14/09/2023
Police Oracle
The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman (PPO) has today published their Annual Report for 2022-23, a year which saw an increase in prison and self-inflicted deaths.
The PPO investigates deaths of prisoners, young people in detention, offenders under probation supervision and individuals detained under immigration powers.
In 2022/23 the Ombudsman received 4,472 complaints, an increase of 1% compared to the previous year. The vast majority of these were about prisons (4,211 or 94%) with 252 about probation services and eight about Immigration Removal Centres.
In 2022/23 the Ombudsman’s team completed 2,165 investigations compared to 1,924 in the previous year, a significant increase of 13%. The three most common topics for complaints were prison property (more than a quarter of all complaints at 29%); staff behaviour (10%) and failures in administration (7%). Other common areas of complaint were prison work and pay; disputes over security categorisation level and adjudications. Just over one quarter of all complaints (27%) were found in favour of the person complaining.
Tragically, the PPO started investigations into 404 deaths, a 23% increase compared to the previous year. Investigations were initiated into:
(20 deaths are awaiting classification although they are most likely to be classified as “non-natural”).
Of these 404 deaths, 322 were deaths of people in prison (34 more than last year); 63 were people who died in the first 14 days of their release from prison; 15 were deaths of residents living in probation approved premises (2 more than last year) and two were deaths of residents from the immigration removal estate (2 more than last year). In addition, the PPO also investigated the death of one person who was released into a care home and died shortly afterwards and the death of another person who had been in a hospital and was moved to a hospice.
Acting Ombudsman from June 2022 to April 2023, Kimberley Bingham expressed her frustrations in the report which highlights there were 404 deaths in 2022-23, 322 of which were prisoner deaths, 34 more than last year.
Adult safeguarding continues to be an area of concern for the PPO as they began investigations into 92 self-inflicted deaths, 5 more than the previous year.
“Prisons have a duty to keep prisoners safe and protect them from abuse and neglect,” said Kimberley.
“97 of our recommendations in 2022-23 related to suicide and self-harm prevention. Self-neglect is an extreme lack of self-care and is a category of neglect which falls under adult safeguarding procedures.
“I am not only concerned by the increase in prison deaths we have seen, but also by the increased number of self-inflicted deaths. A key question in our investigations is whether there are underlying systemic issues that need to be brought to light.”
The Ombudsman’s report highlights the case of Mr K, revealing a prisoner who was found hanged in his cell six weeks after arriving at his prison. He was a challenging prisoner who refused to engage with staff and spent long periods of time in his cell, neglecting his self-care and not always collecting medication. The PPO identified a lack of effective care planning to help address Mr K’s risk, and HMPPS had no self-neglect guidance in place to help staff support prisoners like Mr K.
The PPO said: “We recognise it can be challenging for prison and healthcare staff to work with someone who self-neglects, but more must be done by HMPPS to develop a self-neglect strategy and guidance to be used in the prison environment.”