Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 139)
WEDNESDAY 29 OCTOBER 2003
MR PETER
RUSSELL
Q120 Chairman: In your memorandum
to us, you describe this regime as "reasonably successful".
Mr Russell: Yes. I would not want
to put it any higher than that but we were pointing in the right
direction and making improvements year on year. Success I would
count in terms both of maintaining good order and in terms of
assisting prisoners to undertake activities which would improve
the chances of them not re-offending on release.
Q121 Chairman: But, for reasons other
than the success of your regime, you are now changing it.
Mr Russell: That is correct.
Q122 Mr Pound: In line with the Chairman's
earlier comments about setting the broad scene, the Steele Review
terms of reference included bearing in mind "the lessons
of the past and the new environment created by the Good Friday
Agreement." Could you briefly describe the wider context
in which the Maghaberry situation needs to be considered at the
present time insofar as it impacts on the running of the prison.
Mr Russell: The historical context
was that the Maze Prison had closed three years previously and
that therefore Maghaberry was our largest single prison. It had
been running on an integrated basis while the Maze was operating
segregated regimes. When the Maze closed, there was no segregation
within Maghaberry; all prisoners were held in integrated conditions.
That is good and right; a normalisation process should be able
to achieve just that and that was running, as I said, fairly successfully.
There was plenty of room for improvement but it was not failing
in any way.
Q123 Mr Pound: Presumably, life in
prison reflects life outside prison. So, apart from that one aspect,
were there any other major factors impacting on the organisation
within the prison since Good Friday? I am sorry, it was a very
general question but it was a question to give you the opportunity
to fill in, if you wanted.
Mr Russell: I know that the Committee
have been looking at the issue of drugs in Northern Ireland society
and that is a classic way to illustrate that prisons are not isolated
from the communities from which they draw prisoners. So, if there
are problems with drugs in the community, you get problems with
drugs inside the prison, and that is a generalisation. Were there
any other specific high-profile cases that I can immediately identify?
I do not think so.
Q124 Mr Pound: On a more specific
issue, we heard a lot about the escalation of prisoner protest,
the "dirty" protest and the fires, particularly this
summer. What factors, practical and political, do you think contributed
to this?
Mr Russell: I think that the original
protests were more practical than political. I do not think there
was any great coherent movement behind them. They were said to
be precipitated by the fact that prisoners were being required
to share cells in some cases but that looked to me to be comparatively
opportunistic and there was no obvious way of deducing from the
particular prisoners who went on to the roof that there was any
identifiable organisational caucus behind that.
Q125 Chairman: How did they get on
the roof?
Mr Russell: If you have seen the
front of Roe House and Bush House, the original two-storey architecture
was spoilt by the addition of a single-storey dining room extension
and, despite the attempts to protect that single-storey roof,
it does provide a ladder, if you like. It certainly makes it much
easier for people to get up. So, that was a means by which they
got up. Should they have got up? Of course they should not have
got up. We should have been able to ensure that they did not.
Q126 Chairman: What have you done
to stop that happening again?
Mr Russell: We have changed the
physical configuration of the exercise yards and that will do
in the short-term. The exercise yards are much reduced in size
and are more secure and I think that will serve the security purpose,
but it is not a satisfactory long-term solution and that is something
at which we will have to look further.
Q127 Chairman: They were able to
go from the exercise yard to the flat roof to the top roof?
Mr Russell: It is not a flat roof,
but it is a single-storey roof.
Q128 Mr Pound: So, you think that
it was opportunistic and practical rather than being externally
politically motivated or orchestrated?
Mr Russell: That is my belief.
Q129 Chairman: How many different
times did they get on the roof?
Mr Russell: Twice.
Q130 Chairman: How long was the interval
between the two?
Mr Russell: I think that the dates
are in our evidence: two to three weeks, I think.
Q131 Chairman: In the interval between
the first and the second, clearly your remedial measures were
not good enough.
Mr Russell: That is right. It
takes some time to execute physical works in a prison and we are
counting in days rather than months, so the remedial measures
were not fully installed at that point.
Q132 Mr Bailey: The Steele Review
found that the integrated regime was not adequately delivering
safe conditions to all prisoners. Do you accept that assessment
and, if so, what would you describe as the safety deficits?
Mr Russell: I think it had been.
What was happening was a change in prisoner behaviour, if you
like. We are measured, amongst other things, on the number of
assaults that occur, whether on staff or on prisoners, and we
have been achieving targets in that area. However, what was happening
was that prisoners were starting to threaten that the immediate
future was going to be different from the recent past. So, the
question was not, can we just project the past in a simplistic
sort of statistical way? The question was, what has changed in
our operating environment? I think that what had changed was notably
the number of prisoners able to organise collectively with a purpose
and their determination to do so. Certainly as I heard it from
John Steele, an individual prisoner had said to him, "So,
you think it is safe roundabout here? I could murder somebody
there tomorrow." We had an episode where two republican prisoners
were attacked by seven others, of whom I think five were identified
as loyalist. John Steele himself took that as a signal, a method
of communication from prisoners, to his team and to us, that they
could make it dangerous here, "Just watch us". So, the
issue was not in any failure in our past lives, the issue was
that the context in which we were managing safety had changed.
Q133 Mr Bailey: What changed it,
putting it simply?
Mr Russell: I think simply that
there were sufficient prisoners of like mind able to act in concert.
Q134 Mr Bailey: So, a critical mass
of prisoners with a specific agenda?
Mr Russell: I would say so, yes.
Q135 Chairman: Was there an identifiable
leader amongst them?
Mr Russell: Some leaders emerged
as the process went on. I could not give you names but these things
never happen without a leader emerging, so they certainly did.
Q136 Chairman: Was he identified?
Mr Russell: The Governor is pretty
quick to identify who is taking the lead and from whom the others
are taking signals.
Q137 Chairman: These are all questions
that we can ask him next week. Did he take any action against
the leader?
Mr Russell: What we were facing
after the rooftops was a "dirty" protest and we certainly
took active steps to manage the "dirty" protest. We
separated prisoners; we required them to clean up their cells
and, where they refused to do so, the Governor laid discipline
charges against them for refusing to obey an order and they were
then heard before the Governor, punished and sent to separate
cells for, I think, three days typically, before exhausting that
punishment and returning to normal circulation. So, we were actively
managing them including the location of individual prisoners.
Chairman: We can ask all of those questions
next week.
Q138 Reverend Smyth: Earlier you
said that the folk on the rooftops was a mixed gathering and that
was the impression that I had even earlier myself. How far therefore
was there a degree of collusion, so that prisoners ran the prison
rather than the authorities?
Mr Russell: Do you mean collusion
by staff in allowing prisoners to do things that they should not?
Q139 Reverend Smyth: No, I am talking
about collusion by the prisoners from different backgrounds working
together.
Mr Russell: I understand. Again,
the Governor was closer to this but I think that, on the second
occasion, we had reason to believe that there was some collusion
and it was our intervention which prevented more prisoners from
getting on the roof the second time than did and it turned out
that they were predominantly from one faction that made it on
to the roof. I think that, had we not intervened, there would
have been a wider range represented amongst the rooftop people.
| 
