Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
TUESDAY 10 DECEMBER 2002
ANNE OWERS,
CBE
40. Why does Blantyre House not feature on the
list?
(Ms Owers) I think it is on our list, is it not?
41. I have annex 1 in front of me.
(Ms Owers) We certainly did not inspect it last year,
no.
42. Or the year before?
(Ms Owers) Sorry, before my time. I think we did inspect
it the year before, but I would not like that to be on the record.
43. Do you recall the controversy over Blantyre
House?
(Ms Owers) Indeed yes.
44. So it is an obvious candidate for a follow-up,
is it not?
(Ms Owers) It may well be. [1]
45. When my colleague asked you about your one
wish I thought you might have answered the resolution of the overcrowding
in prisons.
(Ms Owers) Indeed I should have; it is the obvious
one.
46. The population has gone up over 24,000 in
the last ten years and over 6,000 in the last two years. How is
the prison estate coping with these increases?
(Ms Owers) It is coping. You are absolutely right,
I was thinking in a line of questioning and clearly anyone's one
wish in prisons now would be for prisoner numbers to decrease
to the level which would be right and where prisons could do their
proper job. Thank you for reminding me of that; not that I need
much reminding. In answer to your question, I would say that prisons
are coping. They are good at coping, they are good at crisis management
and they are managing a very, very difficult crisis, but they
are managing it with some difficulty and I set out in the annual
report those particular areas of difficulty and the way in which
it is affecting all of our healthy prison tests. It is undoubtedly
true that most prisons are not as safe as they were and you see
that in the rates of suicide and self-harm, which are going up.
That is not just because of the numbers, it is because of the
"churn" of population, the movement in and out of prison
reception, sometimes 100 a day. It is not possible for reception
and induction staff to assess people's risk to themselves or risk
to others properly when they are looking at those kinds of movements.
Prisoners are locked up for longer and that also increases the
likelihood of suicide and self harm, and disturbances are much
more likely to happen in prisons now, so they are not so safe.
They are also not so decent. The Director General and I talk a
lot about two people sharing a cell with a shared toilet with
no screen, where everything happens. They eat, they use the toilet,
one of them may sit on the toilet to eat. Those are not conditions
which the Prison Service wants to provide or that prisoners need.
That is the case. Also, in terms of the other tests, purposeful
activity and resettlement, which I see as key to preventing re-offending
and to public protection in the longer term, you see prison's
ability to do that being compromised. Resettlement obviously consists
of getting people on the right programmes they need, the right
training courses but also, crucially, making links with the outside
world to which they will be released, most of them in very short
order, most of them within a year. The Prison Service's capacity
to do that, to have prisoners in the right place, for the right
course, with the right resettlement links (and resettlement is
still very much a developing area within the Prison Service which
needs to be developed a lot further), that is greatly compromised
by overcrowding. In a way, going over the last six months or so,
the effects of overcrowding are a bit like an oil slick. At first
you saw its effect very acutely, very damagingly, on the local
prisons which are the pressure valves of the system and which
receive people from court and are struggling with these large
numbers of people going in and out. What I am now seeing in training
prisons, which are supposed to be the workhorses of the system,
supposed to be the places where prisoners get the purposeful activity
and the skills and the training they need, is that they are also
now being affected. In one training prison I was in recently,
prisoners are now spending an average of only six or seven weeks
there because they are overspilling from London. In other places,
prisoners are being sent to a training prison, not because they
are suitable for the courses that training prison offers, but
because there is nowhere else to put them. So they are both disruptive
to the course or activity which is supposed to be happening, and
also nothing is happening for them. It is something which is having
long-term effects. Against that I would not want to underestimate
the good work which is still going on in prisons and the extent
to which the Prison Service staff are struggling to cope and doing
their best in those circumstances. It is a much more difficult
job to do.
47. What are the effects on the morale of prison
staff, prisoners and the effect of all this movement into inappropriate
prisons or prisons far away from families? What is the effect
on the links with the family of what is going on now?
(Ms Owers) The effects on all of those are visible
and palpable now within the system. The effect on prisoners is
obvious and the effect on prisoners' feelings of safety, security
and their ability to do positive work is evident at all kinds
of levels. The effect on prison staff too. One of the most disturbing
things is that prison staff who want to do a good job, who want
to be more than turnkeys, are finding it increasingly difficult
to do that and are talking about leaving. They are frustrated
at not being able to do a good job, and there is and has been
a lot of good work going on in prisons. As far as links with families
are concerned, clearly those are disrupted. The number of prison
visits is going down and it is connected with the distance from
home of many prisoners. One of the many individual incidents which
has been told to me over the last year or so was from the prison
officer who was running the juvenile part of Feltham, who was
rung up by a mother whose son had just been moved to Castington.
Castington is a long way away from Middlesex; it is almost in
Scotland. He had the task of telling her where her son now was.
Those kinds of moves are happening all the time and disrupting
those essential links with families.
48. Extra resources have been put in, a couple
of new prisons. Are they on line, already open? Private prisons,
I think.
(Ms Owers) Do you mean resources to deal with overcrowding
specifically?
49. Yes.
(Ms Owers) Yes, there are two kinds of quick build
units going up in prisons. One of them can be built very quickly
but it is very insecure because it is basically a Nissen hut,
in which you can put 20 or so prisoners who obviously need to
be low security risks because they are not going to be in cells.
Then there are slightly more sophisticated versions of that which
are cellular accommodation and they are going up quite quickly.
There is new money coming in, but it is not enough and it is not
quick enough in the sense that if you get one of the Nissen hut
type of establishments, you will not have any additional capital
money. So you may have a bit of extra money for revenue, but you
may not have any workshops or whatever for people to go to. Even
with the other kind of building, if you get some kind of capital
money, you have to recruit staff, teachers, people who can deliver
purposeful activity, if you are going to do anything other than
operate a containment operation. It is easy enough to put the
physical buildings up: it is much less easy to provide the necessary
regimes which will provide purposeful activity.
50. Are these Nissen huts intended to be temporary
or will they turn out to be a permanent feature?
(Ms Owers) I have no idea. I suspect that they may
be with us for a very long time.
51. How many prisoners are accommodated in police
cells at the moment?
(Ms Owers) The latest figures I saw were around 230,
but I am not sure where we stand as of today.
52. A report published yesterday with projections
of long-term trends in the prison population gives four predictions,
the lowest of which by June 2009 is that the prison population
will be 91,400, the highest in June 2009 being 109,600. Everything
has a breaking point. Where is the breaking point in our Prison
Service?
(Ms Owers) I should hate to have to make that prediction.
Predicting prison population figures is hard enough, predicting
precisely where the breaking point is I would hesitate to do.
Certainly at present the system has no headroom at all. There
is no contingency space available in our prisons at all. As I
have already said, prisoners are being overcrowded in the facilities
there are and you cannot put things up quickly enough to accommodate
the capacity which is needed.
53. Can I interpret that as meaning we are extremely
close to breaking point?
(Ms Owers) We are extremely close to a position where
there is simply no more space, where you cannot shoehorn in any
more people, no matter how hard you try and where the prisons
I inspect are very fragile places in terms of prisoners' expectations,
prison staff's needs and expectations and the running of a proper
system. That is as far as I can say. I should hate to predict
further. There is no stretch left in the system.
54. You did refer to the Director General of
the Prison Service's comments that 20% of the prison population
now share a cell meant for one, meaning that strangers need to
eat together and defecate in front of one another in the same
cell. If you were still the head of JUSTICE, what would your comments
be on this feature of our prison system in the 21st century?
(Ms Owers) They would be the same as they are as Chief
Inspector of Prisons, that these are degrading conditions in which
we should not be keeping people. I saw one prison cell in one
inspection where the conditions which the Director General described
obtained. The two people sharing a cell were one man with a permanent
catheter and another young man who was cutting up his arms. They
were literally in that cell for 22 to 23 hours a day on many days.
Those are things I highlight in my reports, which are degrading
conditions to keep people in.
David Winnick
55. I do not know whether you wish to comment
or not, I leave it to you, but where such degrading and inhumane
conditions exist in prisons, two to a cell, where they use the
toilet and are seen by each other in so doing, would there not
be a challenge through the Human Rights Act?
(Ms Owers) I think there might well be in certain
circumstances. If you looked at it as a phenomenon as a whole
it might not reach the very high threshold you would need to have
for a breach of article 3, which as you know is an absolute right
and therefore has a very high threshold. It is certainly my view
that there would be individual circumstances where that happens,
which might constitute a case under the Human Rights Act and the
Prison Service needs to be alert to that. What is more, even if
it were not actually a breach, it is something the Prison Service
would not want to be engaged in.
56. Recognising the difficulties, after all
the Director General and his staff are not responsible for what
the courts decide, rightly or wrongly they have to cope with the
situation as it is, would not one of the first priorities that
you would see be to end what can only be described, in the words
I have used, and you as well, as I understand it, as the degrading
and inhumane way in which prisoners are held in their cells in
such conditions?
(Ms Owers) It is certainly a very high priority indeed.
It is a priority by itself, because we need as a society to provide
safe and decent conditions, particularly in our prisons. It is
also about giving prisoners a model of something which is positive
and something which can motivate them. Yes, on both levels it
is hugely important.
57. It should be one of the first priorities
of the Prison Service and indeed the Home Secretary himself to
end this.
(Ms Owers) Yes, indeed; that and focusing on resettlement
would be the two. There is also the whole issue of safety which
is very important, both safety in terms of suicide and self harm,
but also safety in terms of a generally safe environment.
Miss Widdecombe
58. May I just press you a little on measures
to relieve overcrowding? You have rightly identified that they
fall into two categories: there are those you can do now, prison
ships, Nissen huts, that sort of thing; there are those for the
longer term. May I just press you on the first category? Is it
your view, if you like to phrase it that way, that the emergency
measures which are now being put in place will not actually be
adequate for much longer?
(Ms Owers) My understanding is that they will be full
pretty quickly. I could not give you a direct answer on when.
They are filling as they are building.
59. So the emergency measures now being put
in place are not adequate.
(Ms Owers) It depends. We are looking at "adequate"
on two levels, are we not? Adequate in the sense of simply providing
spaces for people to be put, or adequate in terms of providing
the right kind of prison environment.
1 Note by witness: "We carried out an
unannounced (but planned) inspection of Blantyre House on 7-10
January. For obvious reasons, I was unable to refer to this when
asked about it."
Mr Singh Back
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