Wormwood Scrubs - an unannounced inspection

By Anne Owers, Chief Inspectorate of Prisons

 We last inspected Wormwood Scrubs in February 2000. This was two years after the presentation of a dossier of allegations against staff which led to over a hundred officers being investigated, 27 suspended and three eventually convicted of violence against prisoners; and a year after the second of two damning Inspectorate reports. The 2000 report painted a more hopeful picture: of an establishment which was developing management and staffing structures capable of providing a decent, safe and purposeful environment for prisoners.

This report follows an unannounced inspection, carried out over a 10-day period in December 2001. As promised in February 2000, we wanted to see whether the green shoots we identified then had blossomed. Because of continuing allegations and public concern, we devoted considerable time and resources to the inspection, so that we could carry out a detailed assessment of the conditions and treatment of prisoners at that particular time. As well as our usual prisoner survey, we also carried out structured interviews with staff at all levels.

Six months before our inspection, a new Governor had arrived and was in the process of developing his medium-term plans for the prison. He was working with a virtually new senior management team and was very aware of the scale of the task he faced. The good news for the prison is that during an intensive inspection, carried out with no forewarning, we found no evidence, at the time of our inspection, of a culture of brutality by officers towards prisoners. Indeed, in the segregation unit, the area which had previously caused greatest concern, we found evidence of good and carefully supervised practice. That is not to say that individual incidents of staff-prisoner assault or violence could not take place in the prison. But it is to say that we found both management and staff alert to this possibility, and systems in place designed to prevent and detect it. We also found, amongst both staff and managers, those who wanted to build on this base to drive the prison forward.

However, the bad news is that most of the green shoots of February 2000 had failed to blossom. The Home Secretary, two years ago, told Parliament that Wormwood Scrubs must be restored to its proper status as an effective and healthy prison. This report clearly shows that this had not yet happened. On all four of our key tests - safety, respect, purposeful activity and resettlement - Wormwood Scrubs was less healthy, or at best no healthier, than it had been 22 months earlier. As in 2000, our inspectors found themselves once again being provided with promises, plans and hopes, rather than achievements and outcomes.

Safety

Prisoners' safety is critically dependent upon the first few days in prison (when the risk of self- harm is greatest) and on a prison's ability to tackle bullying. Wormwood Scrubs may have instituted systems which made prisoners safer from staff; but it had no effective systems to make them safe from one another, or themselves. Though permanent reception staff were committed and well- meaning, they were assisted by untrained staff, and first night and induction procedures were inadequate to ensure that prisoners, especially first-time and foreign national prisoners, were properly supported and informed. The prison's anti-bullying strategy was also ineffective. In only two cases we examined had bullies been properly dealt with; in some cases, identified bullies were given jobs as cleaners, allowing them free access to others.

Our survey of prisoners told the same story. Allegations of assaults by staff remained at the same low level as 2000; but allegations of assaults by other prisoners had nearly trebled, from 5% to 14%. Claims of verbal abuse by prisoners on prisoners had also risen sharply, from 12% to 20%. Nearly one in three prisoners felt unsafe sometimes, often or most of the time. The prison's own statistics showed that 44% of recorded injuries were the result of self- harm, and a further 34% resulted from fights and assaults. This is not to say that there were no efforts to improve self-harm and anti-bullying. Committees had been set up and research carried out, and there were good links to drug teams. But these policies foundered at the operational end: with inappropriate allocation of prisoners, and staff who were reluctant to engage effectively with prisoners, and who were constantly being redeployed to locations and tasks they did not fully know.

Respect

We did not find any overt disrespect from staff to prisoners, and on some wings we record a relaxed atmosphere. But overall we found a distance, a reluctance to engage with prisoners. Systems that are fundamental to good running and relationships on the wings - personal officers, requests and complaints, incentives and earned privileges - were not working, or not working well. Race relations was undeveloped. Ironically, the best staff-prisoner relationships were on E wing, which was 'rented out' to Elmley prisoners and run by Rochester officers - in spite of the fact that prisoners and staff were strangers to one another and to the prison.

The prison's healthcare centre had also deteriorated from the promising start in February 2000. There was still no clinical manager, the physical conditions of the inpatient wards was appalling, and regimes for patients, especially those undergoing detoxification, were highly unsatisfactory. Staff were trying to manage an impossible combination of patients, 39% of them with serious mental illness that required NHS care.

Purposeful activity

Purposeful activity had also declined. In February 2000, only 17% of prisoners told us that they were out of cell for less than four hours a day; by December 2001 this had risen to 44%. There were fewer opportunities for exercise and association. The prison had no means of accurately assessing what regime was being provided, and for whom, as its recording and reporting systems were inaccurate and incomplete. In spite of an enthusiastic education department, and an excellent PE department, many prisoners were not being delivered to classes and activities on time, or in some cases at all.

Resettlement

The prison still had no resettlement strategy (though there was some good work being carried out by NACRO and the CAB) and sentence planning was undermined by the continual redeployment of sentence management staff. More also needed to be done with lifers. Drug strategies were in their infancy and prisoners on the main wings had little help with detoxification. This report therefore shows an establishment that during the last two years had stalled, or was sliding backwards, on all our key indicators. This raises important questions for the Prison Service, as well as the prison. The Prison Service has shown that it can rescue disastrously failing prisons: by changing the management, putting in resources and providing emergency support. But the really important task is to convert them into healthy and positive environments, and that had not yet been achieved at Wormwood Scrubs.

In spite of this, we found many examples at Scrubs in 2001, as in 2000, of initiatives that were designed to improve conditions for prisoners, and of people committed to providing a better regime and disappointed at the lack of substantial progress. Reception, visits, the developing atmosphere on A wing, offending behaviour programmes, work on self-harm and the changed environment of the segregation unit are all evidence of this. The new governor was developing a six- month strategy with clear targets designed to deliver change, and had imposed minimum staffing levels in the week of our arrival to seek to ensure a better regime for prisoners. There was a very active and committed Board of Visitors. It is all the more important, therefore, to identify why what we found in February 2000 had failed to develop, and what should now be done to ensure that Scrubs is not trapped in a permanent cycle of promising initiatives that fail to take root.

Two interrelated factors seem to us to be fundamental. The first is the absence of closure in relation to allegations of violence against prisoners. The situation at Scrubs was unprecedented, and continuing: prison officers remained under investigation and suspended officers had returned to work. Yet there had been no independent and published inquiry. Staff, prisoners, governors, the Board of Visitors and the Prison Service were all involved. All were free to make their own assumptions and draw their own conclusions about what had happened, why and how. This situation was corrosive. It undermined prisoners' confidence and the morale of good staff, gave other staff a reason, or excuse, not to engage with prisoners, and took up a large amount of management time. It led prisoners to believe that they could only expect to get redress through solicitors, not through the prison management. It also infected staff-management relationships and undermined attempts to negotiate improved regimes.

Secondly, and partly as a result, the management of the prison was dysfunctional. Management at Wormwood Scrubs had to eradicate a deep and resistant negative culture. There was clearly still resistance, from some staff and middle managers, to change and progression in the prison; and what was described to us as an 'antimanagement culture'. In such a culture, senior managers need support, experience and time if they are not to be worn down by trench warfare on major and minor issues. This had not been the case at Wormwood Scrubs. The departure of nearly all the previous Senior Management Team earlier in the year had undermined continuity and stability. Active management was further weakened by the delegation of management of the very large wings to Principal Officers, who in many cases distrusted the skills and experience of the relatively inexperienced junior governors they reported to.

These problems were compounded by the constant struggle to keep going a regime for which staffing levels had not been agreed, and in the face of staff sickness and suspensions. The prison had lacked the necessary support and direction from Prison Service Headquarters to drive through agreements on appropriate staffing levels. As a result, managers were involved in day to day negotiation about what could be provided and how staff might be redeployed to provide it. Our analysis showed that in two working days, 30% of senior officers and 25% of officers had been crossdeployed and were working in areas with which they were unfamiliar. What prisoners could expect varied from day to day and from wing to wing; managers unfamiliar with a wing depended heavily on basic grade staff for information and sometimes decisions. The absence of accurate monitoring meant that there was no way for senior management to check, let alone influence, real outcomes.

These management problems were clearly a major barrier to the development of a new culture and positive outcomes. More worryingly, they also created gaps through which we feared that the old culture could re-emerge.

There are two messages that we would like this report to send. The first is to the Home Secretary and Prison Service. As this report shows, the failure to establish, publicly and independently, what took place at Scrubs during the 1990s has severely hampered attempts to change the culture and regime there, or to establish whether there were underlying systemic problems which may need addressing in this, and other, prisons. For that reason, many of those involved in Scrubs, from the Board of Visitors to the POA, have supported the call for a public inquiry. I would like to stress that this inspection, thorough though it was, is no substitute for that: it is a snapshot of the prison as we found it in December 2001. This Inspectorate does not of itself have the powers or the mandate to investigate past events.

However, even a public inquiry, though it might eventually bring closure, would not undo the damage that ha s already been caused by inconclusive, long drawn out inquiries. We are aware that the Prison Service is now proactively examining allegations. But this is too little and too late. We suggest that there is the need to develop and to use mechanisms for carrying out transparent and independent investigations to report quickly on serious allegations, or incidents, which go to the heart of the running of a prison. Prisons are closed environments and it is vital that an independent and external spotlight is directed on them when something appears to have gone seriously wrong. We would invite the Home Secretary to consider how this might be achieved under existing powers, what additional powers might be required, and, in parallel, how to ensure that any police inquiries are conducted quickly, effectively and with perceived independence.

The second message is a more immediate one, for the Prison Service and prison. We suggest that some fundamental and urgent steps are necessary to secure a lasting change in Wormwood Scrubs' culture and regimes. First, there must be agreement on the staffing levels needed to allow the prison to deliver agreed regimes, and an acceptance by staff associations of the need to work flexibly, and with proper professional standards, in order to provide a decent and positive environment for prisoners. Secondly, the Governor and his senior management team need to develop their vision for the prison over the immediate and medium term, share this with all staff and require a commitment to it. Thirdly, the senior management team should be strengthened, with a greater number of experienced governors.

Finally, and crucially, over the next two years, the management team should give priority to training, supporting and involving Principal and Senior Officers so that they are able and willing to deliver and own the new vision.

Anne Owers April 2002

HM Chief Inspector of Prisons
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/hmipris/hmipris.htm

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