Covid-19 has entered our prison system. There are now at least two confirmed coronavirus cases in HMPs Manchester and Highdown in Surrey, which means staff and prisoners there are in isolation and hospital. This was inevitable, and as I have said previously, our overcrowded and under-resourced jails need special, urgent consideration. Prisons incubate many malign things behind their walls. Local prisons in particular are overcrowded and insanitary transit camps for people and viruses. So, now that prisoners have become infected, what’s to be done?
The Government does have a plan. I understand that next week legislation will be introduced that will allow certain risk assessed prisoners serving more than 12 weeks and less than four years to be released early under Home Detention Curfew (HDC). HDC was first introduced in the late 90s, in part to ease prison overcrowding. It has the benefit of requiring the offender to wear a remotely monitored ankle tag which could be very useful at a time when tight control of movement is particularly important to ensure he or she stays put at home.
The plan is to increase the HDC monitoring period by six weeks to six months before a prisoner’s scheduled release date. It’s not clear whether this reform would have come into play in any case – as overcrowding was already a serious problem in prisons before coronavirus reared its ugly head. But there is certainly the political cover now for ministers to implement measures that most Conservative MPs would otherwise regard with acute suspicion.
We are currently around 1,700 prison places from going bust in terms of useable capacity. That’s about one Wandsworth prison away from prisoners having to fill (largely non-existent) police cells. Incidentally it’s also close to the number of over 70s currently locked up across the prison estate, with many in declining health, so at acute risk from the virus.
Projections from the Ministry of Justice estimate that extending HDC would result in approximately 600 relatively low risk offenders released under effective house arrest. That might just give the Prison service the headroom it needs to then reconfigure an existing facility to safely isolate and treat infected prisoners who would be ineligible for early release, because of the seriousness of their crimes. There are urgent decisions to be made about medical intervention for prisoners entering a likely severely stretched NHS system in the next few weeks. It would surely make sense for those facilities to be replicated inside one secure perimeter.
Who gets to be released under house arrest is going to be a major factor in the stability in our already wobbling jails. Even when ineligible prisoners are ruled out – those serving over four years, sex offenders and other types of violent offender – demand for release is likely to outstrip supply. Some people will lose out and this inequity, added to likely restrictions on prison social visits and decimated programmes and services as staff isolate or go sick, can easily fuel the sort of anger that led to riots in Italy and mass breakouts in Brazil.
We cannot assume that prisoners who have the least autonomy and ability to protect themselves will agree to stay put in disease incubators while a lucky few go free. Putting aside the understandable lack of public sympathy for people who have got themselves banged up for a moment, it is important to note that prisons in this country do not (thank goodness) operate on a punitive model. There is a much more subtle contract between staff and prisoners. Essentially inmates stay locked up and compliant in return for being treated with decency, fairness and given protection. Ask any prison officer on her own supervising 50 prisoners and she will tell you this contract is one of the major things that keeps her and her colleagues safe even on our violent wings and landings. Changing that contract requires exquisite care and outstanding communication. And the preparation for widescale and spontaneous disorder if the wheels fall off.
The Chancellor said yesterday that this was no time for ideology and orthodoxy when he threw the economic rule book in the skip. This must also be the case when it comes to safely managing prisons in their central work of protecting the public. There are a core number of people in prison (perhaps as low as 30 per cent of the current population) who we must absolutely ensure remain locked up for the duration of this crisis – terrorists, sex offenders and those who have committed a violent offence among them. In order to do this with a sufficient and healthy number of staff, we do need to start thinking outside the prison box.
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