Handbook on Prisons

Yvonne Jewkes, Ben Crewe, Jamie Bennett, Yvonne Jewkes, Ben Crewe, Jamie Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317754541
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The second edition of the Handbook on Prisons provides a completely revised and updated collection of essays on a wide range of topics concerning prisons and imprisonment. Bringing together three of the leading prison scholars in the UK as editors, this new volume builds on the success of the first edition and reveals the range and depth of prison scholarship around the world.

The Handbook contains chapters written not only by those who have established and developed prison research, but also features contributions from ex-prisoners, prison governors and ex-governors, prison inspectors and others who have worked with prisoners in a wide range of professional capacities. This second edition includes several completely new chapters on topics as diverse as prison design, technology in prisons, the high security estate, therapeutic communities, prisons and desistance, supermax and solitary confinement, plus a brand new section on international perspectives. The Handbook aims to convey the reality of imprisonment, and to reflect the main issues and debates surrounding prisons and prisoners, while also providing novel ways of thinking about familiar penal problems and enhancing our theoretical understanding of imprisonment.

The Handbook on Prisons, Second edition is a key text for students taking courses in prisons, penology, criminal justice, criminology and related subjects, and is also an essential reference for academics and practitioners working in the prison service, or in related agencies, who need up-to-date knowledge of thinking on prisons and imprisonment.

Part I Prisons in context

1 Prisons in context

Andrew Coyle

DOI: 10.4324/9781315797779-2

Introduction

This chapter provides a personal overview of some features of imprisonment over the last 40 years. In the early 1970s the world was quite different in many relevant respects. The colonial empires of European countries were being dismantled to be replaced by newly independent countries, and the Cold War was a major part of our political lives. Prisons and labour colonies throughout the Soviet Union and neighbouring countries held well over 1 million men and women in virtual slavery, and the very existence of many of these places of detention was a state secret. In the United Kingdom the world of prisons was also largely hidden from public view and a number of prisons were places of brutality and inhumanity. Within a few years the first cracks began to appear in that closed world. In 1975 the European Court of Human Rights reached its first decision in a case concerning a prisoner in the United Kingdom (Golder v United Kingdom [1975] 1 EHRR 524). In this case the Court concluded that the refusal of the UK authorities to allow a prisoner access to a solicitor constituted a violation of European Convention on Human Rights Article 6 (right to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal) and Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence). The Council of Europe Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) began its work in 1990 when it visited Denmark, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Malta and Austria. In respect of the United Kingdom the CPT reached a damning conclusion about conditions in Brixton, Leeds and Wandsworth Prisons:

The CPT's delegation found that the conditions of detention in the three male local prisons visited were very poor. In each of the three prisons there was a pernicious combination of overcrowding, inadequate regime activities, lack of integral sanitation and poor hygiene. In short, the overall environment in which the prisoners had to lead their lives amounted, in the CPT's opinion, to inhuman and degrading treatment.

(Council of Europe 1991)

This report was published shortly after I became governor of Brixton Prison. The Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment entered into force in 2006 and led to the establishment of an international inspection system for places of detention incountries that have ratified the Protocol. All of these developments are discussed in greater detail elsewhere in this volume.

There are now over 10.2 million men, women and children in prison in the world (Walmsley 2013) – a number which would have been beyond belief 40 years ago – and in many countries the conditions and environment within prisons have changed dramatically. The overview in this chapter is intended to provide a context for the succeeding contributions which deal with specific issues relating to imprisonment. It invites the reader to consider the nature of imprisonment in the first two decades of the 21st century and whether the prison as now constituted is fit for its purpose.

As it was then

I entered the world of prisons in 1973 when I was appointed as one of the first assistant governors in Edinburgh Prison (Coyle 1994). Until that point the management structure in prisons in Scotland, as in the rest of the United Kingdom, had been very simple, with a single governor, assisted in larger prisons by a deputy governor. The vast majority of staff were ‘discipline officers’ of various grades, led by a chief officer. Other groups of uniformed officers with varying or no specialized training were responsible for the prison ‘hospital’, the industrial and working units, maintenance, catering and administration.

The prisoners' day was structured and predictable. It began with cell doors being unlocked around 7.00am, leading to the infamous ‘slopping out’ parade with a procession of prisoners rushing to the ‘arches’ or ‘recesses’, each carrying a brimming chamber pot which was emptied into or around the toilets and slop basins. Each prisoner also had a bottle or jug which he filled with water from the same sink before heading back to his cell. The lucky or experienced prisoners made use of the toilets in the vicinity. The stench pervaded the whole prison and was no respecter of persons. As a new assistant governor and one of the few people who wore civilian clothes, I quickly learned that the suits which I wore to work had to be kept separate from all my other clothes at home and be cleaned regularly to minimize the prison smell that saturated them.

Prisoners were then locked in their cells for a short period while they shaved and washed the best they could with the water that they had brought back, after which they went to one of four dining rooms for breakfast. They then went directly to their work parties. Some of the work was relatively sophisticated and required a degree of skill: printing, bookbinding, carpentry. At the other end of the spectrum there was work that was basically monotonous and unskilled. In those days prisons still had contracts with what was then the Post Office to make and repair hemp mailbags. The most unpopular work was in the salvage party, stripping out redundant copper and other wiring. The prisoners allocated to this work were generally those who had no skills and little ability to learn, by and large men on the merry-go-round of short sentences for repetitive low-level offences. A small number of prisoners were employed on general maintenance in the prison, working alongside prison officer tradesmen, in the prison kitchen or on general cleaning duties. At the end of the morning the men returned to their cells for a numbers count before going on to the dining rooms for lunch, after which there was a one-hour period of exercise in the open air, although in reality there was not much exercise and most prisoners spent the time walking around the yard in small groups. It was then back to the work parties until it was time for the evening meal, usually served around 4.00pm. Following a short period locked in cells while numbers were checked, there was evening recreation, spent in the accommodation halls, playing table games, watching the communal television or cleaning their cells. By 9.00pm all prisoners were locked in their cells until the following morning.

Prisoners on remand or unsentenced were held in an accommodation hall separate from sentenced prisoners and were not required to work. This meant that they spent most of each day locked in their cells, apart from meal and exercise times. They were also entitled to a short daily visit from family or close friends and to see lawyers or other persons in connection with their cases.

In the early 1970s there were no full-time teachers, social workers or other specialists in the prison. Criminal justice social workers (who were the Scottish equivalent of probation officers) visited to prepare reports on remand prisoners when requested to do so by the court, as did psychiatrists and psychologists, and also to report, if required, on prisoners who were being considered for early release. There was a welfare officer who was employed by the prison and who acted as a conduit between prisoners and their families when asked to do so, and who might liaise on behalf of a prisoner with authorities, for example, in respect of housing tenancies. The prison chaplain was a key figure in terms of prisoners’ access to external support. If a prisoner wished for educational support he applied to the chaplain who would decide whether the man would have access to the small number of ad hoc people who came into the prison to provide this. The chaplain also coordinated volunteer visitors who befriended individual prisoners. In 1974 a qualified full-time education officer was appointed in Edinburgh Prison, the first such appointment in any Scottish prison.

The primary task of the new group of assistant governors that I joined in 1973 was to organize and oversee the writing of reports on prisoners who were to be considered for early release under the new parole arrangements which had recently been introduced following the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act 1965 and the consequent legislation in the Criminal Justice Act 1967. In those days a prisoner serving a sentence of more than 18 months became eligible for early release after serving 12 months or one third of the sentence, whichever was longer. Most prisoners who were serving life sentences became eligible for release after they had completed about nine years in prison, and the preparation of reports and documentation had to begin some 18 months before that date. Prisoners serving indeterminate and other long sentences now serve much longer periods before being considered for early release.

One undoubtedly positive change in the last 40 years has been the increase in transparency in prisons. Prisons used to be described as the last great secretive institutions in modern society because of the shortage of information about what happened within them. Given the reach of modern communications it is no longer possible to prevent much of what happens in prisons from coming into the public domain. The publication of regular reports from HM Inspectorate of Prisons and the work of Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs) in each prison has also brought much of what goes on inside prisons in England and Wales into the public spotlight. A changed public climate as to what is and is not acceptable behaviour on the part of public servants has resulted in significant changes in the behaviour of many staff. For example, it is hard to imagine that today there might be such a sequence of events as surrounded the death of Barry Prosser in Birmingham Prison in 1980. These were summarized in a statement by the Home Office minister of state to the House of Commons on 1 July 1982:

Mr. Prosser was found dead in his cell in the hospital wing of Birmingham prison in the early morning of 19 August 1980. The post mortem which was held that afternoon revealed the full and horrifying extent of Mr. Prosser's injuries. The pathologist's report was that Mr. Prosser had extensive bruising all over his body. His stomach, his oesophagus and one of his lungs had been ruptured, and the pathologist thought that the cause of death was a blow, probably by a heavy weight. The inquest into Mr. Prosser's death was held in April 1981. It lasted for seven days and heard the evidence of nearly 50 witnesses … At the end of the proceedings, the jury returned a verdict that Mr. Prosser had been unlawfully killed.

The minister then moved on to deal with some of the recommendations that the coroner had made. His comment on the last of these recommendations is a reminder of how weak management of staff was in those days:

The coroner's final recommendation was that hospital officers should submit a report if they had to use force on a prisoner … We recognise that when, in the proper execution of his duties, an officer has to use physical force, there is always the possibility that there will later be a complaint by a prisoner or an inquiry into the incident. Thus, we issued instructions last year reminding staff that, as a safeguard, each prison officer, including any hospital officer or nurse involved in such an incident, should write a brief factual report to the governor in addition to making any other record. Some concern was expressed by the Prison Officers Association about this instruction and it advised its branches not to comply with it.

(HC Deb 1982: 1130–1132)

The final sentence of the minister's statement includes a damning indictment of the mores of the time within the Prison Service. A mentally ill prisoner had been ‘unlawfully killed’ in a punishment cell. A coroner made what today would be considered a straightforward and entirely proper recommendation that prison staff should in future submit a report whenever force had to be used on a prisoner. The Home Office issued an instruction that this should be done. The Prison Officers Association took issue with this and instructed their members not to comply with the instruction. The minister appeared to accept this as an end to the matter. There is little doubt that the behaviour and reaction of the successors of all those involved – staff, management, trade unions and ministers – would be quite different today.

As it is now

Conditions

Physical conditions in prisons have improved significantly in a number of respects. The daily degradation of hundreds of prisoners carrying foetid chamber pots along landings to stinking slop sinks is thankfully long gone. In his seminal 1991 report following riots at Strangeways and other prisons, the then Lord Justice Woolf described this practice as an uncivilized and degrading process, which destroyed the morale of prisoners and staff (Woolf 1991: 24). Woolf had recommended that ministers should set a timetable to provide access to sanitation for all prisoners not later than February 1996. In April of that year, Prisons Minister Ann Widdecombe travelled to Leeds Prison to witness, in the words ofThe Independent newspaper (13 April 1996), the last plastic pot being discarded as slopping out came to an end in prisons in England and Wales.

It soon became clear that the much-heralded end to slopping out was not all that it might seem. In 2004 the chief inspector of prisons found that there was still slopping out in a women's prison (Lewis 2006) and in 2010 the National Council for Independent Monitoring Boards published ...