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Prison Conditions In Northern Ireland

During a recent parliamentary enquiry into prison conditions in Northern Ireland I was surprised to learn that not only are their re-offending rates lower and the rehabilitation and resettlement rates much higher but more men are actually locked up in the prison in my neighbourhood HMP Armley than in the whole of Northern Ireland, last night 1064. Armley is a remand prison with 50 men going in and 50 men a day going out, either being released or taken to another prison. They are part of the more than 81,000 people locked up on any one night in our prisons which is the largest percentage of any other western democracy, except of course the lock ‘em up ‘United States’. As a result of young suicides in Armley in the 1980’s we campaigned successfully to close the young offenders’ wing, moving all the young offenders out to their own local establishment. Still today 80%, of the men that are locked up in Armley have drug or alcohol or registered mental health problems, most are unable to functionally read or write. In other words in the absence of sufficient mental health facilities, drug and alcohol treatment facilities, care in the community has mutated into “care in custody”.

Certainly both staff approaches and training (suicide prevention initiatives) as well as prison conditions have greatly improved in the last 10 years. The problem now is that prisoners contact me asking me to stay in longer to complete a drug rehabilitation or certified college course before they are moved on or out. Sadly the provision inside is proving better inside the prison than in the community when they come out. Not only are education, drug rehabilitation (prisons put on short term methadone replacement because they are not in the same prison long enough to undergo a full detoxification programme) and resettlement plans undermined by the turnover, new strict rules for re-offending mean that those who are out on probation who are late for an interview by a few minutes can end up straight back in side for breaking bail conditions.

The prison staff generally are doing their best to run a cross between a prison, a psychiatric hospital, and a drug/alcohol detox centre with an undermining churning of inmates. The solution of course is not more larger prisons but less people to be sent to prison and the development of more smaller, local rehabilitation units, not least for women as Baroness Causton’s Review of women’s prisons proposed.

In the meantime, awareness of both prison conditions but more importantly of the real needs of the people society is locking up are getting recognised. Groups nationally like PACT (active in Wandsworth and elsewhere), the Jigsaw Project for families of prisoners in Armley and the volunteers/ mentors in the West Yorkshire Chaplaincy Project, supporting those released, bear witness to the wider understanding that preventing ‘re-offending’ means proper back-up on release. Calling off the ‘Titan Prisons’ project is a welcome start, but creating local rehabilitation and supportive projects for those on release cannot be left on the back burner until the public finances pick up. Investing in those convicted and released now will save us millions of pounds as a society in the next 25 years.

© John Battle MP 6th October 2009