This is WPIC's submission to the House of Commons Justice Select Committee's inquiry into Rehabilitation and resettlement: ending the cycle of reoffending based on our experience of Wandsworth Prison.
Summary - Listen to families; think about those on remand
The time spent on remand or awaiting sentencing plays a critical role in the cycle of reoffending and should be the start of the rehabilitation process. Families play a key role at this time, as well as throughout the prison journey, in stopping the cycle of reoffending, but their contribution is often overlooked and is not always respected.
In our experience, prisoners on remand in custody – who may later be found innocent – or those awaiting a sentence are treated less favourably, especially in terms of their access to education and employment and are offered little in terms of rehabilitation and resettlement, compared to sentenced prisoners, and yet their needs are maybe just as great.
We ask the Committee to consider the importance of the role played by families in reducing reoffending and not to overlook the treatment of those on remand and to make recommendations accordingly.
Introduction
1. Wandsworth Prison Improvement Campaign was formed just over a year ago to campaign for a safer and more decent prison at Wandsworth. We are possibly unique in being a local community group focussing on our local prison. We welcome the opportunity to make this submission to the Select Committee’s Call for Evidence. Our submission is focussed on Section 2 (ii) covering rehabilitation in prison with particular reference to the cohort of remand prisoners and also on Section 3 covering resettlement services and alternatives to custody.
2. An important part of what we do is to work with the families and partners of those in Wandsworth and we believe strongly in the vital importance of family support. We meet with families regularly when they visit the prison and at our own meetings, we have set up a Facebook Group, we bring concerns and complaints to the Governor, and we attend the inquests of the deceased to be with the families at this terrible time and to learn what went wrong.
3. We strongly subscribe to the view expressed in the Farmer Report of 2017[1] that “a rehabilitation culture …will not happen unless good relationships with families and others on the outside are treated as a much higher priority in many jails. These need to be seen as a vital resource and the people who visit and make the often Herculean effort to keep in contact, need to be treated as valued allies in the rehabilitation cause.” The Report documents that “The Ministry of Justice’s own research shows that for a prisoner who receives visits from a family member the odds of reoffending are 39% lower than for those who do not”.
4. Unfortunately, the clearest finding of the Report is that “my work – and the conclusion of Her Majesty’s Inspectorates of Prison and Probation and others – is that there is an unacceptable inconsistency of respect for the role families can play in boosting rehabilitation and assisting in resettlement across the prison estate.” WPIC endorses this finding from its own experience of working with the families and partners of those in Wandsworth.
The problems of remand
5. It is well documented that the remand population has risen significantly and is a major factor in the current crisis in prison spaces. This has largely been caused by a backlog in the courts caused in part by the pandemic. In addition, overcrowding in prisons is exacerbated by the use of prisons by magistrates and the police as ‘a place of safety’ for the mentally fragile and unwell and those who have addiction issues and/or are homeless.
6. The previous Commons Justice Select Committee issued a report on ‘The role of adult custodial remand in the criminal justice system’ in January 2023[2]. As part of their inquiry, they visited Wandsworth. The report noted that “those remanded in category B prisons are being held in some of the worst conditions in the prison estate, with some prisons now at risk of becoming dedicated remand prisons by default. There is a clear lack of support and opportunities available to those held in these prisons and during the reunification of the probation service those remanded were excluded from resettlement support contracts, so many are released with nowhere to go, which increases their likelihood of reoffending. In addition, we heard that no support at all is offered for those found not guilty at trial….”
7. The Committee also received evidence on repeat offenders and in their view this “is often symptomatic of underlying vulnerabilities…..for which there is currently a lack of community provision.” The lack of support offered by Category B prisons (such as Wandsworth) means that their problems are exacerbated and many come out “worse than before”. Their report also noted that while remand prisoners make up around 18% of the total prison population, they account for 35% of all self-inflicted deaths as well as 16% of all self-harm incidents.
8. This report made a number of recommendations for the Ministry of Justice/HMPPS that, while largely accepted by the last Government, seem in practice to have made little headway. One exception is that the current Mental Health Bill will remove police and prison cells as a place of safety for the mentally ill, although this Bill has yet to complete its legislative stages.
9. Since this report was published some headway has been made in reducing the numbers on remand and in particular those convicted but not yet sentenced. (This is illustrated in the Wandsworth figures in the table later in this submission).
HMP Wandsworth – one of the largest remand prisons
10. Wandsworth is a well-known local category B prison reception and resettlement prison serving the London courts. While built in Victorian times for less than 1,000 single-cell occupancy it now houses 1,459 prisoners and is the 3rd most overcrowded prison in England and Wales[3].
11. While it has similar challenges to all Victorian prisons in terms of its failing and inadequate infrastructure, Wandsworth is rather different in that well over 50% of its population is on remand awaiting trial and another 5% are convicted but unsentenced[4]. Immigration detainees account for another 15% (all figures supplied by HMP Wandsworth), Foreign national prisoners make up almost half of the total population, with the largest numbers from Poland, Romania, Albania, Algeria, Hungary and Lithuania[5].
12. Most remand prisoners had been in Wandsworth for less than 90 days, but 44 (2022/23: 82) had been there for more than a year and 13 (2022/23: 33) for more than18 months.
13. Wandsworth had an unannounced inspection in April 2024 and the Chief Inspector issued an Urgent Notification in May. The prison was marked as Poor (the lowest category) for Safety, Respect, Purposeful Activity and “Not sufficiently good” (the second lowest category) for Preparation for Release[6]. A new Governor was appointed in June 2024.
14. The local Independent Monitoring Board also produced a damning report on Wandsworth in August 2024 and drew attention in particular to the shortage of experienced staff, the lack of safety and the inhumane conditions caused by overcrowding[7].
The regime at HMP Wandsworth and its impact on those on remand and on their families
15. Many of the issues and concerns included in the 2023 Select Committee report are still observed in Wandsworth. While we support the mission of the new Governor to change the culture and environment, this is a long-term process and one that is crucially dependent on sufficient funding to tackle both the staffing issues and the urgent need to upgrade and improve the fabric and basic facilities at the prison, including the showers, the lack of hot water and laundry facilities and to deal with the vermin.
16. As of today, the prison operates with a high percentage of inexperienced newly recruited officers and high levels of days lost through absenteeism. While Wandsworth has been promised £100 million over 5 years to replace windows, the showers and to upgrade the hot water boilers, the overall project to refurbish the prison will take an estimated 7 or 8 years.
17. Time out of cell remains a critical issue at Wandsworth. The current restricted regime put in place by the Governor to stabilise the prison and deal with staff shortages means that many men remain locked up for 21 or more hours a day, especially at weekends. This impacts on all inmates, but especially those who may only be in Wandsworth until they are sentenced or released.
18. We would endorse many of the findings in both the Chief Inspector and the IMB’s reports from our own interactions with prisoners and their families and from attendance at recent inquests. The experience of the first days in prison are important as this is a time when rehabilitation can start. Too often the experience makes matters worse:
1. The reception process is slow and inefficient. Staff shortages have meant inexperienced officers failing to understand key paperwork arriving with a new prisoner resulting in critical information about severe mental health problems being missed
2. The holding cell is often overcrowded and hot[8]
3. Cells in the reception wing are dirty and the furniture is broken, the showers do not always work and there is frequently a lack of hot water
4. Prisoners are issued with only one full set of clothing including underwear
5. There are long delays in creating telephone PIN numbers which enable a prisoner to consult family or friends or to speak to their lawyers, together with delays in arranging visitors. This was taking several days or even weeks.
6. A lack of any timetable or guidance on what to do or what is happening that leaves new inmates confused and disorientated.
19. After induction, remand prisoners would not typically be kept in separate accommodation but will be on the wings usually sharing a cell (designed for one) with another prisoner, who may be sentenced or also on remand. Because Wandsworth is a local prison it will contain a lot of people from nearby postcodes who may be associated with rival groups or gangs. Gangs are responsible for a lot of the drugs and violence in local prisons. Remand prisoners who have previously had no association with such gangs or drugs are therefore put at risk. We are told by an ex-inmate that exposure to drugs starts very early, even on the first night, along with instructions as how to brew hooch.
20. Many prisoners on remand will be mentally unwell on arrival and need support and treatment. Others will find their mental health deteriorating through the experience of remand. Wandsworth does not have facilities to treat those who need to be in a mental health institution and the experience of remand (and the delays in getting a transfer to a mental hospital or institution) often exacerbates mental conditions. While those assessed as needing to be transferred to a mental health establishment should be transferred within 28 days the reality is that this is often very much longer, due to lack of space at the hospital/ institution.
21. In general, self-harm and suicides are higher among remand prisoners than sentenced ones and this underlines the need for more support for those on remand. It is a crucial time for family support, which is often unavailable because of the inability to communicate through delays in getting PIN numbers, breakdowns in the phone service, the time taken and procedure to arrange visits. The process of a prisoner sending and receiving emails through the ‘Email a prisoner’ scheme was taking six days for an email to be delivered to a prisoner, and responses were taking a week to be returned. [9]
22. It is during the remand period that family contact by visiting can be especially important. WPIC has spoken with families who visit, many of them elderly or young partners making long journeys with young children in tow, trying to support the person inside and preserve the family unit. While there are schemes and organisations available to assist family visits, there is a plethora of rules and regulations for a family new to prison to discover and to observe.
23. While there are good officers who understand the benefit of a family visit for the prisoner, his family and the whole prison, there are still some officers who see it as a time to exercise their authority and treat families as “something she’d trodden on, like a piece of dirt”[10]. Visitors are left queuing outside in the rain and one mother was required to remove her prosthetic breast in full view of the staff in the security area[11]. Disabled visitors report difficulties and a lack of help in getting access to the visits hall and visits being cut short due to this. The visits hall toilets are frequently dirty and have no soap or a baby changing mat.
24. The Assisted Prison Visitor Scheme provides funding for travel, subsistence and some overnight accommodation costs, but nothing is known about how many claims are made and how much is paid out to families. WPIC has made an FoI request to the Ministry of Justice on the take-up and costs of this scheme and we will be happy to share the reply.
25. Families verify the conditions facing their sons, fathers and partners – the living conditions, the vermin, the hours spent locked up, the inadequate food, the sheer boredom of having nothing to do for hours at a stretch. They contact us to express their despair at the deterioration they find in their loved ones after a short time on remand. Here are two extracts from emails we have received.
“Since being taken into custody, my brother’s already fragile mental health has deteriorated at an alarming rate. Tragically, he has not been given the appropriate support or care that someone in his vulnerable state so desperately needs. He has not taken his prescribed medication since entering the prison, something that has severely worsened his paranoia and emotional instability. His fear and confusion have led to a horrifying refusal to eat - he only manages to eat when I am able to visit him, out of a deep-seated fear that the food served to him in the prison is somehow compromised. As a result, he has lost 40 kilograms in just under three months.”[12]
“My son [name deleted] has ADHD & struggled n Wandsworth physically, mentally & emotionally. I was so shocked when I saw the state of him the day he left Wandsworth…My son entered prison 16 stone and left skinny & frightfully pale, covered in bruises & wearing someone’s else’s clothing.”[13]
26. Purposeful activity and education are also lacking for remand prisoners. Lessons to teach basic English and arithmetic are available but are not well-attended due to a lack of staff to escort them to classes. Access to the library has been very limited in Wandsworth due to staff shortages and although there are book trollies that could be deployed on the wings, the librarian is opposed to their use and as a result the trollies have been removed from most wings.
27.. While Wandsworth had a strategy to prevent re-offending, the Chief Inspector concluded that there was too little in place to meet the needs of the remanded and foreign national population. More concerning is that only 36% of all prisoners said to him that their experience at Wandsworth had made them less likely to reoffend in the future, a finding which was much lower than at most prisons[14].
28. Overall, the regime at Wandsworth is harsh, with remand prisoners at the bottom of the pile. Given the lack of support offered to remand prisoners, men who are eventually found not guilty, or who are released ‘sentence served’ are basically given little or no help at all. Meanwhile, the individual is likely to have lost his job, he could well have lost his home and his partner and close contact with his children, he may now have a drug habit that he did not have before and be in debt through lack of income for the time on remand and possibly to drug dealers in the prison.
29. One hopeful sign had been a Remand Project at Wandsworth that was beginning to assist prisoners who were likely to be immediately released after attending court. This created a more direct line of communication between the courts, probation, healthcare and the prison so that the impact of being immediately released was highlighted and support offered. While judged to have made a significant difference to these men and to the prison as a whole, this project was terminated by HMPPS in March 2024 on the basis that it was just a pilot, and the outcomes needed to be studied.
30. Following pressure from the IMB and others the project was reinstated in July and will run until March 2025. Funding of £180k has been found to reintroduce a remand support leader, a caseworker and an administrator. There are early reports of some success in over 90% attending a life skills course and some 85% of prisoners saying they were helped with their queries. The MoJ also notified the IMB that other local initiatives to assist remand prisoners include a local tenancy sustainment service, and a new project focused on violence reduction was being commissioned at Pentonville and Wandsworth in partnership with the London Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime.
31. While we welcome the reinstatement of the Remand Project and the other initiatives, the project will soon end, and it is not reaching all those is needs to reach. Without support the acquitted or sentence-served prisoner leaves the court with nothing - whereas a released sentenced prisoner will receive housing support and assistance, help with finding a job and a small grant. It can still take 5 weeks for any newly released prisoner to receive any benefits, assuming they know where to go and how to access the system, so unless they have family supporting them and a job to go back to, the temptation to commit a criminal act is high.
What the Select Committee inquiry should consider
32. WPIC is a group of local people, focused on one prison and we are not experts in criminal justice. We therefore hesitate to offer solutions. But from our experience of what we have observed and the people we have met, we would ask the Select Committee to consider the following areas and ask questions themselves.
33. How could the numbers on remand, or the time they spend on remand be reduced, given the risk that this experience will lead to future criminality? Why is it that some people are remanded and not others? What are the alternatives other than bail? In other countries strenuous efforts are made to prevent young people being remanded in custody.
34. How can families be better supported and how could prisoner contact with families be improved? Does the Assisted Prison Visitor Scheme really work and how much use is made of it?
35. Will the Committee please press for the Remand Project (see paragraphs 29 and 30) in HMP Wandsworth to be continued indefinitely and with sufficient funding to cover all remand prisoners?. WPIC will also be campaigning for this.
36. What can be done to ensure that time spent on remand has some purpose? Can the Committee please follow up on the last Committee’s recommendation (No. 12) that shorter courses be available for those not likely to be in prison for long periods of time[15]. The Ministry of Justice agreed that such courses would be in all category B prisons by the end of 2023.
37. Similarly, can the Committee please follow up on the progress made by the Ministry/HMPPS as regards its promised actions on the following recommendations?:
1. Recommendation 15, to put in place modular training for prison officers on working with remand prisoners
2. Recommendation 16, extending the services of the Commissioned Rehabilitative Services for accommodation to all unsentenced prisoners
3. Recommendation 17, for Pre-Release teams to submit referrals on the day of acquittal to the local authority for those at risk of being homeless. HMPPS also promised to investigate the possibility of a subsistence payment for the acquitted and some short-term temporary accommodation support.
References
[1] The Importance of Strengthening Prisoners' Family Ties to Prevent Reoffending and Reduce Intergenerational Crime, published by the Ministry of Justice in 2017
[3] Statistics from the Ministry of Justice (November 2024) and the Howard League (September 2024)
[4] Figures supplied by HMP Wandsworth
At period end | 2022/23 |
| 2023/24 |
|
Remand | 780 | 51% | 809 | 51% |
Sentenced | 228 | 15% | 328 | 21% |
Immigration detainee | 214 | 14% | 228 | 15% |
Recall | 97 | 7% | 117 | 7% |
Convicted unsentenced | 196 | 13% | 72 | 5% |
Unknown | 4 | 0% | 18 | 0% |
Indeterminate sentence | 2 | 0% | 8 | 0% |
Other | 2 | 0% | 4 | 0% |
Total | 1,522 |
| 1,584 |
|
[6] HMIoP report published 6 August 2024
[7] https://cloud-platform e218f50a4812967ba1215eaecede923f.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/sites/13/2024/08/Wandsworth-IMB-2023-24-annual-report.pdf
[8] Evidence from accounts recorded in “Voices from the Inside” a project of recordings of prisoners and their families by Rona Epstein, Honorary Research Fellow, Coventry Law School. ‘Jon’ said “The capacity of the holding cell should have been about 10 and there were 35 of us inside that cell. And everyone was struggling to be able to go to the toilet, to breathe, taking their T-shirts off, throwing water on their faces, it was so hot.”
[9] Evidence from accounts recorded in “Voices from the Inside” from Emily.
[10] Evidence from accounts recorded in “Voices from the Inside” from Jodie and Ann
[11] ‘Parmjeet’s account in “Voices from the Inside”
[12] Email received from a Wandsworth remand prisoner by WPIC in September 2024
[13] Email received by WPIC January 2025.
[14] See the Chief Inspector’s report – para 6.23