Prison Visits
Item 4 on the agenda is a report on our prison visits. Members have visited Barlinnie, Edinburgh, Inverness, Low Moss, Perth and Polmont over the past two weeks, and Alison McInnes and I are going to Addiewell tomorrow morning.
Detailed written reports have been provided in the meeting papers. However, it might, especially given our next agenda item, be helpful to go round the table and highlight—that is the keyword; do not go through the whole paper—the most important things.
I also apologise to Roderick Campbell, whose name has been put incorrectly on the front of the paper. That must have made him cry.
In the following item, we will take evidence from Colin McConnell, who is the chief executive of the Scottish Prison Service and is in the gallery just now. I ask committee members to bear that in mind when they highlight things, because they are already hinting at where they will go with their questions.
John Finnie was at Inverness prison. I ask him to highlight the issues to which he wishes to draw attention.
We were made welcome. A lot of positive work is going on in Inverness. The issues include the limitations caused by the building’s construction and the consequent capacity for meaningful work to be undertaken.
On page 3 of the paper, there is a note about a project on pathways into offending. We need to follow up on that and keep a keen interest in it.
There are many similarities in the reports, so there is no point in highlighting the various work streams that exist in Inverness. Limitations on the education that can be provided there are primarily to do with the fact that the chapel is used for education and the clergy person who is in charge of it places some limitations on its use.
On a positive note, there is a female offenders unit at Inverness; 24 prisoners have been through the unit in the past three years, of whom only three have reoffended. The quality of the fabric of that wing might be an indication of how folk respond if we treat them in a certain way. It is also significant that former prisoners have continuing links with the unit; those who have left occasionally phone in for reassurance and advice. Some of them are in meaningful, gainful employment.
There are many positives, but the structure of the building places limitations on the prison. The fact that it is right in the centre of the town also creates some difficulties.
Perhaps later we can ask why the women’s unit is so successful. That is interesting.
Colin Keir and David McLetchie both went to Saughton. It is HMP Edinburgh, but I call it Saughton. Perhaps they would like to say something about it. David and Colin—it is rather like a routine.
The prisoners’ work programme has limitations, many of which are to do with the significant number of relatively short-stay prisoners, in that it is harder to get them on meaningful programmes. That is probably the biggest weakness in the schedule. On the other side of the coin, there are meaningful activities, too, so I do not just dismiss everything out of hand, although I got the impression that the programme is not as well structured or organised as it might be.
I agree. We saw some impressive work activities, such as portable appliance testing and woodwork, but there are fundamental problems, particularly with the short-term prisoner population. Some prisoners do not have the inclination to do anything, so getting them involved can be difficult. Those are the real issues. There is a shortage of about 250 activities places, which creates some pressure, but the underlying issue, particularly for those on short-term sentences, is that they face a very mundane day.
At the end of our visit, we had a discussion with two prisoners who were due for release later in the week. When we asked them about short-term sentences and the issues of deterrence, punishment and rehabilitation, their answer was that their term in prison was an “inconvenience”. Boredom is an issue. As a result of my visits, my view on short-term prison sentences is becoming harder: to be honest, I do not think that they are worth much.
Your report mentions internet restrictions and states that internet access for educational purposes is provided successfully elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Did you pursue that?
From what I remember of the conversation that we had on that, the issue is about where to draw the line. Allowing internet access for educational purposes is one thing, but there could be access to other things out there on the internet. I have problems with that, although I understand why the educationists want a bit more access. There would have to be barriers to wider access to the internet.
Alison McInnes and I visited Polmont.
The visit was interesting and we were made very welcome. We had a good time exploring a number of things. There are particular challenges for a young offenders institution, because the community is more volatile and staff perhaps have to deal with more relationship issues. Because Polmont is a national institution, it has difficulties linking to local authorities. There is patchy involvement by local authorities: some are fairly actively involved in connecting with offenders in preparation for release, but others are not. That needs to be tackled.
Multiple agencies and partners are involved at Polmont. In some respects that is a good thing, but there are disconnects between them and different approaches are evident. One approach is that of youth and community bodies such as Barnardo’s, which actively encourages offenders to engage with classes and groups. There is also the more traditional college provider, which tends just to accept that a third of the prisoners at any one time will not engage—I think that that is what the person to whom we spoke said. I am concerned by such resignation, so I would like to explore how we could encourage everyone to be engaged in the available activities.
The governor at Polmont is relatively new—she is only a few months in post, I think—and has instructed a thorough review of all the activity. That analysis will be helpful, because it will allow us to see what works and what does not and, perhaps, to co-ordinate the activity better.
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I will add a couple of points to that. I accept the difficulties about internet-based learning and I agree with Alison McInnes about what I call education by stealth: for example, getting people in for plumbing and joinery and asking them to measure out a metre, when they do not know what a metre is. That way, learning has some purpose, rather than its being detached from ordinary life.
Another issue, which I raised in a mental health debate in Parliament, is that many prisoners do not have a general practitioner. Excellent work on drug, alcohol and mental health goes on, data are collected, and prisoners are treated before being discharged sometimes on a Saturday, when facilities such as housing services are not open. We cannot expect that every discharged prisoner will have someone to meet them, but we need somehow not to waste all the effort that the prison officers and medical teams make in prison. Often when prisoners are discharged they get a wee drop of money and, immediately, off they go—back to the way they were before.
The other issue is families and parenting. You should have seen my and Alison’s faces when we watched a young man feed his six-month-old child chocolate. We said nothing. He was a nice lad, and they were a very young couple with a young baby. We watched them and thought that they needed a proper family/parenting centre so that they could get the right training in how to do things. The man was there for a short time and the couple are lucky in that his partner travels from fairly nearby.
Alison McInnes was quite right that Polmont takes young offenders from the whole of Scotland. Twenty-five per cent of the lads there are parents. I nearly dropped when I heard that. Family centres, which we had heard about at Cornton Vale, are very important.
We want throughcare—as usual—and family centres to try to break the cycles. I noticed in Colin Keir and David McLetchie’s paper on Saughton that there are third-generation inmates. We need to stop not just people now, but the next generation going through the churn.
The next report is from Graeme Pearson, who was at Low Moss.
I attended Low Moss last week. It is a very modern prison; it will be a year old next month. It has 700 prisoners, which is just about full to capacity. There are nearly 120 remand prisoners; comments were made earlier about the difficulty of engaging with remand prisoners because encouraging them to participate in prison life and activity is something of a problem. Some of the other short-term prisoners also need to be encouraged to see the point of participation.
Low Moss has some unusual aspects. It has very tight external security; there are a significant number of external and internal closed-circuit television cameras to cover the environment, and the prison has a no-metal policy. Staff and management believe that the prison’s culture can be more relaxed because the external security is such that there is a high level of confidence that the internal area of the prison is reasonably secure, and contraband is reduced to an absolute minimum.
There is a curfew on TV access, so prisoners are put to bed at one o’clock in the morning and TVs are turned off. That seems to have had a positive effect on the prison, because it encourages prisoners to get a night’s sleep, which means that in the morning they are more engaged and determined to go out and do something. I understand that in many other prisons, prisoners are allowed to watch TV through the night. We all know that if people do that, in the morning they are not in the right frame of mind to engage.
Family visits are a main feature of the prison and families are encouraged to come in throughout the week as and when they wish. Family visits take place in the main hall, which looked to me like a gymnasium—you could play five-a-side football in it. However, there is no doubt that prison staff have made it as friendly for receiving families as possible and, apparently, it works. I did not see any families when I was there, but there is no doubting the staff’s enthusiasm. The area looks fresh, clean and tidy.
Cubs, scouts, brownies and guides are all encouraged to meet within the prison environment, and the children of the prisoners are encouraged to join the local cubs and scouts groups and so on. The hope is that those children will take that experience back with them to their own locales and estates, where they might maintain that kind of community involvement.
Prisoners are involved in work within the prison to maintain the prison environment. That includes stuff such as basic painting and window cleaning, which I think is a good thing. The governor is keen for external work to be included within the process at Low Moss. In the old Low Moss, which is now a long time gone, external work groups maintained the pathways, dealt with vandalism and cleaned up areas around East Dunbartonshire and apparently gave a lot of time and effort to the local community.
The first page of my report includes a breakdown of the hours dedicated to the various purposeful activities. Without in any way wishing to undermine the effort that the staff put into those activities, I think that it is very noticeable that “Offender behaviour programme attendance” had a mere 6,800 hours, whereas “Scheduled activity/work attendance” had 436,000 hours and “Other activity (eg PT, sports)” had nearly 52,000 hours. By comparison, the 6,800 hours for the offender behaviour programme perhaps pales into insignificance. The same is true of “Education attendance”, to which 21,500 hours were dedicated. Given the information that we have received over the past couple of years about the importance of education, a bit more effort needs to be given to education and to the offender behaviour programme.
I had a very positive visit. I was really impressed with the culture among the staff and management in Low Moss, who deserve encouragement.
Does “Education attendance” mean formally sitting down to learn to read, write and count, or does it include—as I think it should—applied education?
I think that the education includes all sorts of things. There may be a softness to it, in that prisoners who merely attend and show an interest will be included in the figures. However, prisoners are encouraged to develop practical skills so that they know how to measure, paint and build things, which I think should be encouraged.
Sandra, do you want to tell us about your visit to Barlinnie? You went to the Bar-L.
Yes—I think that is what they called it when we walked in. It was very interesting—
You got a hat out of it.
I got a hat and a mug—the clerk got a mug as well—which you cannot buy. Perhaps in later years the mug might appear as an heirloom on the “Antiques Roadshow”. I thank the clerk, Joanne Clinton, for all the notes that she took.
The visit was very interesting and I was impressed by the dedication of the governor and staff. They were very honest both with us and with the prisoners. We had a tour around most of the prison and met numerous prisoners in numerous areas. They, too, were very up front and honest with us, and were never led by the governor on how to answer questions or on what questions to ask. It was a very relaxed atmosphere in some areas.
Some problems are exactly as other members have raised, including lack of housing and employment opportunities for prisoners on release, particularly for those on short-term sentences and for remand prisoners.
An interesting issue is that remand prisoners do not participate in programmes or courses. The governor said that remand prisoners are often advised by their lawyers not to take part in any programmes or courses because that could be seen as an admission of guilt. I thought that that was a very interesting comment.
As I say in the report, we saw Theatre Nemo. There was also an American actress involved in putting on a play, which 55 prisoners attended. We went in near the end of that play and spoke to a number of the prisoners, who certainly seemed to have got a lot out of it. The play was about someone who had been incarcerated in Auschwitz and it was called “Imprisonment”. We spoke to the actress and, as I said, to the prisoners. One prisoner came up and said that it was even better than going to Òran Mór for a play, a pie and a pint—he thought that it was a much better performance in that respect. I was very impressed by the amount of things that were going on.
Another issue that came up was the lack of throughcare opportunities for short-term prisoners. Obviously, the point about remand and short-term prisoners came across loud and clear. I definitely formed the impression that there really is not any meaningful purposeful activity going on for remand prisoners.
We spoke to a number of the prisoners, and one gentleman said that he had been going through a revolving door for 20 years—and he was not very old. When he got out of prison there was a shortage of housing, so he was given a sleeping bag. That is what happens in some areas. He was put into a hostel, and he got back into the same old ways again.
We were told that literacy and numeracy levels are not as poor as they are portrayed to be. The prisoners were given a five-page booklet to fill in, and 90 per cent of them were able to fill it in. Therefore, it was assumed that they could read what they were filling in and answering.
We spoke about employment and housing, as well. The prisoners feel that there are too many agencies trying to deliver similar programmes. They are not all meeting up, and there is no throughcare, in that regard.
I will mention Low Moss in relation to overcrowding at Barlinnie. The governor had said that, until Low Moss came along, Barlinnie was very overcrowded. At the moment, the prisoner number is nearer to 1,300—Barlinnie hosts 1,104 and there are 560 staff. I was very impressed by what the staff are trying to do, but the main concern—as in other prisons—is about short-term prisoners and remand prisoners. That is perhaps where we should be targeting our resources, which do not seem to be getting through, however, for the reasons that the governor raised with us.
I am conscious, having done it myself, that we have been speaking about purposeful activity, which is a spectrum of activities including activities to address drug and alcohol problems, as well as education and work. That drifts into throughcare, one aspect of which—as one of the purposeful activities in prison—is that it continues afterwards, and is not just seen inside the prison gates. Our inquiry will go into that as well.
We should raise that point as we proceed with our inquiry. In Barlinnie, a number of the prisoners who took part in courses were able to get Scottish vocational qualifications and City and Guilds qualifications at bronze level. A number of them have found employment outwith the prison having finished their courses. It is good that lots of outside agencies are involved in rehabilitation. Those two main areas that I mentioned are the ones at which we should be targeting our resources.
Do employers go into Barlinnie?
Martin Plant Hire employs a number of prisoners; they do not use an apprenticeship process, but the prisoners work there. Various other companies are involved, including the Bike Station, to which people hand in their bikes—some old, some not so old—and prisoners learn how to strip them down and completely renew them. As they go through the course, they get bronze, silver and gold awards. A number of the prisoners have got jobs outside. I am very impressed with what is going on. It would be good to do that on a larger scale.
You, too, had experience of the Bike Station, Alison.
Yes.
Do we know whether the people got jobs at the end of it?
I think that one person was employed at the Bike Station after they had left prison.
Roddy—you were at Perth prison.
Yes. I will try to be brief, as a lot of the points have already been covered. I was impressed by the governor and his staff, including the deputy governor, and by their general attitude to and enthusiasm for the prison.
We visited a number of different activities. One of the things that disappointed me slightly was that there is in the education area a very good kitchen area and an art room, neither of which are being used. We were also in the laundry room and the tailoring facility; again, absence of staff means that the number of prisoners who can do activities there is restricted. Now that I have had the opportunity to see the figures, I can see that Perth does not figure very well on the scale of purposeful activity—it is below average.
I talked to a number of prisoners. I was impressed by the enthusiasm of a young man at the Bike Station, which offers a relatively new activity in Perth. He was very enthusiastic about and keen on the project. Someone from the Bike Station spoke to me about the difficulties in trying to arrange employment, which tallies with what Alison McInnes said about numbers. What we saw was quite good on the whole, but there is a difficulty in making maximum use of the facilities.
We also looked at B hall, which has been refurbished, and the suicide cell, which was not being used. I was not overly impressed by the condition of B hall, and I note that a prisoner on remand died in Perth the day after my visit. From that point of view, I was not necessarily terribly happy with the purposeful activity, but I think that the throughcare is positive in that it goes beyond the statutory throughcare. There is currently a project with Dundee that is in its early days. The prison is certainly doing better than average in its approach to throughcare for short-term prisoners.
I thank members for that.
I suspend the meeting briefly to allow Colin McConnell to take his place so that members can ask questions in our purposeful activity in prison inquiry.
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Meeting suspended.
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On resuming—