20/10/2020
Police Oracle
Work with Offenders on today’s Chief Inspector of Prisons annual report
This morning Peter Clarke, the outgoing Chief Inspector of Prisons laid his fifth and final annual report before parliament. The report covers all the full inspections of places of detention in 2019–20 – some positive and some deeply troubling – as well as scrutiny of the enormous impact of COVID-19 in its early stages.
Mr Clarke made it clear that COVID-19 will overshadow life in detention for months to come and committed the Inspectorate to continue to visit establishments in a way that is both safe and capable of producing clear and independent evidence of welfare in a period of severe restrictions on daily regimes. The Inspectorate has conducted more than 50 scrutiny visits during the COVID-19 period. The Chief Inspector said that it is dangerous to keep prisoners locked up for 23 hours per day for months on end and said that there would be profound consequences for individuals’ mental health.
In a series of interviews accompanying the publication of the report, Mr Clarke balanced his concern for prisoners’ welfare under lockdown with a desire that deep-seated problems pre-existing the pandemic should not be forgotten.
“The challenges faced by many prisons, and the systemic weaknesses that we identified in some key areas, will not have gone away because of the health emergency. When the immediate crisis is over, there will still be an urgent need to address the serious issues that adversely affect the safety and decency of our prisons, the opportunity they offer for rehabilitation and their contribution to reducing reoffending.”
The report is not all bad news, though. Some inspections in 2019–20 provided grounds for cautious optimism. Mr Clarke chose to highlight the impact of leadership and good management on the outcomes experienced by prisoners.
“In 2017, HMP Liverpool was the subject of one of the most damning inspection reports in recent years, and at the time I commented publicly on a failure of leadership at local, regional and national levels. A new governor was appointed, and the process of recovery began. When I returned to Liverpool in September 2019, the prison was almost unrecognisable. The filth and vermin had gone, and prisoners were no longer being held in degrading, squalid conditions.”
Cardiff, a local prison that has faced many challenges, also showed strong improvement in 2019, Mr Clarke added. It was reassuring that in some HMI Prisons Independent Reviews of Progress (IRPs) inspectors saw the positive impact that effective leadership had at other prisons that had suffered from poor performance, such as at Lewes and Channings Wood. IRPs are short, sharp inspections undertaken at prisons where serious concerns have previously been uncovered by inpsectors to examine whether prisons have implemented recommendations and made improvements.
In some IRPs, though, “progress had too often been disappointingly slow. In several cases, it had been many months before there had been any meaningful progress.” At HMP Pentonville in January 2020 inspectors found that little had been done to respond to a very poor inspection report in 2019 until a few days before the IRP itself.
Having praised good leadership, Mr Clarke also highlighted that poor or inconsistent leadership “can and does lead to appalling failure, as was the case in the year at HMYOI Feltham A.”
Mr Clarke used his final annual report to flag up a number of ongoing concerns.
He referred to a disturbing thematic inspection report about the separation of children in custody published in January, where children are unable to mix with their peers either to maintain order, as part of a punishment, due to the prison running a limited regime, or their own decision to self-isolate. The Chief Inspector called the findings a disgrace, saying that. “In many cases children were being held in circumstances that amounted to solitary confinement.”
The report finds that safety remains a major problem in prisons holding adult men in 2019–20. Although inspectors found some improved living conditions.
Drugs, generating debts and violence, were also singled out as an issue of concern by Mr Clarke who said: “
Far too slowly, technology that has been available for many years in other sectors has begun to be introduced into some prisons. For instance, scanners that can detect internally concealed drugs are now being introduced. My experience in those prisons where I have seen them operating is that they are warmly welcomed by staff, who feel safer.”
He urged HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) to use such technology to its full potential.
Other deep-seated problems raised by Mr Clarke included:
The Chief Inspector also raised concerns about conditions in immigration removal centres:
“as usual, immigration detainees suffer a great deal of anxiety because of the uncertainty of their predicament. The slow progress of their immigration cases and the open-ended nature of their detention are issues for them. Notably, self-harm has risen at all centres.”
Charlie Taylor, an education and youth justice expert, will take over from Mr Clarke before the end of the year.