Keeping safe
Juliet Lyon describes how inmates are suggesting ways to make jails more caring places
No one wants anyone to suffer the pain of suicide in prison and the terrible impact such a bleak death has on family, friends, fellow prisoners and prison staff. Everyone wants to turn back the rising tide of self-harm in our jails. And yet last year 113 men and twelve women took their own lives in custody in England and Wales and there were well over 40,000 incidents of self-harm – the worst figure ever recorded.
In February this year the Independent Advisory Panel (IAP) on Deaths in Custody and Inside Time, the national newspaper for people in prison, began a collaboration to help keep people in prison safe. Supported by the Samaritans, the IAP called on Inside Time readers and Prison Radio listeners to say how best to prevent suicide and self-harm. By July we had heard from over 150 prisoners across sixty prisons. Prisoners are experts by experience – they see and hear and know things about life behind bars that others don’t.
What is striking, though not surprising, is how sensible and deliverable their ideas are to prevent deaths in custody. For instance one prisoner, a former paramedic, raised thoughtful questions about the prevalence of self-harm:
Self-harm is a deeply complicated issue that requires special handling. Worryingly, I have seen instances of prisoners using self-harm, including cutting themselves and hunger strikes, to manipulate staff and circumstances to get what they want. This raises two questions. One, do these prisoners need more specialist mental health interventions (many I see exhibiting this behaviour have complex needs including personality disorders)? Two, are things so badly wrong with our current system that people are driven to hurt themselves out of frustration with their situation? As I’ve experienced, prison can be a frustrating place where even simple tasks can be long drawn-out affairs or even impossible.
Good relationships
More prisoners wrote about the importance of good, professional relations with staff than anything else. Many wrote about the damaging impact of staff cuts, exhaustion, low morale, no time to talk and more lock-up, as well as the loss of experienced staff – people like the ‘one particular officer who can tell just by talking to me how my mood is. He notices if I’m down, if I don’t eat, if I don’t socialise.’
There were some inspiring accounts of where a life had been saved by the compassion and humanity of an officer.
I have been in prison now for over thirty years. During this time I have attempted suicide twice. Both times I came close to death. The second time I was in hospital for nine days. These attempts came about because of the death of my sixteen-year-old son. At this time I was in the segregation units of the high security prisons and I can say that there has been little help for me. It was only when I thought of attempting suicide for the third time that I met this senior officer in Wakefield segregation unit. This man had been present when the life support was switched off as his daughter passed away. This man took the time to sit and talk to me not as a prison officer and prisoner but two human beings. This man turned the tide for me and I never got the chance to thank him.
At the same time, the IAP was very concerned about examples of disrespect, of officers laughing at prisoners or even goading them in one or two instances to harm themselves. One respondent called for prisoners ‘not to be treated like nothing. Treat them with dignity and respect – they are son, father, brother or grandfather of a human being.’ The messages prisoners have for the Ministry of Justice and the Prison Service are clear: recruit and retain enough good, decent people; train, support and supervise staff to meet human rights standards set; and establish and maintain safe staffing levels for each prison.
Mental health needs
According to Ministry of Justice figures, forty-six per cent of women in prison and twenty-one per cent of men have attempted suicide at some point in their lives compared to six per cent of the general population. Almost half of all the letters and phone messages we received were about mental health.
Jail is not a mental hospital. Well, it shouldn’t be. But it is at present.
Alongside calls for prompt assessment and diversion into treatment, solutions suggested included counselling, peer support, providing correct medication, increased exercise, activity and improved monitoring. Prisoners emphasised the basic need for fresh air, decent food, a night’s sleep and more time out of cells.
Prisoners stressed the importance of family contact in preventing suicide and self-harm, as well as avoiding homelessness on release and damaging recalls to custody. Proposed improvements included being located closer to home, in-cell telephones and internet access. Nepacs, the North East of England prisoners’ family charity, called for an emergency contact line for family and friends and asked that they are not dismissed ‘as worriers, worse still, nuisances’.
People are sent to prison to lose their liberty not to lose all hope, their dignity or, at worst, their lives. A quarter of prisoners wrote about the enduring pressure and hopelessness of still serving an IPP sentence (Imprisonment for Public Protection – the indeterminate sentence abolished in 2012), especially for those 3,000 or so people who are years beyond their original tariffs.
I have seen so many IPP prisoners harming themselves unreported and taking any drugs just to end the suffering quickly because this is nothing but torture of the highest order… I myself [am an] IPP prisoner with tariff of two-and-a-half years. I have now served eleven years in total and still no end.
New psychoactive substances (NPS) are a significant problem. Many prisoners are living in fear of the impact of drugs such as ‘the epidemic called Spice’ in prison, including the debts and violence that go with it. Many prisoners believe that too often ‘the dealers have the upper hand’. Spice, known as ‘the zombie drug’ because of its effects, is actually a wide range of laboratory-made chemicals designed to mimic the effects of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive compound in marijuana.
Ministers are being asked in the strongest terms both to get to grips with this unjust lingering sentence and with unsafe and unhealthy prison environments.
Government duty
Self-inflicted deaths in prison are avoidable, not inevitable. The government has a duty to hold people safely in custody and to take active steps to protect life. Prisoners’ views and solutions in this Keeping Safe report reflect evidence from, and recommendations made time and again by, amongst others, the prisons and probation ombudsman, HM chief inspector of prisons, the chief coroner and the National Audit Office.
We have a shared responsibility to keep prisoners safe. Quaker representation with regard to social justice and engagement in prison reform, independent monitoring, prison visiting and the chaplaincy all play their part.
In many instances, making the changes suggested by prisoners does not require legislation but, rather, operational adjustments and attitudinal shifts. Having been relegated in recent years, safer custody is back as a top priority for ministers and remains so for managers. There is an overarching need for consistency, good leadership and clear accountability. How much better to be wise before the event and keep people safe rather than to have to promise, yet again, to learn lessons from another tragic death in custody.
Juliet is chair of the Independent Advisory Panel (IAP) on Deaths in Custody.
Comments
Please login to add a comment
