UK: Exeter prison struggling with drugs and rising violence, say inspectors

Assault and self-harm figures at Devon jail are revealed as justice secretary prepares to publish prison reform bill.
Prison inspectors have warned that the situation at Exeter jail is “fragile”, with drugs thrown over the wall on a daily basis and only 29 officers on duty for 490 prisoners.

The chief inspector’s report published on Wednesday says staff shortages at the overcrowded category B Victorian prison are exacerbated by problems including drugs and mental health issues, leaving the prison struggling to cope with rising violence and self-harm incidents.

The report of the inspection, carried out in August, says there were 96 assaults, 45 fights and 173 self-harm incidents at Exeter in the six months before it took place. There had been 10 self-inflicted deaths since the previous inspection in 2013.

The warning of the decline facing Exeter prison came after the chief inspector of prisons, Peter Clarke, told MPs that a combination of unsafe jails full of drugs, an ageing prison population, an “appalling” physical environment and widespread mental health issues provided a major obstacle to the government’s reform programme.

The justice secretary, Liz Truss, is poised to publish a prison and courts reform bill designed to introduce a major overhaul to prison regimes in England and Wales, including devolving powers to prison governors.

Clarke told the Commons justice select committee on Tuesday that the five issues of safety, drugs, ageing prison populations, decaying physical fabric and mental health “will create a major obstruction to the reform programme”. He agreed that there had been “a failure of leadership in some prisons but not all”.

He voiced frustration that there had been a recent decline in the number of recommendations that individual prisons had adopted in the wake of his inspections, particularly on prison safety: “We are now in a position where more of our recommendations on the subject of safety are not being achieved than are being achieved.”

Read full article.