British prisons

[Fishnut]

British prisons are not fit for purpose. I don't think this comes as a surprise to anyone who's been paying even the most cursory attention to the situation but a couple of recent news stories have brought the extent of the problem into sharp relief.

Extradition
Earlier this year a German court refused an extradition request because of concerns about British prisons. An article in the Law Society Gazette gives some details. An Albanian who lived in the UK went to Germany. He was wanted by British police for drug trafficking and money laundering and an international arrest warrant was issued leading him to be arrested by German police. His defence lawyer argued that British prisons are overcrowded and short-staffed and violence is rife. The Court understandably demanded guarantees that British prisons complied with minimum standards in accordance with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and asked for more information about where the Albanian would be sent and the conditions they would experience.

A Manchester police station provided a response on the last day of the deadline set by the court and offered only plans for improving overcrowding, with no guarantees or specifics regarding the detention of the Albanian.

The German court was not impressed.

They asked again for specific guarantees but this time no-one bothered to reply. The extradition was refused and the Albanian was immediately released as he hadn't committed any crimes in Germany.

The Law Society Gazette article also mentioned that the Irish High Court declined to extradite a defendant to Scotland because of overcrowding an an inability to provide proper care for someone with his mental health disorders.

1 in 10 Prisons 'barely fit for purpose'
Yesterday the chief inspector of prisons announced that 14 prisons in England and Wales were 'barely fit for purpose' and should be closed in an ideal world, but accepts that they 'won't be closed any time soon'.

He said the constant demand for cells at Wandsworth meant that on his last visit a burnt-out cell could not be repaired before a new prisoner was moved in.

Taylor said: “We saw a cell that was ready for a first-night arrival, potentially your first night in a jail cell, having been burnt out by the previous occupant. It was just hideous. If the prison was not overcrowded, what you would say is: ‘We’ll take that out of commission and paint it and fix it up.’ But it’s just one out, one in.”

This is appalling. How on earth are we locking people in burnt out cells?!

The overcrowding also means that there is no space for meaningful activity,

Taylor’s reports found that 36 out of 37 men’s prisons inspected in 2022-23 were not good enough for “purposeful activity” such as education, employment and activity that keeps prisoners meaningfully occupied.

The Guardian has put together an explainer, showing how the prison population is rising.

There were 87,685 prisoners across the male and female estates last week, 7.5% higher than in the same week last year, Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures show.

Numbers are predicted to continue increasing with the Ministry of Justice estimating that the prison population will exceed 100,000 within 2 years. There appear to be two main reasons for this - an increase in the number of people on remand (being put in prison while you wait for your trial) and people being given longer sentences.

one in five people in prisons were on remand in mid-2023 compared with one in nine in the last pre-pandemic year, 2019....

More than 32,200 people were in jail for a sentence of four years or more in June 2023 compared with 23,700 in June 2010, a 36% increase (in the same period sentences of between one and four years dropped by a similar proportion while sentences of one year or less dropped 54%).

There are two ways of measuring overcrowding.

The first is how many people are in cells beyond their intended capacity. By this metric almost a quarter of prisoners are living in overcrowded conditions.

The second is whether the prison is within the targets set by the service. By this metric almost 2/3 of prisons are overcrowded with 8 being at 150% or more above their accepted accommodation levels.

Unsurprisingly, this has led to high turnover of staff and a reduction in experienced staff as many have left.

You will, I'm sure, also be completely unsurprised to hear that real-term funding has reduced. The budget is 5.3% less than it was back in 2010-11, despite the massive increase in the prison population and the deteriorating quality of the facilities.

Self-harm among prisoner has reached epidemic levels. In the year to March 2023, 733 incidents of self-harm were recorded for every 1,000 prisoners. I don't know what to say about those figures. They're appalling.

Violence in prisons
Assaults have increased following a temporary decline during covid. There are 185 assaults against prisoners per 1,000 prisoners, and 92 assaults against staff per 1,000 prisoners.

Pepper spray has been used in men's prisons since 2018.

Since then, there have been claims of disproportionate use against disabled people and those from minority ethnic backgrounds.

Black adult prisoners were seven times more likely to have Pava spray [a synthetic form of pepper spray] used against them than white prisoners, MoJ figures showed in December.

Yet despite the clear risks with its use,

The prison officers’ union, the POA, has called for the spray to be introduced in [Young Offenders Institutions] to restore confidence among staff.

Dogs and stun grenades are already used in young offenders institutions but now officers want to use pepper spray as well.

Two teenagers were burned in May by a grenade, a device designed to temporarily disorient not but physically harm...

Between June 2022 and June 2023, the MoJ said the National Dog and Technical Support Group was deployed 62 times to YOIs, with dogs – German shepherds or similar – used in six of those incidents.

It is clear from the article that violence in these institutions is rampant and needs curtailing, but it is unclear to me how this proposal will help.

What is so puzzling is how bad everything is when you consider how much is being spent,

According to the non-profit prisoners’ paper Inside Time, each teenager costs the taxpayer £275,000 a year – six times the fees for attending Eton College.

That's around £750/day and yet kids are scared to leave their cells.

Adult prisons cost an average of £40,000/year/prisoner. That's £109.58/day which isn't a huge amount but still feels enough to not require putting you in a cell that isn't burnt out.

We need proper prison reform. We need to ask why we are locking people up and what we hope to achieve by doing so. Are we just punishing people, or are we wanting them to reform? There will likely always be a need to keep the most dangerous people away from the rest of society but there are better ways of achieving this than sticking people into overcrowded vermin-infested Victorian-era prisons with too few staff and crap facilities.

If covid taught us anything it's that losing your freedom is bad enough. Locking someone away is punishment enough. Inhumane conditions should never be part of our punishment and I'm really disappointed in how resigned the chief inspector of prisons seems to be to the situation. I realise we have a government here who thinks there's nothing wrong with working people being reliant on food banks and who think that human rights are 'woke' so I know he hasn't a hope in hell in getting the government to improve things, but at least call them out, make a noise, show you care about the people stuck in these appalling conditions.

There's a huge long list of things that are falling apart in the UK right now. It'd be much quicker to list the things that aren't being underfunded (politicians, politicians' mates and their businesses?) but how we look after those we have committed to our care says a lot about us as a country and right now it is saying nothing good.

[snoozeofreason]

Yes it's shocking. Part of the problem is that policies that make matters worse (longer sentences for example) tend to be vote winners whereas policies that would make things better, such as reducing the time prisoners spend on remand, are either neutral or vote losers.

The remand issue is particularly shocking because it gets set out in front of our noses in headline grabbing cases, and we don't seem inclined to do anything about it. The trio accused of killing Sara Sharif are scheduled for trial this time next year, and anyone who follows this matter will realise that there is no guarantee that a trial scheduled for September 2024 will actually take place at that time. Lucy Letby had been held on remand for three years by the time she was convicted. It's difficult to get people to realise how shocking this is because of the seriousness of the crimes of which they were accused (and in Letby's case convicted). But nobody should be spending this much time on remand - even if they subsequently turn out to be guilty of some hideous offence - and if such long delays occur in high-profile cases you can be sure that even longer ones occur in cases that are out of the public eye.

[discovolante]

Yes it's shocking. Part of the problem is that policies that make matters worse (longer sentences for example) tend to be vote winners whereas policies that would make things better, such as reducing the time prisoners spend on remand, are either neutral or vote losers.

The remand issue is particularly shocking because it gets set out in front of our noses in headline grabbing cases, and we don't seem inclined to do anything about it. The trio accused of killing Sara Sharif are scheduled for trial this time next year, and anyone who follows this matter will realise that there is no guarantee that a trial scheduled for September 2024 will actually take place at that time. Lucy Letby had been held on remand for three years by the time she was convicted. It's difficult to get people to realise how shocking this is because of the seriousness of the crimes of which they were accused (and in Letby's case convicted). But nobody should be spending this much time on remand - even if they subsequently turn out to be guilty of some hideous offence - and if such long delays occur in high-profile cases you can be sure that even longer ones occur in cases that are out of the public eye.

I started to put together a post about delays in parole decisions - which I think is a relatively minor part of the problem, but still a problem - but I've got covid and I'm a bit tired so I can't be bothered right now.

Of course the longer someone spends in prison - whether it be on remand, serving a sentence, awaiting a decision on parole, whatever - the more difficult it's likely to be for them to piece their life together afterwards. Overall it might be considered that in some cases the societal benefits of keeping someone dangerous in prison outweigh the costs, but if the prison system isn't working as it should then of course the risk of recidivism will almost certainly be higher.

[IvanV]

There doesn't seem to be a good source of information comparing the money spent on keeping prisoners. The best I could find, in a hurry, was Global Prison Trends 2020 which has a rather piecemeal discussion of money spent on keeping prisoners. There's an infographic on page 16, but the text quotes additional reference points oddly omitted from the infographic.

The text notes for example Sweden that spends €380/day/prisoner, the highest it located, in comparison to France at €105/day/prisoner. The French figure is a little lower even than the UK figure mentioned above, and, as it mentions in the text, France has an ECHR judgment against it on the grounds of the conditions it keeps prisoners in. Maybe Germany would also refuse to extradite to France, if it wasn't in the EU and it had to. But many countries spend considerably less than these figures. Rather annoying it did not present a complete set of the data it found.

More generally, the report suggests that the trend of increasing prison populations, while failing to increase spending, and conditions getting worse, does unfortunately seem to be a global trend, not just British. Rather odd that as the world continues to get wealthier, the trend in justice has turned downwards.

They publish a report each year, but on a quick glance it doesn't report annually on costs. But maybe someone with a bit more time could find some other interesting international comparisons from this or other sources.

I found it a little odd that the co-author of these reports is something called the Thailand Institute of Justice, which is located in a country where you would tend to be suspicious about research of political implication, but it seems to be supported by the UN.