6 The prison building programme and
clustering
The prison building programme
188. In December 2007 the Secretary of State
for Justice, Rt Hon Jack Straw MP, announced to the House that
the Government was adopting the recommendation in Lord Carter's
review of prisons that a number of so-called Titan prisons should
be built. £5 billion was to be set aside for the proposals,
although this figure was later queried by the Justice Committee,
among others.
189. In a statement to the House on 27 April
2009 the Secretary of State announced the abandonment of the Titan
prison-building programme. Instead, it is proposed that 7,500
prison places will be delivered through the building of five 1,500
place prisons. In the statement Mr Straw told the House that the
Ministry of Justice already "successfully" operated
prisons of 1,500 places.
190. There are two prisons of approximately 1,500
places within NOMS: HMP Wandsworth with 1,456 places and HMP Liverpool
with 1,443 places. However, these figures are for the 'operational
capacity' of the prisons which
is defined by the Prison Service as the total number of prisoners
that an establishment can hold taking into account control, security
and the proper operation of the planned regime or, in lay man's
terms, the 'safe' level of overcrowding. Not only is it debatable
whether the Ministry of Justice can claim to have experience of
prisons designed to hold 1,500 prisoners, but pressure
on the prison system, in the event, may lead to these new prisons
operating with substantially more than 1,500 prisoners.
191. In addition, the original 'Titan' concept
was of an overall facility big enough to enable, if not require,
the creation of smaller units within one perimeter. In contrast,
the new institutions announced may mean, ironically, that actual
'house block' accommodation will be on a larger scale than that
ever envisaged with Titans. The available evidence—including
from HM Prisons Inspectorate and the Government-commissioned Corston
review—strongly points to 'less is more' in the relationship
of size to success with prisons. Professor Andrew Coyle told us:
"All the evidence is that the best operating and delivering
prisons in terms of public safety and value for public money are
small, locally accountable prisons."[203]
192. Professor Coyle's supported the Chief Inspector
of Prisons' view that the maximum size for a 'run of the mill'
prison was 500 prisoners. However, with vulnerable or otherwise
particularly challenging groups of prisoners, Professor Coyle
thought the evidence pointed to smaller units than 500:
I think if you are looking at specialised prisons,
for example, for young offenders or for women, one of the clear
conclusions of Baroness Corston's Report was that we needed [smaller
prisons]. She was very clear in saying that what was the needed
for them was small dedicated units. The same thing applies [to
other groups of prisoners]. To draw a line from the Solent to
the Wash and take 600 of the most disturbed youngsters and put
them all in one institution in Feltham, you are really not going
to achieve a great deal of rehabilitation. [204]
193. Professor Coyle considered it inevitable
that the new prisons would be built with the aim of reducing staff
numbers, given that the Prison Service currently spends around
three-quarters of its budget on pay:
The Government, despite the rise in prison numbers,
is requiring the Prison Service, along with all government bodies,
to have year on year reductions in cost. Given that something
between 70-75% of the running of a prison is staff costs, the
only place that one can reduce is the numbers of prison officers.
There is an argument for saying that they are already too low,
but I fear, if the pressure remains to reduce costs, that will
be an inevitable consequence.[205]
194. We heard in Sheppey that CCTV cameras, improved
sightlines and automated locking—all potentially part of
prison new-build—could only mean fewer officers and therefore
less opportunities to provide pro-social modelling, build relationships
and informally challenge offending behaviour.
195. The prison-building programme seems to
be entirely focused on economies which are focused only on security
rather than maximising the opportunities for reducing future re-offending.
It contradicts the Government's own research on effective prison
size. The substitution of very large new prisons makes little
or no difference to an approach which is likely to deliver what
will effectively be warehouses for prisoners.
196. We urge the Government to reconsider
the prison building programme in its entirety. Prisons with 1,500
places will not be conducive to the rehabilitative work our evidence
demonstrates should be at the heart of the prison programme.
Clustering
197. The debate over the clustering of prisons
has frequently been overshadowed by, and indeed confused with,
the Titan prison debate. During our visit to the Isle of Sheppey
cluster, which contains a high-security B category prison, a local
and remand C category prison and a D category open prison, both
the virtues and the disadvantages of clustering were outlined
by staff. The positive aspects of such a move (according to some
officers, the "potentially" positive aspects) were the:
- improvement in strategic management
in areas such as reducing re-offending;
- the ability of the prisoner to progress through
the system while essentially remaining under the same management;
and,
- financial savings.
The negative aspects of clustering were held to be:
- the drain on staff time of
meetings away from their 'home' prison;
- the reduction in senior staff numbers and their
location away from staff on the ground, thus reducing staff access
to senior management;
- increased strain on slimmed down central services
dealing with matters and queries crucial to prisoners' peace of
mind; and,
- the perceived easing of restrictions on the
"over-optimistic" transfer of prisoners to lower security
conditions.
Baroness Stern, who has a long-standing interest
in criminal justice issues, has described clustering as creating
"larger prisons by stealth."[206]
198. The Chief Inspector of Prisons has expressed
grave concerns over the likely impact on a high-performing prison
of the clustering of HMP New Hall, a closed prison identified
as unsafe and having a poor staff culture in its most recent inspection,
and HMP Askham Grange, described as the best adult prison the
Chief Inspector had ever seen. The Chief Inspector was strongly
of the view that this clustering could only have benefits in costs
saving:
I have not seen anyone justify [the clustering of
HMP New Hall and HMP Askham Grange]…on the grounds that this
is a jolly good way to run these two prisons, but it is a necessity
in order to save the amounts of money that the Prison Service
is having to look to save in this financial year. I think two
points arise from that. One is that some prisons are specialised
in their function and have become very good at it. We are very
reluctant often to assess prisons as doing well across all our
tests or, indeed, at the bottom end, doing poorly against all
our tests. We have to believe they are really bad before we score
them poorly across all our tests. We have to believe they are
very good. In fact we have only once, for an adult prison in my
time as chief inspector, scored a prison as doing well against
all of our of four tests, and that was Askham Grange, and that
was because it is a small prison focused on a very specific task
and able to give individual care and individual programmes to
the women coming through it.[207]
199. The Ministry of Justice wrote that the expected
benefits were: improving throughput of suitable prisoners from
New Hall to Askham Grange; maintaining high performance at Askham
Grange and improving performance at New Hall "by developing
a more holistic approach to the management of female offenders
across the prison estate"; and improvements related to reducing
re-offending for women offenders with a specialised approach.
The Ministry of Justice also refer to efficiency savings of £260,000
per annum at Askham Grange through reduced management and administration
costs, and "assisting the drive to deliver £620,000
efficiency savings at New Hall". The Ministry of Justice
say that the savings made "have enabled HMPS to support the
continuation of Third-Sector led 'through the gate' support for
women, in particular, the Together Women Project in the Yorkshire
& Humberside region supporting women on short sentences and
women held on remand."[208]
A NOMS impact assessment concluded there would be "minimal
impact" on operations at either New Hall or Askham Grange.
The Chief Inspector of Prisons, when she appeared before us,
did not seem to have been entirely convinced.[209]
We note that it is over 35 miles between HMP Askham Grange and
HMP New Hall; a car journey that involves traversing the outskirts
of Leeds.
200. The clustering of formerly separate prisons
has the potential to yield upfront cost savings through reductions
in the grade and/or number of senior management posts required
per unit or facility and by the centralising of some services.
There are, however, also risks. These include: reduced opportunities
for engagement between prison officers and prison management by
taking governors off-site leading to poor relations between management
and staff and less effective initiatives to tackle negative staff
cultures. The centralisation of services may also lead to restrictions
in the responsiveness of such services to requests for information
and remedial action from frontline staff dealing with prisoners'
queries (an important feature of officer-prisoner relations and
hence, potentially, of "dynamic security"). Our evidence,
and the impression gained at Sheppey, indicate that the benefits
of clustering may outweigh the risks where the institutions in
question are more or less adjacent, or otherwise appropriately
situated, there is a clear strategic and/or institutional rationale
and there is buy-in to the arrangements from management and staff.
Yet, the reverse is likely to be true where any or all of these
characteristics are missing.
201. A close relationship between local prisons
could potentially have benefits in achieving the end-to-end management
of a prisoner's sentence. Economies achieved by sharing prison
services may be possible but 'clustering' should only be undertaken
if it leads to the component prisons being able to function more
effectively.
202. Overall, the circumstance described in this
section lead us to be worried about the way policy decisions are
being taken within the Ministry of Justice. The Titan prisons
proposal was recommended in a report by Lord Carter, described
as being based on evidence. We found the report's conclusions
poorly thought out, the evidence insubstantial and Lord Carter's
arguments presented to us on the subject deeply unconvincing.[210]
It was completely unacceptable for the Ministry of Justice then
to proceed without making the case for its costly new proposals.
For the 1,500 place prisons proposal, and/or further clustering,
to be pursued when both concepts fly in the face of the Government's
own research on what works makes little sense. Experiences
demonstrates again and again that decisions made on the basis
of short to medium term spending considerations often cause major
financial and other problems in the longer term. Prison officers
can only play the constructive role identified in this report
and maintain good order as well as security within the prison
estate if there is clarity of purpose and coherent management
within the Prison Service. That should be driven by the imperative
of making the public safer by holding prisoners securely but above
all by ensuring that offenders are less likely to re-offend after
release. This is the key to both long-term protection of the public
as well as an affordable prison system. Our recommendations in
respect of the role of the prison officer also require a new approach
to a strategic policy on prisons.
203 Q 235 Back
204
Q 238 Back
205
Q 233 Back
206
http://www.epolitix.com/latestnews/article-detail/newsarticle/baroness-stern-titan-prisons-by-the-back-door/ Back
207
Q 176 Back
208
Ev 132 Back
209
Q 176 Back
210
See HC 184-ii (2007-08), Ev 55 ff Back
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