Blog: Operation Safeguard – what does it tell us?

There can’t be many less appropriate codenames for a contingency plan.

“Operation Safeguard” is what happens when even the prison service thinks it’s impossible to overcrowd prisons any further. It allows the use of up to 400 police cells to hold people overnight (and sometimes longer) when there just isn’t a space in a local prison that they can be taken to from court. It’s a big, embarrassing public signal of failure. But what does it tell us about the state of the system more generally?

Well, first it tells us that keeping people safe is far from  the top priority that ministers would have us believe. Plenty of individuals at the front line will do what they can to look after prisoners while this operation goes ahead. But we know that initial reception into custody is perhaps the highest risk moment for self-harm and suicide, and that local prisons are expected to devote attention and resource to it. The aim is to get prisoners settled as quickly as possible, checking for physical and mental health issues that might increase risk and, crucially, allowing contact with other prisoners whose job it is to build confidence and reassure.

It’s not just that a police station isn’t a place where that can be done properly, but also that “Operation Safeguard” is also a signal that prisoners will be being driven long distances late at night to make sure that every available place in a reception prison has been used before resort to police cells. Reception will be happening late, in a rush, with staff working well beyond the end of their shift. Prisoners will be taken to residential wings to be locked in whatever space there happens to be, with everyone hoping that a rapid cell sharing risk assessment doesn’t get exposed as inadequate in the morning.

So the second thing Operation Safeguard tells us is that the prison service is running on empty. I compare the way ministers run our prisons to someone driving around with their fuel gauge permanently in the red zone – and then looking for someone to blame when they run out of petrol and grind to a halt. Too many people in prison is what undermines every aspect of the government’s ambition for a decent, safe, rehabilitative system. It means permanent overcrowding, but when things get really tight, it means worse than that. To get every space filled every day, there will be more cells doubled up, more cells used  that ought to be  out of commission, more maintenance delayed that denies access to showers and even heating or windows that can keep out the cold. It means people being moved around the country every day simply to keep every prison full, regardless of their personal circumstances or sentence plan objectives. It means staff working at prisons far from home, losing working hours to travel and just doing the basics in an unfamiliar place.

And third, “Operation Safeguard” tells us that ministers wilfully ignore the price to be paid for their addiction to imprisonment. It’s sheer hypocrisy to publish grand policy papers promising rehabilitative prisons when the consequence of longer sentences, lower release rates, higher recall rates and mushrooming remand figures is that the prison service never escapes being in crisis. It makes their ambitions a house built on sand – and the tide has just come in.

Peter Dawson
Director