Prison Safety

Andrew Selous Excerpts

Thursday 15th September 2016 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, Ms Vaz. I assure my hon. Friend the Minister that I will speak as a critical friend who will be willing him and the whole ministerial team on to success in this important area. I completely agree with what the Chair of the Justice Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), said at the start of this debate about the duty of care that we all owe to prison officers and prisoners. One of the most upsetting parts of my job as prisons Minister was to read the daily operational reports and see that prison officers had sustained broken jaws, broken noses and black eyes in the course of their duty.

Yet again, I put on record the fact that our prison officers are some of the finest public servants in our country. When we talk of public servants, we often mention teachers, doctors, nurses and police officers—rightly so, as they do outstanding work, too—but we need to remember that even though prison officers are behind those tall walls, they are on the frontline of duty in keeping us all safe. We have a duty to keep prisoners safe, too.

I will concentrate on what the Government said in response to the Select Committee. They mentioned a number of specific actions that they are taking to deal with violence. We have had brief mention today of body-worn cameras. I went around HMP Glen Parva to see their use there, and I was told by prisoners and prison officers that they felt that the cameras were reassuring and helpful. I understand that the advice is that body-worn cameras are even more effective if the five-minute intervention—the measure by which every interaction between a prison officer and a prisoner is meant to be rehabilitative and positive—has been rolled out. I know that work is being done on the violence diagnostic tool to understand in detail the different areas of prisons where violence is happening, and the times of the day. There is increased staff training to equip staff better to deal with those issues.

I was pleased to see mention in the Government’s response of the important work that the Crown Prosecution Service and the police need to do to protect our brave prison officers. I was upset to hear from prison officers in some prisons that on occasion they have gone down to the front counter of the local police station to report assaults, because it was bureaucratic to do so within the prison.

Just occasionally, the view has grown up within police forces that, “Prisons have prison officers, and we are out there to protect the public and the open community.” That is not the case. Police officers have a duty to ensure that order runs within and without the prison wall. Prison officers and prisoners need the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to take that duty seriously. In my experience as prisons Minister, the relationship between police and local prisons was variable. If there was a good relationship between the borough commander and the prison governor, things were good. Sometimes, that relationship was not as good as it should have been.

The Government rightly talk about the importance of getting the early days in custody, the critical first month, right for prisoners. We know the preponderance of self-inflicted deaths—suicides—within the first month. It is important that we help people, particularly those who are in prison for the first time, to cope with the overwhelmingly strange and traumatic experience of going to prison for the first time. Those are all positive things that the Government have mentioned.

One thing that the Government could do on recruitment is to try to speed up the process from the moment someone expresses an interest in joining the Prison Service. If people have to wait too long—of course, proper checks need to be done—their enthusiasm may wane. They need to put bread on the table to feed their families, so they may go to do something else. We need a speedy process that captures people’s enthusiasm to do an outstanding job of public service. We need to ensure that prison officers can get real job satisfaction from doing rehabilitation properly.

On Monday morning, my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) and I had the pleasure of meeting a former prison officer from HMP Northumberland. He was talking with enormous pride of how, when he walks around Newcastle, people come up to him and say, “You helped me 20 years ago in prison. I now have a job. I am paying a mortgage. I know I was a difficult prisoner, but you showed me the right way.” That is why prison officers join. It is an outstandingly important job in which they can make a difference. But new prison officers get frustrated. If they come in and are not able to do the rehabilitative work, they leave to do other things. Empowering prison officers to do the job that they joined to do to the best of their ability is really important.

[Robert Neill]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making such an important point, which is reflected in a concerning statistic. One of the growth areas we have seen in retention issues has been the number of people leaving the service through resignation as opposed to other reasons—it is up from about 37% to 39%. He may know better than I, but perhaps that relates to people coming in and getting frustrated because they are not able to do the job they want to do, and so not being retained in the way we would wish.

[Andrew Selous]

My hon. Friend makes a fair point. We have improved prison officer training. It is now a 10-week course. It is an increasingly good course and, quite rightly, within that training there is a lot of focus on rehabilitation. The ability to turn lives around and prevent people becoming victims by changing lives is the purpose of the Ministry of Justice. If people cannot do that job, it will lead to frustration, which may lead them to resign and take up other work.

Mobile phones that get into prisons illegally are a cause of violence that makes prisons less safe. They are used to help get drugs into prisons. It is not just inhaling psychoactive substances that is a problem but the extreme violent behaviour caused by such substances, which give an adrenalin rush that enables prisoners to fight prison officers for longer. That is why such drugs are so evil. Cracking down on phones, which the Government are starting to do by working with mobile network operators, is really important.

I was pleased to see that one of the good things in the Government’s response was the recognition on page 3 that phones should be used for legitimate family contact. Phones can be provided in the prison, or perhaps in time there could be a type of in-cell telephony that can be listened into in a legitimate manner using the PIN phone system to enable prisoners to contact their families. Prisoner voicemail could help with that. That is all part of creating a safer environment for prisoners and prison officers.

I have talked about the terrible evil of drugs and the extra violence caused by them. The Department is engaged in developing world-leading technology to detect drugs. We should not underestimate how difficult that is. I was glad to see mention in the Government response of the body scanner at Wandsworth. I am keen to know how the scanner has been assessed. It has been there since just before May 2015, so more than a year and a quarter. I understand that similar scanners are in widespread use in the United States of America. I hope that we will shortly have a full evaluation so that we can decide whether they are value for money, whether we roll them out and whether they are effective in dealing with the terrible scourge of drugs that leads to violence in prisons.

I am pleased to see the commitment to building new prisons. In time I am sure we will be told where they will be built. Equally importantly, new prisons will enable us to close prisons that are not fit for purpose.

There were two issues that I had hoped to see more reference to in the Government’s response. The first was jobs for prisoners on release. I remember a prisoner saying to me in HMP Ford, “When I left the prison, I could mop a floor bloody well”—excuse my language, Ms Vaz—“but it wasn’t going to pay the bills.” I thought that encapsulated powerfully the shift that we need to make within prison industries. Of course we want prisoners out of their cells and doing something productive—that is 100 times better than having them locked up—but I am not satisfied with that, and I want to go a stage further. I want work in prisons to be related to getting a job on release. I could not see reference to that in the Government’s response. I hope my hon. Friend the Minister will reassure me that prisons will focus on making sure the work that is done there will help prisoners get jobs on release.

We have some good academies involving individual employers, but why not go a stage further and have sectoral academies for the construction industry, for butchery or for engineering? There are huge skills and labour shortages in the British economy, and prisons can absolutely be at the heart of helping to solve that. When prisoners have a purpose and see the prison regime engaging with them at the start of their sentence, I passionately believe that will help cut down some of the frustration that leads to the violence that makes prisons less safe—the subject of this debate. An increasing use of release on temporary licence, which I hope the Department will continue, is absolutely part of that.

The Government’s response makes reference to the importance of education. People deserve a second, third, fourth or fifth chance in life. If prisoners have not had a good experience of going to school when they were younger, we must not lose the opportunity to give them the education they did not get the first time round. I hope the Government will take forward Dame Sally Coates’s excellent recommendations.

I was pleased to see that the Royal Society of Arts has just published a paper by Professor James Crabbe called “Unlocking Skills Inside”, which talks about the possibilities of further education colleges linking up with local prisons. I was interested in the five broad themes that Professor Crabbe draws attention to: prison cultures, wellbeing, human capital, social capital and knowledge, and skills and employability. The first four of those relate to the importance of helping prisoners change their mindset so that they engage with the employability agenda as well.

Governor autonomy is absolutely key. I have talked about the importance of prison officers getting job satisfaction from what they do, but giving governors their head to run their establishments is really important. To illustrate that, I went to Aylesbury prison, which is a challenging one—I think the Committee visited it—and saw that one block of that prison has an enabling environment accredited by the Royal College of Psychiatrists. The prison has a much calmer atmosphere than others. Prisoners were doing things for the prison officers. When I asked the young men in there, “What effect has this enabling environment had on the number of assaults and violent incidents here?”, they said, “We can’t remember the last time there was a violent incident.” I think we need many more such enabling environments. I know it takes time to get full accreditation, but why not learn from what has happened in Aylesbury and spread it across the whole estate? That would be valuable.

I compared the Government’s response with some of the commitments made by the previous Prime Minister in his speech on 8 February, and some areas concerned me. They were in the speech on 8 February but not in the Government’s response. The final paragraph of the Government’s response, on page 3, talks about

“a clear set of measures to hold prison governors to account”,

but it does not mention holding governors to account on employment or on accommodation outcomes, which were mentioned in the speech on 8 February. It may be an oversight—perhaps the Minister will be able to respond to that. It is critical that we hold governors to account on both employment and accommodation, because that will drive greater engagement with the probation service and the local community, so that we do better in those two critical areas.

I completely agree with what my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) said about mental health. We can be encouraged that my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee), a qualified doctor, has responsibility for mental health in prisons, and I look forward to his proposals. In mental health, as in education, we should not ignore the capacity of prisoners themselves to be the answer to some of the problems.

One of the dangers of prison is that it infantilises prisoners. At Justice questions, I paid tribute to the outstanding governor of Wandsworth prison, Ian Bickers, who has taken 50 prisoners who have level 3 qualifications and said, “Right, you are now educators in this prison.” He has given them a uniform and a wage. They can lose their job if they muck up, and they are going to work on education in the prison alongside the staff coming in from outside. We can do similar things to help prisoners who are getting depressed or anxious. Prisoners can very much be part of the solution to the issues that we are talking about this afternoon.

I agree with what has been said about IPP prisoners. We have to recognise that that situation is a historic anomaly that is difficult to justify. People are now under a sentence given some time ago for a crime which, if committed today, would be given a different sentence. I know that the Department is looking seriously at that issue.

Lastly, I want to pay tribute to those carrying out the important work of chaplaincy for preventing suicide and generally improving the atmosphere in prisons. The week before last I addressed a conference of Catholic prison chaplains. They made the point that they want some of the work that they do to be allowed to take place within education. That work is important in helping to change prisoners’ mindset about engaging with education and employment in prison.