How has coronavirus affected the prison and probation services?

Work with Offenders digs into the detail

There has been a lot of discussion about the impact of COVID-19 on our penal system, with the consensus that our overcrowded, outdated prisons are virtual Petri dishes likely to guarantee the spread of the virus across the whole estate, affecting residents and staff alike.

We know that the MoJ has committed to release up to 70 pregnant female prisoners and as many as 4,000 low risk offenders who are within two months of their normal release date. Beyond this, details have been hard to come by.

However, this Tuesday a significant amount of additional information emerged from a House of Commons Justice Committee meeting on the subject of the impact of coronavirus on the prison, probation and court systems. Unsurprisingly, the Committee meeting was held online to ensure social distancing. Nonetheless, this was an important meeting with a number of important witnesses including the Prisons and Probation Minister Lucy Frazer; Joe Farar, Chief Executive of Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service; Amy Rees, Director General of Probation and Wales; and the Chief Inspector of Probation, Justin Russell as well as key representatives from the probation trades union NAPO as well as a number of voluntary sector providers.

Prisons

First, some key facts and figures:

• 6,268 prison staff are currently self isolating – and therefore, obviously, not at work.
• There were 203 confirmed coronavirus cases among prisoners and 49 among prison staff.
• Just 14 pregnant women prisoners and four male prisoners have been released early by Tuesday, although the Minister promised that “several hundred” would be released the following day.

The Minister and various officials laid out a range of strategies that the MoJ is using to try to reduce the prison population. Currently approximate 15,000 prisoners share cells with others, making social distancing an impossibility. The aim is to reduce the numbers sharing as far as possible.

In addition to the early release scheme, the government is trying to reduce the number of people going into prison by training up a new cohort of bail officers to be on duty at every court in order to put bail packages in place to avoid defendants being remanded in prison. At the same time, the courts are trying to expedite cases relating to people currently remanded in prison since a sizeable proportion will receive either short custodial sentences which they may well have already served while on remand or community sentences. In either case, this means that individuals will be able to be released into the community straight from court. 

Probation

There was also a lengthy discussion about the impact of COVID-19 on the probation service. Probation is currently working to a new “exceptional delivery model” and there were different views as to whether this meant an increased workload or not. It is clearly a very different working pattern at the moment, exacerbated by the fact that 2,000 probation staff are currently self-isolating of whom just 1,100 are able to do at least some work from home. It is clear that the first two weeks of the new delivery model was an extremely busy time; the reality is that the 4,000 prisoners who may be released early will only be let out if they are assessed as low risk to the public. The probation service was basically required to update its risk assessments on its entire caseload in order to decide which individuals (the vast majority) could be supervised by telephone for the duration of the lockdown.

This high number of risk assessments, combined with the fact that probation officers working for the National Probation Service were required to do home visits to very high risk offenders and all offender manages were expected to double contact levels for those being supervised by telephone clearly added to the workload. You may be wondering how probation officers can do home visits without compromising social distancing, but the protocol is for the probation officer to drive to the supervisee’s home and talk to him or her by telephone from outside or from their car with the supervisee being required to be visible in the window of their home to ensure that they are both residing at the proper address and observing the lockdown.

On the other side of the coin, there is much less work to do for the courts since their operation has been cut right back and, obviously, there are no group work programmes and hardly any face-to-face work.

The probation service has also set up a number of multi-agency regional accommodation taskforces to try to ensure that prisoners who are assessed as suitable for early release have homes to go to.

Conclusion

The government came under fire last week for not broadcasting a Justice Committee hearing with many commentators saying that the sort of unprecedented decisions currently being made should be open to public scrutiny. It is pleasing to be able to report that this problem has been resolved quickly and, although the technology did not work perfectly, it was important to see both ministers and senior officials responding to questions from politicians of all political parties. Members of the public are able to watch the broadcast live and to replay it or even download it to watch at a time of their choosing.

Work with offenders will continue to keep you up-to-date on the latest developments.