HMPPS and 'Inhumane' Prisons

As the MoJ continues making plans for the future of probation in England and Wales as part of HMPPS, it's worth reminding ourselves that this same employer is responsible for prisons that are 'inhumane'. This press release from Dame Anne Owers, National Chair of IMBs:- 

The prison system is in a state of ‘fragile recovery’ after a lengthy period of staffing problems, increases in drugs and violence, and inadequate rehabilitation opportunities, said a report published today, summarising the findings of prison independent monitoring boards in England and Wales to the end of 2018.

In the report, Dame Anne Owers, National Chair of the IMBs, highlights:

• the damage to regimes caused by insufficient staff, and then the risks resulting from a high proportion of new and inexperienced staff
• the impact of new psychoactive substances on prison safety, with a rise in violence and self-harm
• continuing failings in prison maintenance contracts, with crumbling infrastructure and sometimes degrading conditions
• the over-use of segregation for prisoners with serious mental health concerns or risks of self-harm
• the long-standing inability to manage prisoners’ property effectively; and
• the shortcomings of community rehabilitation companies (CRCs) and housing and benefits problems that undermine successful resettlement.

Dame Anne said that some new initiatives were showing signs of promise, but that it was too early to say whether they would have a sustained impact on outcomes for prisoners. They include:

• staff recruitment drives
• management focus on decent conditions
• the new drug strategy and measures to prevent the entry of drugs
• the roll-out of offender management in custody; and
• revised processes for supporting prisoners at risk of self-harm and reducing violence.

Boards will continue to monitor the impact of these changes.

The report also raised significant concerns about the number of prisoners with serious mental health conditions, or at risk of self-harm, being held for lengthy periods in segregation units, where their condition deteriorates. It points to the need for more appropriate alternative provision, particularly in NHS facilities.

Dame Anne said: “There is no question that IMBs are still reporting some serious and ongoing problems in prisons. The decline in safety, conditions and purposeful activity in prisons over the last few years has seriously hampered their ability to rehabilitate prisoners.

“This will take time to reverse, and will require consistent leadership and management both in the Prison Service and the Ministry of Justice, as new staff, policies and resources bed in.

“This report provides a benchmark against which we will be able to judge progress. IMBs will continue to monitor and report on the new initiatives now being rolled out and their impact on the ground on the conditions and treatment of prisoners and the ability of prisons to turn lives round.”

--oo00oo--

This from the Guardian:-

'Inhumane': damning report on English and Welsh prisons

Prisoners are living in squalid and inhumane conditions in buildings that are unfit for purpose, according to a report that paints a damning picture of prisons in England and Wales. The report, which details the crumbling infrastructure of prisons, summarises the findings of independent monitoring boards in the two countries to the end of 2018.

Boards raised a number of failings that directly affected health and safety, including overflowing toilets and urinals, damp, mould and unheated cells, and a sewage pipe uncapped for months. Four prison boards described conditions as squalid, others as inhumane and unfit for purpose.

In Exeter prisoners were forced to use buckets to flush their toilets since these were blocked, and there was waste and excrement on the floor, and overflowing urinals. At Lincoln prison the health and safety executive is investigating the origin of a legionella outbreak that left one prisoner dead. Half the prisoners at Long Lartin and 400 prisoners at Coldingley were in cells without any integral sanitation; the boards at those prisons described the situation as “inhumane and undignified”.

Dame Anne Owers, chair of the Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs), said the prison system was in a state of “fragile recovery”, pointing to improvements in staff recruitment drives, the new drug strategy and measures to prevent the entry of drugs, as well as revised processes for reducing violence and supporting prisoners at risk of self harm. But she added it was too early to say whether new initiatives would have a sustained impact on prisoners.

Owers said: 

“There is no question that IMBs are still reporting some serious and ongoing problems in prisons. The decline in safety, conditions and purposeful activity in prisons over the last few years has seriously hampered their ability to rehabilitate prisoners. This will take time to reverse, and will require consistent leadership and management both in the Prison Service and the Ministry of Justice, as new staff, policies and resources bed in. Boards across England and Wales continued to raise the issue of two prisoners sharing a cell meant for one – with a toilet, sometimes unscreened, in a cramped space where they also ate their meals, which the report noted, “would not be acceptable in any other publicly owned building”.

The report pointed to failures in maintenance contracts, which exacerbated the problems caused by under investment over many years. One prison had 900 outstanding jobs, another more than 1,300 planned and 1,300 preventive jobs. The mother and baby unit at Eastwood Park, one of only three in the country, was out of use for more than two years because of catastrophic water damage.

The report also highlighted the issue of insufficient and inexperienced staff, the impact of new psychoactive substances on prison safety, the overuse of segregation for prisoners with serious mental health concerns, and shortcomings of community rehabilitation companies, as well as housing and benefits problems that undermined successful resettlement.

Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “As the eyes and ears of the local community, people who volunteer to be independent monitors play a vital role in trying to keep prisons safe. Their reports reveal the enormity of the challenge to transform a failing prison system that has been asked to do too much with too little for too long.”

Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: “This report makes very sobering reading for the new prisons minister, Robert Buckland. There can be no disputing the firsthand, directly observed, evidence of over 51,000 individual visits to prisons. The report describes a catalogue of failure to deliver even the most basic standards of care and a chronic waste of human and physical resources in our prison system.

Buckland said: “I want to thank members of independent monitoring boards across England and Wales for their continued dedication, commitment and hard work. I recognise the board’s concerns and we are tackling the issues raised head on. Over the last year we have invested more than £70m to get more officers on the landings, disrupt organised crime and improve security, and, as the report notes, we are starting to see some positive results.”

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. 

Politicians - The Problem and Solution

It's clear to all that something has to be done about our burgeoning prison crisis and I noticed this contribution to the Political Quarterly blog that succinctly covers how we got to where we are. Politicians caused the problem and now they have to fix it:-  

Total prison reform will take political bravery, but it's our only option

It is often said that there are no votes in prisons. This, I think, is largely true. Crime and justice has not been a prominent issue during recent elections, but that does not mean that prisons are not political.

Overtly political decisions are made about how people are expected to behave, the rules that they should abide by and what happens when they don’t. Prison is now regarded as the central column of the criminal justice system and not the ultimate sanction available to courts. But surely prison should be a scarce resource?

Soaring incarceration rates in Britain

More than 25 years ago I started working in penal reform when the dark days of the Strangeways riots were seemingly behind us. There was muted optimism following the publication of the Woolf report heralding a more humane, decent and effective prison system.

But the optimism I felt at the time was short lived. The use of prison as a sanction has been on an upward trajectory since the beginning of the twentieth century, yet since the mid-1990s since it has more than doubled with 83,216 men, women and children in prison in mid-April 2018. We have more people in prison than any other state in Western Europe, with an incarceration rate twice as high as Germany.

In the early 1990s, the Home Secretary Michael Howard’s ‘prison works’ mantra was underpinned by Tony Blair, Labour’s shadow, whose rhetoric of ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ has become famous. This is the point at which prison numbers begin to steeply climb.

The political rhetoric and the concomitant use of prison has been shown to mirror public outcry over high profile crimes, not least the murder of James Bulger. I fear that though they cannot be ignored, such events have been co-opted by the political classes to steer the nation on a punitive path that may actually be counterproductive.

New criminal offences

Successive governments have relied on the criminal justice system to deal with a whole panoply of issues. Criminal justice legislation – and increased criminalisation – has until recently has been a regular feature of the parliamentary timetable.

In the Howard League’s evidence to the Justice Select Committee’s Inquiry into the Prison Population 2022 we suggest that between May 2010 and May 2014, 1076 new criminal offences were created in England and Wales, approximately two-thirds of which carry possible custodial penalties.

There has also been an increase in the creation of Acts of Parliament which are law-and-order related. According to our estimates, a mere 11 law-and-order Acts were passed between 1980 and 1989, with another 11 passed between 1990 and 1999. 31 such Acts were then passed between 2000 and 2009, and so far since 2010 there have been 26.

Longer sentences

However, by far the biggest impact is due to the fact that sentences have become longer. Over the past ten years, average sentence lengths, imposed by sentencers, have increased by 24 per cent across the board. For certain offence types the rise in sentence lengths is particularly notable. For example: over the past ten years, average prison sentences for fraud offences have increased by 54 per cent; average prison sentences for miscellaneous crimes against society have increased by 45 per cent; average prison sentences for criminal damage and arson have increased by 118 per cent; and average prison sentences for robbery increased by 51 per cent.

There is an over-representation of young men in from BAME backgrounds in prison, and a preponderance of poor health including high levels of mental health needs and addiction.

A further contributing factor is the use of recall (when an offender has been released on licence or parole and they breach a condition of their release). Since 1995 the number of people in prison due to recall has increased by approximately 4,000 per cent, from about 150 people on any given day in June 1995 to 6,186 people on 30 September 2017.

This statistic is indicative of the greater number of people who now spend a period on licence since the last government’s transforming rehabilitation reforms whereby short sentence prisoners are now liable to a period on licence. But this is only part of the picture as research has shown that recall occurs not because a person has reoffended, but following an administrative breach for instance being late for an appointment or any behaviour that worries an offender manager.

Should prison incapacitate or rehabilitate?

In these circumstances can we rely on prisons not just to incapacitate but to rehabilitate people? The evidence of the recent past makes this assumption at best questionable. The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Peter Clarke, characterised prisons as being as in crisis and chaotic - indeed in recent months he has condemned the leadership at Liverpool prison and nationally, for its “abject failure” to provide a safe, decent and purposeful regime. While at Nottingham prison he triggered, for the first time, the Urgent Notification Protocol because the prison was “fundamentally unsafe.”

The Prisons Inspectorate is just one voice in an ever-louder chorus from Independent Monitoring Boards, charities and academics about the state of prisons. Prisons are dirty and decrepit. And they are full. The most severely overcrowded are Leeds, Wandsworth and Durham prisons each holding around 50 per cent more prisoners than they should safely hold.

Recent research by the Howard League showers that the number of officers fell by as much as 40 per cent when the prison budgets shrank. This means that there are fewer staff to unlock doors, take prisoners to work, education, training or exercise - so they have nothing to do, little purposeful activity and so it is not surprising that tensions will rise.

And violence does appear endemic. Incidents of assault and self-injury are at their highest levels since current recording practices began in 1978. If there is no purposeful activity, prisoners may well look to other ways to make the time pass more quickly; it comes as no surprise that there is evidence of increasing drug use in prison.

The public is not being well served by prisons. A crude measure of effectiveness is reoffending rates with 44 per cent of adults being reconvicted within one year of release. For those serving sentences of less than 12 months this increases to 59 per cent. The National Audit Office estimates that reoffending by all recent ex-prisoners costs the economy between £9.5 and £13 billion annually.

Reduce the number of people in prisons

We cannot build our way out of this mess. Building more jails only causes problems to grow; it does not solve them. The most sensible way to tackle the problem is to reduce the number of people in prison instead. Why is it that other western European democracies do not lock up as many of their citizens? I do not see their communities characterised by endemic crime. And it is not just in Europe, in the US some 35 states cut their prison rates between 2008 and 2016 and reduced their crime rates.

This does not mean that we condone crime. It means we need to think differently and find solutions elsewhere. In Scotland, for instance, the focus is on investment in community sentences. And some of the best solutions are to be found in welfare and social policies like Surestart schemes and public health approaches to knife violence.

If prison has such poor outcomes, surely it is time to take a different approach? The public – whatever that amorphous word means – want to feel safe, so there needs to be clear political leadership rather than the current Justice Secretary merry-go-round.

We need the kind of political leadership that supports people to be active citizens, and diverts them away from the criminal justice system. Politicians need to be brave and look away from prison as the answer.

Anita Dockley is Research Director at the Howard League for Penal Reform

Governors Take On the MoJ

Following the government reshuffle and the obvious disappearance of a Minister for Probation, the MoJ may feel that further progress has been achieved in their long-term aim of completely erasing the term from the lexicon of criminal justice. They've never understood us and were always nervous and irritated by our proudly independent voice and notorious historic resistance to all attempts at imposing command and control.

I have heard it said that this blog continues to be regarded as a 'risk' by the MoJ, precisely because it steadfastly remains a bastion of non-conformity and resistance to their efforts at ridding themselves of such troublesome dissident voices. So imagine how upset and uncomfortable the mandarins must be at the emergence of a much reinvigorated Prison Governors Association under the inspiring leadership of Andrea Albutt. 

Of course there was a time when the Probation Service had a similar authoritative and respected voice, but we all know where that got us. Anyway, here she is telling it how it is in the Guardian and I dare the MoJ to try and silence her:-      

Andrea Albutt: ‘Carillion has left our prisons in a terrible state’

Andrea Albutt, the president of the Prison Governors Association, is angry. The former army nurse, who joined the prison service as a young hospital officer in 1990, announced last week that despair was “running through the veins” of her organisation. With the highest rates of self-harm, suicide, drug use and violence ever seen and the recent scathing prison inspection reports on HMPs Liverpool and Nottingham, the prison system has arguably reached the lowest point in its history.

The collapse of Carillion, the construction company responsible for prison maintenance contracts, has only added to its woes. “It’s a big deal,” says Albutt. “Governors have had to run prisons with not-fit-for-purpose contracts which failed to deliver the promised service. These contracts have failed in their entirety, leaving accommodation and maintenance in a far worse state than when governors owned their own works departments.

“We desperately need a reintroduction of the prison works department. I can then say to my works guys, ‘the seg’s [segregation unit] in a mess, needs work, B wing needs new windows’. I, as the governor, the boss, tell them – and then they crack on with it. With an external contract, governors are not empowered to do that. Too much senior management time has been spent trying to deal with these contracts instead of strategically managing prisons.”

Since taking over the £200m maintenance and cleaning contracts for the prison service, agreed by the then justice secretary, Chris Grayling, in 2014, Carillion has been continually criticised by the Prisons Inspectorate and Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs) for its failure to carry out contracted works. In its latest annual report, the Independent Monitoring Board for Dartmoor prison said that Carillion’s contract was “an ongoing source of frustration”, calling it cumbersome and expensive.

It is clear from talking to her that Albutt cares a great deal about our prisons. But, I say, why should decent, law-abiding citizens care? If prisoners are living in cells with no windows, infested with rats and cockroaches, many would say, so what? They shouldn’t have committed the crime. “We disempower people when they go to prison,” she says, “so we have to care for them. If we don’t do the best we can for them, what hope is there? You have to remember that prison could happen to anyone – a member of your family, a friend, a loved one. I know how I’d want anyone in my family treated, if, God forbid, it happened to them.

“It’s a well-coined phrase – but there but for the grace of God go any of us, really. None of us knows what might be waiting in life, and you have to remember that most people in prison will be released.” The main source of her frustration is the constant change at the top at the Ministry of Justice. This is where she gets particularly animated. “In seven and a half years, we have had six secretaries of state, which has left prison governors punch-drunk with change,” she says. “We have endured constant interference from ministers who have little or no knowledge of the complexities of prisons, and who leave our service in a disastrously worse state than they found it.

“So, we had David Lidington for six months and he didn’t do anything. It just feels like they do not care about our prisons. They chop and change secretaries of state without a thought. Ministers don’t know prisons, their special advisers don’t know prisons. They might visit them occasionally, but they haven’t a real clue about how to run one safely and effectively. Even civil servants busy writing policy – they also might have visited a prison, but they don’t know prison.”

Albutt certainly knows about prisons. She joined the prison service in the first place, she says, “just to pay the mortgage,” but it soon turned into her vocation. She spent seven years patrolling prison landings, including HMP Woodhill, a Category A prison holding some of the most dangerous prisoners in the country, before being promoted to management.

“As one of the first women into Brixton, I quickly saw that it was a brutal place – and I was just shocked at some of the things I saw,” she recalls. “As a nurse in the army I’d seen tragedy, but the violence of prison was something else.”

Initially her male colleagues were “terrible” she says. “I don’t know if they felt threatened by women entering their male environment, undermining their perceived macho culture.” In contrast, she says male prisoners were generally quite protective of her and her female colleagues. “I have to say, though, that there were times in that first six months when treatment by male colleagues was so bad, I thought about getting out. But I stuck it out and I’m glad I did. In that respect, it’s a different world in prison these days.”

What’s her advice to the new justice secretary, David Gauke? “The one positive thing is that the path we’re on now, started by Michael Gove and then carried on by Liz Truss, is helping us make, possibly – and I emphasise possibly – some inroads into the decline. I don’t know David Gauke at all; we had a brief conversation on the phone, but I just hope that he doesn’t decide to go down a completely different path.

“We lost 7,000 staff and apparently we’re getting 2,500 back. But that still leaves us with 1,500 vacancies, so in fact we need closer to 4,000. I was talking to a colleague last week, and I think they are wondering in the MoJ why things aren’t improving. Well, if you had new officers who were experienced and confident you might get some improvement. But if you’ve got brand new officers going into a place like Liverpool, it’s going to take a while for them to get confident, to acclimatise and to make a difference,” she says. “A failing prison takes forever to turn around. To get back to where we were 10 years ago is going to take years. That’s something I’m determined to get through to ministers.”

She also wants a public inquiry into government policy in the prison service over the past decade. “It’s highly unlikely we’ll get one,” she admits. “We have the Grenfell inquiry and rightly so. But if you think of the number of people who have killed themselves in prison in recent years [2,022 since 1990], so many people have died in our care in prison. We need to look and find out why.”

Career: 2015-18: operational lead for HMPPS national project; 2012-15: governor, HMP Bristol; 2010-12: governor, HMP Eastwood Park; 2007-10: governor, HMP Swansea; 2004-07: governor, HMP Low Newton; 1990-2004: prison officer at HMPs Brixton, Woodhill, Grendon, Wakefield and Eastwood Park; 1984-1990: military nurse, Queen Alexandra Royal Army Nursing Corps, serving in Germany, UK and Falkland Islands.

Shooting the Messenger

We've previously discussed the disgraceful dismissal of Faith Spear, the former Chair of a prison IMB in Suffolk, and now I notice the story has been picked up by the BBC:-  

The prison monitor sacked after voicing her concerns

She was the watchdog who was accused of causing "embarrassment" by ministers and driven to the depths of despair after voicing concerns about prison monitoring. Then serious rioting erupted at several English prisons. Was Faith Spear right to blow the whistle on the state of England's jails?

Her fate was sealed with a printed, rather than handwritten, ministerial signature. Received on a cold morning this January, Faith Spear, the suspended chairman of the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) at Hollesley Bay in Suffolk, knew what the letter from prisons minister Sam Gyimah would say.

She had, he told her, "repeatedly disclosed classified and other information, often in an inaccurate manner" and had "failed to comply with agreed policies and procedures". Her role as chairman was terminated and she was told she could not serve on another IMB for at least five years. To this day Mrs Spear believes she was punished by a system more interested in controlling its own reputation than listening to grave concerns over the state of prisons.

The spark for the Faith Spear case was an article published by The Prisons Handbook in April 2016 entitled "Whistle-blower without a whistle". Using the pseudonym "Daisy Mallett", Mrs Spear challenged the idea that monitoring boards were truly independent.

"I want to speak out," said Mrs Spear in the article, which named neither individuals nor her own prison. "I am here as the public's eyes and ears, that is my role, but my voice is silenced. Prisons today are starved of resources. When I make the prison aware of issues with prisoners I am made to feel like I'm an irritation to them, but I am not here to irritate the prison process." The repercussions were immediate.

A letter was fired off from the HQ of the Independent Monitoring Boards Secretariat - housed in the Ministry of Justice London HQ - to every IMB member in the country. In it, president John Thornhill alleged Daisy Mallett's article contained "inaccuracies and misunderstandings". He warned the Justice Secretary (then Michael Gove) had been alerted and "legal advice" sought.

In less than a year, Mrs Spear would be unmasked, suspended, involved in various hearings and ultimately sacked from her voluntary role as an IMB chairman. Her experience echoes that of Ray Bewry, who to this day is the only former prisoner (his conviction was eventually quashed) to have served on an IMB.

"Any effective IMB member cannot do their job," claims Mr Bewry who served for a decade on the IMB at HMP Norwich. "They want them to do what they are told, and not rock the boat." Having revealed she had three years of service and a degree in criminology, the outing of Daisy Mallett was perhaps inevitable. Sure enough, within days of publication Mrs Spear, a mother of three, was called at home by then vice chairman Christine Smart asking her if she was behind the article. Mrs Spear confirmed that she was.

And at the April 2016 meeting of her IMB board, Mrs Spear was made to read out a statement confessing to being the author of the offending article. She was then expected to resign. "It had already been planned as to how it was going be," she said. "I was ambushed."

"Faith just walked on to a minefield," says Mr Leech, the Thailand-based founder and editor of The Prisons Handbook. "She should have refused to answer any questions and just move on with her business as chairman." Perhaps. But hindsight is a beautiful thing.

"I read my statement then had 50 minutes of every member questioning me, bullying me, taunting me. It was one of the worst experiences I have endured," Mrs Spear says. Sent outside for 40 minutes, she was then told her board had unanimously decreed she should "step down as chairman". "If I did not, there was an ultimatum," she said. "They would not work with me."

So what caused such a revolt? Mr Leech believes the most likely trigger was that Mrs Spear "criticised the recruitment process". This, he said, was tantamount to suggesting some IMB members were not up to the job.

The IMB Secretariat told the BBC it encourages members "to engage in the national debate on prison standards" though it cautioned "this must be a way that does not compromise their independence and draws upon evidence and experience". The secretariat would not comment on the "specifics" of Mrs Spear's case, saying "any questions on the termination of an IMB member should be directed to the MoJ press office as these are ministerial appointments".

Something else happened while Mrs Spear was absent from the boardroom. Nomination forms were created for her successor and a new vice chairman. Mrs Spear only learned of this because a fellow member broke ranks and sent a chain of emails to her. One, from Mrs Spear's predecessor Dr David Smith to the then vice chairman Christine Smart, concerned "nominees for board positions". In it, he wrote: "A delicate one, that was devised in the hope or expectation that Faith would resign. "She has not and if she became aware that nominations had been requested, it would add fuel to the fire. "I suppose we could always tear up the nomination forms and pretend it never happened."

Mr Leech, who was also sent copies of the leaked emails, said: "What we had here were people saying 'we will just rip it up and pretend it never happened'."

The BBC approached Dr Smith and Mrs Smart about both the attempt to get Mrs Spear to stand down and the leaked emails. Dr Smith declined to explain what he intended by his emails to fellow board members. However, he said an investigation into the matter had concluded that those "complained about had no case to answer as the allegations against them had not been substantiated".

Mrs Smart too said the matter had been "independently investigated and reported to the minister and a decision taken" adding: "I have nothing further to add."

The Ministry of Justice was asked whether the nomination forms were a contravention of IMB rules and whether it felt Mrs Spear's allegations of bullying behaviour against fellow IMB members had been properly investigated. Neither question was answered. Both Mrs Smart and Dr Smith subsequently resigned from the IMB of Hollesley Bay. For weeks after that fateful meeting in April, Mrs Spear continued to carry out prison visits at Hollesley Bay. And at the May 2016 board meeting, she found herself sitting alone.

"Faith wasn't eating properly," says Mrs Spear's husband of 30 years, Joseph. "There have been some real lows. Seeing the physical and mental impact on Faith in front of me was remarkable." During this time, she spoke about her experience to the East Anglian Daily Times (EADT).

In June, she found she had been suspended. A letter from previous prisons minister Andrew Selous cited the EADT article - and not the Prisons Handbook piece - as grounds for the suspension. The letter told her she was accused of "failing to treat colleagues with respect" and for "acting in a manner which could bring discredit or cause embarrassment to the IMB".

"It was just astonishing what people had engineered against her," says Mr Spear. "I have seen her rebound and find her feet and a place to rearticulate the issues she was concerned about."

Independent Monitoring Boards are "part of the UK's obligations to the United Nations for independent monitoring of prisons", says Mr Leech. "IMBs need to be fit for purpose. They are not. They are groomed to be quiet."

The Ministry of Justice said: "We value the work of Independent Monitoring Boards which play a vital role in ensuring prisons are places of safety and reform."

A few months after Mrs Spear was suspended, her worst fears were realised with a string of prison riots at places such as Bedford , Birmingham, Lewes and Swaleside in Kent. At Bedford, £1m of damage was caused while in Birmingham stairwells were set alight and paper records destroyed during trouble on four wings of the category B prison.

The IMB Secretariat issued a statement on the riots. Its irony was not lost on Mrs Spear. In it, Mr Thornhill claimed: "IMB members have regularly expressed great frustration that their real concerns about the state of prisons has been largely ignored over the years." He spoke of "serious issues" and "staff shortages", words not too far removed from Mrs Spear's own warnings that prisons were being "starved of resources".

And then, in January, she was sacked as IMB chairman. "The crisis in our prisons has never been as bad as it is now," says Mr Leech. "In the case of the Faith, they shot the messenger and they did not read the message."

Call For Early Release

In advance of the expected Parliamentary statement from Justice Secretary Liz Truss later today, the latest Guardian editorial makes it clear where it stands on the vexed issue of prison early release:-

The Guardian view on the Birmingham prison riot: a call for action

The riot in Birmingham prison last Friday, which at its height involved more than a third of the prison’s 1,450 inmates, was the worst since the Strangeways riot in Manchester 26 years ago. Moving the perpetrators out of Birmingham so that repairs can begin has put the stability of other prisons on a knife edge. As the justice secretary, Liz Truss, who will make a statement to MPs on Monday, acknowledged last month when she announced that an extra 2,500 officers were to be recruited, many of Britain’s prisons are dangerously understaffed and experiencing unprecedented levels of violence; Birmingham’s annual monitoring report emphasised just those problems. This crisis, like other crises in the public services, has been years in the making. As Britain enters its seventh year of austerity, there is no respite in sight. But prisons offer a real chance to show how to do more with less.

The chairman of the parole board, Nick Hardwick, who was until January the chief inspector of prisons, warned in a BBC interview on Sunday that the current balance between prison population and the number of officers was unworkable, and that on their own the new officers were not enough. More than 7,000 prison officers have gone since 2010 when Ken Clarke became justice secretary and promised a revolution in rehabilitation. Mr Clarke wanted shorter sentences – he proposed halving the sentences of offenders who entered guilty pleas – and a cut in reoffending, to reduce the prison population by 3,000. He offered up cuts of £2bn to the Treasury, nearly a quarter of the department’s £9bn budget; and by early 2013 the figures showed the first fall in prison numbers since the 1990s. But by then Mr Clarke had been replaced by Chris Grayling, with a brief to be tough on punishment, and numbers started to rise again, without any reverse to the shrinking budgets.

After Mr Grayling came Michael Gove, who spoke persuasively about the need for reform. But there was no change in the state of Britain’s prisons – now routinely condemned by the prisons inspectorate, who describe crumbling buildings and rat and cockroach infestations. There are not enough staff, and many are relatively new recruits, so in most jails few prisoners are constructively occupied; many are locked up almost all day, every day. In the year to June, 105 inmates killed themselves. At the same time there is a huge increase in the availability of psychoactive drugs, sometimes flown in by drones, that greatly exacerbate levels of violence. In the words of Peter Clark, Mr Hardwick’s successor as chief inspector, in his first annual report, “the grim situation [described in Mr Hardwick’s last report] has not improved, and in some key areas it has, if anything, become even worse”.

This is the mess that Liz Truss inherited when she was made justice secretary by Theresa May in July. Last month she unveiled a modest plan for reform, and some experts applaud her efforts to get a grip on a fast-deteriorating situation. She persuaded the chancellor, Philip Hammond, to release the cash for the extra staff announced in November. But they will take months to recruit and train – and, as the weekend’s events show, time is one of the commodities she does not have. In those circumstances, she was ill-advised, when she launched her prison reform white paper in early November, to rule out reviving the changes that Mr Clarke was forced to drop four years ago.

She expressly ruled out what she called “arbitrary reductions” to the prison population. That sounds as if she is resisting the demand now made by every one of her predecessors since 2005 to review the cases of the more than 3,000 offenders held on indeterminate sentences for public protection, even though some were originally imprisoned for minor offences and have been detained for far longer than the maximum sentence. Instead she restates the official line that reducing reoffending is the way to cut prisoner numbers. That is a pledge which sounds increasingly hollow in the face of the chief inspector of probation’s criticism last week of some of the private providers who run probation services.

In the Commons Ms Truss will almost certainly pledge to bring down the full force of the law against inmates involved in the Birmingham riot. But that means more prisoners in prison for longer – and the cost is high, yet the regime that is threatening the stability of many more prisons remains unchanged. Almost all prisons are operating at or near 100% capacity. This is just not sustainable. Ms Truss must think again about early release. Prison isn’t working.

--oo00oo--

Article in today's Guardian:-

Birmingham prison riot: government was warned two months earlier

The government was warned two months before a riot at HMP Birmingham involving hundreds of prisoners that the prevalence of psychoactive drugs meant urgent action was needed to prevent attacks on vulnerable prison officers. A report by the independent monitoring board found that prison officers at the jail “feared for their personal safety” and were terrified about a possible “mamba attack” by intoxicated prisoners. Black mamba is the name of one of a number of illegal psychoactive substances available in prisons.

The justice secretary, Liz Truss, will address MPs on the riot in a Commons speech on Monday.

HMP Birmingham was the scene on Friday of the worst prison riot since the infamous 1990 Strangeways unrest, as more than 600 prisoners ran rampant for 12 hours, setting fires and battling specially trained Tornado Squad officers. The chaos follows repeated warnings of a prison service in meltdown, with claims of systemic staff shortages and a surge in jail violence including an alleged murder, three large-scale riots and the escape of two prisoners.

Hull prison was on the brink of serious disorder on Sunday night after 15 prisoners were transferred from HMP Birmingham, including one thought to have played a key role in the disorder there and said to have attacked a senior prison officer.

Mike Rolfe, chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, said it was “only a matter of time” before a prison officer was seriously injured or even murdered in the violence. He said it was inevitable that large-scale disturbances would occur at other prisons in the coming days, weeks and months. “We’re seriously concerned about the state of prisons, not just with the high levels of violence, but the now regular theme of rioting which is spreading,” he said. “We’ve got serious concerns that there’s potential that this will spread and continue to happen over the next few months until the MoJ [Ministry of Justice] start listening to us properly.”

Nick Hardwick, chairman of the Parole Board, said on Sunday that the situation in the prison system was “very grave”.

“The levels of violence, and suicide, and self-harm are not merely increasing, but the rate at which they are increasing is accelerating, and we have now had a succession of very serious incidents that are unusual, and the fact that you now have this spate of them is a matter for the most serious concern,” he said. “Successive ministers cannot say that they weren’t warned about this. I, and others, have been warning about this for a number of years, and so the fact that we have reached this state now shouldn’t come as a surprise.”

Hardwick, a former chief inspector of prisons, said government plans to recruit 2,500 prison staff did not go far enough. The number of prisoners needs to be reduced to a manageable level if more jail riots are to be avoided, he told BBC Radio 4’s World at One.

The uncompromising report by the independent monitoring board, published on 27 October, urged the justice secretary, Liz Truss, to take urgent action to combat the widespread availability of psychoactive substances at HMP Birmingham, including “spice” and “black mamba”. Illicit drugs blighted all wings in the jail, the report found, fuelling a “climate of fear among prisoners” that included bullying and intimidation, and creating unsustainable pressures on emergency and medical services.

“The problem is too great for the prison alone to manage,” the report concluded. It added: “Many staff are now concerned for their personal safety as well as for the safety of the prisoners and how to deal with the next ‘mamba attack’. A solution is required urgently.”

The report found that cannabis use had actually increased in the prison since April 2016, when psychoactive substances were made illegal. Last month HMP Birmingham bosses were criticised by a coroner after a prisoner overdosed on a cocktail of drugs while on the detox wing of the jail.

The Birmingham and Solihull coroner, Louise Hunt, issued a Regulation 28 Report – to prevent future deaths – which included 12 matters of concern. These included the need for more netting in exercise yards to prevent drugs being thrown over the wall, more drug-detection dogs and full body scanners in the prison.

The independent monitoring board also warned ministers that serious incidents of violence at HMP Birmingham had increased to the point where safety “cannot be guaranteed” for all. Assaults on staff at HMP Birmingham rose 84% to a record high of 164 incidents last year, according to MoJ figures.

There have been several warnings about prison safety after statistics revealed soaring levels of violence in jails in England and Wales, with assaults on staff up by 43% nationwide in the year to June. Ian Cruise, an independent councillor in Birmingham who resigned as a prison officer at the West Midlands jail in July, said it was an “absolute madhouse” and should be taken back from G4s control. Cruise said he quit the Category B jail because he felt it was “physically unsafe to work in this prison”.

“We used to say we can feel it boiling, something’s going to go. You just felt it,” he told the Guardian. “It builds and it builds. If you’ve got something that’s simmering, you get to the stage where it boils over and once it does you get situations like what happened on Friday.” Cruise said prisoners would become irate that the hot water and electricity would go off fairly regularly, threatening to “smash their cells up” because their televisions would not work.

It is thought that Friday’s riot may have been sparked by a relatively small protest about cold showers in the Victorian jail, which holds 1,450 prisoners. A G4S spokesman said boilers are fixed the same day they break down and that all boilers in the prison had been changed over the last 12 months at a cost of £200,000.

He added: “Like every prison in the country, it is a constant challenge to tackle drugs by reducing demand and combatting supply. Birmingham is a very busy local prison and sadly we do see prisoners coming to us with significant drug problems, which have often developed over many years. Our drugs intervention team works hard to manage prisoners’ addictions and try and divert them into work, education and other purposeful activity.

“We will continue to work with the Ministry of Justice and our partners locally to continue to provide prisoners with the opportunity to turn away from drugs and crime.”

About 240 prisoners from Birmingham were transferred to other prisons on Saturday, with trouble flaring almost as soon as 15 suspected rioters arrived at HMP Hull on Sunday. The Prison Officers’ Association said an officer was attacked, CCTV cameras were torched and prisoners refused to return to their cells following the arrival of the men, one of whom is thought to have played a lead role in the Birmingham disturbance.

The riot raises the prospect of further wildcat strikes by prison officers following the walkout by up to 10,000 staff in November in a protest over rising jail violence. Rolfe said more than 30 staff had left HMP Birmingham in recent weeks and that G4s had set about “disposing of” higher-paid senior staff to replace them with cheaper, less-experienced officers. He said this strategy had helped G4s turn the jail from a loss-making property to a profit-making prison since it took over in 2011.

“It’s been something that we’ve all seen coming, like a slow train coming over a hill. The crash has finally landed now and this is what’s been caused by trying to bring down costs in a system that you need to fund adequately to ensure you get the right outcomes,” he said.

An advertisement on the G4S website states that the company has 25 openings for the full-time role of prison custody officer in Birmingham for which “no specific previous qualifications or experience are required”. The job pays £20,228.16 a year for 39 hours a week, the equivalent of just under £10 an hour, as well as “company pension, generous holiday entitlement, training and development”.