An influx of more than 1,000 prisoners in the immediate aftermath of the riots that hit England last month has fuelled gang culture in prisons and led to serious incidents, the chief inspector of prisons said on Wednesday.
In his first annual report, Nick Hardwick said the decision to remand more than 65% of riot defendants in custody had already resulted in incidents at Feltham young offenders institute and Brixton prison in London, and "significant numbers" of people had been placed on suicide watch.
Hardwick said that although the prison service had coped with the influx of riot-related inmates, there had been serious tensions involving existing prisoners who had been moved to other prisons to make way for the new inmates. New gangs were forming, particularly where London-based inmates were being moved in large groups to prisons around the country.
He also reported that his prison visits in the past four weeks had revealed first-time inmates on riot charges had been joining gangs for their own protection.
He said the gym at Feltham had been wrecked during an incident, and young inmates had got out on to a roof space before the situation was brought under control. At Brixton, prisoners had refused to go back to their cells.
"There have been tensions between prisoners, some potentially serious incidents and significant numbers of young people placed on self-harm prevention procedures," said Hardwick. "It is a credit to the staff involved that there have not been more serious incidents."
The chief inspector said the prisons inspectors had looked at a small cross-section of prisons and young offender institutes in the past few weeks to gauge the impact of the riots on the prison system.
"Up to now they have had the capacity to physically absorb the extra numbers. But capacity is more than just a question of how many prisoners can be squeezed into the available cells. The concern my report highlights is that there will not be sufficient capacity to do anything useful with many of them when they are there."
Hardwick says that for too many convicted rioters a prison term will mean having to sit out their sentence with very little constructive to do and little input to prevent them reoffending.
He said 15 months after the coalition came to power, the "rehabilitation revolution" promised by the justice secretary, Ken Clarke, had yet to start. "The improvements in prisons over the last five years are very welcome … but for many short-term prisoners, the reality will be being locked up in a small shared cell with an unscreened toilet for 20 hours a day – with too much access to drugs and negative peer pressure and too little access to work and resettlement help."
The chief inspector of prisons said Clarke was right to say that rehabilitation had been too low a priority for the prison service in England and Wales, but the rehabilitation revolution now "needed a rocket" under it to get it going. Few prisons holding young men manage to provide them with even 10 hours a day out of their cells.
Hardwick said what struck him most in his first year in the role was not that terrible things were done to prisoners in jails in England and Wales but that for far too many, nothing happened at all while they were inside.
The chief inspector also disclosed that he is talking to the army and the Ministry of Defence about the feasibility of officially inspecting British military detention facilities in Afghanistan.
by Alan Travis taken from http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/sep/14/influx-prisoners-riots-serious-incidents
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