A new report out today has found that a year on from being described as being “reminiscent of Dickensian England”, HMP Manchester has barely improved.
Chief inspector of prisons Peter Clarke found that during a three day visit in June this year that little progress had been made in two thirds of the recommendations made a year ago.
Then Inspectors concluded that levels of violence had increased significantly since the
previous inspection in 2014. The prison had failed to consider the influence that poor living
conditions, the attitude of staff and illicit drug use had on the high levels of violence at the
prison.Environmental standards around the prison were deficient, which encouraged a serious vermin problem while too many prisoners, some 40%, were locked up during the working day,even though there was sufficient activity for all.
At the beginning of June this year, after making twelve recommendations last July, the inspectors found reasonable progress had been made in four recommendations,insufficient progress made in three and no meaningful progress made in five.
The prison had recently revised the safety strategy and there was an appropriate structure
in place to progress and deliver the related actions through a safety committee. Assaults on
prisoners had reduced significantly since the full inspection, and we judged there to have
been reasonable progress in this area. If the establishment is to reduce violence further,
particularly against staff, the lengthy list of actions aimed at reducing violence should be
prioritised and time bound says the report.
The visit found that the use of force remained high. Despite this, there had been no meaningful progress against this recommendation; governance had not improved, staff rarely used their body-worn cameras, with no adequate explanation for this, and too few recorded incidents were scrutinised to provide assurance and institutional learning.
Reasonable progress had been made in efforts to reduce the supply of drugs, and mandatory testing results showed that drug use was relatively low compared with other local prisons.
“The drug strategy now identified the important links between relationships, environment,
and drug use. Unfortunately, the meeting in place to drive the strategy did not explore these issues in sufficient depth or have all the key stakeholders in attendance.”
The Inspectors also found that promising work to support prisoners in crisis had started so recently that progress at the time of the visit had to be judged as insufficient.
“This was very concerning given that there had been three further self-inflicted deaths since the full inspection in July 2018. It was bewildering to find that actions to prevent deaths in custody simply had not been reviewed until shortly before our visit.”
They concluded that as HMP Manchester was relatively well resourced and had fewer inexperienced staff than we have found at similar prisons. It was therefore hard to understand why progress had been so slow in many critical areas
