Examination of Witness (Questions 60-79)
HOME OFFICE,
PRISON SERVICE
AND NATIONAL
OFFENDER MANAGEMENT
SERVICE
19 DECEMBER 2005
Q60 Mr Bacon: The ones that Mr Wheatley
said earlier were insecure?
Sir John Gieve: Yes. If you look
at chart 14 on page 33 you will see that is a mix of open prisons,
and the open prisons on the whole had these things built very,
very quickly. The main problems occurred in category C prisons.
Mr Wheatley: Which are medium
secure prisons.
Q61 Mr Bacon: Do you think that the
modular temporary units are fit for purpose?
Mr Wheatley: They are doing the
purpose at the moment. Would we build them again? I think we have
said we accept the recommendations of the Report and we would
not. Are we able to use them? Yes, we are. They are not out of
use and the prisoners quite like being in them and we are continuing
to run secure and controlled establishments with drug use down
this year as against last year and escapes down this year as against
last year.
Q62 Mr Bacon: What discussions have
you had about finding cheaper ways to do not necessarily temporary
but fast construction? McDonald's hamburger restaurants are delivered
on the back of a lorry and erected in one week when they start
generating money. Plainly it is different because they are not
trying to keep people in, they do not seem to need to do that,
people stay in of their own accord, but the fact is they are robust
structures, they are designed to last, they are designed to have
low maintenance costs and one would have thought that with the
developments in modern methods of construction it would be relatively
simple, notwithstanding the security aspects, to have evolved
something that could be erected much, much more quickly than in
the 100 or 140 or 180 days, indeed in seven, 14 or 21 days. Have
you made any progress in looking at that?
Mr Brook: We have let strategic
alliances with eight new build constructors, so we have gone through
a process partly of learning from what happened in this case ensuring
that people have got the right skills and the right investment
in order to build accommodation for us. We are exploring with
the people who have developed ready-to-use units which are robust
and are delivered relatively quickly but they are an awful lot
more robust than the sort of things that you are talking about
because they are due to last 40 years with prisoners in them.
We are talking to them about how we can do something much quicker
but along those lines, so something much more robust than modular
temporary units but not quite as robust as the current RTUs.
Q63 Mr Bacon: I am a bit of a fan
of these brick-clad steel framed units. They are £1,700 a
place and you spend £2 billion a year, I think it is, in
total in the Prison Service. That was what Mr Narey once told
me, I have not looked up the recent figure but I am sure it is
not less than that, is it, Mr Wheatley?
Mr Wheatley: For the overall system
it is above £2 billion, yes.
Q64 Mr Bacon: Yet, at £1,700,
for £17 million you could have 10,000 extra places per year.
It does not sound to me an awful lot of money compared with your
total budget if there were a commitment radically to increase
the number of places.
Mr Brook: That of course does
not cover the running costs of these, just the building costs.
Q65 Mr Bacon: This is true.
Mr Brook: Yes, we can build places
relatively cheaply.
Q66 Mr Bacon: So is the main restriction
the running costs that evolve from the extra staff that you require?
Is that the main constraint?
Mr Brook: Yes, that is the main
cost that is significantly more than the capital cost of building.
Sir John Gieve: There is also
a space requirement. On the whole we are putting these into spare
space within prisons walls. If you are building a whole new prison
and getting planning permission that obviously takes a much longer
time.
Q67 Helen Goodman: Sir John, on Friday
I went to visit the local fire station, and I think you are also
responsible for the Fire Service.
Sir John Gieve: No, we are not
any longer.
Q68 Helen Goodman: The Home Office
is not responsible for the Fire Service?
Sir John Gieve: No.
Q69 Helen Goodman: I beg your pardon.
The point is the Fire Service have an estimate for the value of
a human life which is £1. something million pounds and I
wondered what the value of a human life was calculated to be in
the Prison Service?
Sir John Gieve: I do not know
that we use a financial equivalent for the value of a life. I
do not think we do.
Q70 Helen Goodman: Do you think we
should?
Sir John Gieve: I am not sure
what we would use it for.
Q71 Helen Goodman: One of the problems
that has been brought to our attention is that the level of suicides
is much higher in overcrowded prisons and I was wondering what
value the Home Office and the Prison Service place on avoiding
suicide in prison?
Sir John Gieve: We put a great
value on that. I do not think that it is straightforward to say
that suicides are higher in overcrowded prisons. This year, for
example, so far we have had what seems to be a significant reduction
in suicides in prisons despite the fact that the estate has been
more crowded than before and that suggests that there are other
factors at work.
Mr Wheatley: There does not seem
to be a straightforward link between overcrowding and suicides.
The number of suicides this year so far is 72 as against 92 in
the same period last year, although we have just been through
a period of peak overcrowding, so whatever is going on is more
complicated. We can mitigate the risks by the sorts of interventions
I was speaking about before. In fact, we use cell sharing as a
protective measure because being on your own in a cell and depressed
and facing a long sentence and possibly coming off drugs is probably
one of the things that is most likely to precipitate suicide in
a long night on your own with nothing else to think about. Having
company can reduce the risk. At the same time, if we crowd prisoners
so much that staff cannot care for prisoners and the place begins
to feel just like a big sausage machine, that is dangerous. We
try to play that into the judgments we make about the level of
overcrowding that prisoners can bear.
Q72 Helen Goodman: I appreciate that
it is complex, but do you dispute the research by the Howard League
that, of the 159 suicides between January 2004 and October 2005,
90 were in the 35 most crowded prisons?
Mr Wheatley: But the reason for
that is that the most overcrowded prisons are local prisons, those
who are receiving direct from the courts. The greatest risk of
suicide is on first arrival in prison and immediately after sentence.
Within the first day there is a high risk. That risk then reduces.
If you can get somebody through the first week they have a substantially
greater chance of never committing suicide. If they have not committed
suicide within the first month of either coming into custody or
being sentenced they are very unlikely to commit suicide. The
prisons that are overcrowded look after the most at-risk people,
those who are coming in straight from the streets in many cases
with a multitude of problems. It does not necessarily relate to
the overcrowding. If you do the same equation and say are the
most overcrowded prisons the places with the most suicides, the
link is not clear. There is a link of some sort but it is not
as clear as that.
Q73 Helen Goodman: Can you explain
whether you are trying to eradicate all overcrowding in prison
because it would appear from figure 4 that you are quite content
as long as overcrowding does not exceed 24%?
Mr Wheatley: I think that is a
question for Sir John. I personally would prefer to be running
prisons at their ordinary uncrowded capacity but I am not usually
able to do that. I am concerned to defend that we never have places
that are more crowded than we think we can safely look after people
in.
Sir John Gieve: I agree with that.
Obviously, we would like to reduce prison overcrowding. We have
not been able to do that in recent years. In fact, it has got
a bit more crowded although still not to the sorts of levels that
were common in the late eighties. Whether we can do that depends
a lot on the trend in sentencing over the longer period.
Q74 Helen Goodman: Could you explain
why your target for overcrowding is different as between the public
and the private prisons, which are set out in paragraph 1.6?
Mr Brook: I am happy to do that.
The main reason for the differences in the targets is the differences
in the types of prisons. Most of the private prisons are comparatively
new and therefore built better for overcrowding and they are comparatively
small and a lot of them are local prisons and we have already
talked about local prisons on average being more overcrowded than
other prisons. It is a fact of the type of prison rather than
any difference in treatment between the two.
Q75 Helen Goodman: Mr Wheatley, do
you want to comment on that?
Mr Wheatley: Victorian prisons
that have had integral sanitation put in, and most of my local
prisons are Victorian prisons, have had what are called three-into-two
conversions. In other words, we took three cells and turned the
middle cell into two separate toilets, put a wall in, and those
cells are certified in uncrowded use for two people because they
have got a separate sanitary annexe. You physically cannot overcrowd
them. If you put another bed in you cannot get at the toilet.
Those places, although prisoners are sharing cells, cannot be
overcrowded further and that affects the public sector estate,
not the private sector estate which is newly built and does not
have that system.
Q76 Helen Goodman: Do you not see
that there is a paradox in this, that it is the newer estate where
you have already agreed that there should be a higher level of
overcrowding? That does seem to be somewhat counter-intuitive,
does it not? If it is new should it not be built more fit for
purpose than something that was built 150 years ago?
Sir John Gieve: It depends which
way you look at this. The fact that they are better equipped to
take more people is the reason we put more people in them.
Q77 Helen Goodman: Yes, but more
people is not the same as overcrowding. You have got a different
overcrowding target, not just a higher target to take people into
prison.
Sir John Gieve: But, as Phil has
said, it depends on the overall estate and the split between public
and private also covers the split between different ages of prison
and different types of prison. We did not start out by saying
that these new private sector ones should be more overcrowded.
We look at what is safe to operate within each individual prison
and then, when you add it up a certain way, you get different
numbers for different categories.
Mr Wheatley: In building design,
in both the public sector and, as we specified for the private
sector what we wanted, we asked people to build so that it is
possible to get flexibility out of those goals, not to build such
small cells that one can only squeeze one person in. We deliberately
built to allow some flexibility because we will need the flexibility
to cope with the seasonal fluctuations that have already been
referred to and changes in sentencing policy. I do not ever expect
to have no overcrowding, and having some capacity to overcrowd
in new builds is very sensible. It would be silly not to do that.
Q78 Helen Goodman: The forecast has
been quite difficult. Do you have a mathematical model for the
size of the prison population? How do you go about forecasting?
Sir John Gieve: Phil may want
to say some more about this but yes, we do model it and we do
some short-term projections based more on recent trends and longer
term ones running for seven or eight years which are based on
a criminal justice model which tries to model the impact of different
changes in court and other behaviour and offender models, and
a re-offending model, if you like, which tries to pick up what
is going on in the population. Yes, it is based on mathematical
models.
Q79 Helen Goodman: Are you confident
that the prison population will not rise above the 80,000 that
is the currently projected figure?
Sir John Gieve: I have said already
that I am not confident it will not rise above 80,000. We are
taking various steps at the moment to live within that figure,
which is what we have budgeted for. For example, we are trying
to reduce the number of foreign nationals in prison, particularly
those who have reached the end of their sentence and are awaiting
deportation, to encourage courts to use tagging rather than remand
for people who are not thought to be dangerous to the public and
so on. It is not by any means inevitable that we will need more
prison places than the ones we currently have planned but I would
not be confident that we will not have to add to them further.
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