Latest From Napo 215

Here we have the latest mailout from Napo today, complete with yet another set of bloody letters - RRMP - from the command and control HMPPS:-

NPS Pay Talks Resume

Welcome news reached us this week during the NPS Joint National Committee, that discussions on Pay are to resume in the near future. Dialogue between HMPPS and the Treasury has taken place to discuss the pay remit and we expect to receive a formal invitation to meet with the NPS Pay and Reward team soon.

The delay in the payment of pay progression due in April and the failure by the employer to properly resource the competency based framework project (see below) has been a considerable source of anger for our members.

What’s been going on?

The pay year in the NPS runs from April to March in line with the financial year. The 2018 pay deal agreed by members, was for two years, 2018/19 and 2019/20 so members received payment for the second year of this in April 2019. READ IN FULL - or read below.

OMiC Update

Our regular meetings with members of the OMiC Board have resumed now that we are working towards recovery and some of the staff who were seconded out of the OMiC project will be returning to it. A final draft of the OMiC recovery EDM will be shared shortly for our final opportunity to consult on it but this week’s meeting was a useful opportunity to raise some of the issues that have really been highlighted by the Covid-19 crisis.

SPO line management arrangements

While the move to formal line management of prison SPOs by the Governor has not yet happened informal management arrangements most certainly are in place and there have been examples of tensions between the NPS approach to exceptional delivery and the prison service approach placing prison SPOs in an almost impossible situation. We have supported manager members to address these issues and in some cases escalated them to ensure that SPOs have the right level of support from their division in implementing the EDM and the NPS guidance on social distancing, hygiene and PPE that underpins the protection of health and safety during the crisis. We have insisted that these issues be taken into consideration as we resume discussions about the line management of the prison SPOs. For now issues should be raised locally via the divisional implementation board and if necessary referred to Katie Lomas.

The approach to recovery

Once the EDM is published each prison will develop a regime recovery management plan (RRMP) and local reps, both Napo and POA must be involved in consultation on this along with the associated Health and Safety risk assessments for the OMU and related activities. As reported earlier in the week Napo and the POA have agreed to work collaboratively on this and where there is no Napo H&S rep in the prison local branch reps will be able to liaise with the POA H&S rep and members working in the establishment.

Napo HQ

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What’s been going on?

The pay year in the NPS runs from April to March in line with the financial year. The 2018 pay deal agreed by members, was for two years, 2018/19 and 2019/20 so members received payment for the second year of this in April 2019.

The pay deal included the commitment to developing a competency based framework (CBF) for pay progression to use from 2020/21 onwards. Our position has always been that the scheme needed to be agreed in time for it to be in place for a full 12 months before it was used to determine progression. So to determine progression in April 2020 it needed to have been in place by the end of March 2019. When it was clear that this would not happen we secured a further agreement from the employer that progression in April 2020 for the year 2020/21 would be automatic. When it then became clear that the CBF scheme would not be in place by March 2020 we secured a further agreement for automatic progression for 2021/22. These agreements stand.

In March this year, the employer explained to us that because the pay progression due in April 2020 had not been agreed by HM Treasury they would not be able to pay it on time and would have to wait until they were authorised to enter talks with the trades unions on any pay award for 2020/21.

All Government departments have to go through proper process in terms of pay. First they get the 'advice' from HM Treasury which is based on Government directives about public sector pay. This usually comes in the early part of the year. Then the departments submit a proposal to HM Treasury and then they begin negotiations with the Unions. Once we, as a union, get to a point where we have achieved as much as we feel possible by negotiations we put the offer to members in a ballot. If the offer is agreed the pay award is made. This negotiation is a completely separate process to pay progression.

Next steps

This year the process has been delayed because there was a General Election in December 2019 which meant that HM Treasury were later than usual in issuing their advice. We know that the advice has been issued to the employers in the last few weeks so we expect to start negotiations on the pay award very soon. The Trade Unions in any case submitted our pay claim in March 2020 so that the employers were aware of our position. You can see the claim on our website here https://www.napo.org.uk/nps-pay-claim-20202021 which also neatly summarises the position in relation to pay progression. This pay claim was developed in consultation and approved by Napo's Probation Negotiating Committee (PNC) who report to every NEC meeting which means that the reps on PNC and NEC will have been involved in the conversations about it. The pay claim was, as is customary, sent out to members and placed on the website for reference.

We have written to members in mailouts at the end of 2019 and in March and May 2020 to update you on the pay position which essentially is that the progression through pay scales will be automatic for 2020/21 and 2021/22 but that for this year progression will not be paid until the pay award negotiations have been settled. Once we resume pay negotiations we will let members know and will report progress, initially this will be in confidence to the Napo PNC. Once we have negotiated as much of our as possible, the offer will be put to members.

Latest From Napo 193

For quite some time readers have been suggesting that Offender Management in Custody (OMiC) was another disaster in the making and this latest news from Napo would tend to confirm that view:-  

Napo and POA in dispute over OMiC as Johnson announces 10,000 more prison places

Today’s big story on sentencing reform, and the return of the Tories favourite old pre-election mantra of ‘lock em up and throw away the key,’ is symptomatic of the failure by successive Governments to properly understand the need for a balanced approach to prisons and rehabilitation.

I have just returned to HQ from the interview with Sky News earlier today where I tried to introduce a different perspective, and highlight a number of Napo’s campaigning priorities. Depressingly today’s debate has been dominated by the headline of 10,000 new prison places (and at least one new prison) to be financed by another huge windfall from that Magic Money Tree.

Same old, same old

There are a few reasons why the policy shift should be subject to major scrutiny. Firstly, because it represents a brutal ‘pitchforking’ of the reformist shoots previously planted by Messrs Gauke and Stewart on the need to abolish short term prison sentences which would have made a decent start in freeing up space across the HMP estate. Although by now we should know better than to expect a few facts to get in the way of the populist soundbites resurrected by Boris and his chums as they move inexorably towards a November general election.

Secondly, and in fairness to Secretary of State Robert Buckland, who at least acknowledged the need to take a holistic view of penal and rehabilitative policy on the early bulletins, it's yet again been all about Prison being the place where society’s ‘problems’ can be sent and sorted. Anyone with even half an idea about the justice system can tell you that this is a patently absurd mind-set, both from a financial and political standpoint. It's been tried tested and failed more times than many of us can remember and has seen the Prison population rise to bursting point across several decades.

OMiC dispute

Today, and perhaps very well-timed, your National Chair Katie Lomas and I have served notice on Sonia Crozier that Napo are now in dispute over the Offender Management in Custody strategy for a number of reasons as articulated in our letter. Our serious doubts about the practicalities of OMiC were raised a long time ago and have been again in light of the Governments U-turn on Probation, but it’s been an awfully long slog trying to get someone to take our concerns seriously. Today’s announcements should at least ring some more bells in this regard.

Fortunately it's not just us who are somewhat miffed at developments, and last week we met with our colleagues from the POA who also have serious issues in common cause around grading, qualification and workloads. We agreed to exchange notes going forward, maintain contact and seek joint meetings with senior HMPPS leaders and Ministers.

We will also be raising this subject as a matter of urgency at this weeks’ meeting of the NPS JNC and we will report further to members as soon as we can.

Ian Lawrence, General Secretary

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Sonia Crozier, Chief Probation Officer and Executive Director Women 

HM Prison and Probation Service 

12th August 2019 

Dear Sonia, 

Dispute re OMiC 

During recent engagement with your Officials about OMiC, we have received information that causes such significant concern to our members that we have no option but to formally register a dispute. Our concerns are summarised here. 

Lack of Consultation 

At the last meeting on July 24th we were presented with (after around a year of asking) a Powerpoint presentation titled “OMiC Staffing Model”. The document was dated March 2019. This document includes changes to agreed workload timings and changes to work practices such as completion dates for OASys and the OASys review frequency that we have not been properly consulted about. These constitute a significant change for members as well as establishing a lower level of assessment and review than is currently in place for clients in custody. 

Broken assurances on staffing levels 

At the start of OMiC, we were assured that the Offender Management part of the project would not be rolled out until staffing levels are safe. It is now clear that this is not the case and many members are reporting that their division is pressing ahead despite the significant vacancy levels and unacceptably high workloads that exist. 

We have been informed that, in five prisons, there are serious staffing issues that are not likely to be resolved by the “go live” date. Our understanding was that in such a situation the “go live” would not proceed, but instead we have been informed that the Case Management Support model will be used instead. This will force Probation staff to take on dangerously high caseloads of high risk clients and will see prison staff who have not had the requisite training or acquired the qualification to carry out offender management tasks with those clients. Taking aside the reality that the Case Management Support model rarely affords the workload relief it promises in the custody part of the sentence, there is little work that can be usefully given to someone else in this way. Our members who are being forced to work in this way are at real risk from such excessive workloads and we know from tragic experience that working so far beyond capacity also prevents members from delivering the standard of work required from them. 

SPO workloads 

We have raised our concerns for some time about the prison SPO role after it was announced that the ratio of SPO: reportee would be 1:14 FTE rather than the 1:10 FTE in the community. The SPOs working in prisons will be supervising both probation and prison staff who are on different sets of terms and conditions. We already see SPOs in the community struggling with workloads, especially where there are a number of part time staff (far more likely in a predominantly female workforce) which often means there are far more than 10 staff to supervise. In Prisons, these difficulties will be exacerbated, as the SPO is expected to drive the rehabilitation culture in the OMU while referencing multiple management and support structures for the two sets of staff. Our representations on this issue up to now have been ignored. 

Change to agreement on the contracted out estate 

During the meeting on the 24th July, we were also informed that, contrary to the previous assurance that high-risk clients in the contracted-out estate would have an OM with a Probation Qualification, there was a plan to use the Case Management Support model here too. This again forces members to work with dangerously high caseloads and way beyond their safe capacity thus risking their health and safety as well as making it impossible for them to deliver the standard of work expected. 

Concerns about the model 

You are of course aware that right from the start, Napo have questioned the OMiC model because it builds in working practices that are not supportive of desistance including inconsistency of worker through the sentence. The change of Offender Manager during the preparation for a client’s release is particularly concerning; as the period immediately prior to and just after release are especially vulnerable points in the sentence. The blueprint for the change to Probation Services discusses how problematic these “handoffs” are, and this forms part of the basis for one of the most significant U-turns in policy we have seen in Probation. It is therefore astounding that the OMiC model is being forced through with the same flaws embedded. 

The announcements by the Prime Minister over the weekend of the intention to create 10,000 new Prison places, in itself means that urgent dialogue (and surely a further review) is now necessary on the whole OMiC strategy and the resourcing requirements that are going to be needed in Prisons and Probation. 

In addition, the OMiC model has been altered for the Women’s Estate to remove the Keyworker role for those women described in the documentation as “high complexity women”. We have made representations about the degrading language being used and suggested that “women with complex needs” would be more appropriate. We question the decision to remove the Keyworker role which has been described as providing more consistency. Using consistency of worker as a reasoning for any decision in this model is bizarre, given the representations we have made about the model overall, but in this case it doesn’t fit at all. The Keyworker role is one of the positive aspects of OMiC, providing an additional supportive member of the “team” in the prison. This should be used to enhance, not supplant the interaction with the Offender Manager. Instead of removing the Keyworker role we believe that the Keyworker should remain, but the Offender Manager should be allocated additional time to ensure that positive working relationships can be built. 

No consultation on job losses 

In addition to the practice concerns we have illustrated above, it is very clear that the OMiC model is simply seeking to resolve the acute and chronic staffing issues in the NPS by giving staff unacceptably high workloads and by giving 30% of the custody caseload to Prison staff to manage. Although no NPS staff will lose their employment (because of the high vacancy rate in the NPS and our ‘no redundancy’ agreement) this nevertheless represents a net loss of jobs which has also not been the subject of prior consultation with the unions. 

In view of the urgency of this issue, we are seeking its inclusion as an additional item at this weeks’ meeting of the NPS JNC. Meanwhile, Napo will be taking steps to consult with our sister trade unions and our members about how we should progress this dispute. 

Yours sincerely 

IAN LAWRENCE 

General Secretary

KATIE LOMAS 

National Chair

Rory Gets Out of Jail Free

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Politics is as much about being lucky as anything and Gavin Williamson getting the chop was the perfect opportunity to get Rory Stewart out of a tricky situation at the MoJ. 

Despite him being highly regarded in many quarters, it's certainly the view taken by the POA, together with some sceptical prison reformers. It was also the day after the Joseph McCann story broke with the MoJ admitting he may have been mistakenly released from prison. At the time of writing, although McCann has been apprehended, by any measure the circumstances look shocking and may well prove to be yet another factor in potential candidates for the ministerial vacancy proving difficult to strong-arm. This from the Independent last week:- 

Rory Stewart ‘given get out of jail free card’ on prison pledge, say campaigners

Rory Stewart‘s removal from his role as prisons minister has “given him a get out of jail free card” on his pledge to improve the prison system, justice campaigners have claimed. A cabinet reshuffle sparked by the firing of defence secretary Gavin Williamson over a national security leak saw Theresa May appoint Mr Stewart as secretary for international development – widely seen as a promotion.

As prisons minister, a role he served in from January 2018, he vowed to resign if he failed to reduce the levels of violence and drug use in jails selected for the 10 Prisons Project, a £10m campaign announced in August 2018 to tackle “acute” issues in 10 of the most challenging jails. Criminologists and prison officers said it marked a continuation of the “ministerial merry-go-round” at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) which was “destabilising” for the sector. Campaigners said Mr Stewart had forged a good relationship with them and made “positive” pledges, but these now risked “disappearing into a black hole”.

A MoJ spokesperson told The Independent that progress on the 10 Prisons Project would continue regardless of who replaced Mr Stewart. But campaigners worried that it would suffer the same fate as the “six reform prisons” project, which Michael Gove set up as justice secretary but was shelved after he was sacked in 2016.

Mark Fairhurst, national chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association (POA), said: 

“Rory Stewart has been given a get out of jail free card.” 

He added: “The pledges [Mr Stewart] made and the way he engaged with us and listened to us were positive, but the question is what happens now? This is the problem. You forge a good working relationship with these ministers, and you start to make progress, because certainly the things he’s implemented are things that we’ve been calling for years. But then all of a sudden, just as you’re moving forward, they get replaced or promoted. So then you’ve got to do the same thing with somebody different, and you can only hope that they have the same engagement with the trade unions, respect what we say and act upon what we say like he’s done. Unfortunately this new prisons minister, whoever he or she may be, will not have time to settle in because this is an emergency – we are still in crisis. Safety is a massive issue. We’re getting staff with their throats slashed and getting their heads stamped on.”

Mr Fairhurst said that while Mr Stewart was making progress, the 10 Prison Project was not on track to succeed, and that his ministerial move would allow him to “get out of jail free” on the pledges. “We all know that it will fail,” he added. “I think people in power knew what was coming and needed to protect him.”

Stirling University criminologist Dr Hannah Graham said: “The ministerial merry-go-round in justice in recent years is destabilising. It hasn’t offered probation, courts and prisons practitioners the consistent stability and support they need. At a time when painfully high numbers of people are dying on probation and in prisons, accountable and morally courageous ministerial leadership is so very needed.”

Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said there would be a “good deal of regret” at the loss of Mr Stewart, but that it was “safe to assume” that his replacement would not commit to resigning if the 10 Prison Project doesn’t deliver. Indeed, the 10 may well disappear into the same black hole as the ‘six reform prisons’ that Michael Gove set up as justice secretary before moving on,” he added.

--oo00oo--

Writing on Facebook, Napo Vice Chair David Raho offers some observations:-

"This is something that could well impact on future probation either way. He is smart and gets the issues quickly and certainly realised very early on that TR1 was a huge mistake although he has persisted longer than some others of influence in the know with the idea that, despite the growing mountain of evidence questioning this, that there is a substantial role for private probation in delivering probation services than the sort of reduced involvement such as that seen in Wales. My enduring impression of him (gained from a wide variety of sources) has been of a man that at least appears willing to listen and to hear different points of view. He has also been more willing than others to look into, and appear to consider, other realistic possibilities rather than simply ploughing on regardless with the same old same old. Listening is one thing, hearing is another, doing what needs to be done is something a bit more challenging.

Let us not forget that in August 2018 he challenged us to judge him on his record over the next 12 months. This at least shows a bit of gumption. In fact, he said that he would step down if matters in prison had not improved. We should judge him on how things have been going since that offer. I am hoping his successor will come to the right conclusions about TR1 and do the right thing re: TR2.

How did he do?

Perhaps in probation, we will know in a couple of weeks time and either give him a thumbs up for a reasonable effort or a Grayling Award for failure in public office. It’s a key role. Let’s just remind ourselves of what it involves. Specific responsibilities include:

Prison operations, reform and industrial relations
Probation services and reform industrial relations
Sentencing (including out of court disposals)
Public protections (including Parole Board, IPPs and Serious Further Offences)
Foreign National Offenders
Extremism
Electronic Monitoring
Supporting the Secretary of State on departmental finances and transparency

Whoever is appointed has a tough brief in troubled times."

David Raho goes on to say:-

"We live in interesting and chaotic times where it is considered considerable progress and a major concession for the unions to actually be invited to meet in the same room as ministers rather than junior staff. They are still not consistently invited to the higher level meetings where the decisions are made yet - not even Labour did this in recent times.

It is POA action that is feared by government because of public sympathy re: physical risk to PO’s and immediate public safety as they could paralyse the system and force the government into an embarrassing situation where they would be forced to bring the army in. The POA are traditionally far more militant than Napo and their actions are sometimes also used instrumentally by prison governors to achieve their aims to increase resources. The POA have much greater membership density across most of the prison estate than Napo has across probation. They do however concede that they did not resist privatisation enough when it was occurring under New Labour. By way of contrast Napo’s influence is now and historically achieved through rational and persistent argument scratching away at the underbelly of the CJS in recent times utilising modern communication skills to get the message across - sometimes it comes together well and the message gets through to change the narrative slightly. That is what has happened recently with a little help from our friends some of whom operate across the political spectrum.

Potential collective strength, though a noble and honourable aspiration, would only become a reality following a massive and unprecedented increase in union membership followed by the political transformation of staff (the majority of those working in probation are small c conservative) and radical mass epiphanic changes of attitude and motivation across probation from a general position of reluctant acceptance and apathy to solid unified rejection and activism ie unlikely but not impossible.

We will no doubt be able to judge his contribution with greater accuracy shortly. He has certainly made some of the right noises and at present his main contribution is to apparently take into consideration information from others that Graylings team for example did not. This has caused concern to private providers of probation services who believe they have been assured further contracts and for unions and reformers to dare to hope that the government will perform a dramatic u-turn. However, we are wise to be sceptical as actions do very much speak louder than words and until decisive action by government to sort out the mess follows from words then no one can have any faith in what is said.

Faith is a very relative term. I have little faith in politicians to act rationally taking into consideration relevant evidence but I’m prepared to be surprised. ‘Perhaps in probation we will know in a couple of weeks time and either give him a thumbs up for a reasonable effort or a Grayling Award for failure in public office.‘

David Raho

(Published with author's permission)

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. 

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

As we all know, privatisation of public services is going really well and everyone seems to think Rory Stewart is a really good Prisons minister. What could possibly go wrong? This from Civil Service World:-

Public sector bids barred from next round of prisons contracts, confirms MoJ

Public sector providers will not be allowed to bid for contracts in the next competition to operate prisons, the government has confirmed, with HM Prison and Probation Service only able to provide a comparator to external bidders. Justice minister Rory Stewart announced the launch of the competition, which support plans announced by the Ministry of Justice in June to add up to 10,000 new prisons places, in a written statement to the House of Commons yesterday.

Through the competition, the MoJ will appoint and framework of prison operators, from which it will select the operator for each new prison in shorter ‘call-off’ competitions, he said. The framework will only be open to private companies unless bids do not meet a given standard, Stewart said. The new framework will be used to appoint companies to operate prisons that are already under private management once the existing operators’ contracts run out, and to award contracts for new-build prisons.

The first contracts to be opened to a call-of competition will be two new-build prisons in Wellingborough, in Northamptonshire and Glen Parva in Leicestershire. Construction of both prisons will be funded using public capital. “HMPPS will not bid in the competition but will provide a ‘public sector benchmark’ against which operators’ bids will be rigorously assessed. If bids do not meet our expectations in terms of quality and cost, HMPPS will act as the provider,” Stewart said.

The MoJ announced plans for the Wellingborough facility in 2016, four years after HMP Wellingborough closed, taking with it 600 places. Construction is set to begin in December, so that the prison can open in 2021. The construction of Glen Parva prison was initially intended to be privately-funded, but in last month’s Budget it was announced the government would fund it. The facility will open in 2022. In a written statement earlier this month, Stewart said the public funding would “enable the prison to open earlier than originally planned to meet the needs of the growing and complex prison population.”

The announcement comes at a time when private prisons contracts are coming under intense public scrutiny. In August the Ministry of Justice was forced to take over control of HMP prison from the private contractor G4S after an inspection showed high levels of violence and self-harm. In his statement yesterday, Stewart said the framework “should reinvigorate the prison market by encouraging new providers to enter the custodial arena”.

“It will also enable MoJ to more effectively and efficiently manage a pipeline of competition over the next decade,” he said. Earlier this year, Stewart said the MoJ was expecting the prison population to rise by around 10,000 to 93,000. He said he wanted to reduce “if not eliminate” shorter prison sentences of up to 12 months, although there is no legislation currently in train to make this happen,

Mark Fairhurst, national chair of the POA – the trade union for prison officers and secure psychiatric workers – branded the move to limit bids to private providers an “insult” to taxpayers.

“It’s an absolute disgrace that taxpayers’ money is being used to build prisons to be run by to profiteers, without the public sector being allowed to bid,” he said. “Prisons are not for profit and we’ve proven time and time again that private providers are not fit for purpose,” he said, pointing to the example of HMP Birmingham.

He said the union would fight “tooth and nail” to prevent any publicly-run prisons from transferring into the hands of private operators, which would mean prisons officers who are now civil servants moving into private employment.

“The question that remains now, is are they going to bar G4S and Serco from bidding?” he asked. The two companies, which between them run 10 of the 14 contracted-out prisons across the UK, are both under criminal investigation by the Serious Fraud Office over their running of electronic monitoring contracts.

He also said the union would “insist” the HMP Birmingham remain under public management, and would take “all necessary steps to show our discontent” if it were returned to G4S.

Shadow justice secretary Richard Burgon said prisons privatisation had been a “costly failure”, and that the statement showed the government was doubling down on its commitment to privatisation “instead of learning the lessons and changing direction”.

Prison and the Feminine Touch

It's always interesting when the prison crisis features in the financial press. This from the FT:- 

Jailers and reformers at odds over cash cure for prison chaos

Austerity has left institutions understaffed, overcrowded and beset by drug problems

When inspectors visited Bedford prison last month, the conditions took them by surprise. Rats and cockroaches scuttled through cells and corridors, while smoke from drug consumption pervaded the wings. There was a “dangerous lack of control” and the number of assaults by inmates on staff was higher than at any other jail in England and Wales. 

For the fourth time in less than a year, the inspectorate invoked an emergency protocol requiring an urgent response from the justice secretary on what steps he would take to stabilise the prison. The rapid decline in standards at facilities such as Bedford has fuelled calls for help for prisons in next week’s Budget. Between 2010 and 2015, the peak years of austerity, the Prison Service lost a quarter of its budget and nearly 30 per cent of its staff. A drive to recruit more officers is boosting numbers again, but the loss of veteran staff has left newer hires struggling to control increased violence and drug-taking.

Persistently high inmate populations mean that well over half of jails in England and Wales are overcrowded. Meanwhile, physical conditions have deteriorated to the extent that inspectors at Bedford logged 600 outstanding repairs. The question now for ministers is whether putting cash back into the system will help undo the damage — and if so, where new resources should be focused. The most obvious priority for investment is staff. Ministers passed their target in April to recruit 2,500 new prison officers, but as even more are recruited, plunging morale is driving experienced employees from the service. According to the Ministry of Justice, the number of middle-ranking prison officers who left in the year to June was up by 10 per cent on the previous 12 months, and of these, a higher proportion were resignations than the year before.

One prison officer told the Financial Times that the flood of young recruits, and particularly women, had transformed the composition of staff so dramatically that jails “now look more like nightclubs”. Inspectors noted that 77 per cent of prison officers at Bedford had less than one year’s service. The answer, according to the unions, is to divert funds towards retention. Mark Fairhurst, national chair of the POA, the prison officers’ association, said that if ministers wanted better results from prison officers “they need to pay them more at all levels, and return the pension age to 60, from 68”, he said. “There need to be proper incentives to go into the prison service and stay there.” Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, agreed. “What’s missing at the moment is those well-remunerated middle-managers, many of whom were lost in the early round of cuts,” she said.

Another key area for investment is physical infrastructure. Prisons minister Rory Stewart has already announced a £10m programme to introduce airport-style body scanners and sniffer dogs to prevent drugs being smuggled into 10 jails in England and Wales with some of the most acute problems. But the prison officers union argued that if the government was serious about stopping drugs, it had to go further, extending the rollout of body scanners to all adult male prisons and bringing in technology to block signals from mobile phones and drones, which are essential to maintaining drugs supply. The Howard League, however, is wary of such spending. “Do you need to spend money on all this security? Or do you just get prisoners out of their cells and give them something to do all day?,” asked Ms Crook. “Young men who are locked in their cells doing nothing except watching daytime television are going to get angry and are more likely to take drugs . . . the devil makes work for idle hands.”

At Bedford, some prisoners are allowed access to education and work activities, but nearly 40 per cent of inmates are locked up during the working day. Ms Crook suggested that providing better conditions for prisoners — such as clean toilets, in-cell phones to call their families, and purposeful activities — would be better solutions to drug-taking than expensive deterrent tactics. 

Neither the Treasury nor the justice ministry would comment on the Budget. However, Ms Crook added that while investment might ameliorate some of the problems in prisons, “it won’t solve them”. The more intractable issue is the high prison population, which stands just above 83,000, having risen by a third in the past two decades. Ken Clarke — the justice secretary who oversaw the first round of budget cuts in 2010 — agreed to significant cost savings partly because he intended to bring down the number of people in jail. Subsequent Conservative justice secretaries have continued the austerity regime, but without the same drive to cut the population.

While the easiest solution politically would be to reduce the number of inmates on short sentences, this is unlikely to have much of an effect because the population growth has been driven by a 40 per cent increase in those on longer sentences of four years or more since austerity began. This could be tackled by changes to future sentencing policy — which would take several years to show results — or changes to existing sentences, which would prove much more contentious. Nick Hardwick, the former chief inspector of prisons, said it was “critical” that ministers combined any new spending with finding a way round the population deadlock if prisons were to start functioning. “We need to get the finances right and achieve a sustainable population,” he said. “We have to find a way of creating some space in the system again.”

--oo00oo--

I notice BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour has recently covered the subject of prison and female staff:- 

The women who want to work in a male prison

The prison service in England and Wales is in crisis, amid reports of widespread problems with drugs and violence in numerous jails. Three women explain why they want a job working behind bars in a men-only prison.

The word "misunderstood" is tattooed in pink along Charmaine's arm. It's in memory of her friend who was murdered. Her friend had the same tattoo done before she was killed. "I can't really say what it means," admits Charmaine. "Some people think it's from a song, but I think it's more to do with how my friend saw herself as a person." She describes her as being like a sister. "We did everything together. She was my world."

The tattoo is now motivating Charmaine in her new career. She's just become a prison officer. "If my friend knew I would eventually become a prison officer, she would have told me I was mad and needed my head testing." But it was something Charmaine's mother said that stayed with her. "After my friend's death it took me some time to really think straight but my mother told me once that everyone deserves a second chance. I couldn't think about anything else except how much I hated my friend's attacker, but after a year or so I started to think about what my mother said. I decided I would try and make a difference and become a prison officer."

We have agreed not to use Charmaine's surname - or the surnames of the other women featured in this piece - for security reasons. I met Charmaine when she was in training at Newbold Revel, an 18th Century, Grade II listed country house in Warwickshire. She's 50 years old and a mother and grandmother and used to be a painter and decorator on building sites, where she was the only woman. Charmaine decided she wanted to try something new after having one too many accidents while painting, so recently she's been working in a prison to get the feel of it, before committing to it completely.

She says she's ready for the challenge and feels confident that she can cope with violence or incidents of self-harm, partly because she's already had some personal experience of it. "My brother and nephew took their own lives. It's not something I'm scared of. I know I can deal with it and be sympathetic and compassionate to the family, but it's hard."

She says her life experience will definitely play a part in her new role. "You're seeing youngsters come into the prison for the first time and it's nerve-wracking for them. You need someone with motherly instincts who can pick up if someone's upset." Charmaine has been a victim of crime. She was also in an abusive relationship and ended up at a refuge. Even so, she prefers to think about prison as a place of rehabilitation rather than punishment. "Prison teaches them not to go back out and reoffend. We try and teach them that what they've done is not a good thing, and then help them go back into society and be a better person."

Training alongside Charmaine is Sally, 49, and Calypso, 24. Sally had a career in banking and then local government, while Calypso has been doing bar work as well as an Open University forensic psychology degree. As trainees, they all spend 10 weeks at Newbold Revel, although the full training is 12 weeks long. It's a mixture of classroom theory and practical exercises using role play. Recruits learn cuffing, cell-searching, locking and unlocking doors, as well as how to deal with confrontation and communicate well.

Charmaine, Sally and Calypso start their new careers at a point when prisons are feeling the strain. There's evidence of an increase in sexual violence between inmates and there have been stark warnings about rising violence and drug use behind bars. Because of the number of people leaving the service, the government aims to train 5,200 new prison officers this year and says it is on track to meet the target. The trio are also joining a male-dominated industry. According to the latest figures, there are about 21,600 prison officers in England and Wales. Just over a quarter of those are women.

Despite the challenges, all three women say they're positive about their next step, insisting they're not naïve. "I really believe in what I'm doing," Sally says. "For me, there are no rose-tinted glasses. I'm excited because I know there's a rehabilitation culture in prison. That's what brings change and that excites me. Yes, there'll be challenges, but those challenges are opportunities."

"It is risky," admits Calypso, "but that doesn't put me off because a lot of it is to do with your interpersonal skills. "It's not about how big and tough you are. If I can help just one person, I've done my job in life."