Drugs, violence and inhumanity – the cost of overcrowded jails

Prisons have been struggling to provide humane containment, unable to ensure constructive activity for thousands of prisoners, due to record levels of overcrowding over the past year, according to a report published today by the Prison Reform Trust.

The report also says that there has been a significant increase in the amount of drugs used by prisoners and that jails have become more violent with a significant number of serious assaults.

It reveals that the Prison Service is concerned that drug dealing in prisons is more organised and has drastically cut back the number of offending behaviour programmes to invest in drug treatment.

A Measure of Success, analyses the Prison Service’s performance against its main targets over the past financial year and sets out how each prison performed. It shows that the service failed to meet seven of its 18 key performance indicators (KPIs), including its target of providing prisoners with an average of 24 hours a week purposeful activity. In some local jails prisoners have been locked in their cells for up to 20 hours a day. The purposeful activity KPI has only been met once in the last nine years and will now be scrapped.

The Prison Service also failed to meet its KPI on suicides with 92 prisoners taking their own lives in 2003-2004.

The report notes that an average of 16,500 were living two to a cell designed for one person, having to defecate in front of one another and some times eat their food whilst sitting on the toilet.

A Measure of Success recognises the Prison Service’s excellent record on escapes and acknowledges the tremendous achievement in basic skills provision but it says that squeezing prisoners into every available space has meant that too many people have been shipped around the prison estate, held long distances from their home towns, disrupting attempts at rehabilitation.

The report concludes that achieving KPIs should be viewed as a way of encouraging improved performance and not as firm evidence that prisoners are being treated humanely or constructively.

The main findings are:

• Rising numbers sentenced to custody meant the Prison Service failed to meet its overcrowding target. The average rate of doubling up in single cells was 21.7 per cent. In some jails it was over 75 per cent.
• The number of positive drug tests increased to 12.3 per cent against a target of ten per cent. It is the second consecutive year that the recorded rate of drug use in prison has increased, returning to virtually the same level it was at three years ago.
• The Prison Service failed to meet its target of providing an average of 24 hours a week purposeful activity. The Prison Service has only met its purposeful activity KPI once in the last nine years.
• The total rate of serious assaults was 1.54 per cent against a target of 1.20 per cent. It is the seventh consecutive year that the KPI on assaults has not been met.
• Although the Prison Service met its overall target for completions of offending behaviour programmes by prisoners, the Prison Service has decided to review the use of these programmes after research raised questions about their effectiveness.  For the sixth year running, the Prison Service failed to meet its target for working with sex offenders.  Just 1,168 of the more than 4,000 convicted sex offenders in prison completed the Sex Offender Treatment Programme.
• All three KPIs on escapes were met maintaining the Prison Service’s excellent record in this area in recent years.
• The revised performance indicator on staff sickness was met with the average rate of staff sickness 13.3 days per person. However, this is still higher than the average sickness level in other comparable public sector professions and in four years the number of days lost per member of staff increased by 23 per cent.
• The targets for the number of prisoners achieving basic skills qualifications at entry level and at level one were significantly exceeded. Overall, more than 15 per cent of adults in England and Wales who gained literacy and numeracy qualifications last year did so in prison.
• The Prison Service claims that nearly 33,000, approximately a third of all prisoners, had an education, employment or training place arranged to go to on release from custody. But a third of these prisoners only had a Jobcentre interview arranged. Overall it is not known if the nearly 33,000 prisoners did or did not take up an education, employment or training place or for how long.
• There are question marks over the validity of the data used to compile KPIs. Purposeful activity figures can include time when workshops are closed or classes are cancelled due to staff shortages.
• The current set of  KPIs do not reflect the diverse needs of prisoners.  New KPIs should be introduced for reoffending rates, the distance prisoners are kept from their homes, sentencing planning and time out of cell. 

Speaking today, the report’s author, Enver Solomon, said:

“This report demonstrates that overcrowded jails don’t work. They are unsafe, inhumane, and ineffective. Far too many prisoners are passively serving time when they should be actively paying back the damage they have caused to communities.”

Director of the Prison Reform Trust, Juliet Lyon, added:

“There is small comfort in the Prison Service’s good record on preventing escapes if people leave our overcrowded jails more, not less, likely to offend again.”