Report author concerned over lack of Government action on prison suicides

The author of a report into prison suicides has raised concern about the Government’s failure to take action on recommendations he published earlier this year.

Labour peer Lord Harris of Haringey said he suspected an official response to his review was being held up by a “rearguard action” from figures within the Prison Service resisting change.

The review of self-inflicted deaths among prisoners aged 18-24 in England and Wales recommended new responsibilities for prison officers to take a direct interest in the progress of individual inmates, as well as early intervention to reduce numbers of young people being put behind bars.

Lord Harris told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that since he reported in July there had been “complete silence” on the part of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) on how its thinking was developing.

He complained that his planned appearance before a ministerial board on deaths in custody was cancelled at short notice last week and that he was told it was “not worth it” for him to meet Justice Secretary Michael Gove at this point.

He said Mr Gove had made “quite positive” hints about efforts to rehabilitate prisoners, but added: “What concerns me is that there is complete silence as to the way their thinking is developing.

“I just think there’s a lack of concern. I suspect there’s a rearguard action from the Prison Service, who find some of our findings really rather worrying, because it recognises that they simply don’t know what’s going on in prisons and that prisons at the moment are under enormous stress and presumably will get more so with the cuts that are just around the corner.”

Lord Harris said he did not believe his report had been “shelved” but added: “My concern is that we’ve already had 12 young people take their lives in prison so far this year, in just nine months. The number of suicides across the board has risen really quite dramatically in the last year or so, so action needs to be taken.

“Every month that we don’t take action we are wasting countless millions of having people in the prison system who don’t need to be there, failing to rehabilitate those who can be rehabilitated and, what’s more, lives are at risk.”

The report found that there was a group of young people in prisons who could have been kept outside if measures had been taken to help them deal with mental health conditions and other problems in their lives, he said.

Lord Harris said: “I’ve met with Michael Gove shortly before the report was published. He listened intently, took notes and nodded repeatedly while I spoke to him. I’ve suggested that another meeting now would be helpful, given that his thinking will have developed over the summer, and I was told it really wasn’t worth it until thinking was further developed.

“I suspect that there are people in the Prison Service who think they’d rather be allowed to just get on with it. But getting on with it means the same things keep happening again and again. These cases over the last 10-12 years you see the same patterns repeating. People who call for help not being helped, people who shouldn’t have been there in the first place, or people where some simple sensible care could have been provided.”

The MoJ told Today that Lord Harris’s recommendations were under consideration and it remained the department’s intention to respond in the autumn.

Copyright (c) Press Association Ltd. 2015, All Rights Reserved.