Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
12 JANUARY 2004
MS FRANCES
CROOK, MS
JULIET LYON,
MR ENVER
SOLOMON, MS
DEBORAH COLES,
MS HELEN
SHAW AND
MS SARAH
CUTLER
Q20 Lord Lester of Herne Hill: When I
last looked at this in the 1970s, one of the problems was that
mentally disturbed prisoners were not being put in special hospitals
because of the system or objections from trade unions and therefore
there were quite a lot of people in places like Parkhurst who
ought not to have been there but should have been in mental institutions.
Is that still a problem and is part of the problem that there
are loads of people who should not be there at all and should
be in care for the mentally ill?
Mr Solomon: Yes.
Q21 Mr McNamara: How is this the responsibility
of trade unions?
Ms Crook: It is not trade unions,
it is psychiatrists, it is everybody. It is a muddle.
Ms Lyon: I have worked in mental
health for 15 years and I think diagnosis is a wonderful thing
to ensure that you only admit people you feel you can work with
and you can always exclude them by deciding that, instead of having
psychotic tendencies, they have full-blown psychosis and cannot
fit into your unit and vice versa. There is awful lot of that
going on. People were forever being shunted off and prison is
probably the only place where they cannot refuse to admit somebody:
whoever turns up at the gate has to come in. I think this is an
issue. The way in which the Department of Health, NHS, has continually
excluded difficult and challenging patients is one of the things
that the Committee really usefully could address. It is quite
interesting that the new Chair of the Prison Officers' Association
is addressing our conference on men and mental health in May of
this year because he wants to make the point that he feels professionally
that his members are compromised by being asked to work with people
who are mentally ill when they are not trained to do so and they
do not have the professional skills to do so. That is an example
of a union with a grievance of its own and I think a just grievance
in this case.
Q22 Mr McNamara: Can I go back to the
point you were making earlier before Lord Lester raised a particularly
important point. You were making that case that members of the
judiciary, knowing of the severe disorders of some of the convicted
prisoners, were, as a matter of policy, deliberately sending them
to prison rather than to mental hospitals, secure or otherwise.
That is what you said before.
Ms Coles: I do not think I said
"as a matter of policy". I think what I said is that,
at a number of inquests for some of these deaths that we have
attended, there has been clear evidence that the sentencers were
well aware of the high risk that those individuals presented and
the fact that there had been psychiatrist reports presented at
court warning of the potential risk that, in particular, young
people posed and yet chose to send them to prison. It may have
been a question of, where else could they have gone? This particularly
is the case around young people and the role of the Youth Justice
Board in there not being adequate non-custody places and that
has featured in a number of these deaths. What I said was that
they were well aware of the serious risk those people presented
to themselves and yet, for whatever reason, they sent them to
prison establishments that could not safely care for them rather
than looking at alternatives to custody.
Q23 Mr McNamara: This is a very serious
point that you are making here. It is a very grave accusation.
Did they, in making the recommendations for prison, seek to draw
the prison authority's attention to the vulnerability of the people
they were sending to prison?
Ms Coles: Yes.
Q24 Mr McNamara: They did do that?
Ms Coles: Yes.
Q25 Mr McNamara: So, it is not quite
as awful as it seemed in the first statement. So, it is a question
therefore of that information arriving with the prison authorities.
Ms Coles: Yes.
Q26 Mr McNamara: And the reaction of
the prison authorities.
Ms Coles: And how that was then
dealt with. What concerns us in those kind of cases is that it
is unfair that the subsequent inquiry investigation into that
death does not address the significance of sentencing policy and
the role that judges and courts play in a process whereby a prisoner
ends up in a prison establishment and then takes their own life
and it is not right that the focus of attention should only rest
with the Prison Service, which is the problem with the way in
which the investigations and subsequent inquests are at the moment.
Mr McNamara: So, we are looking at procedure
and process. Are there, in this rather bleak picture, any good
examples or good factors within particular prisons or under particular
governors in the United Kingdom where practices have been adopted
and procedures have been adopted or even, from what you said in
your earlier evidence, the actual guidelines of the Prison Service
have been followed, that could be usefully cited as examples to
this Committee of where things have gone right and where there
has been proper concern and where there has been proper regard
to the human rights of the sentenced prisoners?
Lord Campbell of Alloway: Are there any
printed guidelines? Is there anything written?
Mr McNamara: Yes.
Q27 Lord Campbell of Alloway: Is it available
in all prisons?
Ms Crook: That is a different
question! There are masses of information and guidelines and orders
and instructions and bits of paper and there are some very, very
good policies. Whether they are adhered to by busy staff who are—and
I say this advisedly—often not very well educated themselves—they
may have received some training but they may not be very well
educated and there is a difference—and how well the instructions
and the procedure is communicated to frontline staff where often
there may be one or two members of staff dealing with 200 prisoners
. . . It is very difficult to carry out good practice if you are
only seeing 200 adult male prisoners who do not want to be there.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: I take your
point.
Q28 Mr McNamara: Are there any other
examples of prisons were there are . . .?
Ms Crook: The better run prisons,
generally. I would say that suicide is the end of a continuum
of distress and that if you want to look for good practice, you
have to look at prisons which are working more effectively. You
might also have to look at judges who are avoiding custody. So,
it has to be the end of a whole continuant and, if you look at
good sentencing practice, you would have to look also at good
probation, good youth offending team practice and also some of
the better prisons. A local prison would be Leeds where they do
get education, they do go out and there is more activity despite
gross under-funding and under-resources and a huge number of people
going through the system. It is a better-run local prison than
some others.
Q29 Mr McNamara: Ms Cutler, could I ask
you a question in relation to problems with the detaining of immigrations.
Are there any particular problems that they might have separate
from other prisoners in the United Kingdom, accepting that there
may well be language and culture differences, I understand that?
Do they have any more particular problems?
Ms Cutler: There are two particular
distinctions I should make at the beginning: there are people
who are detained solely under Immigration Act powers who are in
mainstream prisons and then those who are detained in purpose-built
centres; and the vast majority of immigration detainees are in
purpose-built centres. At the last quarter, there were 195 people
in prison—Belmarsh, Brixton, Wandsworth etc—who were
solely under Immigration Act powers. So, some of the issues that
have been mentioned already obviously apply to that group. In
relation to your question about specific difficulties that immigration
detainees face, the most obvious and stark, from listening to
this discussion, is that they have not committed a criminal offence,
with perhaps the exception of an immigration offence; they are
not criminals; they are not sentenced; their detention is indefinite;
they do not know how long they are going to be there. So, in contrast
with the kind of incidences of first-night suicides, I would say
that the opposite is perhaps true in immigration detention where
people start off with a fairly high level of optimism about either
winning their case because they may not have come to the end of
their case or that surely, in Britain, they are not going to be
there indefinitely, that someone is going to come and let them
out, and then, as the months pass—years in some cases—I
think people's hopes and expectations are dashed and then you
start to see very serious attempts at self-harm. Thankfully, there
have only been a small number of successful attempts at suicide.
In immigration detention, I think the Home Office has had five
cases over the last decade which obviously, in comparison to prisons,
is very low, but what I think we do need to be very worried about
is the high level of self-harm attempts. The biggest issue for
me is really why those people are detained in the first place
and all the issues Lord Judd was raising about alternatives and
whether the immigration officers who make a decision to detain
really appreciate just how vulnerable refugees and asylum seekers
are when they choose to detain them and whether the system has
enough safeguards to protect people against what is really a process
without judicial oversight. So, I think the problems that you
identified such as cultural differences and language barriers
are very real ones. I know that inspection reports by the Chief
Inspector of Prisons last year identified that, in centres where
detainees spoke English to the staff, they received a superior
level of mental healthcare and physical healthcare and, where
the detainees spoke no English and they relied almost exclusively
on other detainees to interpret, be that in health consultations
or with legal advisers/with the Immigration Service so that the
access to care is very limited for people who do not have good
language skills and particularly those who do not have solicitors.
Twenty-five per cent of people in Lindholme, when Lindholme was
visited, had no legal representation whatsoever and that then
left them in an extremely vulnerable position where they had no
one to advocate on their behalf either about their mental health
or to assist them in securing their release from detention. There
are alternatives to detaining people.
Q30 Lord Campbell of Alloway: Is there
a communication process? When each of them comes into an immigration
holding centre, is there a drill? Is there a formal process? Are
they engendering communication with somebody who can speak the
language? If so, how long does that take before they come into
the centre? Is there something that is pretty efficient and laid
on to ensure that there is this form of communication?
Ms Cutler: I think it varies very
considerably between the centres. Most centres have a process
for health screening in the first 24 hours and that involves an
induction to the centre and they also have to sign a form to say
that they understand in their own language the reasons for their
detention, so there is that process. The problem is that it does
not always work and that centres are very restricted on the amount
of money they can spend on interpreters and really it is a matter
of luck if there happens to be a speaker of your language in the
centre at that time, they might call on them to help. Obviously,
if you have sensitive issues, for example if you have been tortured,
if you have been raped, if you have had other problems, you may
not want to use someone of your own language who is a fellow detainee
to convey that to the detention centre, and that is really where
the whole system of safeguards breaks down because it is entirely
reliant on the individual being able to advocate on their own
behalf directly to the people making decisions about their detention.
Q31 Lord Campbell of Alloway: But is
it not very difficult to establish a really satisfactory system
in practice?
Ms Cutler: It is difficult but
there are things that could be much improved that would really
help.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: I take your
point.
Q32 Lord Bowness: Can I just go back—and
I do not want to delay the Committee too long—to this question
of the role of the judiciary. The statement that those passing
sentence chose to ignore the evidence was qualified, but there
was an earlier statement, I think from Deborah Coles, that people
who are sentencing do not understand the nature of the institutions
to which they are sending people. I would like to ask whether
you would want to qualify that answer in the same way that you
qualified the answer that you gave to Mr McNamara about choosing
to ignore evidence because I think there is an issue here about
whether in fact there are practical alternatives. It is easy to
make the criticisms that have been made.
Ms Crook: I think that the second
part is very interesting because, quite a lot of the time, the
sentencers do not know about the alternatives and that is the
problem. They have all been taken around a prison and usually
it is a herded guided tour for magistrates, so they will have
had a quick tour of a prison and mostly they will know superficially
what it is like. They do not know the detail. They will not know,
for example, that, at most young offenders' institutions, the
children in prisons never see daylight—they do not go outside
throughout the whole of their sentence—because that is not
what the prison staff tell them. So, they are given a quick tour,
so they know a bit about the institution. Quite a lot of the time,
they are not taken to some of the very good alternatives that
do exist and they are not taken there very regularly; they may
do one quick probation tour with the probation officer. So, there
is a level of ignorance amongst the sentencers generally, which
is quite worrying. I would not blame them entirely for that because
it is the time and training for them, but I think it is a serious
issue.
Q33 Lord Bowness: Where does the responsibility
lie for informing the judiciary, at whatever level, of the alternatives?
I think we probably find it quite surprising that you are actually
giving this evidence that, when a judge comes to pass sentence,
he is not aware of alternatives that are available to him. That
is precisely the evidence you are giving the Committee.
Ms Crook: I said "sentencers";
there are magistrates as well.
Q34 Lord Bowness: I did say "judiciary
at whatever level". Is the criticism being levelled specifically
at the magistrates or are you including higher levels/higher courts
as well?
Ms Lyon: There is a patchy system
of court diversion across the country and, where it works, it
appears to work well. It may well be that there are courts where
they do not have a good probation scheme available to them and
they simply do not know what to do—I would support that
idea—with the mentally ill people who come before them.
I was in a Midlands women's remand prison recently and, if I could
just say very quickly, there were two women whom I met. One had
set fire to herself in a car park; she had no hair and no eyebrows;
she was very scarred. She was in jail for doing that, really.
I could not quite work out the whole story but essentially, when
she spoke to me, she said, "My mother killed herself and
I will do the same. I am just trying to do it. I chose a completely
stupid place to do it." She was very ill; she was in a very
bleak place with some hardworking staff doing their best but it
was a very bleak prison indeed with no mental healthcare in that
prison or certainly no healthcare unit, though there will be one
built in 2006. Subsequently, I have heard that another woman has
been sent there for harassing NHS Direct—it is an interesting
thought that you can go to prison for harassing something that
is designed to help you when you have problems. Sometimes when
one is going around prisons talking to prisoners, it is impossible
not to think, goodness, what has happened? Where they did this,
they were at their absolute wits end. Some of the people are so
vulnerable, their crimes are not huge and yet they fetch up in
places like that one which really is very under-resourced to deal
with their problems.
Q35 Lord Bowness: I suppose the question
is, is that ignorance on the part of the judiciary at whatever
level or just lack of resources in the prison?
Ms Coles: I think it is also a
question of what resources are used and perhaps, rather than building
more prisons, we could be investing money in good-quality alternatives
in order that the damaged vulnerable people who end up killing
themselves in prison could actually go somewhere that could keep
them safe and then the judges would be given other options rather
than to send them to prison.
Q36 Lord Bowness: That of course is an
entirely different point to the point that people are in the wrong
place because of the ignorance of the judiciary.
Ms Coles: But it is linked.
Ms Crook: The point that Deborah
made earlier about the investigations is very important. We must
not forget Zahid Mubarek, who was murdered in Feltham by his cellmate,
who was a first-time offender who had been convicted of attempting
to take and drive away a car. The investigations have only ever
looked at what happened in the prison and obviously things went
desperately wrong in the prison, but should they not also look
at how he was sentenced to prison in the first place?
Mr Solomon: I think it is that
the judiciary do not have confidence in the services available
in the community, whereas they might have more confidence that
an individual might have a chance of getting detoxed. So, they
will not get the treatment but the judiciary might think that
at least they will get detoxed whereas they do not have confidence
that that will happen in the community. So, it is a question of
building up community services and looking at the kind of levels
of input that are required in a multidisciplinary area.
Q37 Mr Woodward: My two questions relate
to overcrowding. Remembering the Prison Reform Trust report of
2000 which looked at the impact of overcrowding which concluded
that overcrowding had direct relation to self-harm and self-inflected
deaths and given that we have seen a dramatic increase in the
prison population now of some 75,000 with the Home Office predicting
that, within five years, we could have anything between 95,000
and 110,000 behind bars, could you give us an indication of exactly
what role overcrowding plays in the self-harm and self-inflicted
deaths and are there any specific incidences which you would like
to give us which demonstrate just how serious the consequences
of overcrowding currently are.
Ms Lyon: As far as I know, in
terms of numbers of prisons currently overcrowded, it is 81 out
of 138. Thank you for remembering our report. It was a summary
of evidence from Independent Monitoring Boards who raised their
concerns, one of which was the impact of overcrowding on suicide
and suicide risk. The kinds of issues that they drew to our attention,
and the kinds of issues that they think matter, are the uncertainties
that occur because of overcrowding. You have the basics, having
to share a cell with a stranger, not getting very much staff time,
being shut in your cell for long periods of time, but you also
have something which officials refer to as "the churn",
which is this constant movement from one jail to another. Even
serving a short sentence, you might serve it in four or five prisons.
For someone who is not very stable, that level of uncertainty
is very hard to manage. We have so many points of entry into a
new jail. We know the first few days of custody are the most tricky
and in effect we are replicating this with the churn because people
are going into unfamiliar circumstances, unknown to staff and
the staff may not know they are at risk. I think this churn is
easily as important as overcrowding in any one single institution.
I do not know whether there is evidence of an individual death
where there have been lines drawn across areas of overcrowding
but we see this kind of continuing impoverishing experience, with
people not knowing who they are dealing with. In the larger prisons
there are personal officer schemes which enable individual staff
to have a few prisoners for whom they are responsible and these
have fallen apart in the main. So has sentence planning, which
is trying to make sense of a sentence: why you are there and using
the time constructively. If you add to that the very low levels
of purposeful activity, the Prison Service has not met its key
performance target for purposeful activity for the last few years.
It does give you an idea of how much isolation and desperation
you find in an overcrowded prison.
Ms Cutler: Can I give an example
of an immigration detainee? We have done some case studies which
I will pass to you at the end. He spent a short period in Wormwood
Scrubs. He was convicted of trying to use a false document to
leave the UK. He spent six months there and at the end of the
sentence his detention was maintained under Immigration Act powers.
He was then moved to Haslar Detention Centre but was transferred
back to Winchester Prison. He spent several months in Winchester
Prison and we obtained a psychiatrist's report which said that
for most days he spent 22 hours a day on his own, in his cell,
worrying about his future. "Because of his general frustration,
desperation and recurrent disappointing news, he has now resorted
to harming himself deliberately." It goes on to detail the
harm he caused himself. That is another illustration of where
over-crowding impacts; where there is no escape from the limits
of a cell for 22 hours a day. This is a man who was detained in
total for 22 months for committing a minor immigration offence
that then led to long periods in prison under Immigration Act
powers.
Q38 Mr McNamara: Does the Home Secretary
know that the person was trying to leave the country?
Ms Cutler: He was going to the
US to try and claim asylum there, but he was intercepted and we
paid for his accommodation for 22 months.
Q39 Mr Woodward: I am very struck by
the arguments you make, but I am equally struck by the danger
of generalisations. I recently spent some time visiting Liverpool
Walton Prison and I was immensely impressed by the steps that,
on every single wing, the governor was taking on absolutely the
kind of concerns that you are raising. I am conscious that as
we look at this there is a danger that the extremely good work
that may be being done by some runs the risk of being damaged
by the generalisations. I am aware that we have been speaking
in quite broad generalisations so far this afternoon in looking
at the problems and it is probably necessary to make sure that
in this evidence we mark out where it is going. It is very interesting
listening to Sarah pointing up that there may be a particularly
growing and exacerbated problem in relation to people who are
here, being detained in relation to immigration and asylum issues.
I was wondering whether or not the changes that are happening
in the prison system are a response to those whom we might call
proper criminals, but we have not got it at all right in terms
of the consequences of overcrowding and so on, for example, around
the areas that Sarah is raising. Would that be a reasonable generalisation?
Ms Cutler: I think so. My contact
with the Prison Service is through immigration detainees. There
are clearly massive strides that could be made. It would presumably
free up places in the prison system if we stopped using prisons
for immigration detainees. In October 2001, the Home Secretary
did give a commitment to stop using prisons. When there was a
fire at the Yarl's Wood Centre, it burnt down and they felt there
was pressure on accommodation so they started using prisons again
in increasing numbers. However, I think it is absolutely astonishing
that we are using up spaces in an overcrowded prison system. I
have a whole host of concerns about the logic of expanding the
detention estate. A decade ago there were 250 places in immigration
detention. There are now between 1,500 and 2,000 and the government
wants to increase this to 4,000. That includes families, children
and single women. We are creating a situation with increased pressure
on the detention centres to remove people where they are extremely
vulnerable. They are terrified about returning home for whatever
reason. The mechanisms to stop people from harming themselves,
to stop people from trying to take their own lives, are going
to have to become increasingly complex. I think we are setting
ourselves up to create a very dangerous situation in detention
centres and in prisons where there are immigration detainees.
The Prison Service has commented in the past that it does not
want immigration detainees in its prisons. They cannot manage
them; they are a completely different population from the rest
of the people that have been described today.
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