Written evidence from a serving prisoner, HMP Wakefield

Personal Statement

In 2005 I was convicted of attempting to import a container of cocaine into the UK. I was sentenced to 28 years reduced to 25 on appeal. Whilst on remand I was made a Category A prisoner. 3 months after being sentenced my status was reviewed and the recommendation was that:

Whilst it is acknowledged that Category A was appropriate on remand, given the review of drug related offences under the Category A criteria, consideration could be given to a downgrading of *** security category. However a further consideration is the fact that *** is appealing against his conviction and sentence and his production at court. On balance it is recommended that *** should at present remain in Category A.

Twelve years later in 2017 I remain a Category A prisoner despite never having committed an offence against prison discipline. There are no Offender Behaviour Programmes for drug traffickers but the courts have held that education is a pathway to rehabilitation and can help to reduce risk. The Secretary of State has said that prisoners must be given new opportunities to engage purposefully in education with earned release for prisoners who make a commitment to serious educational activity

At my own expense, and with more obstruction than assistance from the prison authorities, I have studied to obtain a BSc (Hons) in Criminal Justice Studies, a BA (Hons) in psychology and an LLB (Hons) together with MSc in Criminology and Criminal Psychology. ***

Having completed the 25 year sentence I remain in prison for the non-payment of a confiscation order - and yet I still remain Category A despite the fact that if I paid the fine I would then immediately be released to exercise my art 8 convention rights and leave the UK to live abroad with my family. I will not be on licence.

The Ministry of Justice describes the evidence based Offender Assessment System as

“A risk and needs assessment tool designed to contribute towards ensuring security and control through the identification and management of risk. It has been developed as a comprehensive assessment and planning instrument to give a systematic and evidence based structure to the established sentence management process”

According to the System my risk to the public is so low that it cannot be further reduced: how then can I be a person whose "escape would be highly dangerous to the public"?

I have no doubt that as an administrative punishment I have been kept as a Category A prisoner because under the Equality Act I have repeatedly and successfully filed litigation against the prison authorities asserting that as a disabled Jew my protected characteristics have been disregarded. Apparently, I do not know my place.

THE REFORM OF THE DISPERSAL SYSTEM

And

REDUCTIONOF THE NUMBERS OF CATEGORY A PRISONERS

This submission outlines the flaws in the dispersal system and the categorisation of Category prisoners. It indicates the very considerable financial savings that could be made if the dispersal system was reduced in size. The criteria for Category A which is based on a prisoner's dangerousness if he did escape and not how likely he is to escape should be amended to exclude prisoners who are physically incapable of escaping. More weight should be given to the official evidence based risk assessment tool, OASys, and less attention paid to the highly subjective opinions of trainee psychologists.

There are approximately 120 public sector prisons in England and Wales of which only 8, Belmarsh, Frankland, Full Sutton, Long Lartin, Manchester, Wakefield, Whitemoor and Woodhill are designated as suitable for the containment of those high security prisoners who are considered to be the most dangerous should they escape. 3 of the High Security prisons, Manchester, Belmarsh and Woodhill, hold provisional Category A prisoners who are awaiting trial whilst the 5 remaining prisons hold only convicted prisoners and are classified as High Security dispersal prisons.

The High Security Estate

All convicted prisoners are located according to their classified security risk and it is this classification that forms the basis for separation and differential treatment. The significance of the policy of security categorisation is that it does not derive from a judicial finding or any formal administrative procedure but rather from the recommendations of Earl Mountbatten's inquiry into prison escapes and security following the escape from HMP Wormwood Scrubs of a spy, George Blake, in 1966. In his report on the escape Lord Mountbatten recommended stricter security measures, most of which were brought in and humane ones, most of which were not.

Following an escape from Parkhurst prison in the Isle of Wight in 1995 General Sir John Learmont was commissioned to review prison service security in general and the escape from Parkhurst in particular The Learmont Review[1] recommended prisoner profiling by asserting that "categorisation is fundamental to security. It is the key to ensuring the safe custody of prisoners and work on its improvements must be given proper priority". However the Learmont Review's recommendations on security classification were largely ignored due in some considerable degree to Prison Service scepticism regarding the qualifications of a retired General to advise on prison security. Indeed, the Director General of the Prison Service described Sir John as an "expert on billets and blankets" with a "propensity to bark orders and an attention span measured in seconds rather than minutes"[2]

The highest security classification is Category A which defines a prisoner as one "whose escape would be highly dangerous to the public or the police or the security of the State, and for whom the aim must be to make escape impossible"[3] The directives relating to Category A prisoners form part of a number of PSIs which form the restricted National Security Framework and provide establishments with instructions and guidelines regarding the reporting-in of Potential/Provisional Category A prisoners to the Category A Team (CART), a specialist unit within the High Security Prisons Group (HSPG). The National Security Framework (NSF) incorporates and defines the mandatory requirements that are derived from the relevant security specifications and seeks to identify those prisoners remanded in custody awaiting trial who may fall to be classified as Category A. The NSF[4] stipulates that the Deputy Director of Custody [DDC] for the High Security Estate is responsible for categorisation and allocation of Category A prisoners.

Identifying and assessing all the relevant risk factors of those prisoners who may be categorised as Potential/Provisional Category A requires judgment to be exercised and staff are instructed to balance the public protection issue with the need to avoid reporting-in case unnecessarily. However, in practice, there is a propensity, if not a predisposition to err very considerably on the side of caution and categorise every borderline case as Category A. Indeed, the stipulated mandatory guidance[5] is that even if marginal the "case MUST be reported to the Category A Team". In deciding whether or not Category A status is necessary, the theory is that consideration will be given to whether the stated aim of making escape impossible can be achieved for a particular prisoner in lower conditions of security and, if so, then that prisoner should be categorised accordingly.

However the guidance rnakes clear that such consideration will arise only in a limited number of cases since escape potential will not normally affect the consideration of the appropriateness of Category A because the definition is concerned with the prisoner's dangerousness if he did escape and not how likely he is to escape.

There is thus the fantastical reality that prisoners with zimmer frames, in wheelchairs with missing limbs or with multiple sclerosis and other physically debilitating conditions making escape impossible are, nonetheless, made Category A. There are many such cases at all dispersals prisons, particularly at HMP Wakefield and they remain as Category A long after any possible justification for such categorisation has disappeared thereby demonstrating a complete lack of realism. A Standard Category A prisoner is one who would be supposedly be highly dangerous if he escaped but the official criteria states that there need be no specific information or intelligence to suggest that there is a threat to escape. Any definition of a Category A which encompasses a one legged prisoner in a wheel chair is stupidity writ large; it is not a measure of competence or prison craft nor is it a sensible use of taxpayers money

The truth is that such definitions provide the CART and the DDC with the justification necessary to perpetuate the existence of a largely unwarranted and highly expensive empire. The reality is that any success in preventing escapes has been achieved not by efficacy, efficiency or intelligence but by barbed wire and high walls and casting the widest net possible to ensnare those who might possibly escape.

Lack of informative data

At any one time there are around 1,000 Category A prisoners in the High Security estate for whom it is alleged that "escape would be highly dangerous to the public or the police or the security of the State". Escape must be made impossible for such prisoners, and Category A status is deemed essential even for the lame, limbless and disabled for whom escape is, as has been said, already physically impossible.

It is clearly statistically impossible for there always to be the requisite number of prisoners for whom Category A status is appropriate. Crime, the courts and sentencing policy simply do not work like that. The discretionary Category A criteria expands or retracts as and when the numbers require. There cannot be too many Category A prisoners because there aren’t enough spaces and there cannot be too few because then it would not be possible to justify the costs of an expensive dispersal policy. Thus, as a general proposition, a prisoner sentenced to 15 years when numbers are low would be made Category A and yet when numbers are high the same prisoner would be made Category B.

The CART would, of course, deny that such is the case but the reality is that primary consideration for Category A status is sentence length and not offence albeit certain crimes invariably attract long sentences. Nonetheless, there are no short term Category A prisoners: a rapist sentenced to 4 years would not be Category A whereas a rapist sentenced to 18 years would certainly be Category A. It is extraordinarily difficult to obtain any informative data from the CART but what data can be extracted tends to indicate that if 8-10 prisoners are confirmed as Category A in the first quarter of the year then 8-10 will downgraded by the third quarter.

It is shocking that, according to responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, the CART is unable to provide data which would disclose how many prisoners have been Category A for 5 years, for 10 years or even longer. Moreover, and really quite disquietingly, the CART does not consider it necessary to hold data which informs as to how many Category A prisoners have been convicted of what type of offence. I would respectfully ask the Committee to reflect on this point. Even supermarkets know their customer's history - but not the CART.

Accordingly, it is very difficult, perhaps intentionally so, to scrutinise or hold a yardstick of judgement to the work of the CART. The protection of the public cannot be an exact science but current annual review process of confirming or downgrading Category A status is an entirely arbitrary system based on the exercise of uninformed discretion which deliberately ignores the evidence based Offender Assessment System ("OASys") the Ministry of Justice describes as

“A risk and needs assessment tool designed to contribute towards ensuring security and control through the identification and management of risk. It has been developed as a comprehensive assessment and planning instrument to give a systematic and evidence based structure to the established sentence management process”

Yet prisoners whose public protection OASys scores public are so low that they cannot be further reduced remain classified as Category A because CART prefers to rely on the speculative conjecture of malleable trainee psychologists to massage the number of Category A prisoners to the requisite level. That they may do subconsciously in the furtherance of a policy that that they do not fully comprehend is perfectly possible but the refusal by the CART to mine readily available data in order better to inform the decision making process is Luddite.

This lack of data is a lacuna in the area of criminal justice statistics exists only in the uncommunicative HSE where the avoidance of scrutiny and analysis engenders complacency and incompetence. Throughout the rest of the criminal justice system data detailing offence, sentence, religion and age is readily available and it is completely beyond comprehension that such data should not be readily available in the HSE. Without such data it is impossible to say that the public are properly protected or that the existence of CART in its present clandestine form is justified.

This document contends the number of Category A prisoners should be reduced by a process of intelligent reassessment based on OASys scores and by downgrading those prisoners with a physical impairment which would make escape impossible. Only two or at most dispersal prisons, supported by three feeder HSE establishments, would be required and the financial saving would be considerable: the current annual overall resource expenditure on Long Lartin and Wakefield totals almost £70 million. Long Lartin was originally a Category C prison and could easily be rehabilitated. As a dispersal prison, Wakefield is an anachronistic example of expediency subverting intelligence: to house of the country's most dangerous sexual offenders in a decrepit Victorian city centre prison overlooked on all sides by high rise buildings does not indicate public safety should there be an escape.

REVIEW OF CATEGORY A STATUS

The system for considering re-categorising Category A prisoners is set out in a series of constantly changing Prison Service Instructions ("PSI") which stipulate in mandatory terms that

"The Category A Team will review the security category of each remanded provisional Category A .prisoner …...immediately upon conviction and sentence.”

"Each prisoner confirmed as Category A at a first formal review will normally have their security category reviewed two year later and thereafter annually on the basis of progress reports from the prison. These annual reviews entail consideration by a Local advisory panel (LAP) within the establishment which submits a recommendation to the Category A Team.”

"The completion of the first annual review should coincide as closely as possible with the same month of the year as the previous review. The preparation for each annual review will therefore need to take into account time needed for the preparation of reports"

Personal experience shows this rarely happens. A Category A prisoner should be provided with the requisite pre-hearing progress report dossier at least 28 days before the LAP hearing. Given that the High Court has held that Prison Service Instructions (PSIs) contain the directions of the Secretary of State and as such

"….represent the policy of the Government in relation to the matters they cover and are required to be carried into effect in every prison in England and Wales. Compliance with PSIs is, in all material respects mandatory. It is not an option open to a governor or his appointed representative to depart in any material particular from the requirements of the PSI. Any such departure would be unlawful both by operation of the terms of the PSI and the Prison Rules”

In theory the Category A review process is purposeful and efficient: however that practice and procedure is not the case can be easily seen from the CART's own data. For example, recent data relating to HMP Wakefield shows that only 100 of 146 Category A prisoners received their annual review and of those only 3 were recommended for downgrade.

Indeed, figures for the year ending December 2015 show that 9% (72) of all Category prisoners in the HSE did not receive a review and 50% (36) of those prisoners were located at HMP Wakefield. Of more concern is the discrepancy between dispersals prison: in 2013 and 14 only 4 Category A prisoners at HMP Wakefield were recommended for downgrade compared with 42 at HMP Long Lartin.

For reasons which the CART have been unable satisfactorily to explain a Category A prisoner at Long Lartin is 10 times more likely to be recommended for downgrade – and 10 times more likely to have that recommendation approved - than a Category A prisoner at Wakefield. If Category A prisoners at Wakefield are 10 times more 1ikely to be a danger to the public than Category A prisoners elsewhere why then are they located in a city centre prison surrounded by homes, schools and playgrounds rather than in a relatively remote rural location like Long Lartin?

An analysis of the data extracted from CART suggests that in order to justify the continued existence of the dispersal prison system as currently constructed a core group of prisoners remain as Category A for much longer than the safety of the public requires. CART appear to be unaware that there is a moral as a well as an ethical objection to treating people as things.

** Personal information redacted

March 2017

TABLE 1

EXPENDITURE ON THE DISPERSAL SYSTEM

TABLE 2

Average annual cost per prisoner per prison

TABLE 3

Category A Prisoners

EDUCATION

The courts have held that education is a pathway to rehabilitation and can help to reduce risk. The Secretary of State has said that prisoners must be given new opportunities to engage purposefully in education with earned release for prisoners who make a commitment to serious educational activity. Yet Ofsted inspection of prison education has found that one in five prisons were inadequate for their standard of education and another two fifths required improvement. Only a quarter were good and scarcely any outstanding. Official figures[6] for the 5,000 prisoners in the High Security Estate show that only 70 are afforded the facilities that allow them to study for a degree and none of those are at HMP Wakefield.

Either the 800 long term prisoners at HMP Wakefield are less intelligent than those at other dispersal jails or Wakefield's education system needs radical reform. Indeed, insofar as meaningful opportunity for further education is concerned HMP Wakefield is, quite disgracefully, the worst performing prison establishment in England and Wales.

Letter dated 9 January 2017 from a serving prisoner, HMP Wakefield to the Chair, Justice Select Committee

Thank you for your letter of 27 October 2016. I write again regarding Prison Reform which I understand your Committee is reviewing. I raise two points that might be of interest to the Committee. I hope you get the time to glance at the outline.

1 LITIGATION

I have often found it necessary to issue legal proceedings against NOMS/Ministry of Justice. I have done so on several occasions because the internal complaints procedure is pretty well worthless. For example, I raise a complaint and it is answered by a prison officer. I do not accept the response and escalate the complaint which is then answered by a more senior prison officer. No governor grade ever sees the complaint.

That's the end of the internal complaints procedure.

Complaints to the Ombudsman take a long time to get nowhere and the quality of investigation is generally thought to be abysmal. So litigation is now becoming the preferred avenue of complaint. Most prisoner are, of necessity, litigants in person and therefore claim fee exemptions for court costs: as the claim progresses expensive court time is taken up to a far greater degree than normal. If the prisoner loses he never has the funds to pay the Ministry's costs and if he wins it generally no more than a very few hundred pounds. The inadequate internal complaints system is direct responsible for this cost to the public purse.

The Government Legal Department acts on behalf of the Ministry and goes to barristers for opinions and representation. It’s an expensive process. I estimate that in the past year the Ministry has incurred costs of around £200,000 in order to fund their various defences in the claims I have felt obliged to file against the Ministry. They have lost judicial reviews and civil claims, all of which could - had the prison authorities been willing - have been resolved by Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) or an independent adjudicator.

I feel sure that if a prison governor was obliged to fund the cost of litigation from his prison's budget then the cost to public purse would be greatly reduced: claims could be resolved without resort to litigation and justice would be quicker and cheaper. But, because the funding of the defence comes from a bottomless pit of taxpayers money every claim is defended to the hilt, regardless of merit.

Who would not litigate if someone else was paying the bill?

CATEGORY A ISSUES

The number of Category A prisoners has greatly increased over the years and there are now around 1,000 prisoners who are classified as Category A: a prisoner “whose escape would be highly dangerous to the public or the police or the security of the State, and for whom the aim must be to make escape impossible". There is now a High Security Estate with 5 so called "dispersal" prisons for convicted Category A prisoners and the three “High Security prisons" for unconvicted Category A prisoners. In my view it is nothing more than empire building.

Whether or not the Category A prisoner in question has the ability to escape is a complete irrelevance: I have multiple sclerosis and other Category A prisoners in cells adjacent to me are in wheelchairs or need two sticks to walk 5 yards. Escape for them would be an impossibility yet nonetheless because of the defining criteria they are subject to the same restrictions imposed on younger, fitter Category A prisoners.

The inexorable increase in the number of Category A prisoners can be attributed to many factors some of which include empire building and self-aggrandisement: the more prisoners the Deputy Director for Custody has under his control the more important he (sub-consciously) thinks he is. And why take any chance at all when the public purse will continue to fund the exorbitant price of your decision not to downgrade Category A prisoners? Its a win win situation.

In response to a Freedom of Information request Category A HQ has informed me that they do not have data sets which inform as to how many prisoners have been Category A for 3 years, 5 years, 10 years or more. They are completely unable to say how many Category A prisoners - in numbers or as a percentage - have been convicted of murder, terrorism, drugs or sexual offences. *** any member of the public would surely think that the department responsible for dealing with those prisoners "whose escape would be highly dangerous to the public or the police or the security of the State, and for whom the aim must be to make escape impossible" would hold such basic information. If nothing else, it would enable them to make more informed decisions as to who should or should not be classified as Category A.

Look at the cost to the public purse. I take Whitemoor as an example and use figures provided by the Ministry in response to Freedom of Information requests. The figures are slightly out of date because despite the requirements of the statute the Ministry always delays responding to my requests: its their way telling me I am not liked!

The Certified Normal accommodation of HMP Whitemoor is 458 with an Operational Capacity of 473. The current average prisoner population is 439: the figures fluctuate but there are usually around 150 Category A prisoners. That means - roughly that 290 prisoners at Whitemoor are Category B - or lower - and do not necessarily need to be located in a dispersal prison: they are classified as being suitable to be located at a Category B training prison. However, because they are needed to fill the prison solely in order to dilute the Category A prisoners they stay at Whitemoor.

Yet regardless of whether the prisoner is Category A or B the annual cost remains the same: £79,000 per place. If the Category B prisoners at Whitemoor were located at HMP Lowdham Grange - a Category B training prison - the annual cost would be £32,000 per place, a saving of over £45,000 per prisoner pet year.

Category A HQ will say its not as simple as that - but it really is. If the Category A prisoners at Whitemoor were distributed around the other 4 dispersal prisons - 40 to each prison - Whitemoor could be closed at a saving of around £26 million a year.

I use Whitemoor as an easy example but one could perhaps use Wakefield as a better example for it has a city centre site that could be sold to developers. The figures state that 1 in every 85 prisoners sent to prison is a person "whose escape would be highly dangerous to the public or the police or the security of the State, and for whom the aim must be to make escape impossible". That really is a nonsense and yet the system is self-perpetuating because the claim - which I fully support - is that the escape of dangerous prisoners must be made impossible. But who is dangerous? Do cripples have the ability to escape? And when did a prisoner last escape from the confines of a Category B training prison?

There is lots of money that could be saved from the prisons budget if the High Security estate was properly managed - and that money could fund the employment of more prison officers. The overall resource expenditure on the five dispersal prisons alone is £190 million a year. Sensible management could reduce that by over a third - I estimate some £65 million a year.

The reform of the Category A system is long overdue: Category A HQ is staffed by an inefficient elitist group with delusions of experience and ability. They appear to answer to no one. I am mindful of Thomas Fuller's dictum: Be ye never so high the law is above you and that is why I now seek a remedy in the courts.

I hope this outline- for that is all it is - has thrown some light on a murky place.

January 2017

*** Personal information redacted