Slum prison

Prison Reform Trust response to HM Inspectorate of Prisons report on a full announced inspection of HMP Norwich, released 26 August 2005.

The report into HMP Norwich reveals accommodation and healthcare that is ‘unfit for habitation’, huge lapses in safety despite seven recent deaths and failure to provide vocational education in a training prison.

Recommendations following inquiries into self-inflicted deaths had not been enacted. The report says, ‘checks by night staff were made routinely every hour on the hour. This was too predictable and the absence of any variation calls into question the validity of these entries’.

Juliet Lyon said:

“There is an almost total failure to provide a safe, healthy prison at Norwich. It is difficult to credit that after recent deaths in custody even the most basic steps have not been taken to make the prison safer. Having only a third of staff, and just one permanent member of the night staff, trained in suicide awareness is obviously unacceptable. This inspection questions whether cells are really checked at night, questions whether staff will even enter cells in an emergency and states that they are neither trained nor equipped to prevent self-harm or suicide.”

The report criticises the whole system of care for prisoners. One Samaritan hotline was broken, another had been withdrawn. Calls to the Samaritans made on normal phones were charged and then cut off after 7 minutes. Special cells set aside for prisoners to talk to listeners (other prisoners trained by the Samaritans) were ‘poor’, one had an unscreened toilet, another was dirty and no toilet paper or kettle were provided in any. Support plans for prisoners at risk were not followed up. Finally, obvious ligature points were left in place in young offenders’ wings and prisoners’ cell bells were muted by staff. Many vulnerable prisoners are housed on a landing within view of other prisoners and within range of thrown objects. There was almost no employment for them, instead they spent the day locked up.

The report also criticises much of the prison’s accommodation calling it disgraceful. In particular, the healthcare cells were filthy, with graffiti on the walls. It says “we witnessed one young man who was detoxing and feeling unwell being admitted into one of the cells. It was cold and dirty and the cardboard furniture appeared to be stained with blood.” One wing was decrepit with peeling walls and filthy showers. It squeezed three prisoners into cells designed for one. There were no facilities for prisoners to wash their own clothes in all but one wing of the prison. Instead they washed and dried them in their cells.

Juliet Lyon said:

“Overcrowding is turning the Prison Service into a slum landlord. Worse, the healthcare cells, with no electricity and filthy walls suggest a time before Florence Nightingale. We can only hope that the shame of this report, and a new governor help make this prison safe again.

But this is only the latest in a line of reports to show up shocking conditions in our prisons. Treating prisoners with such a lack of decency, and failing to train or educate them is wrong of itself and hugely inhibits their successful resettlement in the community. The root cause is overcrowding. With more and more people are being sent to prison for non-violent, non-serious offences, this will not be the last shocking report. This will carry on until the government wakes up to the drift towards mass incarceration.”

This and other inspection reports can be accessed at the HMCIP website

Notes for Editors :

1. HMP Norwich has a Certified Normal Accommodation of 591, that is the number it is designed to hold without overcrowding.  In both June and July, Norwich was substantially over this figure with a population figure of 778 for June and 775 for July. This takes it very close to the absolute ceiling of its safe limit.

2. On self-harm prevention, the Chief Inspector of Prisons says: “There had been seven self-inflicted deaths in the past three years. We were seriously concerned to find that action plans had not been fully implemented, even where a remedy was quick and easy to implement: such as staff carrying ligature shears. Some specified dangerous ligature points had not been removed, staff training reached only a third of unified grades, and only one permanent night staff member had been trained.”

3. This year there have been 52 apparently self-inflicted deaths in prisons in England and Wales.

4. On the healthcare cells, the Chief Inspector of Prisons says: “some of the cells were the worst healthcare accommodation we have seen. The cells had very little natural light, the concrete floors were pitted and uneven, the toilets were not screened and there was grafitti on the walls, which were also ingrained with dirt. Some of the cells did not have in-cell electricity.”

5. The prison population in England and Wales stood at 77,008 on Friday 19 August. That is up 1,911 on the year before. The population is the highest ever, the last in a long series on new records. In July the Home Office was forced to tear up their long-term projection for the prison population as growth broke the ceiling in just months. The population is projected to reach as high as 90,000 before the end of the decade.