Our prisoners are locked up with too little to do

Work with offenders on renewed concerns from the Chief Prison Inspector

The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Charlie Taylor, has used publication of two inspection reports on Category C prisons (HMP Brixton & HMP The Mount) to highlight the issue of a lack of purposeful activity provided across the prison estate.

Category C prisons

As most regular readers will know, all our prisons are put into alphabetical categories rating the levels of security needed for an individual establishment’s residents. Category A prisons are high security while Category D are open prisons. Category C prisons are training and resettlement jails that hold prisoners whose escape risk is considered to be low but who cannot be trusted in open conditions. More than a third of all those in custody in England and Wales are held in such institutions, which, according to the Prison Service, should be providing prisoners with “the opportunity to develop their own skills so they can find work and resettle back into the community on release”.

Inspection findings

Following inspections in March this year, both Brixton and The Mount were judged ‘poor’, the lowest grade, in the provision of purposeful activity. The combined prison population of the jails was 1,716 at the time of the inspection, and most of these prisoners were locked up for 22 hours a day and even longer on weekends.

A high number of people in prison at both establishments were unemployed: long waiting lists and poor allocation of work were creating problems at The Mount, and there were not nearly enough activity spaces for the population at Brixton. Both inspection reports were critical of the leadership teams at both jails, saying that they lacked the oversight and scrutiny to identify and rectify the situation.

Ofsted, which inspected the quality of education provision alongside prison inspectors, rated overall education provision at Brixton and The Mount ‘inadequate’. Both prisons were found to offer too few opportunities to gain accredited qualifications, and prisoners’ learning suffered from poor attendance rates and lateness, often due to delays in prisoners being unlocked from their cells

One prisoner at Brixton commented in the Inspectorate’s survey that there were:

 “… no courses for prisoners to engage in… There is no thing for a prisoner to focus on or use as a qualification on the out.”

Inspectors also rated The Mount as “insufficiently good” in the area of respect, while Brixton was judged poor, which is regarded as symptomatic of a prison in serious trouble. At Brixton, inspectors found that overcrowding compounded the issue of lack of time out of cell. Too many prisoners shared dirty, graffitied, and poorly equipped cells designed for one, and it was often difficult for prisoners to access basics, such as toilet roll, clean bedding, and clothing.

Inspectors found that safety at The Mount was mostly good, but violence at Brixton was on the rise, and, distressingly, the dangerous environment had led some prisoners to isolate themselves out of fear.

Running prisons with purpose

So concerned is the Chief Inspector that he has published a blog post to accompany the two inspection reports. The blog highlights that three of the four Category C prisons which have been most recently inspected (the performance of HMP Rochester was rated as being as poor as that at Brixton and The Mount) are simply locking up the men in their care for much too much of their time. Inspectors found delays in getting prisoners back into education, training and work at all three establishments, describing the main reasons as: too few activity spaces, poor allocation processes, staff shortages and a tentative approach to reopening the regime.

Mr Taylor said that it was particularly depressing to see workshops and classrooms that should have been thriving, either empty or with just a handful of prisoners taking part in activities. He goes on to say that Release On Temporary Licence (ROTL) had almost entirely stalled and the best-behaved prisoners were losing out on the chance to start going to work in meaningful jobs outside the prison wall. The Chief Inspector argues that a jail like Brixton, on a small, inner-London site, can only really be successful as a resettlement prison if a sizeable proportion of its prisoners are working out in the community every day.

He rejects COVID-19 as a reason, pointing out that the fourth category C prison recently inspected (HMP Coldingley in Surrey) was doing a much better job with prisoners out of their cells for an average of seven hours a day and inspectors describing the atmosphere as calm, with prisoners spoke positively about the jail.

Mr Taylor concludes by reminding us that it costs about £45,000 to keep someone in prison for a year and that:

“It is in all our interests that our prisons, particularly category C jails, invest more effort in giving prisoners the skills to resettle successfully when they are released.”