Prisons haven’t really recovered from Covid

Juliet Lyon CBE, who stood down this year after seven years as chair of the Independent Advisory Panel on Deaths in Custody, answered questions from MPs last month about her time in the role

How do conditions in prisons now compare with when you started at the beginning of 2016?

I think the warning signs were already there in 2016. Deaths had risen quite markedly in that year. You could see a reflection of the cuts being introduced in staff numbers and regime delivery. It did not feel like a very good year to start. Now, I just think it’s awful, actually. The deprivations that happened, particularly during Covid, and the extreme imprisonment, and the choices made to hold people in isolation, have continued in some shape or form. We are not seeing prisons with purposeful activity in the same way as people might remember them. We are now seeing high numbers of deaths, unfortunately, both self-inflicted and natural deaths. It is obviously hard to determine how much is due to what happened during the extensive period of Covid lockdown, which was more like two years than one; what has happened as a result of having to take extreme action, like Operation Safeguard; and the problem with the workforce and pressures from that direction. 

Can you give us some examples?

We have heard a lot about workforce and workforce pressures, but some of them have led, for example, to the withdrawal of key work, which we believed was making a significant difference, in that one prison officer would have the focus of just a few prisoners and consequently would get to know them well and help them to manage their time in prison and make some use of it. Although that key work has been reintroduced, it tends to be mostly on a monthly basis. In most places it is not much more than a quick welfare check.

Is that partly a capacity issue?

Absolutely, and also experience. One in three officers has been in post for less than three years. That is problematic. Certainly, prisoners have said to me on prison visits that they are worried about the safety, particularly, of young people who have come into the service. The earliest age at which you can enter as a prison officer is 18. That is very young, given the requirements of the role. Quite a lot of staff have not worked in a prison operating on a normal basis, so they literally have conducted most of the transactions with prisoners through a door. We know that prisoners have been locked up, but in large local prisons they are still largely locked up, and the attempts to reintroduce the regime, which are important, have not really been fulfilled as yet.

Do you think the Government did enough to prevent death in prison during the pandemic, either from Covid itself or for other reasons?

There were other choices that could have been made. An experiment was conducted by the Lord Chancellor, Robert Buckland, to release the most vulnerable people, which he felt would lead to about 4,000 people being released, but it became absolutely mired in bureaucracy as a scheme and lost its way fairly quickly. That choice was missed. Subsequently, there was a really important choice after the vaccination of everybody in homes for the elderly, including all the staff. That seemed like a brilliant opportunity to apply that to people in detention, particularly in prisons. I fear that that was not considered to be politically palatable. Advice about universal vaccination was turned down flat again and again, including by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, and ministers. It just meant that everything was protracted. People did get vaccinated, but only when they reached the age bracket parallel with people in the community.

This is an edited extract of the hearing of the Justice Select Committee on April 18.