Ombudsman publishes Learning Lessons Bulletin on prisoners’ legal mail

Prisoners’ correspondence with their lawyers must be kept confidential, but when prison staff have opened this mail inappropriately, it was usually due to human error rather than anything more sinister, said Prisons and Probation Ombudsman Nigel Newcomen. He added, however, that some prisons needed to improve their processes for handling such correspondence. Today he
published a bulletin on the lessons that can be learned from complaints about the way prisons handle legal and confidential letters.

This bulletin considers complaint investigations completed by the Ombudsman between April 2014 and June 2015. There were 32 investigations into complaints about staff opening legal and confidential access letters. The Ombudsman upheld half (16) of these complaints in favour of the prisoner.

Download PPO’s Learning Lessons Bulletin Complaints issue 6: Legal mail: Rule 39

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