The grim reality of being locked up during lockdown

What's it like being locked up during lockdown? The latest statistics on prison safety paint a grim picture of life behind bars, which has been made worse by the pandemic.

Even the good news must be caveated. Assaults on staff have reduced quite dramatically, which in any circumstances must be a good thing given a backdrop of record-breaking rates of violence until the virus struck. However, they have reduced mainly as a consequence of an unprecedented lockdown introduced to prevent the spread of Covid-19. This has dramatically reduced the time inmates spend outside their cells; as a consequence, it has rather limited the available opportunities for prisoners to knock seven bells out of prison officers and each other. The unforeseen consequence is an epidemic of distress and despair.

Prisoners being deprived of the structure of a regime, purposeful activity, visits or much in the way of human interaction are harming themselves in record breaking numbers. This shows in sharply increasing rates of self-inflicted injury amongst female prisoners, up by eight per cent last year in the most recent figures. To put this in context, over the last 12 months across all of our prisons there was an average of 161 incidents of self harm every day. 67 people took their lives. Even though this last figure represents a substantial fall, due largely to the efforts of staff and clinicians, it is still a sobering and shameful toll.

But it is the overall death rate in prisons that is the most ominous statistic because this is perhaps starting to reveal the extent of Covid infection and the human destruction it causes. It also calls into question the strategy adopted by the Ministry of Justice to control the pandemic in places almost ideally designed to catalyse it. 

Put a large number of people with disproportionate levels of underlying health conditions together in overcrowded and insanitary closed conditions. Add Covid. The result before the new variant had probably taken hold was 51 prisoner deaths due to Covid-19 and, according to one report in the Telegraph, up to 5,000 prison officers sick or self-isolating at one time. This is not only staggering but entirely unsustainable. 

It is reasonable to assume this trend will now sharply increase. But the lag in reporting means we will only know the true extent of how bad things are in our jails in several months. 

For now, I hear daily reports of prison wings where close to half the prisoners test positive. In one prison yesterday, so many staff were off through Covid-19, that it is relying on emergency drafts of officers from elsewhere to keep going. 

It is very difficult to ascertain the number of prison officers who have died of Covid as these aren’t represented in statistical bulletins. But recently the Prison Officers Association (POA) highlighted what they called completely inadequate PPE for staff dealing with symptomatic prisoners. Without question, prison staff shuttling in and out of prisons on shifts each day must be vectors of community infection, not to speak of the dozens of prisoners routinely released every day.

So what is the prison strategy and is it working? Many people, me included, argued for the release of carefully screened non-violent offenders on electronic monitoring tags at the start of the pandemic. This would have created enough space to allow an isolation prison for symptomatic Covid prisoners and headroom for staff to focus on continuing to run regimes for the rest of the population. This is happening in parts of the US. The Ministry of Justice did introduce such a scheme but it has resulted in just a few hundred releases.

Instead, the prison strategy revolves around virus suppression within and between prisons of a population made as static and compartmentalised as possible. This approach is helped to some extent by a criminal justice conveyor belt that has all but ground to a halt; fewer prisoners are entering custody because many courts have effectively stopped working. It also means, as repeated prison inspections show us, that no meaningful rehabilitation can take place. This is a ticking time bomb for society: prisoners are likelier to be angrier than ever when they are eventually let out. 

One way, of course, of ensuring prisons are not over run with Covid-19, is to immediately implement mass testing and vaccinations for all prisoners and staff in every one of our jails. Otherwise, sick prisoners will start to fill an already beset NHS and sick staff will cause already overstretched establishments to fall over with dire implications for security. While this might make sense though, it's unlikely any politician is going to get behind a campaign like this any time soon.

But they should. Prison staff and managers have worked heroically to deal with a completely unprecedented threat of a global pandemic in prison. One estimate, published last April, suggested as many as 2,700 prisoners would die if nothing was done. Where we are is some achievement. But things are changing as the new variant burns through our 117 establishments. 

I am in touch with front line prison staff daily and they are scared. The initial strategy seems to have worked, but, like the virus, it must adapt now to rapidly changing circumstances. Some of the ills of violence and suicide that have plagued our criminal justice system have receded in the face of draconian restrictions. But they have not fully disappeared. 

Meanwhile, the threat of sharply increasing Covid fatalities will be giving prison bosses and prison reform advocates sleepless nights. You won't hear much sympathy for those locked up right now, but we should all surely hope that prison should not become a death sentence for those on either side of the cell doors.