1.. prison officers and police a list of convicted who supply drugs or other..... .What happens to those prison officers who are caught supplying drugs? 2.The extent to which drugs have taken hold in our jails 3. Howard league fewer prisons is the answer. 4.Russell, longer sentence is driving increase
List of prisons, police, & court personnel charged with or convicted of supplying drugs or drug dealing, assault, misconduct and more.......Those Convicted of an offence from 209 to 2018. What happens to those officers who caught supplying drugs leaving addicts behind them, are they just sacked!
The extent to which drugs have taken hold in our jails was detailed by the Chief Inspector of Prisons in his annual report last month.
“The ready availability of drugs in too many of our prisons sits behind much of the violence,” Peter Clarke said. “We are regularly told by prisoners how easy it is to get hold of illicit drugs in prisons and of the shockingly high numbers who acquire a drug habit while they are detained.”
Last week, he voiced the same concerns when the Government announced its temporary takeover of HMP Birmingham from G4S.
With the highest levels of violence of any prison of its kind in the country, Mr Clarke said he was astounded at “one of Britain’s leading jails slipping into a state of crisis that is remarkable even by the low standards we have seen all too frequently in recent years”.
One of the key failures he identified was the “blatant” use and trafficking of drugs.
Illustrating the futility around the issue at the prison, he wrote: “When inspectors at one point raised the fact that drugs were clearly being smoked on a wing, the response from staff was to shrug.”
On the face of it, the Government cannot be accused of the same resignation.
Days after HMP Birmingham was brought under state control, Prisons Minister Rory Stewart said that his key task was to reduce violence in prisons, with the new psychoactive substance (NPS) Spice being its biggest cause.
His focus, he said, was on massively reducing the supply of drugs, as well as restoring basic decency to our prisons and providing training and support for prison officers to enable them to challenge the behaviour leading to violence.
“We have an increasingly detailed understanding of how new psychoactive substances have driven prisoners into aggressive frenzies and self-harm and trapped them in dangerous drug-debt,” he wrote last week. “And we have better intelligence on how organised criminal gangs smuggle the substances in.
“But, we should and can do far more to improve our basic security procedures. Better netting and window-grilles will prevent throw-overs and drones, new body scanners will detect drugs being smuggled in through the gate. So will more sniffer dogs. And we need to improve our searching of everyone who enters the prisons – accepting that, although the vast majority of families and prison officers are not engaged in the trade, we need to search and catch those who are.”
Mr Stewart’s pledge followed other Government announcements in recent months on its determination to “fight drugs and improve security” across the prison estate. £10 million will be spent on 10 of the most violent prisons (although this does not include HMP Birmingham) on new scanners to detect packages inside bodies, sniffer dogs trained to smell psychoactive substances and improved perimeter fences, with Mr Stewart vowing to resign if these 10 prisons cannot turn things around within 12 months. This is in addition to another £7 million for airport-style security scanners, enhanced searching techniques, phone-blocking technology and improving intelligence around organised crime.
A focus on reducing violence in our prisons is clearly welcome, as is the recognition that tackling drug use is key to this. But, beyond stabilising the situation, can the measures announced by the Government lead to any lasting change? It is difficult to see how.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
While drugs have always been a feature of prison life, Spice – the brand name for a group of drugs called synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists (SCRAs), originally designed to mimic the effects of cannabis in a legal way – has caused chaos in recent years as the ‘psychological cosh’ of choice among inmates. Leaving users aggressive, comatose or anything in between, it has gained a toxic foothold in prisons lacking staff, decent conditions and meaningful regimes.
The realities of drug markets are such that Spice in prison continues to evolve. A plant-based form of the drug smoked with tobacco has already given way to Spice that is sprayed onto paper and enters jails in the guise of prison mail for inmates, which is then rolled up and smoked. Whether sniffer dogs, however well trained, will be able to keep apace with the changing chemical compounds in Spice is questionable.
The Government’s attempts to legislate its way out of the issue have not worked. The 2016 Psychoactive Substances Act, which made the supply and possession of Spice in prisons illegal, has had little to no impact on the availability of or demand for the drug.
The law of unintended consequences that often operates in drug markets has also been ignored. Reports suggest that the prison smoking ban, introduced over the past two years, has led to an increase in Spice use as it is now vastly cheaper than tobacco. Left without lighters which can no longer be bought from the prison canteen, inmates are now using the elements in vape devices, fashioning makeshift bongs and taking apart the electrical wiring of kettles to smoke Spice.
Such a lucrative market is Spice, with much of it linked to organised crime, that it is hard to imagine it being definitively halted. Barter no longer acts as prison currency, with drug dealing inside becoming an increasingly professionalised pastime. Facilitated by illicit phones, debts are commonly settled by relatives or friends on the outside, who pay into a bank account and inform the inmate dealer when this is done. For some prisoners, Spice is such big money that a deliberate recall to prison is an attractive option to deal some more and add to illicit nest eggs.
Other uncomfortable truths must also be acknowledged. Drones may make for colourful headlines but most drugs are thrown over the prison wall, are hidden in post or are carried in – including by prison staff. A blind eye cannot be turned to young and inexperienced officers working in violent environments awash with drugs on modest salaries who are susceptible to corruption and Mr Stewart is right to recognise the need to be open to tackling this.
Fundamentally, however, the Government’s focus on security does not address why demand for drugs in our prisons is so high, and the more challenging question remains: how can we stop prisoners turning to drugs?
As Volteface has argued, supply reduction measures can only disrupt supply, not eradicate it, so there needs to be a shift in emphasis towards making prisons more effective places of rehabilitation and tackling problematic drug use.
In a report into a 500-inmate riot at HMP Birmingham in December 2016 – released by the Government under Freedom of Information last Monday – investigators said that they were repeatedly told by prisoners that “brazen drug use was tolerated”, while staff said they felt “powerless to intervene due to shortages and the perception you would be exposed or isolated if you were the ‘one who challenged’”.
“We asked the Prison Council why prisoners resorted to psychoactive substances, not least because of the known health risks,” the report states. “The simple answer was that it was a ‘bird killer’ – in other words, days of imprisonment spent in oblivion, to counter the effects of boredom and inactivity, the market for such distraction was more marked at Birmingham where structured activity was lacking and regime was inconsistently delivered.”
That a lack of purposeful activity and poor conditions drives drug use is clear. Busy, meaningful regimes and effective support for those using drugs would be far better at managing drug problems than focusing only on increasing security measures. But, this requires investment and bold thinking by politicians undeterred by tabloid headlines and the fact that this cannot be packaged as a quick-fix solution.
Investing in security to tackle drugs and violence in our prisons is ultimately an exercise in confronting symptoms, not causes. Without an honest, pragmatic understanding of why prisoners are turning to the likes of Spice, drug use in our jails will continue to deteriorate, not reduce.Hardeep Matharu is a senior writer and researcher at Volteface. Tweets @Hardeep_Matharu
Jez
'Reports suggest that the prison smoking ban, introduced over the past two years, has led to an increase in Spice use as it is now vastly cheaper than tobacco.' Nice to see a reporter has worked it out, its not hard. Whilst there is demand Spice use will continue to grow within our prisons regardless as to how stiff the penalties are, Where there is a high demand which there is someone will always be willing to take the risk. Its time real investment went into our prisons to make the environment far more effective at rehabilitation and not geared to retribution.
Howard league
If we want safer prisons, we must have fewer prisoners.
I read two documents back-to-back this morning, which prompted this blog. The first was Rory Stewart’s article on Medium about reducing violence in prisons. The second was the newly released prison population projections from the Ministry of Justice.
Rory Stewart’s comments about getting a grip on prison safety are welcome and I support what he is trying to do. But his department’s own publication throws into sharp relief the futility of his efforts if they are not accompanied by a commensurate attempt to reduce the prison population.
The number of men, women and children in prison stood at 83,165 as of Friday 17 August 2018. The Ministry of Justice says that the population is projected to increase steadily by 3,200, reaching 86,400 people in March 2023.
This 2018 projection is much lower than last year’s – 2,800 lower for June 2019 and 2,400 lower for March 2022, to be precise. At face value this is a good news story but there are a few things that require a closer look. Here are the two projections side-by-side:
It is interesting that the slope of the blue line in this year’s projection is virtually the same as it was in last year’s projection. In other words, the big difference is where the projection is starting from, not in the trends it predicts around sentencing and release.
Another way of putting this: despite the dramatic, welcome and long overdue reduction in prison numbers since the start of the year, this projection does not assume that all of the drivers of this decrease will continue.
This is worrying. It speaks to a lack of concerted effort within the Ministry to pull the policy levers that would start to bring the population down in a systematic and sustained way.
Specifically, the Ministry of Justice predicts that improvements to how home detention curfew (HDC) is managed will continue – but that the phenomenon of the courts doing less business will reverse, while remands will stay flat. Worryingly, recalls are forecast to grow as prisoners serving IPP sentences are released – something that we know can have appalling consequences.
At the start of the year, the prison population was going down. It seemed that there were fewer people being pulled into the flow of the criminal justice system and into prison, as well as more effective ways of getting people out of prison. But for the fifth week in a row now, the prison population has gone up and these projections further suggest that the tide is turning. The government needs to take action now and that must involve legislative reform across sentencing, curbing recalls and abolishing short prison sentences.
Ominously, without such reform, sentence lengths and custody rates are projected to continue to increase, offsetting any small areas of respite or improvement. Over the past ten years, average sentence lengths across the board have increased by 24 per cent, and the trend continues. At one point under Margaret Thatcher the prison population was around 40,000. Now the debate is around whether it could hit 90,000.
The prisons minister’s suggestions for improving safety in prisons for staff and prisoners are good ones. I am impressed by his attempts to instil a new vision and get a grip on the worst performing prisons in the estate. I hope he stays in post long enough to see these changes through. But his efforts around training, security and culture will fail if they are not accompanied by a concerted attempt to get a grip on the prison population, namely by making a proper plan for how to bring it down.
Comments
Nora Mccormack29 Aug 2018 says:
Sometimes it’s down to police that people get locked needlessly my son who has been to prison before was stopped and arrested for possession of a cannabis cigarette not lit the police could have given on the spot fine but chose to arrest,detain over night send to court telling him he can be sentenced he had to have a solicitor, but fortunately the magistrate didn’t jail him but fined him £215 it just money making and needlessly put people in jail for trivial crimes and it is trivial
The main points are summarised in the graphic below:
Overall projections
The population is expected to grow reaching roughly 86,400 in March 2023. In the short term (to April 2019), an increase in the number of prison receptions is forecast, particularly of shorter sentenced offenders, due to the assumption that the number of cases received at the courts will increase from current position to the average levels observed in the 12 months to early 2018.
In the longer term, increases are driven by the underlying growth in the population of offenders sentenced to longer-determinate terms (in particular, those sentenced to 4 years or more). Growth in the sentenced determinate population, serving custodial sentences of 4 or more years, also reflects increases due to offenders sentenced to Extended Determinate Sentences (EDS), following the abolition of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences. As a result, growth in the determinate population is partially offset by declines in the indeterminate population, as IPP offenders are released from custody.
Recalls
The Recall population is projected to increase above current levels. Projected growth is driven by an expected increase in the pool of offenders on licence particularly as further IPP offenders are released, a proportion of which will likely be recalled to custody. There is no evidence to suggest the future direction of determinate recall population, so the MoJ is using a flat projection at current levels. The large increase in the recall population has been driven by high numbers of short term prisoners being recalled following the Transforming Rehabilitation changes. If the MoJ decides to change the requirements for licence supervision (as it is considering) for short term prisoners, this may reduce the number of people in prison for recall.
New drivers
Further changes in the prison population are expected as the result of a range of policies, including those already in effect but not yet fully represented in the population and those expected to take effect over the projection horizon. The projections only consider the impact of government policies which have achieved Royal Assent. These include:
The impacts of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 which includes provisions for restricting the use of cautions; changes to the framework for the sentencing and release of serious and dangerous sexual and violent offenders; and the introduction of a new test for the release of recalled determinate sentence prisoners;
The impacts of the Serious Crime Act 2015 which includes provisions for additional caseload and associated custodial sentences relating to new offences for controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship;
The expected impacts of the Sentencing Council guidelines on reduction of sentence for early guilty pleas;
The expected impacts of the Sentencing Council guidelines on Possession of Bladed Articles and Offensive Weapons, leading to increases in sentencing levels.
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This week’s post examines three more questions with the aim of highlighting key concerns and, I hope, of promoting positive ideas about how the MoJ can design a better probation service. The question numbers refer to their numbering in the consultation document, so this week’s post starts with question 10.
Please do take issue with me and set out your views and thoughts in the comments section below.
Question 10: Which skills, training or competencies do you think are essential for responsible officers authorised to deliver probation services, and how do you think these differ depending on the types of offenders staff are working with?
One of the key outcomes, the MoJ is looking for from the second version of Transforming Rehabilitation is the re-creation of a probation identity with staff from both sides of the public/private divide feeling that they are part of the same profession and more movement — both ways — across that divide.
The consultation document commits to the development of a new probation workforce strategy which will more clearly specify the training, skills and competencies that staff will require for different roles. The MoJ also intends to develop a framework of recognised training for probation staff to maintain standards across the profession and provide staff “with ways to evidence transferable skills as they progress in their careers, while still allowing scope for providers to develop their own approaches to training and development”.
This workforce development strategy will have to take into account the difficulties that NPS and CRCs have had in recruiting staff in some parts of the country. The NPS has addressed this via a significant recruitment drive; whether CRCs can attract qualified and experienced staff seems more problematic.
To turn to the consultation question, I am not convinced that the key abilities and skills to be a good probation officer in a CRC are inherently different than those working for the NPS. The latter group must cope with the pressures of working with a group of people who are, by definition, those who commit crimes doing the most harm but CRC offender managers must supervise large numbers of people, very many of who are perpetrators of domestic abuse in the knowledge that most individuals convicted of a serious further offence while on supervision are low or medium risk offenders.
Given the current mainstream practice of people learning on the job, it seems to me that high quality apprenticeships is the natural way to achieve a suitably skilled workforce. I know that Kent, Surrey & Sussex CRC is working with Interserve – who run the Humberside, Lincolnshire & North Yorkshire CRC – as well as Skills for Justice on a trailblazer apprenticeships project.
Question 11: How would you see a national professional register operating across all providers – both public and private sector, and including agency staff – and what information should it capture?
The MoJ is keen to assure that all probation providers use properly qualified staff and intend to develop a national professional register as a way of maintaining a single list of those staff who are trained and authorised to deliver probation services:
As well as recognising the specialism and value of probation work, this register will ensure that staff who lack the requisite qualifications, are subject to relevant disciplinary processes or have been previously dismissed for poor performance or malpractice, cannot undertake roles for which they are not suitable. We will therefore develop, in consultation with staff, providers and unions, a process by which, subject to appropriate safeguards, staff could be removed from the register and their authorisation to practise revoked in certain circumstances.
The Probation Institute has already developed such a register but there are no statutory requirements governing its use. There are also no details as to whether probation staff will be required to pay to keep up an annual membership of the register, as happens in other professions such as nursing.
Question 12: Do you agree that changes to the structure and leadership of probation areas are sufficient to achieve integration across all providers of probation services?
One of the drivers for the re-design of TR was the acknowledgement that the NPS/CRC split was failing to deliver an integrated service both to courts and to the offenders the probation service supervises and supports. For this reason, the MoJ has re-structured the CRC system moving from the current 20 CRCs in England to 10 CRCs with the new contract areas designed to align with the NPS regions as shown below.
The MoJ sets its rationale for this change below:
10 probation areas in England should help simplify the system and remove the current problem of individual providers operating across different geographical areas. Fewer, larger delivery areas offer the chance to simplify the delivery of resettlement services, as it should be possible to reduce the proportion of resettlement prisons releasing to multiple areas. This also reduces the risks associated with offenders moving around the country – for example, there will be fewer occasions where a change of address requires the formal transfer of the case between providers.
The flip-side of the coin is that (with the exception of London), many CRCs comprise several (between 3 and 7 by my reckoning) Police & Crime Commissioner areas making strong strategic links with PCCs problematic.
Whether the appointment of one HMPPS senior leader for each area will make a substantial difference is unclear and what the relationship will be between the CRC and this leader is not defined.
Regular readers will know that I find the logic of a fragmented service difficult to follow. If we must have a mixed economy, why not have 10 (or 39, the number of English PCCs) local probation services delivered by public, private or third sector bodies where one organisation is responsible for delivering all the responsibilities of the probation service? This one body can then have one straightforward set of working relationships with other criminal justice and social justice services.
It is interesting that the slope of the blue line in this year’s projection is virtually the same as it was in last year’s projection. In other words, the big difference is where the projection is starting from, not in the trends it predicts around sentencing and release.
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