13/07/2022
Police Oracle
Work with offenders looks at today’s Annual Report
Chief Prison Inspector Charlie Taylor made the publication of his 2021/22 annual report (laid before Parliament this morning) an opportunity to highlight two main issues: the continued situation where many prisoners are locked in their cells for 23 hours a day and ongoing staffing crisis.
The report
The annual report reflects just how busy the prison inspectorate is; publishing 63 separate reports in the year to March.
In his introduction to the report, Mr Taylor says that the lack of purposeful activity in prisons is “a seemingly intractable problem” raised by each of his six predecessors since the first HMI Prisons annual report was published 40 years ago. A number of recent inspections found that some prisoners were locked up for 23 hours a day or more.
“In category C training prisons, in spite of their remit, the situation was often little better, with prisoners spending their time sleeping or watching daytime television rather than engaged in the work, education or training that would help them to resettle successfully in the community on release.”
Mr Taylor emphasised the impact on the emotional and mental health of people on prison with 51% of men and 76% of women telling inspectors they had mental health difficulties. It is not clear what the longer-term effect of lockdowns will be on prisoners, but the Chief Inspector says that “there is no doubt that there will be a price to pay” for the loss of family visits, the limited chance to socialise with other prisoners, the lack of education, training or work, the curtailing of rehabilitative programmes, the cancellation of group therapy and the dearth of opportunities for release on temporary licence.
Mr Taylor talked about how disheartening it was for inspectors to go into prisons and find workshops and classrooms mainly empty:
“The failure to fill the gaps in the skills and education of these prisoners and the low expectations of their abilities and potential meant they were learning to survive in prison rather being taught how to succeed when they were released.”
Staffing
The Chief Inspector comments at length about the impact of staff shortages with an increasing proportion of frontline staff being new recruits. Inspectors found that most prisons were not providing new staff with enough support. The report says that staff shortfalls and less prisoner time out of cell placed a “monumental” pressure on the ability of staff to build positive and constructive relationships with prisoners. This meant that, coupled with the lack of effective key work, few new staff had been able to fulfil the full rehabilitative role of a prison officer. The findings from the inspectorate’s staff survey revealed that the majority of respondents who were frontline operational staff had low or very low morale at work.
Women in prison
Other issues highlighted by the report was the need for greater support for women prisoners both inside jail and as part of their resettlement into the community. The Chief Inspector notes that resettlement planning had been hindered by the changes made with the unification of the Probation Service, which led to the ending of contracts with community rehabilitation companies that had previously provided resettlement services and an ongoing uncertainty about future provision. He complains that women who are on remand or unsentenced received little or no support as HMPPS did not contract the new service providers to deliver it.
He also draws attention to another long-standing problem: that too many women were released homeless or to very short-term accommodation. Mr Taylor also pointed out the lack of information regarding homelessness on release, saying that the sustainability of housing outcomes for released women was not measured accurately at any of the prisons which were inspected, making it impossible to assess the extent of the problem.
Immigration units
As well as prisons, youth custody and police custody suites, the prison inspectorate is also responsible for inspecting immigration facilities. He described the arrangements for people who cross the Channel in small boats as “haphazard”. When the inspectors visited Dover in November last year, they found some families sleeping on the floor in flimsy tents with inadequate bedding or crammed into facilities where some basic safeguards were not in place.