Connections – by Ombudsman Adrian Usher
In a news post published today, Prisons and Probation Ombudsman Adrian Usher states why he believes that prisoners having phone contracts could save lives.
A society is measured by the treatment of its prisoners said Winston Churchill once.
Last year in England and Wales, every three and a half days a prisoner killed themselves. So what does this say about our society and why should we care?
Some hold the view that men and women who are committed to incarceration and have decided to end their lives, whilst no cause for celebration, should be briefly mourned. This, in many ways, is understandable. In a world that provides such rapacious competition for our empathy, where should we place those who have offended against us?
However, to take such a view is to miss a very serious consideration for the safety of society at large. If, as is indisputably the case, those who commit suicide represent the tip of an iceberg of despair within the prison population, then society has some very pragmatic reasons for wishing to mitigate this risk. Desperation is an emotion unlikely to assist an individual trying to resist reoffending when released. Indeed, we know that it is often quoted as the being the predominant motivator for further crime. Therefore, striving to reduce self-
inflicted deaths makes, not only moral, but also practical sense.
I asked myself how might this be achieved?
Understanding the emotions that lead to suicide and self-harm is a complex task. Psychiatry, psychology, sociology, philosophy and theology are amongst the schools of thought that have something to contribute on understanding why an individual makes, in an instant, an eternally irrevocable decision.
However, there are factors that we know can make a positive difference and many of these are woven into prison rules and policies. The day-to-day delivery of such measures by compassionate staff within the prison service undoubtedly saves many hundreds of lives a year. However, there is more that can be done, and we know that a very significant positive consideration is regular contact with those loved ones on the outside.
Prisoners feeling part of and connected to a world beyond the prison walls may feel like a counter-intuitive aspiration for our criminal justice system. After all, a court has determined that in order to protect the public, an individual should lose their liberty. But loss of liberty is not the same as isolation.
The severing of ties with family, friends and home communities are not only significant negative factors in suicide but also in reducing reoffending. If you believe that no one in the world beyond the prison gates cares for you, then when you walk out of them there is considerably less shame in offending against that world.
Denying contact with those that care for individual prisoners only serves to push them into a closer connection with a prison world – the rules, both literal and cultural, within which they have spent most of their lives and they can make more sense of. Being able to access loved ones in their home communities is a constant reminder that they have something worth getting back to. I believe that giving prisoners a desire to return to and remain with those that care for them is a powerful incentive to change.
Since taking up my role as Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, I have realised that
prisoners are the poorest paid workers in the country. If prisoners take part in meaningful work in the morning and afternoon from Monday to Friday, they will receive between £15 and £30 in total for the week. This nominal amount is added to their prison account and the prisoners are then faced with some choices.
They can purchase vapes (smoking was banned in prisons in 2016), they can buy additional food (the budget for prison provided meals is around £3.00 per prisoner per day), or they can put money into their phone account which allows them to phone family and friends from their pre-approved, phone directory. It should surprise few that in a binary choice, nicotine and nourishment often win over family contact, however, there is a straightforward way in which this could be addressed.
Prisoners currently pay for their phone calls per minute in a way that almost no one in society now does. In effect, this means they pay far more for calls than you or I do, and it occurs to me that there is no reason why this should be the case. The vast majority of the cost for any prison telecom provider is in the establishment and maintenance of infrastructure. The actual cost of a call is negligible. My argument is that telecom providers could provide unlimited
minutes to the prison service in the same way they do to most of the public, without impacting profit. Prisoners could be placed on monthly contracts which they pay for themselves. Then the decision regarding the number of minutes each prisoner is allowed, would rest, where it should, with the prison Governor.
There are precious few levers for prison Governors to operate in trying to incentivise good behaviour – and this could be a significant one. Every prison is different, from the presence or absence of in-cell phones, single, double or triple occupancy of cells, levels of security and many other variations. The Governor will appraise them all in order to optimise access to phones in their prison, however, I believe they should be liberated from considering cost as one of them.
When I ask Governors why prisoners pay for their calls per-minute when nobody else does, I am almost always greeted with furrowed brows and silence. The more reflective respond with “because they always have”. When I suggest contracts instead, I have yet to find anyone in HM Prison and Probation Services or in private prisons, at any rank, to offer a dissenting voice.
As one Prison Officer succinctly put it as we discussed the idea on a prison landing, “I would rather he was in there talking to his mum than out here fighting with me”. When I am investigating the circumstances of a self-inflicted death in a prison, far too frequently do I find that they had no credit on their phone account. This leaves me to speculate if, in their darkest hour, they had had the ability to contact a friend or family member, would they have made a different choice?
There is an opportunity here. Quite apart from the moral argument that, for those in crisis, a phone-call can literally be a life-saver. There is the potential, at zero cost, to reduce suicide, self-harm and re-offending alongside creating a calmer prison population. There are clear benefits for prisoners, prison staff and the public. If our society can indeed be judged by how we treat our prisoners, then the right people need to make the right connections.