Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons in Scotland (Annual Report 2011-12)
Agenda item 2 is the annual report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons in Scotland. We will receive evidence from Brigadier Hugh Monro, whom I welcome to the meeting. I know that you sat through the whole of the previous part of the meeting on a very uncomfortable chair, Brigadier. We will do something about that. This is the first time that the committee has considered the chief inspector’s annual report, but it is not the first time that the chief inspector has appeared before us. I welcome you back.
We will start with questions from members—it is their turn this time.
Good morning. I will kick off by asking a bit more about the personal officer scheme, which is referred to in the report. You suggest that the scheme is not working very well. Perhaps you can tell us why it is not working very well and what steps could be taken to improve it.
Brigadier Hugh Monro (Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons)
Thank you for inviting me here. It is a great honour to be asked about the annual report and I thank Roderick Campbell for his question. The personal officer scheme goes to the heart of what the Prison Service is about in terms of rehabilitating prisoners into the community.
I heard something on the radio this morning about the mentoring of prisoners and the delivery of prisoners from prison back into the community, and I think that the personal officer scheme represents the Scottish Prison Service’s contribution to that—and, by the way, it is free, because we are already paying for prison officers. In my view, it is a service that should be provided. I know that everyone in the Prison Service has agreed, yet in almost every prison that I go to, there are a number of things that I see are not happening.
First, I do not see prison officers who have been trained to do the job of personal officer, which I think needs a bit of training. Not all prison officers are ideal fits for such mentoring support, so I think that something could be done to train and encourage officers. That is an important aspect. The absence of that is one of the main reasons why the scheme does not work very well. The other main reason is that I do not think that managers in halls or unit managers more widely are prepared to supervise and to lead the scheme in a way that I think would make a dynamic difference. If we put all those elements together, we would have a much better system.
In addition, I do not think that the scheme should be confined to just those prison officers who work in the residential halls, which is currently the main intended practice. I think that any person who works on the staff in a prison may have a particular attribute that makes them effective in providing such support. Therefore, as well as a training process, there ought to be a selection process for how the scheme is best provided.
We need to put all that together and have properly trained and selected staff who are properly led and supervised. There also needs to be measurement. I do not see nearly enough measurement of progress on who is providing the scheme, who is looking after which prisoners and whether they are doing so in the most appropriate way. We must also look at how the prisoners do within prison—whether they go to work, education and so on—what their connections with their families are like and how they will progress once they get out into the community.
That is rather a lot, but it is absolutely fundamental to what the Scottish Prison Service should be doing in rehabilitating prisoners and delivering them back into the community.
Will the Scottish Prison Service board and its new chief executive be receptive to those comments?
I certainly think so. The context in which I have delivered the report, which is the third of the four that I am to produce in my period as chief inspector, is one of a new leadership for the Prison Service. The annual report that we are discussing is for last year, as it were—the year up until April 2012. Since then, we have seen a real difference in the direction in which the Prison Service intends to go, with the appointment of a new executive.
My personal view is that, once the governance of the board has been sorted out—which I know the chief executive is keen to do—and once we see how the board intends to take such issues forward, we will see a much bigger improvement in how the scheme is implemented. I also think that there will be an improvement in the training and development of the staff who will deliver it.
However, it is important to make the point that, as chief inspector, I inspect only what I see; I do not inspect good intentions or strategic plans. On this question and a raft of others, I can tell you only what I see and the evidence that I gather.
Does anyone else have a question on the same topic—preparations for release and so on?
That not being the case, we will hear from John Finnie.
Good morning, Brigadier Monro. As a Highlands and Islands representative, I want to ask about legalised police cells, all but one of which are in the Highlands and Islands. What level of use do you understand is made of legalised police cells?
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The level of use is relatively low, so I have recommended that a number of police cells be closed, because I do not think that they are relevant. That is because of the contract for escorting prisoners from normal police cells to an appropriate prison. However, clearly in the Highlands and Islands and the Northern Isles, there could be a logistical problem that might be compounded by poor weather. For example, I personally inspected Kirkwall legalised police cell—I know that it is not in your area—and although, as far as I can remember off the top of my head, it had hardly been used in the previous 12 months, that does not mean to say that it should not be there. Where it is relevant and geographically sensible, such cells should continue.
I do not know if that gets to the answer that you wanted.
Yes, it does. The logistics of prisoner transfer are important so, given that Lochmaddy is in what we would refer to as the southern part of the Western Isles and that there are challenges in trying to get off the islands, why is there a recommendation to dispense with Lochmaddy?
I will need to come back to you on that issue, but the level of use at Lochmaddy is particularly low and there was a feeling that prisoners could be flown out if necessary. However, I will come back to you on that, if I may, Mr Finnie. That would be the sensible thing to do.
Convener, may I ask a couple of other questions please?
Certainly. No one is waiting with supplementaries.
A comment was made about outdoor exercise. I presume that there will be a follow-up inspection of that. Are records kept of people being exercised in the fresh air?
Yes, indeed. When we make such a comment, we follow it up. I expect the Scottish Prison Service to run an action plan on each of my reports and we will look at those action plans. If we commented on outdoor exercise in a particular prison, we will follow that up, either formally, by going back to reinspect the prison, or informally, by keeping an eye on the action plan and visiting the prison just to double-check. I set great store by outdoor exercise and care about whether people are appropriately dressed, and so on, so I would go back and double-check that.
Finally, are you content with the lines of responsibility for someone who is in a legalised cell? Who is responsible for that person?
I think that I will need to come back to you on that one. You are asking particularly about legalised police cells.
Yes, indeed.
You can just write to the committee, Brigadier.
I have a question about sex offenders. You make specific reference to what you call the penal cul-de-sac, with particular reference to Dumfries prison. Anecdotally, we know that there are other cul-de-sacs within the prison estate.
The general public is vexed by the threat from sex offenders, and the evidence is that they can be prolific offenders when they return to the community. Do you have any comments on the way forward in managing and dealing with sex offenders? Are you concerned about such penal cul-de-sacs creating new networks and associations among those who offend?
You also mentioned the reoffending programmes that are run in prisons. Do you have any evidence to indicate the success or otherwise of such programmes?
I will start with the penal cul-de-sac. That comment was specifically targeted at Dumfries prison and the sex offenders who refuse to admit their guilt and have been sent there for that reason, and who were therefore not getting access to sex offender programmes that were, at that time, being run at Peterhead prison and are now run at Glenochil. I felt strongly that that was not a healthy way forward, either for the sex offenders or for the staff and the prison as a whole. I was trying to get the Scottish Prison Service to produce a strategy for managing sex offenders—at that stage there was not even a draft strategy—because I felt that all we were doing was shipping the awkward squad down to Dumfries and, as I said, that was not healthy. I am pleased to say that that has changed—there is certainly a draft strategy now. I would need to go back to Dumfries, which I am doing in January, to double-check that there has been some movement forwards on the issue.
On the penal cul-de-sac business, I go back to the point about mentoring. There is a danger that we put certain prisoners into a place and leave them there. We secure them, as it were, which is fine, but that is not trying to motivate, lead and progress them. What I really worry about is that at some stage offenders will be released from those conditions directly back into the community. That does not seem to be a sensible way of progressing when those offenders should have had the benefit of a sex offender programme that would challenge their behaviour.
I do not produce solutions; I merely ask the questions. At what stage do we “test” sex offenders in open conditions? How do we do that without raising the risks associated with putting sex offenders in the public domain, not only in the public’s perception but in reality? The counter to that is that if we release sex offenders directly from closed conditions, is not the risk just as high if not higher?
I take account of the multi-agency public protection arrangements—I am perfectly clear about those. We try to deliver those arrangements pretty well in Scotland but there are a lot of questions to ask, not just about the penal cul-de-sac but about how we get sex offenders back into the community.
That takes me on to the last point that you raised, which is the business of sex offender programmes. I cannot tell you, and no one has told me, how effective those programmes are at dealing with sex offenders and challenging their behaviour. No one has told me whether the programmes are worth while and what the reoffending rate is.
Sex offenders are extremely difficult to understand. The public find the subject extremely difficult to understand. That is why we need a bit of clarity on the issue. I would like to know more about risks—-whether we are raising risks and how we lower risks. I am not in any way trying to be an expert, but are sex offenders rather like alcoholics, in that abstinence is good for them—they will get that in prison, hopefully—but once they are released, their behaviour goes back to what it was before? Is it rather like an alcoholic visiting the pub outside the prison gates? I do not know the answer, and no one has ever explained it to me in a sensible fashion that is worthy of the public.
Do you get the impression from the Scottish Prison Service that it attaches sufficient priority to the challenge that you have identified here and that it will respond to that challenge with the speed that you would welcome?
We are in a better place than we were when I inspected Peterhead and Dumfries a couple of years ago. Obviously, we have moved the offenders from Peterhead to Glenochil and they now have their own residential block in Glenochil—they are in one place there. I need to go back and look at that.
The issue has at least been addressed by the Scottish Prison Service. A sex offender working group is looking at it and trying to sort out the cul-de-sac issue. I am not in any way suggesting that this is easy, because it is not. I find it difficult to understand the people who will not admit their guilt and are resolute in doing so. That is why we need to understand the issue better and why we need a strategy. I would like staff to be trained to deal with the issue. I will probably come back to staff training in relation to a number of issues, but staff must be trained to deal with sex offenders. How do they motivate someone whom they do not understand? How do they try to take them forward? Those are big questions, and I do not know what the answers are.
Was there not a programme at Peterhead many years ago that involved special training, in which sex offenders first had to recognise that they had committed an offence? What happened to it?
The sex offender treatment programme known as STOP, to which I think you are referring, has now moved into the Scottish Prison Service good lives programme, which is still very much in evidence. However, I have not seen evidence of how successful those initiatives are, and we are finding difficulties in trying to understand the issues and move forward. There is not only a training issue, but a throughcare issue.
I acknowledge that it is a thorny problem that is not easy to resolve, and by no means do I feel that the organisation is reticent in dealing with it. However, given the on-going damage that those offenders do in our communities, which lasts a lifetime, I take it that you would agree that the issue—difficult as it is—needs some additional attention. Measuring what works, what is successful and how to assess risk properly when returning offenders to the community is an important priority that we should address as quickly as we can.
Indeed, and I absolutely accept what you say about priority. That is why we have tried to make the issue a priority.
When I inspected the Castle Huntly open prison earlier this year, I was slightly surprised to find that there were only—I think that I am right in saying—fewer than five, and perhaps only two, sex offenders in the prison. However, in the previous 12 months we have released around 150 sex offenders directly from closed conditions, without testing them in open conditions.
I do not know whether that is right or wrong, but we need some evidence and some help with the matter of risk because, as you rightly point out, we do not have that.
Good morning. I have two separate questions.
First, you produced your second follow-up report on Cornton Vale earlier this year, in which you noted that unsatisfactory progress had been made on about a third of your recommendations. Since then, there has been a radical change of heart, which we have all welcomed. However, we need to caution against saying that everything is fixed. There is still a short-term problem at Cornton Vale, and I would be interested to hear about which issues you think still need to be picked up.
I was particularly concerned, as you were, by the use of the silent cells. I know that there is now a new separation and reintegration unit, but there has been an overreliance on such facilities. Although the fabric might have been improved, it would concern me if the mindset had not changed and the facility was still being used in the way that it had been previously. Do you share those concerns? Can you speak more generally about what we still need to monitor at Cornton Vale in the short term?
It was recognised when I attended the committee meeting previously that huge progress has been made. I was interested to hear Kate Donegan’s view on how the commission on women offenders—and also, I hope, the inspectorate’s reports—has changed the landscape.
We hope that the Justice Committee had a bit to do with it as well—you should not forget us.
And the Justice Committee, convener.
Alison McInnes was promoting the issue.
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I entirely agree with you, convener. The discomfort of my seat in the public gallery must have affected me. You had better strike that from the record. [Laughter.]
Your political support has been very important in that regard. I was interested to hear the discussion about mental health in the previous evidence session. In no other prison in Scotland is the mental health situation as stark as it is at Cornton Vale. In many respects, that is because—as someone said earlier—the women do not get into the services. They do not try to connect and sort out their own problems; those are very much on show. Those of you who have been to Ross house, for example, will know that it is a pretty discouraging scene.
I have been quite specific in my reports about mental health services at Cornton Vale. One issue has been the extent to which staff who are dealing with extremely challenging mental health issues are appropriately trained. There has been some progress, as the second follow-up report indicated, on mentalisation training and so on. However, we are dealing with really challenging people, particularly those who are in the separation and care unit. At some stage, a strategic judgment will have to be made about those very challenging mental health issues and whether we are prepared just to put those people in prison; to send them off to another institution to deal with their issues; or to invest in appropriate training and facilities for prisons. If one is going to build a new female prison, one might think about that. There is an issue with the training of staff and how they look after people with seriously challenging mental health issues.
The second area that we have been involved in has been the segregation of those challenging women. When I produced the reports, I had a particular concern about the so-called back cells, the cells in Younger house, which were utterly shocking and horrible to be honest. We have encouraged the creation of—and we now have—a new unit, which is real progress, but I question why it has taken us three years to get there given that a morning spent in one of those cells is too long. There is a fundamental question to be asked about that.
The other question about segregation is how long someone should sit in a segregation unit. I am talking not just about female offenders. As you and I know, there are women who have been there for over a year. In whose interest is that? It is certainly not in the interest of the offender; it is not in the interest of the staff; and, in my view, it is not in the interest of Scotland. It is shaming. In essence, we are accepting defeat and saying that we have failed to take the person on either clinically or by mentoring them and leading them to a better way. There are significant questions to be asked about the long-term segregation of people with mental health issues.
I do not know whether that answers your question.
Yes, very thoroughly. I have no doubt that your three reports on Cornton Vale were what sparked the change of heart. You are to be greatly thanked for the work that you have done. It is my view that it is an abuse of those individuals’ human rights to keep them alone in their cells for such a long time. We need to pursue that, and your response has been helpful.
My other question relates to your annual report. You pose the question whether it is possible that the use of remand is increasing reoffending rates rather than reducing them. I would be interested in your thoughts on that point.
We were at Clive Fairweather’s memorial service last week. He produced the original report to which I referred in my annual report, and we should pay tribute to him for starting this off. It is interesting that an increasing number of people who have not yet been either proven guilty or sentenced are sitting in prison. I worry about that. As I say in my report, I worry about whether it is appropriate for them to be held in custody. I do not think that any of us would fuss about them being held in custody if it was entirely about safety and security. If it is in their own interests or those of the community that they be held in custody, I would not worry about it, but I do not know how many of the people on remand fall into that category.
If remand exists purely for administrative convenience—that sounds like a rather throwaway line, but we are talking about people who have a chaotic lifestyle, have probably committed a number of offences and have a history of failing to turn up to court—we must ask whether custody is the right way forwards. Are there not other ways of ensuring that the court’s orders are adhered to? I have a concern about that.
I also have a concern about how people on remand are being treated in prison. Particularly if a prison is overcrowded, not as much direct intervention takes place with prisoners on remand as with other prisoners. I find that perplexing. As I think I say in the report, prisoners who are on remand have access to physical exercise in the gymnasium and, potentially, good access to their families—privileged access to families compared with other prisoners—but is it not an opportunity to intervene in other ways, particularly if they are younger people? If young people are in the last-chance saloon, remand gives us an opportunity to do something about it, whether they are guilty or not guilty.
The last piece is whether prisoners on remand have lost their house, their job or their family. Can we do remand in another way that means that they do not have to lose those three things and that allows them to carry on with their job or go to school if they are of that age? I do not know how we would do that; perhaps we would think about putting them in prison overnight.
We must address the issue differently. I am not trying to criticise the courts or suggest that the issue is easy, but we need to consider it practically and try to come up with better solutions.
Are you optimistic that dialogue will now happen or are you still uncomfortable about it?
I do not inspect optimism.
That is another person who will not smile, along with Graeme Pearson.
I have a supplementary question on remand. I go back to the days when Clive Fairweather was the inspector of prisons—we were at his memorial service together. He said exactly the same as you are saying 13 years later—which is a bit depressing—about the conditions for prisoners on remand being worse and there being too many people on remand. Also, 50 per cent of them are not convicted, so they have been in prison for a period although they are innocent.
I am not sure about this, but I do not think that tagging is used for people who are on remand. If they are not a danger to the public, could we use tagging and keep them in their jobs and with their families while they go through the court process?
I am saying that we need to consider the matter much more widely. What are the opportunities for doing that? We should separate the people whom the court felt were a security or safety issue from those who were just troublesome in another way. I am sure that there are ways of doing that. We now have much more intelligent tagging systems that would fit that bill very well.
Have you raised that anywhere?
Not that specific question, convener. I can only report on the issues; I can only tell you what I see and write a report.
I was asking whether there had been a response from the SPS or the Cabinet Secretary for Justice on alternatives to placing people in prison on remand. They are still innocent until proven guilty. There may be an issue about them being a danger to the public in certain circumstances, but in other circumstances there is not. Therefore, as long as we could track where they are—in their home or wherever—they could keep their jobs, especially because, as we now know, 50 per cent are not convicted at the end of the court process, so we bang up people who are innocent.
I certainly had acknowledgement from the cabinet secretary and officials. I know that good work is going on in the Government to look at the issue, but I have not seen specific ways forward that are going to be implemented. All I can do is raise the issue, which I think is one that really needs to be tackled.
We could raise it as well.
Was records information made available to you that dealt with different categories of people on remand? For example, someone might be remanded because of the threat of potential intimidation of witnesses or because they might commit further offences. Did you get detailed information on different categories of remand prisoner?
No, I did not. We looked at remand as a general category. The 50 per cent figure was approximate. I do not have a PhD in statistics, so I had to be careful about how I dealt with the information. I know that work is going on in the Scottish Government to look at what happens to remand prisoners but, rather like the reoffending rate, it is not an easy category to measure. That is why I was fairly approximate in my statistics. To answer your specific question, I did not see how many remand prisoners were in what might be called a particular safety or security category.
Thank you. That is something that the committee could take up with the Scottish Government.
I intended to ask about overcrowding and the remand situation, so most of my questions have been answered, but I wonder why so many prisoners are on remand. I know that some are in and out because of being on bail. Do you have an answer as to why so many are on remand?
I do not think that I have. I think that there are—
Forgive me, but I think that that is a matter for the sheriffs and the judiciary to make decisions about.
I was going to come on to that, but I thought that I would ask that question just now.
It is not really a matter for the chief inspector of prisons to know why a sheriff decided that somebody should be put on remand.
I will ask another question. Have you ever raised that issue with sheriffs, prisoners or anyone else?
I have done so informally. One asks such questions in informal discussions with sheriffs, but I do not want to put sheriffs in an awkward position.
We should not pursue this. It would be unfair to ask about informal discussions that the chief inspector has had with members of the bench.
I think that the answer is possibly that sheriffs and so on are not giving custodial sentences, but I will leave that aside. I have another question.
You referred to activities in prison. It has been suggested that remand prisoners cannot get involved in such activities because of the need to separate them from convicted prisoners. Overcrowding is also an issue in that regard. There is no legal requirement for remand prisoners to do work in prison. How could we get round that? The convener said that perhaps people could be tagged rather than remanded. Would it not be helpful for people, though, to be involved in activities in prison? How do we get round the difficulty of their not being able to be involved in such activities?
This comes back to my points about mentoring and leadership. I have referred to the prison regime and having to keep remand prisoners separate from those serving sentences. In many respects, that is entirely right. Further, a number of those on remand do not want to engage in activities, and because they are not under sentence there is little effort to try to encourage them. I would like to see more encouragement. More outreach is perhaps possible, not so much for them to go into the education centre, but perhaps for education and encouragement to be offered to them.
I was interested to hear the committee’s earlier discussion about addictions. Some remand prisoners may well have an addiction. Although the clinical medical services will deal with that and although individuals will be on methadone or whatever, there could be some engagement on alcohol and drugs. After all, if one hopes to get such a service outside prison, why cannot it be offered inside prison? I do not think that there should be any stigma attached to that.
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We have to look at these people as an opportunity, not a threat. For goodness’ sake, they have not yet been found—and might well not be—guilty. In any case, it does not matter; the police or the court has decided that they should be in prison, and there might be an underlying issue that can be dealt with. We ought to make an effort to treat these people as individuals and induct them into prison in a way that shows more of an understanding and at least makes an attempt to get them on the right course, if only to ensure that they are connected when they go back outside. I simply do not see enough of that going on.
Thank you very much. That was a very interesting point.
I have two questions, the first of which follows on from Sandra White’s question. After visiting Castle Huntly, Perth, Polmont and Cornton Vale prisons earlier this year, I was struck by the lack of what you call in your report “purposeful activity” as well as properly structured and thought-out rehabilitation programmes. I know that you have made some comments about the remand programme, but how satisfied are you in general with the rehabilitative programmes in our prisons?
From a strategic point of view, I am not very satisfied at all with delivery. What is the point of prison? It has, of course, a safety and security element and a punishment element, but if we are to reduce reoffending and give people another chance they must have the very best possible access to purposeful activity that suits them as an individual to give them the best possible chance when they get out and to give the community the best possible chance of connecting with them to take them forward. I do not think that enough is being done about that.
Sometimes we use the word “rehabilitation” wrongly. I do not mean to stigmatise people with a general comment, but the term assumes that at one stage offenders had the proper foundations for a successful life. However, many of these people did not have such proper foundations. Many found education to be a challenge; many have got a drug and/or alcohol problem; and many might have had a pretty chaotic upbringing or lifestyle. Rehabilitation suggests that we take people back to where they were before, but the fact is that we need almost to start again and rebuild those foundations to ensure that when people come out of prison they have a much better chance of surviving.
My point, which I think you are throwing back at me, is that rehabilitation and the building of such foundations should be absolutely central to the functioning of prisons and that we should get the maximum number of people into work, vocational training or education. I note that the wage structure for prisoners is interesting. If they go into education, their wage drops. I find that rather bizarre.
From what you have seen in our prisons, what do you think is the best way of putting these programmes together? Do we need a national strategy? Should it be up to the individual leadership—by which I mean the prison governors—or is it incumbent on the colleges that have been tasked to deliver these programmes to do this? How far up the food chain should such a strategy go?
If we had a national view about the point of rehabilitation and what it is trying to deliver, we might be able to measure that in a sensible way when people get back out into the community.
There is an issue about the contract for the education providers, Motherwell College and Carnegie College, which was signed just over a year ago. The contract is very much based on literacy and numeracy, but those issues are not always the problem. That kind of approach is very narrow; we should have taken a wider approach to education and learning and focused on what was most appropriate for the individual.
When I inspected Castle Huntly this year—I think that this is in the report—I specifically commented that the education centre in the open prison, at the end of the prison process, is still talking about literacy and numeracy. At that final stage, surely we should be talking about how we are going to deliver people into the community. If people have not learned to read and write by the time that they get to Castle Huntly, there is not much hope for them. We need to apply education and learning in the most appropriate way for the people whom we are talking about, whether they be young offenders or people who are getting out into the community.
There needs to be—I do not know whether strategy is the right word—not only delivery of what we are trying to do but measurement of the throughcare process. Again, as with many of the other things that we have been talking about, no one can tell me how well we are doing on this. The figures that I quoted in my previous report were really very low. At that stage, I think that the proportion of prisoners out at activities was 35 per cent at Cornton Vale and 50 per cent at Glenochil. If rehabilitation is so important, surely the figure should be up in the 80s and 90s. Everyone should be encouraged to participate in an activity either within their hall or elsewhere in the prison. If the figure is not up into the 80s and 90s, I think that we are failing.
I will make just one other point, which is about technology. Addiewell prison has technology whereby prisoners go to—you will have seen this—a hole in the wall where they can dial up their food menus, arrange their visits and book their activity for the week ahead. Because that technology has a database behind it, when I said to the people at Addiewell, “Your access to activities is at only 65 per cent, which is not good enough,” they were able to increase that by 15 per cent by the time of my follow-up inspection because they could interrogate the database and do their timetabling better. In other words, they were able to get the right people to the right place at the right time. Ironically, only the private prisons have that technology with a database to manage prisoners. None of our new prisons has that new technology, so they are not able to interrogate the database and get the right people to the right place at the right time. That is a very local issue, but in my view that is exactly the sort of spending that we should be encouraging.
Brigadier, can you give us your thoughts on the Government’s proposal to change the arrangements for the prison visiting committees?
I am not sure that I should; I can give a very short answer.
You tease us by saying, “I am not sure that I should,” but then go on to say something.
The reason that I say that is because Professor Andrew Coyle is looking at whether I should take over the monitoring of prisons and have within the inspectorate, and under my charge, a prison monitoring service. I think that those arrangements have been made public, and I have said that I would be content to take that on under certain provisions. However, while Professor Coyle is doing his review for the cabinet secretary, I think that it would probably be wrong for me to go into any more detail, if that is all right.
That is very diplomatic. In any event, I think that our committee will take evidence on what I believe will be an affirmative instrument on the prison visiting committees.
In your response to Alison McInnes you mentioned that your report cites examples of good practice and not so good practice on family access. What is your view of the way in which those whom you have been critical of are taking on the issue of family visits and general interaction? Given those criticisms and the problems that have obviously been encountered, how do you think the forward planning on that is going?
Thank you for raising the issue of family visits, which are a really important part of prison. I am absolutely clear in my mind that Scotland should be at the leading edge of family visits. We need to understand that it is not about arranging visits to prisons; it is about making a genuine attempt to rehabilitate prisoners into the community better, using families as the solution, not the problem. It is about making a genuine attempt to get everyone to understand how we can do that and about making a genuine attempt to engage with the families of prisoners in order to help them. The families may have issues around health or education or other wider aspects that visiting centres in prisons can help with.
It is absolutely central to what prisons are trying to do, so I was made very unhappy in the past, first by the real resistance to my proposal that every prison should have a visitor centre such as those at Edinburgh and Perth, because those centres are where we can support and help prisoners’ families so much better.
There was also resistance in many respects to trying to make visiting facilities of a sufficient standard—that point is particularly relevant to Cornton Vale. Indeed, in some prisons the visit room arrangements were frankly shocking—Cornton Vale was a particular case and Aberdeen was an example until it produced a portakabin, which was much better.
Since April this year, with the new chief executive coming along, there has been a complete change. The resistance that I felt in the past has gone and we are now pushing at an open door. I spoke to Kate Donegan last night at the prisoner week service at Dunblane cathedral—a great event. I was particularly pleased to hear that the new visitor centre at Cornton Vale will be up and running quite soon. I am not quite sure exactly when “quite soon” is, but the situation is much better than it was. That will make a huge difference. Just the fact that the chief executive immediately accepted not only my recommendation but, in particular, Dame Elish Angiolini’s recommendation on that was such a change in how the Prison Service views the issue that I am now optimistic—I am almost tempted to inspect that optimism.
To answer your question, we need to look at how to take that forward. First, we must ensure that there is provision in new prisons for a proper up-and-running visitor centre and I am glad to hear that there will be one at Grampian. I am sure that in any future prison there will be one—that will be a huge step forward. How we then backfill, as it were, older prisons will be difficult but it must be done. I have been to visitor centres in England. I think that I am right in saying that every prison in England has a visitor centre, but principally to process visitors rather than anything else. However, there they can use a portakabin. We do not have to have an architectural gem such as the one at Edinburgh prison to make a visitor centre—it can be a portakabin. We need to backfill all those old prisons that do not have a centre.
We also need to look at what those visitor centres are doing. I think that they need to do more than just provide a cup of coffee and an arm round a shoulder. This is where health and education can become part of the connections that we can make with families. These are families who are coming from, in many cases, the most difficult and challenging parts of Scotland so why do we not use those centres to try to support and help the families better? We need to take visitor centres a stage further forward—call them help centres or something and see whether they cannot do even better and produce a better result.
For example, I do a lot of dealings with Dyslexia Scotland. I come across a lot of prisoners who have dyslexia and who are often not properly assessed, so I have to take their word for it. I am told that dyslexia is often passed on from generation to generation. Why is there not, for example, at each visitor centre information for families about dyslexia? The children may well be dyslexic. Have they been tested?
There are lots of things that we can do with the centres. We need to have much more ambition about the way in which we deliver families into prisons and to make that more acceptable in future.
I am not sure whether that has answered your question.
It sounded good enough for me.
12:30
You mentioned that the family contact officer should be given a higher priority. Is there only one family contact officer in a prison or are there several? If they are not given a high priority, are they low down in the pecking order?
It depends. Most prisons would, I hope, have at least two or three. Is that enough? It depends—how long is a piece of string? At Polmont, where there is quite a high parental interest in what is going on, I would like to see more. How do you keep family contact going with young people, particularly those who are under 18? I think that they have just increased the number of contact officers at Polmont.
I remember inspecting Glenochil and saying that it needed more family contact officers. It put more in place, but then, because it had a staff shortage, it had to take them away again. From that we can take away the fact that family contact officers are probably not the highest priority in the prison. Should they be? Yes. Given the answer that I have just given, I am absolutely convinced that that is the way forward. If we are really going to connect families with both prisoners and communities, we have to make a real change in the way that we take things forward.
The issue is not just about the prisoner but about the community and the prisoner’s family within the community. At a service last night in Dunblane, I heard that, when prisoners are released from prison in Singapore, the community celebrates—people tie yellow ribbons round the old oak tree, and so on. We do not celebrate that at all. The community is not ready for that to happen; people are almost of the opposite view. I wonder whether, if we invested more in our families, we would be investing more in how communities deal with the whole situation in a more positive fashion.
It may be that you have no advice to offer us, but I will ask my question anyway. A high proportion of people in our prisons come from a background of having been in care and having been looked after. Given the privileged access that you have had to prisons over the years and the knowledge that you have accrued, and in the context of everything that you have just said, do you have any advice for the committee about the linkage between children in care and how some of them come into the criminal justice system and prison? Are there things that occur to you that we should bear in mind in order to deal with that potential link? It seems that a high proportion of people who end up in Polmont have come from a care background.
That is absolutely right. Although I do not inspect secure units, I have visited three such units. I sometimes wonder whether we are getting a real return on the considerable amount of money we invest in them and whether we need greater involvement from third sector organisations that could treat people as individuals in the community. I visit a number of third sector organisations who do precisely that: mentor in the community and try to help each person make progress. I am not sure whether that has answered your question about care, but I think that each individual child needs that help.
It is not clear to me—I have not seen the figures—how many young people in secure units go on to Polmont. I asked about that when I visited the secure units about two years ago. The precise figure was indistinct, but my impression was that more than 65 per cent were going on to Polmont. That seems a very high rate, given the investment in secure units and the process that goes on there.
That is not intended to be a criticism of secure units; it is perhaps a criticism of our lack of understanding of the data. Why are so many young people going on to Polmont? Is it because they have been given such long sentences that they will go there in any case? That would be understandable. Is it because they will reoffend if they go back into the community? If that is the case, we need to understand the figure a bit better.
I understand your response and your perspective on the matter. It came as a shock to me to discover that the majority of children who are in residential care—outwith detention units—are there not because of criminality but because of a breakdown in family circumstances and other issues. What worries me is that a substantial number of children who go into care end up in the criminal justice system. In your journeys around prisons, have you gleaned anything that would give us a hint about what we might do about that link? Once a child is in a detention centre, the deal is almost broken, as it were; I am thinking about an earlier stage.
We worry about what young people in Polmont learn from one another, so we should perhaps have the same worry about children in care. There is the same issue in secure units. A person might go to a secure unit—or into care, I guess—because of a behavioural problem or other underlying issue that is not a criminal justice issue, and they might well then meet people who come from a criminal background, who are—I put this in inverted commas—“bad”. In that case, is it wise to put people in such a situation?
That is where we perhaps need a third sector approach. For example, Includem takes an individual-in-the-community approach, as opposed to putting people together in care. I am probably speaking from the edge of my knowledge here, but such an approach might be of benefit.
The Justice Committee encounters such huge and complex issues all the time. What you are talking about probably merits a separate inquiry.
Do you want to comment on the evidence that we heard earlier about the transfer of healthcare delivery from the SPS to the NHS?
It was an interesting session. I thought that Frank Gibbons’s comment about it being early days was intriguing. Before the transfer, he was one of my healthcare inspectors—I now use an inspector from Healthcare Improvement Scotland—so I know him well. He has a deep knowledge and understanding of prison healthcare, so his view that these are still early days is relevant.
Frank Gibbons’s comment was certainly relevant to me. I have inspected only four prisons since the NHS took over and I cannot give much more than a general picture of where we are. It is certainly true to say that the process of transfer went well, although each prison and the health board that it was dealing with might have done things differently. The complications are compounded by the fact that some prisons are national prisons, some are local prisons and some are both, but we have got through the process of transfer perfectly well.
The important point to take away is that now that the transfer has taken place there is a good opportunity for improvement. The important point is that throughcare can improve greatly and is beginning to do so.
I still have two major areas of concern, which I have raised before. The first involves addictions. In my previous annual report, I said that not enough is done to encourage and support prisoners to come off methadone or reduce their use of it. Methadone is a perfectly sensible medical mechanism, but I too often see prisoners either maintaining their dosage or even increasing it. I would like more thought to be put into how we deliver that treatment. I am not trying to make a clinical point—that is not my business—but I think that we need to consider whether there is enough mentoring, leadership and persuasion involved in how we deal with the complex underlying issues.
Connected to the issue of addiction is a concern that not enough is done about alcoholism. I do not think that there is sufficient access to alcohol treatment programmes. Much more of an effort is made on drugs.
The final point that I would make on addiction is that I do not think that there is sufficient measurement of trends—again, I have mentioned this in reports. What drugs are we talking about? How are we dealing with them? Is the use of heroin going up or down in prison? Why are we not measuring the trends in the prison population? Is the number of people who test positive for drugs when they enter prison going up or down? The measurement is poorly done.
I also do not think that we have a proper, comprehensive drug-testing regime. If we had one, we would have a much better clue about the smuggling of drugs into prison. Is it still an issue? If so, what can we do about it?
The second major area of concern relates to mental health, which has been discussed quite a lot this morning. I have a particular concern about mental health training, not just for the experts but for the whole prison.
There has been an interesting discussion, but I think that there is still a lot of work to do.
As you heard us say, we will probably return to the questions in six months’ time to see whether we are getting the same or similar answers or whether there has been progress.
You have had a long morning, waiting to speak and answering questions. I thank you for your attendance.