REMAND PRISONERS DENIED RIGHT TO PREPARE FOR TRIAL
Thousands of remand prisoners in England and Wales are being denied their legal right to prepare for trial, according to a new report published today by the Prison Reform Trust. Restricted Access: Legal Information for Remand Prisoners finds that many prisons are failing to fulfil their statutory duty to provide frequent and reasonable access to legal reference materials.
The report is also critical of the overcrowded, Victorian prisons in which many remand prisoners are held. Writing in the foreword to the report Stephen Shaw, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, warns that:
"Remand prisoners have the worst conditions and the most limited regimes, while their needs, including their health needs and resettlement needs, frequently go unmet".
There are currently just over 13,000 remand prisoners in England and Wales, an increase of 15 per cent in the last twelve months. This compares with a rise of around 8% in the number of unsentenced prisoners. The remand population is made up of those defendants awaiting trial and those who have been convicted but are awaiting sentence. A pressing need of most remand prisoners is to prepare for their trial. However, according to the Prison Reform Trust's new study, 48 per cent of prisons do not hold all the legal reference books that they are required to stock. In over 75 per cent of prisons, staff shortages meant prisoners had inadequate access to law books. The report finds that just 15 per cent of prisons had legal reference material available in languages other than English. As a result, foreign national prisoners are especially disadvantaged in attempts to prepare for trial.
Many remand prisoners reported problems in gaining access to law books within prisons. One prisoner referred to having had "a desperate need for access to key legal references", while another said that he had been on remand for four months but had "found it very difficult to access any information from the prison library". This was echoed by a prison librarian who said that prisoners had "no time to examine legal documents". More recently concerns have been voiced about bail information schemes which are failing in many prisons, due to overcrowding pressures.
Each year large numbers of innocent people are remanded in custody. Of male prisoners received on remand in 2000, 52 per cent did not subsequently receive a prison sentence; of female remand prisoners, 64 per cent did not go on to receive a custodial sentence. Around 23 per cent of males and 21 per cent of females remanded in custody were acquitted, or the proceedings were terminated early. These figures underline the importance of prisons providing adequate access for remand prisoners to legal reference materials, legal advice and bail information. They show the need for good quality pre-sentence reports to provide adequate information for the courts and present a compelling case for a reduction in the needlessly high use of custodial remand.
Two years ago, in December 2000, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons published 'Unjust Deserts. A thematic review of the treatment and conditions for unsentenced prisoners in England and Wales'. This report identified the needs of unsentenced prisoners and the restricted regimes and poor conditions in which they were held. The then Chief Inspector, Sir David Ramsbotham, referred to
"a startling gap between what the public might reasonably expect to be in place for unsentenced prisoners and what is actually in place… Nowhere was this more important than in terms of access to due process. The review identifies that the length of time prisoners were locked up in most of the large directly managed male local prisons prevented access to legal books (where these were provided) and to solicitors by phone, and unfairly disadvantaged defendants awaiting trial in custody compared to those remanded on bail. Furthermore, prisons were not yet operating pro-active and consistently staffed bail information schemes ensuring that all those who had a chance of a successful second bail hearing were helped to do so".
There has been no satisfactory response to the recommendations made in this review. The current Chief Inspector, Anne Owers, made it plain in her Annual Report, published on 9 December, that efforts by the Prison Service to reform were being overturned by the pressure of overcrowding.
Commenting today Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust said:
"Restricted access to legal information for unsentenced prisoners makes a nonsense of Government claims to be speeding up justice. This specialist study conducted with prison librarians lifts the lid on a system in crisis. Lack of information at every stage from court reports through to prisoners' preparation for trial is a disastrous own goal for the Home Office as it struggles to cope with a rapidly rising population of unsentenced prisoners, many of whom need not be there in the first place".

Key recommendations in the report include:
• A Prison Service standard for frequency of access and extent of provision of legal texts should be drafted
• The procedures for supplying books and legal texts to libraries and making them available to prisoners should be reviewed as a matter or urgency. Monitoring provision should be part of establishment audits and reports by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons.
• There should be more time available for prisoners to gain access to, and look at, legal texts. Fifteen or twenty minutes is not sufficient time to grasp complex legal information.
• More CD-ROMs, the computers to use them on and adequate IT support all need to be provided.
• Photocopiers should be available for prisoners to make photocopier so pages are not ripped out of books - something which is currently standard practice.
• More translated material should be made available for those for whom English is not their first language.
• We recommend a regular survey of users to identify problems with or gaps in provision