UK: different sides of a shared story

Kimmett Edgar. The prison service management of the COVID-19 situation was to ban outside services from coming into prison, and more: shutting down social visits for families and almost all of the prisoners’ activities. For a majority of the population, that meant spending more than 23 hours per day in their cell by themselves. We knew which policy was applied but not how it was affecting the men, women and children who are behind the doors. It was really important to bring to the public, as well as to prison service and the government, what that experience was like. It is not just a matter of spending three or four weeks 24 hours per day behind a cell door but also of not knowing how long that is going to last. When the extent of a prison officers’ engagement with prisoners is limited to a line of closed doors, they cannot know what’s going on in there either. It’s a closed book to them. Hundreds of voluntary organisations across the country, which are often the ones reporting information on issues such as self-harm, could not get in anymore either.

With COVID measures, the prison service cut itself off from a vital source of information that was dependent on the now-suspended interactions with prisoners. Hearing directly from prisoners makes it possible for us to tell prisons about things going on inside that they might not be aware of.

The point of CAPPTIVE was to contact our network’s 800 prisoners to present what a lockdown was like for people living in those cells. We put out an open letter in the InsideTime newspaper, went on national prison radio, tried as many approaches as possible to reach people in their cells. We got information from over 300 sources from 80 to 90 prisons, about two thirds of the overall estate. CAPPTIVE is not a research project with a survey sample, a response rate, closed questions, and quantitative data. We are trying to get a snapshot of what is going on in prisons now. We are taking prisoners’ points of view as well as other sources of information, like the prison inspectorate’s short scrutiny visits and prison administrations. We want to present more than one side of the story.

We suggested six main themes: families, communication, regimes, health and innovation. We thought communication was particularly important. We wanted to know how the prison administration was informing prisoners of measures, but also whether prisoners were being heard, and what they thought should be done based on their experience. Communication is a two-way street. The topic on regimes included progression, release on temporary licence and parole. Many requirements could not be fulfilled anymore, like completing courses, demonstrating some reduction of risk or communicating with offender managers to be released. The third topic is health. Although healthcare has never been particularly good in prison, during the pandemic there were no face-to-face doctor appointments, dentists didn’t come into prisons, a lot of the routine treatments were delayed. This research will cover physical health but also prisoners’ mental health and well-being. There is already so much pre-pandemic research about the impact of solitary confinement that we did not have to bring too much new evidence on the consequences of prisoners being locked up in their cells for 23 and ½ hours a day. There is a good reason why the United Nations defined prolonged solitary confinement as a form of torture. The final topic is innovations, because all prisons across the world are facing a situation they have never been in before. For example, prison administrations, in this country and throughout the world, suddenly had to cope with the fact that the primary risk to the physical health of a prisoner came from prison officers going in and out the door every day. Once, a prisoner wrote to us: “We understand prison managers can’t get this right first go, it’s new for everybody”.

Soruche Saajedi. For the first two to three months, there were absolutely no social visits happening throughout the country. Many prisoners and their families had zero contact during that time. One thing that was done universally across the prison estate was giving an extra £5 free phone credit. But most prisoners don’t really have suitable access to a phone, like in-cell phones, to use it. The government gave out 900 mobile handsets to be distributed across about 60 prisons. A little back-of-the-napkin math shows that is not enough. So obviously there was an issue with prisoners actually getting out of their cells to use the phone.

And when you are locked up for 23 and ½ hours, you have to take your shower, do your phone call and your exercise, in only 30 minutes. People were writing insane things to us: “yesterday, I queued up my entire half hour to go on the phone and I didn’t get my phone call in the end”.

In April, the Minister of State for Prisons and Probation, indicated that great use would be made of video call technology. In the end, the rollout was very slow. The first three months, only about 20 additional prisons went online. For these calls, a member of staff has to be present in the room. At the early stages of the pandemic, about a third of the staff was off sick across the prison estate, which limited the access even more. Prisoners were restricted to one or two video calls a month. When you have limited access to phones and video calls, the range of family members that you can stay in contact with diminishes. Prisoners had to prioritise certain people over others. Lots of problems also arose with the video calls’ highly securitised system. The participants have to maintain eye contact, not move or make any dramatic movements on camera, and make sure no unregistered person appears in the background otherwise the software automatically cuts the image. It can sometimes take 15 minutes to log back in. People with young children, for instance, have not been able to properly use the video calls. It’s very difficult to keep a 2-year-old to sit still on your lap without moving around.
All communications were seriously limited. A few submissions to CAPPTIVE were written on the back of complaints forms because even getting stationary paper and pen was really difficult. Some prisons have communicated with families via Twitter and social media to give them at least some sort of reassurance.

The situation now is not substantially better than it was in April-May. We are in another lockdown, so the visits have been suspended again. Video call technology is still not been properly rolled out across the estate. There are not more phones in the system. Eight months on, I am still getting emails from family members saying that have not seen or spoken to their loved one for a long time. A major issue is for people with young children. For imprisoned parents, these are really important years to form a bond.

Some have gone into jail when their kid is 2 months old. The child is now 10 months old and they’ve barely had any contact. They are really worried that their children are not going to recognise them.

Parents looking after a child while the other parent is in prison face a lot of strain and struggle. Meanwhile, the parent that is in prison has to deal with the anxiety of time lost and the lack of communication. Many prisoners would say that the toughest thing has not been the lack of exercise or the intermittent supplies of essential goods, but being cut off from your lifeline, your support line: your children, your wife, your husband.

Kimmett Edgar. Prisoners’ wrote us about how empathetic staff had become and how helpful and supportive they were. They found officers to be very caring, looking after people. On the down-side, there was very little available to give people a sense that their time had any meaning whatsoever. The administration turned to so-called distraction packs to prevent self-harm. These packs contained jigsaw puzzles, crosswords or colouring books. Needless to say, it was deemed pointless by many.

The response to COVID turned prisons from places aiming at some form of rehabilitation and preparation for release into dehumanising warehouses, where people are stuck in a room with a television and a distraction pack with no beneficial impact.

The measures were necessary, briefly, to preserve people’s lives. But a lot of residual harm came and continues to this day. No one should spend 23 and ½ hours in a cell. The rest of us out here discovered that lockdown could be a good time to go for a walk in the woods, connect with sparrows, leaves and water… You have no such connexion with real life in a cell. It’s dehumanising in so many ways. Pre-COVID, people depended on prison officers for basic needs, such as unlocking their cell to go to the telephone and talk to their family. But they also had other ways of meeting their own needs: on their way to education, prisoners could stop at the healthcare window to ask for an appointment. With the COVID regime, many needs were found to be neglected, with negative consequences on their well-being.

Respondents to the CAPPTIVE project pointed to things they found helpful during that time, although it was mentioned that none compensated for the general deprivation. One described how a fellow prisoner on his wing had taken it upon himself to keep everyone occupied. Another wrote that he had developed in-cell exercise workouts for the others. Ironically, people found it most helpful when governors gave prisoners opportunities to contribute to the effort and make a difference. At least one prison was regularly sending around a survey under each door to ask “how we can work together to do this better?”. Some prisons had a weekly governor briefing on the television to explain where things were at in the prison. Meeting prisoners to discuss the COVID response, getting prisoners’ views and taking those views on board, these were very helpful.