Blog

Closure of HM Prison website hails confusion for prisoners' families.

 

The Prison Service website has closed - and it will be missed. Action for Prisoners' Families has been sign-posting the site for years as a valuable resource for prisoners' families, practitioners, academics, journalists and anyone who needed to know about Prison Finder, Prison Service Orders and the Child Protection Action Plan. The content from the site has now been split between DirectGov  for the ' general public' and the Ministry of Justice website  ' for practitioners and stakeholders.'

Prisoners' families are seen as both  'stakeholders' and the 'general public.' If they want to check the details of a prison where their family member has been transferred to they now need to go to the MoJ website, where, on the home page, it is prohibitively complicated to access ' Prison Finder.'

The Cabinet Office sees this as part of its "ongoing web rationalisation project" but it is a poorly thought out cost saving exercise for which there was no consultation. Yet another service has been quietly reduced.

Prisoners' Right to Work

The fact that prisoner's families pay for many of the prisoners' basic requirements remains a little known fact and one that deserves more prominence in the debate about whether prisoners should work or not. The government backs reform in this area  and talks about encouraging private firms to employ prisoners at realistic wages. The Howard League's report Business Behind Bars estimates that these measures could make £9.9m for the public purse as well as £17m per year for victims' funds.

The public purse and victims are, of course, very important; but so too is the domestic reality of family members who literally pay for a crime they did not commit - when the prisoners, on a wage of £4 a week - need help with paying for 'phone calls as well as buying stamps, clothes and supplementary food.

The Prisons Inspectorate has long pointed out that lack of meaningful activity contributes to a cycle of impoverishment, whilst posts on the Prisoners Families Voices blog reflect the anger and anxiety of families under pressure.

As one mother of three put it," I send my partner £10 a week so he can put some money on the prison telephone and buy toiletries. I visit every week with three young children so that's a taxi and £10 a week. Then I need money for drinks for the children in the visits room . That is another £40 a month. So what do I do? Save over £120.00 a month and deny the children of a dad?"

 

Could prisoners' children receive political recognition?

 

European Prisoners' Children Week ( June1-8) arrives in the midst of debate around the rights of children and their families. Article 8 of the Human Rights Act ( the right to a family life) has affected change for both the partner of a prisoner ( who is to receive artificial insemination) and the five children of a burglar who was freed, on appeal, to look after them.

Sections of the British press may cluck but , at a European level, the wind is blowing in the right direction with the publication of  Children of Imprisoned Parents and with a day of discussion  about children of incarcerated parents to be held at the UN in September.

Children of Imprisoned Parents draws on data collected from several countries over two years. It asks," are children's rights considered when their parents are imprisoned?" and concludes that the," perspective of the child is remarkably absent from the judgements of the European Court of Human Rights that involve children of imprisoned parents..."

You can find an abridged copy of the report to download here ; we will also send hard copies on request.

 

The Strangeways documentary

The three part documentary about Strangeways prison has attracted more than five million views; more than the number of people who watch either 'Glee' or 'Panorama'.

 

The governor of the prison allowed cameras in for nine months to ‘dispel the myths’. Responses to the series have been varied; prisoners’ families have reported that their children are being bullied at school  whilst on-line commentators have made the usual  “It’s a body builders club, with Play stations and cable TV” comments.   

Five million viewers, however, are five million viewers – the majority of whom have never been into a prison and do not know what it is like – viewers who know nothing of the true experiences of offenders, their families, the Prison Service and the numerous over-burdened professionals, most of whom are paid for by the tax payer. 

To portray the offender and their families in a realistic way is advantageous to the offenders themselves, their families and the prison system; some viewers might only see Playstations, but others will sympathise with  an over-burdened and under- resourced system, struggling to cope with the mentally ill and suicidal. Amongst these viewers, one hopes, there will be the policy makers, criminal justice workers, funders and practitioners whose work will benefit from seeing a true picture of prison life.  

To keep offenders out of the public eye is to draw a curtain over them which only contributes to uninformed opinions. But the more that offenders, families, and prison staff are seen as individuals the more likely it is that uninformed criticism will make way for informed common sense. 

 

HM Inspectorate of Prisons - unique and democratic

 

 

Prisons Inspectorate Appreciation Society 

In the Government’s recent cull of quangos, APF was concerned that the Inspectorate of Prisons might be abolished in a bid to save money.  So we were delighted when its value and importance as an independent ‘auditor’ was recognised and its future was secured for the time being.  However, the reports this hard-working group of people produce rarely get a mention in national media unless they are truly exceptional or truly appalling.  What a waste this is – the Prisons Inspectorate is unique in providing this service to our society.  Visitors from abroad are amazed that we have such a service.  We at APF trawl every report for the Inspectorate’s observations on visits, telephone calls, any involvement of families in sentence planning, family support work, etc. so we can use the information to tell other prisons what is being provided, support and congratulate our members and non-members alike in managing to provide high quality or innovative services in these straitened times, and celebrate improvement where there has been some.We also make sure that we let the Prisoners’ Families’ Voices blog know when inspection reports are published. Families are often interested to hear about these reports.  If my partner was in a prisoner which had just had an inspection done, I’d want to know what it said, in the same way I’d want to know the outcome of an Ofsted report for my child’s school. 

 The Inspectorate operate on  a shoe string and their function is to tell prisons and the Government where there are problems and room for improvement.  We should all make use of this excellent resource and we should applaud the inspectorate for the fantastic work it does just in case it is ever considered for the chop.

 

Care Not Custody

Welcome to the Action for Prisoners' Families  Blog where  we will comment on the many issues affecting prisoners' and offenders' families.   If you have an issue you think we should blog about or would like to write a blog yourself, please E-mail Diana Ruthven The schizophrenic man who suffocated himself in HMP Manchester in 2004 will not be forgotten. His mother knew he should not have been admitted to a psychiatric ward and her case inspired the Womens' Institute Care Not Custody campaign. If the police had heeded his sister's advice at the time of arrest he might still be alive. Now the Departments of Health and Justice are to set up a national service to divert mentally ill people from prison.

Meanwhile the Departments of Education and Justice have announced grants for six projects to support the families of offenders. It is good news that government departments are working together but to be effective criminal justice needs to work with family members.We believe that families should be engaged in sentence planning so that practitioners benefit from their insights when planning diversion, sentence progression and resettlement. This could make a real difference to the lives of the offenders, the families and the capacities of the professionals who work with them.