A new year brings hard choices for government

Everything we read in inspection and IMB reports, that we see on visits to prisons, and hear about from letters, emails and phone calls, tells us at PRT that excessive bang-up is still common across most of the prison estate. We also know that overcrowding levels have been increased in some prisons, and that staff and prisoners are being constantly shuttled between establishments to avoid even greater use of police cells.  It’s all too obvious that the government’s response to a second “urgent notification” about HMP Exeter is hamstrung by the inability to move prisoners out of an overcrowded and crumbling prison as it has in response to similar reports in the past. We hear about prisons where the heating or water supply has failed for days on end and all the prison service can do is distribute extra blankets. The system’s in permanent crisis mode.

But you wouldn’t guess that from the answers ministers have been giving to parliamentary questions on the subject. According to the government, “the majority of prisons are delivering a full or near full regime”.  When you dig a little deeper, what this means in reality is that a “full regime” is no more than what the Governor thinks is deliverable with the resources they have. It certainly isn’t the opportunity for everyone to be out of their cell doing something constructive. And there is no system in place to measure how many people are actually spending most of every day locked in their cell, still less to prevent that from happening.

People are in prison for longer than ever, but doing less than ever.

We know that the new prisons minister, Damian Hinds, has inherited a disastrous situation. It can’t have been easy for him as one of his first acts to have to stand up in parliament to say that the prison service had run out of space and was having to use police cells. And we know that the staffing crisis which is crippling prison regimes is not of his making. But the answer cannot be to pretend that all is well when it isn’t.

So we’ve written to the minister to ask four specific questions:

• How are you monitoring excessive confinement?
• What is the department’s projection of the prison population and capacity over the next 12 months?
• How long does the department intend to keep Operation Safeguard in place?
• What further measures do you plan in the immediate future to reduce both excessive confinement and overcrowding?

The government faces hard choices in the new year, all politically unwelcome. But none of them are made easier by looking the other way. There is a way out if they want it — but it requires politicians of all persuasions to end their competition to look tougher than their opponent. Reducing the demand for prison places — not increasing their supply —  is the only sustainable solution.

At PRT, we will continue to tell the truth about what prisoners and their loved ones are facing, and to argue that the time has come to abandon our national addiction to imprisonment.

Thank you for your interest in and support of our work during the last year. Whatever your connection to prisons and the people who live and work in them I hope that you enjoy a peaceful Christmas.

Peter Dawson
Director