Prisoners are bingeing on daytime TV like teenagers, says jails inspector
Offenders are bingeing on daytime TV in jails like teenagers, says the chief inspector of prisons.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Charlie Taylor said too many prisons had failed to introduce 9am-5pm work-style regimes after Covid lockdowns and instead had taken the “comfortable” option of keeping inmates in their cells for up to 20 hours a day watching TV because it dampened the risk of violence.
While accepting some prisons faced staff shortages, he said governors should be aiming to replicate the working day in jails so that offenders were training, learning rehabilitative skills or improving their education during the day with “domestic” time in the evening.
Many currently spend two or three hours in workshops in the morning learning skills, followed by two hours locked in their cells for lunch, and 1.5 hours in the afternoon for exercise or domestic duties. “There's nowhere which gets a two-hour lunch break,” said Mr Taylor.
“A lot of the prisoners are completely out of the habit of getting up and going to work. It's a bit like teenagers. If you allow them to sit around watching daytime TV and some of them are teenagers, they maintain that option. Prisoners are out of the habit, but I think jails are also out of the habit of running a proper regime.”
Only six prisoners in jobs workshop
He said prison visits had revealed empty workshops and overgrown gardens. In one dry stone walling workshop, where trained inmates could walk into jobs earning up to £400 a day, there were only six people doing it.
Mr Taylor warned that without a job to go to, or education, there was a high risk of reoffending. “It feels that the regimes are run expediently for the prison, rather than in the interest of prisoners, where the idea should be that they will create fewer victims if they come out and work,” he said.
Prisons also needed to rethink their “hierarchy” where offenders got more status and pay from cleaning the floors of wings than learning to read. “That hierarchy is a prison hierarchy and isn't a hierarchy that applies to employment when you come out,” he said.
“There are far too many prisoners employed doing jobs like wing cleaning, which is considered to be quite a high status and well paid job in a prison because you get to stand around on the wing leaning on a mop, getting the gossip, chatting to other prisoners, to staff,” he said.
It was partly driven by the benefits of using prison labour to help run the jail but Mr Taylor warned: “That isn't much of a preparation for actually going on and working when prisoners come out.”
‘Some prisoners are very sophisticated at grooming people’
Shortages of experienced prison officers were putting new recruits at risk of being groomed by hardened lags who exploited them to bring contraband into the jails, said Mr Taylor.
The shortages also mean there is an increased risk of violence because “there aren’t enough officers and prisoners become frustrated, then the risk of violence increases.”
“Some prisoners are very sophisticated at grooming people to cross boundaries. For example, it starts off with the prison officer being asked to bring in something which isn't illegal, but can lead into bringing something against potentially illegal,” he said.
He said called for the current centralised recruitment of officers to be scrapped with governors allowed to interview and hire so they could judge their effectiveness.
