UK: Owers' report show prisons lurching from crisis to crisis
01 January 2007
The fifth annual report of Anne Owers, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, portrays a prison service lurching from crisis to crisis. The impact of the 20% growth in prison population since Anne Owers came into office has been to undo any positive changes implemented by prison staff. The report illustrates various aspects of the contemporary crisis:
* The impact of the stabilisation of growth of the population of female prisoners has been undermined by the population pressures in the male estate leading to womens' prisons being re-roled to hold men, destabilising often vulnerable women and leaving many further from home.
* Despite population pressures, there has been a fall in the number of self-inflicted deaths... However, the impact of self-harm prevention strategies is most marked in the early days of custody, assisted by better first night support and improved detoxification. A significant number of new prisoners are being forced to spend the their first nights in police cells due to the extent of overcrowding, or are being driven from one overcrowded jail to another in pursuit of a place, and are in effect locked-out of the benefits of the strategies employed.
* Throughout the system, the pressure of prison numbers constrains decisions about how to allocate resources, prevents prisoners being held within their home region, and has contributed to significant backlogs in sentence planning assessments.
* Inspectors assess each establishment against four healthy prison tests - safety, respect, purposeful activity and resettlement. In all the prisons most affected by overcrowding - adult male local, training and open prisons - assessments since April 2006 were less positive than in the previous 12 months. Three local prisons, compared with one for 2005-06 -were assessed as performing poorly as regards safety and respect. In the previous inspection year, two-thirds of training prison assessments were positive; since April 2006 only half have been. Positive assessments for open prisons dropped from 85% to 62%.
* The number of offenders handed indeterminate sentences, and the number of foreign nationals held unnecessarily post-sentence, further increase the prison population pressures.
Anne Owers commented that:
I can't say other than that we have a serious crisis and one which is impacting on the ability of prisons to do rehabilitation. It is also making prisons riskier places to run. It is normally considered good practice to build an ark before the flood rather than during or after it.