Oliver Standing, Director of Collective Voice, said: 

“Effective drug treatment and recovery has real transformational power – reducing mental and physical health harms, supporting people into super-charged citizenship, healing families and creating savings for the public purse. And crucially it has a strong, proven link to reducing crime – keeping vulnerable people out of the criminal justice and leading to fewer victims of crime in the future.

“The findings of the report are stark. It is estimated almost half of those supervised in the community by the probation service have a drug problem. The fact that only slightly more than two per cent were referred into specialist support in 2019/20 surely represents a systems failure. Although community services have experienced a decade of profound disinvestment, Dame Carol Black’s recent review has set out a compelling vision of a refreshed and renewed system and made the case for major investment. This important thematic review will help to shape that brighter future.”

Probation and Drug Policy

Continuing my lonely mission of highlighting the incompatibility of probation being part of HMPPS and civil service control, here's a timely piece on the politics.co.uk website reminding us of the utter folly of our drug policy:-   

50 years in, the war on drugs is an unmitigated disaster

There’s arguably no piece of legislation in the modern era which has been more ineffective, needlessly cruel or morally insane than the Misuse of Drugs Act. Last week saw its 50th anniversary. And over the course of that half century it has maimed and mutilated countless lives, thrown hundreds of thousands of people pointlessly in prison, and accomplished the square root of absolutely nothing at all.

The facts speak for themselves. Dame Carol Black’s review of drugs for the Home Office last year found that 3 million people took drugs in England and Wales in 2019. Drug use has shot up since 1971, when the Act was passed. Less than 10,000 people took heroin back then, whereas over 250,000 do now. Cannabis use has gone from under half a million to over 2.5 million today. Around one per cent of adults had tried drugs in the 60s, compared to around a third now. It’s fair to say that the legislation has not worked for that which it was intended to achieve.

The illicit drugs market is worth an estimated £9.4 billion a year, most of which is directed towards sustaining criminal gangs. In recent years, the ‘county lines’ system has begun to supply drugs from an urban hub towards rural or coastal towns, displacing local dealers. One of its marked features is the exploitation of children, typically aged around 15-17, who are deployed as ‘runners’ transporting drugs and money.

On any given day, a third of the prison population is there for drug related crime – around 40% for convictions on the basis of specific drug offences and 60% for crimes related to drug addiction, like theft. In prison, they continue to use drugs. Random drug test data suggests 12,500 inmates – about 15% of the total population – are using drugs on any given day. Most users entered prison with a drug problem, but eight per cent of female inmates and 13% of males developed their problem with drugs while they were incarcerated.

These figures do not include the people who are given a caution for drug possession, many of them teenagers. We rarely talk about this, because it doesn’t involve a prison sentence, and therefore seems fairly small-fry. But cautions involve an admission of guilt and therefore constitute a criminal record. They freeze countless thousands of young people out of many of the professions and kneecap their career before it has even begun.

Under any possible analysis, the war on drugs has been an unmitigated failure. More people take drugs, more people die of them, more people end up in prison, and more money is funnelled into criminal gangs. For half a century we have tried to accomplish something which cannot be done. We have legislated for what is inconceivable. And, in reality, we have fuelled the worst possible side-effects of drug use: broken lives, dead bodies and rich criminals.

If the world made any sense, the political class would accept that the legislation has failed. It would acknowledge that people are clearly going to take drugs regardless of whether they are banned or not. It would prioritise their protection rather than their criminalisation. It would read the data, recognise the endless wave of needless suffering it reflects, and do something to change it.

But the world does not make any sense and therefore the political class has done something else, which is actually quite startlingly insane. It has drawn the curtains, turned off the lights, and pretended that reality does not exist. It has closed itself off from expert opinion and the basic facts of narcotics use so that it can justify continuing with a demonstrably failed policy.

In many ways, drug policy was an early forerunner of post-truth politics. Anyone who tried to point out what was really happening was ignored, or, if they refused to keep ignoring reality, punished. In 2009, David Nutt, chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, a statutory body which reports to the government on drug harms, contributed to a paper assessing the damage of various narcotics. His analysis of nine “parameters of harm” suggested alcohol was the fifth most harmful drug – after heroin, cocaine barbiturates and methadone, but ahead of LSD, ecstasy or cannabis. The response of the then-home secretary, Alan Johnson, was to dismiss him.

This is the standard operating model which successive governments have used. For decades now, parliamentary select committees have called on the government to investigate drug law reform, only to be ignored by whoever was in No.10. And that approach remains in place today. Dame Carol Black’s review of drugs was explicitly barred by the government from considering “changes to the existing legislative framework”.

It makes no difference who is in power. The policy is the same under Labour or Conservatives. There isn’t even any distinction within the parties. For all their differences, and the ferocious infighting that goes with them, you could fit a thin blue Rizla paper between the drug policy of Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer. The closest we ever got to sense was Tony Blair downgrading cannabis to Class C – a decision that was soon reversed.

It doesn’t even matter what politicians’ views were on drug reform before they took office. In 2002, David Cameron was part of the home affairs committee when it recommended a discussion on “the possibility of legalisation and regulation”. Ten years later, when he was prime minister, he ruled out a suggestion from the very same home affairs committee that there should be a royal commission on drugs. No matter who sits in No.10, the view never changes. People who saw sense magically became impervious to it when in power. And then, like former home secretary Jacqui Smith, rediscover their sense after they have left it.

The curtains stay down, the lights stay off, the war on drugs continues, and all evidence discounting it is rejected.

If we were going to be honest about drugs, we would admit the following six things.

First: you cannot stop people using drugs. People have used drugs for millenia. As far as we can tell, they have done it since the dawn of man. Wherever you find a human activity that cannot be stopped, you are best off trying to regulate it, so that you can minimise harm, instead of trying to outlaw it, which will merely drive it underground.

Second: we should not try to ban drugs, even if we did have a chance of succeeding at it. It is up to people to decide what they want to put in their body. Many drugs are harmful. Even relatively harmless drugs like cannabis can suck the dynamism and ambition out of people. Other drugs, like methamphetamines, are much more dangerous. But in every case, it is people’s right to choose to do it.

Some people find that opinion shocking. And yet they at the same time believe alcohol should be legal. This simply makes no sense. Alcohol can make people violent, damage the body, and be addictive. We respond by helping those who struggle with it, while respecting the decision of those who choose to consume it. The same applies to other drugs and there is no morally consistent position to claim otherwise.

Third: our moral duty as a society is to help people who decide to take drugs. That involves providing addiction services for those who cannot stop, advice for people experimenting, and regulating the market so that drug dealers are prevented from mixing dangerous ingredients in with the active ones.

Fourth: the war on drugs has created a ceaseless grind of broken lives, in which tens of thousands of people are funnelled into prisons for a non-violent crime, where they are brutalised all over again by an under-funded system, and then become more likely to take drugs and commit crime in order to buy them. Even the caution system, which devastates young people’s professional prospects, constitutes a cruel and needlessly vindictive response to a perfectly normal youthful curiosity.

Fifth: the war on drugs ignores the rich while punishing the poor. Look at the government. Around the Cabinet table, prime minister Boris Johnson and minister for the Cabinet Office Michael Gove have admitted taking cocaine, while foreign secretary Dominic Rabb has admitted taking cannabis. Why are they any different from the people currently languishing in prison? Why should they be allowed to treat drugs as youthful high-jinks, when others have their lives ruined by the police response? The answer is because of their class. Overwhelmingly, people from more elevated social backgrounds avoid the brutality of the system, while those from poorer backgrounds do not. As Barack Obama said: “Middle-class kids don’t get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do.”

Sixth: the war on drugs is racist. It was from the beginning and it still is today. Black people are stopped and searched for drugs at almost nine times the rate of whites. They are convicted of cannabis possession at 11.8 times the rate, despite having lower rates of self-reported use. As a UN group of human rights experts said in 2019: “The war on drugs has operated more effectively as a system of racial control than as a mechanism for combating the use and trafficking of narcotics.”

The cruel irony is that the world around us is realising the insanity of the war of drugs, even as Britain stays trapped in its curtains-down, self-imposed blindness. In the US, state after state has experimented with drug reform. The pressure is now building at the federal level, with the House of Representatives voting to pass a bill to decriminalise cannabis late last year. In Europe, several countries are pursuing liberalisation to various degrees, including Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, the Czech Republic and Germany.

Britain stands increasingly alone, pursuing a deranged fantasy agenda which drives users into danger and money into gangs. The war on drugs cannot be won and it should not be won, even if it could be.

We can’t put up with another 50 years of this deranged masquerade. The price in human lives is too steep. But where is the political leader with the bravery, the insight and the backbone to say so? At the moment they are nowhere to be seen. So instead, we stay in our self-imposed madness, keeping the curtains locked down tight, patrolling the light switch, and dismissing anyone who speaks the truth.

Ian Dunt is editor-at-large for Politics.co.uk. His new book, How To Be A Liberal, is out now.

Common Sense Drug Policy

It's been some since we mentioned drug policy here in the UK and, apart from a couple of police initiatives, anything positive happening. Whilst this situation is most unlikely to change, especially with a Tory government in control, it's worth reminding ourselves that there is an enlightened alternative as outlined in a Transform report published last week on the Portuguese experience. (Graphs and references are not shown).  

DECRIMINALISATION IN PORTUGAL: SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

BACKGROUND

In 2001, Portugal decriminalised the personal possession of all drugs as part of a wider
re-orientation of policy towards a health-led approach. Possessing drugs for personal use is instead treated as an administrative offence, meaning it is no longer punishable by imprisonment and does not result in a criminal record and associated stigma. Drugs are, however, still confiscated and possession may result in administrative penalties such as fines or community service.

Whether such a penalty is applied is decided by district-level panels made up of legal, health and social work professionals, known as ‘Commissions for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction’. Where an individual is referred to a Commission for the first time and their drug use is assessed as non-problematic (low risk), the law requires their case to be ‘suspended’, meaning no further action is taken. Fines can be issued for subsequent referrals. Where some problematic trends are identified (moderate risk), brief interventions are proposed — including counselling — but these are non-mandatory. In ‘high risk’ cases, where more serious problematic behaviours and dependence are identified, individuals may receive non-mandatory referrals to specialised treatment services.

In the vast majority of instances, problematic drug use is not identified, and cases are simply ‘suspended’. Individuals referred to the Commissions overwhelmingly view their purpose as helping to reduce use and educate on drug risks. They are non-judgemental in nature, and a primary focus is safeguarding the right to health of those referred.

Importantly, the decriminalisation of personal possession is only one part of broader health-centred drug policy reforms that involve an increased focus on harm reduction and treatment provision. By ‘accepting the reality of drug use rather than eternally hoping that it will disappear as a result of repressive legislation’, Portuguese reform allows drugs to be treated as a health, rather than criminal justice, issue. The benefits of these reforms, therefore, arise from both decriminalisation itself and the establishment of a wider health-based response to drug problems.

Portugal was not the first country to decriminalise some or all drugs, and it has not been the last. However, it is one of the most prominent and influential. The Portuguese model directly influenced the 2020 decriminalisation measure passed in Oregon, for example, as well as proposed decriminalisation in Norway. Portugal is regularly held up as the leading example of drug decriminalisation, so understanding the outcomes is vital.

DRUG-RELATED DEATHS

In the first five years after the reforms, drug deaths dropped dramatically. They rose slightly in the following years, before returning to 2005 levels in 2011, with only 10 drug overdose deaths recorded in that year. Since 2011, drug deaths have risen again but remain below 2001 levels (when there were 76 recorded deaths).

In 2001, Portuguese drug death rates were very similar to the EU average. While rates fell in Portugal following reform, they increased across the rest of Europe in the same timeframe. From 2011 onwards both Portugal and the rest of the EU have trended similarly, rising until 2015/6 — however, the gap between the two remains considerably wider than it was pre-reform. In real terms, drug death rates in Portugal remain some of the lowest in the EU: 6 deaths per million among people aged 15-64, compared to the EU average of 23.7 per million (2019). They are practically incomparable to the 315 deaths per million aged 15-64 experienced in Scotland, which is over 50 times higher than the Portuguese rates.

CRIME

The move away from criminalising and imprisoning people who use drugs has led to a dramatic change in the profile of the prison population. In 2001, over 40% of the sentenced Portuguese prison population were held for drug offences, considerably above the European average, and 70% of reported crime was associated with drugs. While the European average has gradually risen over the past twenty years (from 14 to 18%), the proportion of people sentenced for drug offences in Portuguese prisons has fallen dramatically to 15.7% in 2019 — now below the European average.

Most of this decline occurred in the first decade following decriminalisation and the establishment of a health-led approach. Since 2010, the actual number of people in prison for drug offences has remained relatively steady, but a rise in overall prison numbers means the proportion of people serving sentences for drug offences has continued to fall.

It has also been suggested that reform has led to a reduction in drug seizures. However, drug seizure data is difficult to analyse so any conclusions should be treated with caution: reduced seizures may be a result of fewer drugs on the market or they may simply be down to reduced police activity.

DRUG USE

Levels of drug use in Portugal have been consistently below the European average over the past twenty years. This is particularly the case among younger people: Portugal has some of the lowest usage rates in Europe among those between the ages of 15-34.

In the first five years after drug policy reform, use of illegal drugs rose slightly among the general population but fell again in the following five years. Use among 15-24 year olds fell throughout the decade, and among the general population was lower in 2012 than in 2001.

However, consumption trends in Portugal have been keenly disputed and often misrepresented. While drug use during individual lifetimes among the general population appeared to increase in the decade following reform, use within the past 12 months fell between 2001 and 2012. Both the World Health Organization and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime consider use in the past 12 months (recent drug use) or within the past month (current drug use) as better indicators of trends among the general population.

Since 2012, past-year use appears to have risen, particularly among those over the age of 25. This is, however, based on relatively limited data from SICAD (the Portuguese drug dependence agency) and only one further dataset — in 2016. In any event, Portugal continues to retain one of the lowest rates of drug use in Europe.

Consumption figures alone tell us relatively little about the level of harm experienced through drug use. A rise in drug use among individuals using only occasionally, and recreationally, is unlikely to lead to large rises in deaths or other harms. For this reason, measuring levels of high-risk drug use, particularly among people who inject drugs, is important. As of 2015, there were an estimated 33,290 ‘high risk’ opioid users in Portugal. Per 100,000 population, this is above the European average. However, it is lower than when decriminalisation was established in 2001. Researchers have also noted a fall in the proportion of individuals referred to Dissuasion Commissions found to be dependent on drugs, suggesting a general reduction in problematic drug use — though this may, in part, be linked to police not repeatedly referring the same individuals if they are already in treatment. In 2018, 90% of individual cases were found to not demonstrate problematic use.

Drug policy reform in Portugal was combined with a change in approach to drug education, moving away from abstinence-based ‘just say no’ campaigns. Drug use in schoolchildren has been consistently below the European average for the past twenty years. Rates in 2019 were roughly the same as 2001. In line with European trends, as reported by the European school survey on alcohol and drugs (ESPAD), they have shown a gradual, consistent decline in the last 10 years. ESPAD also reports that perceived availability of drugs among children in Portugal is lower than the European average.

HIV TRANSMISSION

Drug policy reform in Portugal included wide-reaching needle and syringe programmes aimed at reducing risk of infection among people who inject drugs. In 2001, Portugal had 1,287 new HIV diagnoses attributed to injecting drug use. It had over 50% of all new HIV diagnoses attributed to injecting drug use in the EU in 2001 and 2002 despite having just 2% of the EU population. In 2019, with only 16 new diagnoses, it only had 1.68% of the EU total.

While HIV diagnoses have gone down across Europe in this period, the trend in Portugal is much stronger. Owing to its previously extremely high levels of transmission, Portugal retains some of the highest HIV prevalence rates in Western Europe among people who inject drugs (at 13%). However, this still marks a significant downturn since the millennium, when half of all new HIV diagnoses were attributed to injecting drug use. AIDS diagnoses in people infected through injecting drug use have also fallen dramatically over the past twenty years: from 518 in 2000 to just 13 in 2019. Again, this is a stronger downward trend than the EU average: in 2000 Portugal had 15% of new EU diagnoses; in 2019, it had less than 5%.

HEPATITIS B AND C

Hepatitis C prevalence among people who inject drugs has been estimated as the highest in Western Europe and is a result of multiple epidemics in the late 20th century linked in part to unsafe drug injecting practices up to the 1990s. Prevalence of hepatitis B (which, unlike hepatitis C, is commonly spread through means other than blood-to-blood contact) is below the Western European average. The EMCDDA reports that the number of new yearly hepatitis B and C reports have fallen consistently over the past twenty years.

TREATMENT AND HARM REDUCTION PROVISION

A key feature of the new Portuguese drug policy, alongside decriminalisation, was the expansion of treatment services. Between 2000-2009, outpatient treatment units increased from 50 to 79. However, the number of individuals in treatment for drugs steadily decreased between 2009-2018, which may be linked to significant reductions in health and welfare budgets following the impact of the global financial crisis. Following the absorption of the country’s independent Institute for Drugs and Drug Addiction into the National Health Service (which itself saw budget cuts of 10% in 2012) health spending continued to fall until 2015 — to under 9% of GDP, from roughly 9.9% in 2009.

A reduction in absolute treatment numbers may also be related to reduced levels of problematic drug use, as discussed above. A study comparing patients entering treatment for heroin dependence pre- and post-reform found an overall decrease between 1992 and 2013, which the authors suggest could be linked to a fall in the number of newly dependent individuals. EMCDDA data also indicate a changing profile of individuals entering drug treatment, with admissions for opioids steadily falling over the past ten years but admissions for cannabis going steadily up.

According to the latest available yearly data there are an estimated 17,246 individuals in opioid substitution treatment in Portugal. Using this data, combined with EMCDDA estimates on levels of problematic opioid use in European countries, it can be estimated that over half of people with problematic opioid use in Portugal are in some form of opioid substitution treatment, slightly above the European average.

Harm reduction has also been a central tenet of the Portuguese drug policy reforms. The latest available data indicate that 1.3 million syringes are being distributed per year. This is significantly down since 2003, when the figure was at 2.6 million, but is still one of the highest in the EU.45 Portugal also has an estimated 2,137 needle and syringe programmes in operation, roughly three times the number of Spain — despite being a quarter of the size in population. Nonetheless, some advocates have been ‘frustrated by what they see as stagnation and inaction since decriminalisation came into effect’, particularly in relation to overdose prevention centres, naloxone provision, and needle and syringe programmes in prison. Portugal did finally open its first mobile overdose prevention centres, in Lisbon and Porto, in 2019. Other harm reduction efforts have been praised — including in relation to the provision of safer smoking kits — but it is clear that continued investment is needed.

SOCIAL COSTS

A 2015 study found that the social costs of drug use in Portugal fell 12% between 2000 and 2004, and 18% by 2010. While the former figure was largely driven by the reduction in drug-related deaths, the latter was linked to a ‘significant reduction’ in costs associated with criminal proceedings for drug offences and lost income of individuals imprisoned for these offences.

CONCLUSION

Portugal has set a positive example for what can be done when drug policies prioritise health rather than criminalisation. At the turn of the century, Portugal was facing a crisis, including high levels of HIV infection among people who use drugs. Many impacts of reform were felt immediately: new HIV infections, drug deaths and the prison population all fell sharply within the first decade. The second decade saw slower improvement in key measures, as well as an upturn in drug deaths. However, many of these factors need to be put into context. Drug policy is still only one variable interacting with a complex mix of social, economic, cultural and political factors, and cuts to wider health provision in that period will have played a part in this. Nevertheless, Portugal is in a much better position than it was in 2001 and recorded drug use and drug deaths as a proportion of the general population are both well below the European average.

Portugal’s experience is a lesson in what can be achieved when policy innovation and political will are aligned in response to a crisis, and hopefully it will continue to evolve and lead on this issue. However, while ending the criminalisation of people who use drugs is hugely important both in its own right, in reducing stigma and as an enabler of any effective public health response, it only addresses part of the harms caused by prohibition. With innovation taking place elsewhere, including regulated cannabis sales in North America and safe supply of opioids and other drugs in Canada, there is also room for Portuguese drug policy to learn from and build upon other reform efforts, and continue in its global leadership role.

Big New Idea

"Ground breaking" news. The wheel can be reinvented, even if reluctantly, and ever so slowly. Who would have thought that a social work, rehabilitation approach may have an impact on reoffending? 'Getafix

Just announced by MoJ and NPS:- 

£3 million pilot to reduce reoffending by young adults

Young adults supervised by the probation service will receive specialist drug and mental health support at a new £3 million centre to reduce reoffending.

• Specialist support for 18-25 year olds under probation supervision
• First hub to be based in Newham, London
• Range of specialist services, including drug and mental health support, will based under one roof

The hub, the first of its kind, will be based at Newham Probation Office and has been developed by the Ministry of Justice and the Mayor for London’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC).

Young adults have a particularly high risk of reoffending and are more likely to carry out drug, robbery and possession of weapons offences, and be caught up in gang crime.

Mental health and substance misuse experts will work alongside National Probation Service staff, as part of an innovative new approach ensuring vulnerable young adults, many of whom had troubled upbringings and poor education, receive the enhanced support they need to avoid a life of crime.

Offenders released without a home or a job are significantly more likely to reoffend, so accommodation, training and employment services will also operate from the hub to help cut crime.

This support is already available but bringing this range of services under one roof and tackling these complex issues together at an early stage can prevent thousands of people becoming victims each year and save some of the £18 billion annual cost of repeat crimes.

Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, Robert Buckland, MP, said:

"This ground-breaking new model will help offenders get their lives back on the straight-and-narrow before it’s too late and they become career criminals. It will mean less reoffending and fewer people becoming victims of crime while also giving these young adults all the tools they need to make the most of their lives."

London’s Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, Sophie Linden, said:

"It’s vital we do everything we can to prevent reoffending and give young people who have been through the criminal justice system the support they need to turn their lives around. We know the pandemic has meant fewer jobs and opportunities for our young people and that is why this new hub in Newham is so important. It will give us the platform to make vital interventions and deliver specialist support to vulnerable young people, helping them turn away from crime and rebuild their lives through access to housing, education and job opportunities."

The pilot will launch in July and run until March 2023 for 18-25 year olds who are assessed as having low levels of maturity and 17 year olds transitioning from the Youth Offending Service to adult probation. It will then be externally evaluated and, if a success at reducing reoffending and improving outcomes for this cohort, rolled out across the country.

All staff will receive specific training in the brain development of young people. Young adults have distinct needs, which are different to both older adults and children and treating them as a specific group will ensure the root causes of their offending are spotted and addressed earlier on in their development.

This £3 million of Government funding follows a £148 million investment to protect people from the scourge of illegal drugs and a £70 million package to support offenders into temporary accommodation upon release.

Taken together, this £220 million of funding highlights the Government’s commitment to tackling crime.

A Very Sad Saga

Following his recent magnum opus performance in front of the PAC, some might have been surprised by this tweet from BBC's Danny Shaw:-

Congrats to @ButlerTrust award winners. Recipient of a special prize (and standing ovation) was HM Prisons & Probation Chief Michael Spurr who leaves his post this month. 

Regular readers are of course fully aware of the ongoing omnishambles that Mr Spurr has presided over within the probation part of his HMPPS bailiwick, but this lengthy, forensic FT article from several weeks ago confirms that the prison part has been just as much of a disaster:- 

What went wrong at Britain's prison of the future?

HMP Berwyn was meant to be a blueprint for fixing the penal system. Two years on, it is 40 per cent empty

In the hours before the first inmates arrived at Britain’s newest and biggest prison, governor Russ Trent said he was feeling proud. Nick Dann, the project’s deputy, confessed he had butterflies. They sat in the room that would soon be used for family visits: brightly coloured seats were grouped around low tables, overlooked by giant motivational posters. “Big journeys begin with the small steps”, read one. 

It was February 2017 and reporters were being shown around the empty site under a leaden sky. A group of boxy buildings jazzed up with stripes of red, blue, green and yellow, HMP Berwyn could almost be mistaken for a school from the outside, were it not for the bars on the windows and its location on a windswept industrial estate in North Wales. The two men knew that a lot was riding on HMP Berwyn. The rest of the prison system in England and Wales was spiralling into crisis. Prisoner numbers had almost doubled since the 1990s as a result of tougher sentencing, but prison places had not kept pace, leaving the government to stuff about 85,000 people into buildings originally designed to hold about 65,000. It had become common to cram two people into cells designed for one, sometimes in Victorian jails that were beginning to fall apart.

Between 2010 and 2017, the government cut the number of prison officers by a quarter as part of its post-recession austerity drive. The result of the crowded conditions and low staffing was a surge of violence and despair among inmates. Self-harm rates among prisoners had gone up by two-thirds since 2010; serious assault rates had more than doubled. Almost half of adults leaving custody were reoffending within a year of their release. If those were the problems, the government hoped HMP Berwyn would be the blueprint for the solution. The £220m Category C prison (prisons are ranked from A to D, with A the most secure) would hold 2,100 men, making it one of the biggest in Europe. Its size would bring economies of scale, but it wouldn’t just be a vast warehouse in which to store criminals cheaply. 

Trent, a charismatic former Royal Marine, promised a rehabilitative culture that would turn lives around. Prisoners would be referred to as men, cells as rooms, and wings as communities. Men would have phones, laptops (offering internal services, not the internet) and showers in their rooms. The prison would be run by the public sector, but outsourcing company Interserve would manage workshops to prepare inmates for jobs on release, and education provider Novus Cambria would offer a range of courses. Sarah Payne, then head of the prison service in Wales, told an event in 2015 that the goal was for HMP Berwyn to be “the flagship for the rest of the country [and] England to emulate”.

Two years after it opened, mystery surrounds the government’s prison of the future. As inmates continue to be crowded into older, dilapidated prisons, HMP Berwyn remains 40 per cent empty. Without the planned economies of scale, the prison that was forecast to be one of the cheapest Category C jails to run in England and Wales (at £14,000 per year per place) is currently one of the most expensive, at £36,000 per year per place. The Prison Service says HMP Berwyn is going through a “deliberate phased population increase” and running costs will reduce over time, but its own annual business plans show the original schedule was for it to be “fully populated” nine months ago. 

Julian Le Vay, a former finance director of the Prison Service, now retired, told the FT it was normal to build up a new prison population slowly, “but never this slowly”, particularly when “lives are being put at risk” due to overcrowding elsewhere. “There’s something going on there that they’re not being quite open about.” The Ministry of Justice declined to let the FT visit the prison and refused a request to interview any managers or officials. But information from prisoners’ families, prison officers, contractors and lawyers, together with reports and statistics gathered through Freedom of Information requests and MPs’ written questions to ministers, suggest HMP Berwyn remains half empty because key elements of the project have veered off track. 

When the prison opened, some buildings were either unfinished or unusable. The Interserve workshops, which were meant to provide prison jobs for 520 inmates, are delivering a fraction of what was promised, according to data the FT obtained through an FOI request. Assaults on staff and “use of force” incidents by staff against prisoners are higher at HMP Berwyn than other Category C prisons, according to government data. Since the prison opened, 338 ambulances have been sent there, the police have been called 135 times and the fire service 27 times, the FT’s FOIs show.

Injuries reported to the Health and Safety Executive, also obtained through FOIs, include broken bones, excrement flung in prison officers’ faces, and nurses intoxicated after inhaling second-hand fumes from synthetic drugs such as spice, said to turn people into “zombies”. Reports from the prison’s health team show prisoners have been taken off prescription anti-depressants, anti-psychotics and painkillers without their consent, which some inmates say has driven them to self-medicate with illegal drugs. And Trent was suspended last year in mysterious circumstances. In a letter to MPs, one inmate called HMP Berwyn “the Rolls-Royce of prisons with a Ford Cortina engine under the bonnet”. 

It is not unusual for new prisons to have rocky starts: HMP Oakwood, a vast prison that opened seven years ago, began badly but is now running relatively well. And HMP Berwyn is still functioning far better than many of the UK’s jails. But as the government prepares to build more new prisons, it is worth learning the lessons from this project’s early years. It is a story of good intentions undermined by bad decisions and bungled procurement — and a reminder of how hard it is to do something different when the wider system is on its knees.

When HMP Berwyn opened, the Daily Mail newspaper called it “the cushiest jail in Britain”. The Sun plumped for “Pampered Porridge”. But while the tabloids sneered, prison experts praised ideas such as putting phones in cells to help prisoners maintain relationships with their families, which is linked to lower reoffending. They worried, though, that a series of early decisions would undercut the prison’s rehabilitative intent. Only 30 per cent of the cells were designed for one person; the rest were doubles.

Many prisons were already putting two men in a cell out of desperation, but this was a deliberate choice. There will always be some prisoners who prefer to share a cell — they may benefit from company if they are at risk of suicide, for example. But most people struggle without personal space. The decision contravened the recommendation to eliminate enforced cell-sharing by the UK’s official Mubarek Inquiry of 2006, commissioned after a teenager was clubbed to death by his cellmate. “If people consent to it . . . that’s fine,” said Frances Crook of the penal reform charity The Howard League. “But to build a new prison [that] forces people to share cells . . . even the Victorians didn’t do that.” 

Only 30 per cent of the prison’s cells were designed for one person The double cells at HMP Berwyn have narrow beds on each side, a desk with one chair, and a lidless toilet and shower in the corner with a curtain. Le Vay called it “a major retreat from civilised penal policy”, adding that it had probably been a way to save money. A Prison Service spokesman said the double cells were “purpose-built for double occupancy”, that “many” prisoners preferred to share, and that they spent a lot of time out of their cells. 

Experts also questioned the prison’s size and location. “The current government seems committed to building warehouse-style ‘mega-prisons’, despite a multitude of academic evidence and Inspectorate [of Prisons] reports showing that small prisons are more operationally effective,” wrote Yvonne Jewkes, a criminology professor at the University of Bath, in a journal article in 2017. Local politicians had wanted a smaller prison that could hold men from North Wales fairly close to their homes, which research shows is helpful for rehabilitation. “But it very quickly became evident [the MoJ] wanted to do a Titan, Texas-style prison” that would hold many prisoners from England, Marc Jones, a councillor from the town of Wrexham, told the FT. 

The chosen site was an industrial park 3.5 miles outside Wrexham (£4.50 return from the city centre by bus, £8 each way by taxi), which itself was a long journey for many prisoners’ families, particularly the 75 per cent or so from England. For some, these decisions doomed the project from the start. “There is no way that prison can function effectively ever,” said Crook, citing its size, location and double cells. 

Others believed HMP Berwyn could surmount the challenges. After all, it would have new facilities, plenty of activities and a totally different culture. “Everything we know that works well is [at Berwyn],” Trent told the news site Wrexham.com in 2017. He said every inmate could attend work or education, and would be treated with respect. “If you’ve got trust and respect, it reduces the chance of violence between the men and the people who . . . look after them.” But one by one, these promises started to come unstuck. When the prison health team, supplied by a local health board called the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, gained access to the site in early 2017, it discovered the health facilities “had not been designed or built to the specifications and designs submitted by the Health Board”, according to its own annual report. 

Asked for an explanation, a Prison Service spokesman told the FT that construction company Lendlease had met its obligations and the healthcare facility “was designed to the NHS standard”, but that the health team had “identified amendments that could be made to the specification, to go beyond the NHS standard and deliver an even better quality of service”. The health team’s report painted a different picture. It described a “lack of compliance with infection prevention and control standards, unsuitable and insufficient data and electrical configurations and unsuitable design of facilities”, which made treating patients “unsafe” and “required a complete rebuild of some areas”. That led to delays in providing healthcare for months after the prison opened. In January 2018, 98 men had been waiting more than 14 weeks to see a dentist. 

Those weren’t the only problems. The project, built on the site of an old tyre factory, initially came in £45m under budget thanks in part to “value engineering” decisions such as changing the prison’s layout and mitigating asbestos “on site” rather than paying to remove it. A few months after it opened, Roland Karthaus, director of a firm called Matter Architecture, performed tests and surveyed inmates at HMP Berwyn with the MoJ’s permission for a research project. His final report said that while the building was far better than many older prisons, there were too few areas for staff, no proper ventilation in the house blocks (where the cells are) and problematic noise levels. According to Karthaus, the “reverberation time” for sound in the house blocks was 3.5 seconds. “Above a second, speech becomes virtually unintelligible . . . so you have entirely hard surfaces, everyone is shouting all the time and you can’t escape it, it’s your whole life,” he told the FT. 

Maintenance also became a problem. In January 2018, there was a complete failure of the heating and hot water, which took five days to fix. This winter, the heating broke down again. The prison service was “urgently working” with contractors to fix problems with the heating system, a spokesman said. Then there was the centrepiece of the rehabilitative vision: workshops that were meant to keep 520 prisoners busy, imparting useful skills. Interserve’s winning bid to run them listed five subcontractors including a call centre, a small windmill manufacturer and a recycling company. Interserve’s 2017 annual report, published in April 2018, devoted a special box to the project, saying it “provides employment places for 520 men . . . designed to replicate a normal working environment”. But that wasn’t true when the report was published and it’s still not true today. 

The workshop buildings were not ready when the prison opened, according to multiple sources and FOI requests. They lacked basics like electrical work, fixtures and fittings. “The lack of work spaces has probably been the greatest challenge for everyone who lives and works at Berwyn,” Trent wrote in his anniversary message to staff a year after the prison opened. “The procurement process has not yet gone as we would have hoped or planned [and], consequently, there are too many men left on the communities during the day.” 

Today, two full years after the prison opened, the workshop buildings are still not ready. “There were just so many delays, it was ridiculous,” said Mark Gilbert of recycling company Emerald Trading, one of the original subcontractors, who became fed up of waiting and pulled out. Interserve has been running a pared-down set of workshops inside one of the house blocks. In January this year, it was providing 200 places, with about 150 to 160 prisoners attending on average. Interserve told the FT that the box in its annual report “was intended as an explanation of the project and our contractual obligations, and not performance of the contract”. 

No one admits blame for the workshop mess. Lendlease told the FT: “All of our work was successfully completed to specifications requested by the MoJ.” Interserve told the FT it had been asked by the MoJ in October 2017 (eight months after the prison opened) to provide the mechanical and electrical work required to finish the workshops. That final contract was only signed in October 2018 and the work is not due to be finished until April. A prison service spokesman said Lendlease and Interserve “delivered on the specification requested of them”. He added: “The process of deciding who would ‘fit out’ the workshops was carried out once the detailed functionality of the workshops was known, and there were delays during this process, due to the detailed negotiations required.” 

The workshop debacle helps explain why there are still only about 1,300 inmates in a prison designed to hold 2,100. Prison deputy Nick Dann told MPs last year that the population “ramp-up plan” was linked to the number of activity places available. “It is primary for us and our stability that we have activities for the new men as we receive them each week.” Crook put it more succinctly: “The devil makes work for idle hands.” 

At 4.30 one recent afternoon, prisoners’ ­relatives spilled out of HMP Berwyn into the bitterly cold dusk. Most headed for the car park. Sally Smith, a wriggly baby in her arms, flopped on to a chair in the visitor centre. She had been to see her partner, who was transferred to HMP Berwyn almost a year ago. “They sold him the dream,” Smith (not her real name) sighed. “They said it’s a new prison to help people. But it’s terrible.” It’s not easy to gather a fair impression of life inside a prison from outside the gate. 

No official inspection report for the prison has been published yet and prisoners are banned from communicating with journalists without permission from the governor. Interviews with prisoners’ relatives, friends, lawyers and other representatives paint a mixed picture. Some of those transferred from other prisons found it a vast improvement. “People want to come here — it’s like they’re ­winning if they’re here,” said one young woman whose partner had arrived a month ago. He had started studying maths. Another called it “really good”, especially the education facilities. 

‘They said it’s a new prison to help people. But it’s terrible’ HMP Berwyn’s Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) — a panel of citizen volunteers — wrote in a report last July that men were “treated fairly and with decency” and the MoJ “should be applauded” for supporting a “new progressive regime”. Ian Lucas, the Labour MP for Wrexham, told the FT he had been sceptical initially about the prison’s size, but felt the project had been delivered well overall. It was a good physical environment and everyone he met there was focused on rehabilitation, though he added this had been “undermined to some extent” by the failure to open the workshops. 

Others described a consistent set of problems, starting with the prison’s failure to live up to its own promises. HMP Berwyn staff had gone on “roadshows” to recruit prisoners from other jails. “They had a list of courses and things they could be doing, which is what he wants, he wants to better himself,” said the partner of one prisoner, who did not want to be named. “Now he’s there, they’re like, ‘Oh no, we don’t have the facilities for that.’” Her partner is one of 250 inmates at HMP Berwyn who have asked to be transferred to a different prison, according to data obtained through a ministerial written question. Kelly Coombs, who runs Census Group, a call-centre company that employs inmates in many prisons including HMP Berwyn, said that while the prison’s aspirations were “exactly right”, inmates felt they were “promised this entirely transformative experience, and that hasn’t happened”. 

Drugs have also found their way in. By October 2017, it was clear some men had been “abusing the freedoms in visits” to smuggle in drugs, Trent admitted in his anniversary message; the rules were duly tightened. On March 31 last year, a 22-year-old called Luke Jones died in his cell. The preliminary inquest blamed a heart attack probably caused by spice; a full inquest has still not been held. The IMB wrote in July 2018 that illegal drugs were “readily available” in the flagship jail. But it also warned that some prisoners had been driven to “self-medicate” with drugs because of the prison’s practice of taking some inmates off their prescription medications. 

Smith, sitting with her baby in the visitor centre, said this was one of the first signs of trouble for her partner. He was on mirtazapine for anxiety and depression, but when he was transferred to HMP Berwyn, a prison doctor told him: “We don’t like these here.” Smith added: “They said they’d put him on something else but they never did. He’s basically in withdrawal.” 

 A table contained in the health board’s annual pharmacy report for 2017 provides a snapshot of the number of prisoners with prescriptions on arrival, and the number in November 2017. The number of men on a range of different antidepressants such as mirtazapine had been cut between 65 and 78 per cent (depending on the specific drug in question). Anti-psychotics had been cut between 45 and 63 per cent, hypnotics and anxiolytics between 93 and 100 per cent, and most opiates by between 82 and 100 per cent. Only methadone had increased, by 8 per cent. 

Ian Lucas, the local MP, who has visited the pharmacy at HMP Berwyn, called it a “tough love” approach. “Essentially it’s a deliberate policy to not prescribe them the amount of drugs, because apparently they say that some of them come with a Sainsbury’s bag full of . . . prescribed medication,” he said. “You can imagine that one way of coping with being locked up is just being doped up all the time.” 

In his anniversary message to staff, Trent acknowledged “our policy of optimising medication” had proved “very difficult for men to cope with in their early days” but suggested they felt much better “as they come through it”. But the IMB warned in its July report that men were living in the Care and Separation unit, sometimes known as a segregation unit, because they couldn’t cope without medication that, in some cases, they had been using for a long time. “It would appear to the Board there is a downside to a policy which means that, in effect, a percentage of men are subject to a compulsory detox, which inevitably affects behaviour and adds to the supply and demand issues around illicit drugs in the establishment.” 

Pamela Taylor, chair of the forensic faculty for the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said such an approach was “not unusual” but that HMP Berwyn was “much more structured and . . . committed in the way they [are] trying to do it”. She also said many prisoners and non-prisoners accumulated prescriptions over time that might no longer be appropriate: “[So] many of us would say it is good, but I can also understand why it’s not universally liked by the people on the receiving end.” Ideally, she added, such decisions would be made consensually with patients, drugs would be tapered and patients would be reviewed. “The big question is whether they then get, within a reasonable period of time, a further review to check how they’ve been without that medication, and/or an option to go back to the doctor and say, ‘Look, I feel just dreadful.’” 

Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, which provides healthcare in the prison, told the FT its practice was to give prisoners a “medication review” with a GP on arrival, in accordance with a guideline from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. “Within the prison population, medication is often abused by patients and it therefore may not be appropriate for said medication to be prescribed,” a spokeswoman for the health board said. “At HMP Berwyn we have noted large numbers of patients transferred from other prisons have never had medication reviews that meet the standard of Nice guidelines and therefore their ‘normal medication’ is not deemed as safe and effective to continue.” 

She said an alternative was prescribed where appropriate, and that the objective was always to reach agreement with patients, but that “often, patients do not always agree with prescribing decisions, despite the best efforts of clinicians to explain the reasons.” She also said the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales had not upheld any complaints into the health board’s practices.

Broken promises and drug problems have been compounded by the inexperience of HMP Berwyn’s prison officers. This has been a problem across the prison service: many seasoned officers were lost during the deep cuts between 2010 and 2017. The challenge was magnified at HMP Berwyn because it had to be staffed from scratch. Data obtained through an FOI request shows that, in September 2018, about a fifth of HMP Berwyn’s front-line prison officers had less than a year’s experience, and a further 56 per cent only had between one year and two. More than 40 per cent were still in their twenties. The jobs are advertised at less than £23,000 a year and turnover is high. 

Staff said seasoned prisoners exploited their inexperience. “A lot of them take advantage of the good nature of the system [and] a lot of the staff,” explained one HMP Berwyn prison officer who has now left his job. Another said new staff were “not supporting each other, which makes the wings unsafe. The [prisoners] make the rules and the new staff are too worried to challenge them.” 

Families of prisoners, meanwhile, said the officers dealt with prisoners more aggressively than was typical in other prisons. The latest published statistics for January to September 2018 support both sides of this story. Assault rates at HMP Berwyn are slightly above average for similar establishments, but it is assaults on staff that really stand out: the rates are higher than at any other Category C prison in England and Wales, according to the FT’s analysis. One of these attacks happened the day after Luke Jones died. A prisoner, upset about his death, fractured an officer’s cheek and broke his nose with a single punch, then assaulted a second officer. Other prisoners intervened to help the officers. The first was hospitalised for five days; the second told the court he thought he and his colleague were lucky to escape the wing alive. 

Arfon Jones, the Police and Crime Commissioner for North Wales, told the FT the prison had been a drain on resources. “This year, I have made it perfectly clear, I am not putting any extra money into that prison,” he said.  As for staff violence against prisoners, the government has no recent comparable data on “use of force” at different prisons. But last year, official inspectors criticised HMP Humber, a Category C prison with a similar population size to HMP Berwyn, for 206 “use of force” incidents in the previous six months, “more than at . . . other category C training prisons”. 

In the most recent six months for which data is available for HMP Berwyn (July to December 2018), there were 626 such incidents, which are meant to be used only as a last resort. Injury reports filed to the Health and Safety Executive include several where prison officers fractured bones in their hands during “control and restraint” incidents. The partner of the prisoner seeking a transfer said she thought some young staff had “got a bit of power and it’s gone to their heads”. 

Mark Fairhurst, national chair of the POA, the prison officers’ union, told the FT: “Inexperienced staff tend to use force as a first option, whereas experienced staff will use de-escalation techniques. If you don’t have experienced staff . . . then really you need management grip — and by that I mean: why don’t we have managers on residential units who stay there and guide and coach staff and motivate them?” 

“Management grip” was meant to be governor Russ Trent’s style. “He’s very command-and-­control . . . and he likes to get stuff done,” said Crook. At HMP Berwyn, Trent was determined to instil a different culture. When Faith Spear, a former IMB chair at a different prison, visited the prison last summer at Trent’s invitation, he handed her a pack of cards. Each card represented a different “Berwyn practice”, she explained in a blog post. “Day 1: We recognise achievements and celebrate successes #thankyou.” “Day 2: We actively listen to each other and make eye contact #respect.” 

But multiple sources say some staff clashed with Trent’s style, which they felt gave too much power to prisoners and left them unsupported. At most prisons, inmates earn privileges through good behaviour, but at HMP Berwyn they were given privileges on arrival and had them removed for poor behaviour. Fairhurst said: “That really, in my eyes, has been a social experiment that has gone severely wrong . . . You had management in place, many of whom were newly promoted and wanted to embrace this new culture to the detriment of security, control, order and discipline.” 

Trent seemed undaunted by any internal resistance. In July last year he tweeted: “‘It’s impossible’ said Pride. ‘It’s risky,’ said Experience. ‘It’s pointless,’ said Reason. ‘Give it a try,’ whispered Heart.” A month later, he was abruptly suspended from his job after allegations were made about him; the Prison Service did not specify what they were. Trent did not respond to the FT’s attempt to contact him, but the Prison Service said that, following an investigation, “no formal disciplinary action” had been taken. He has now returned to work in the Prison Service (though not at HMP Berwyn). An interim governor was brought in, and a new permanent one will start next month. 

In response to the figures on violence, drugs and staff inexperience, the Prison Service spokesman said the government was spending an extra £70m to fight drugs across all prisons, training more than 4,000 new prison officers, and rolling out “Pava” incapacitant spray to officers. HMP Berwyn has been given new drug-detection equipment, dogs and a specialist search team. It is also using a new “Challenge, Support and Intervention Plan” to help staff “manage violent prisoners” and a key worker scheme to improve prisoner-staff relationships. 

As dusk fell, Smith gathered up her baby and headed to the car park to meet her cousin who had driven her from England. She wouldn’t have to do this journey much longer: her partner was due out fairly soon and she couldn’t wait. But if there was a plan in place to help him get on his feet, she didn’t know about it. 

Most jails in England and Wales don’t have a great record at helping prisoners transition back to normal life. “I left prison with £46 and PTSD,” said Cody Lachey, a former prisoner (not at HMP Berwyn) who now speaks out about prison reform. The public might like the idea of “brutalising prisoners”, Lachey told the FT, but it ultimately costs society when those people are released back into the community: “People are entering broken, and leaving in bits.” 

The team at HMP Berwyn hoped to show there was a better way, but the prison is tied into a wider probation system that is in disarray. In 2013, then justice secretary Chris Grayling began the part-privatisation of the system across England and Wales: a group of mainly private-sector companies took on contracts to manage low-to-medium-risk offenders, while the public sector continued to deal with high-risk ones. 

In a damning report published last week, the National Audit Office concluded the MoJ had “set itself up to fail” with “rushed” reforms that proved “extremely costly for taxpayers” and had seen the number of people on short sentences recalled to prison “skyrocket”. In Wales, the contract was given to Working Links, a company owned by a German private equity firm. Last month, Working Links collapsed into administration. The government has said that the private probation contracts will end early, but the design of the new system is not yet clear. 

Katie Lomas, national chair of Napo, the trade union for probation officers, said HMP Berwyn had a “really positive aim” to focus on rehabilitation. “But if the structure that you are trying to put that inside of doesn’t help, then you’re at war with yourself before you even start.” Liz Saville Roberts, a North Wales MP from the Plaid Cymru party who has obtained data about HMP Berwyn through ministerial questions, agreed. “The regime itself was, and is, very worthwhile,” she said, “if it was given the means with which it could actually succeed.” Crook of the Howard League, meanwhile, argued the answer was not to build more prisons at all but to reduce the prison population. 

The government’s stance appears to be in flux. Last month, David Gauke, the justice secretary, made a case for abolishing custodial sentences of less than six months and managing those criminals in the community instead. He called for “a national debate about what justice, including punishment, should look like”. But plans for big new prisons continue. In December, the MoJ amended its request for planning permission for a new Category C prison in Yorkshire: having “reviewed the level and distribution of strategic need”, it wanted to up the number of prisoners from 1,017 to 1,440. 

Still, there are signs the MoJ has learnt some lessons. The design for a new prison in Wellingborough states that the majority of cells will be singles, not doubles. The Prison Service spokesman noted that closed floors and bar-less sealed windows there would “help reduce noise levels and create an atmosphere conducive to rehabilitation”. He pointed out the IMB for HMP Berwyn had recognised the “considerable achievement” of opening a big and complex prison, and the “excellent work” of staff who ran a regime “with many examples of good and innovative practice”. 

He added: “As with any new prison there have been planning and implementation issues, which we have worked hard to resolve, and we know there will be more to do as we move towards full occupancy. Lessons learnt from Berwyn, along with our extensive consultation of stakeholders and prison design experts, will shape our approach as we develop an estate that can improve rehabilitation and create safe and secure environments for staff and offenders.” 

Inside the prison fence, not everyone is so optimistic. Shortly after Luke Jones died at HMP Berwyn, an older prisoner wrote a letter to Inside Time, the magazine for people in jail. He wanted to tell Jones’s family how sad and upset everyone was. “An internal investigation . . . will now ensue, and then a message to say ‘Lessons have been learnt’ . . . I’m a middle-aged man now and angered by the sadness I feel at this young man losing his life,” he wrote. “No lessons are ever learnt.” 

Sarah O’Connor and Cynthia O’Murchu are investigations correspondents at the FT. Additional reporting by Helen Warrell.