birminghamprisonofficer's posterous

Incentives and Earned Privileges.

  Incentives and Earned Privileges (IEP) is the scheme in all prisons whereby prisoners are rewarded for good behaviour, and have privileges withdrawn for poor behaviour.  The most significant is generally access to televisions, followed by out of cell time, money etc.  Most prisons run on three levels, Basic, Standard and Enhanced, and all prisoners are classified by their behaviour.

  IEP was brought in in an attempt to provide a way of controlling prisoners without resorting to violence, to give them an incentive to cooperate.  It is in general an excellent system, which I believe is vital to safety, rehabilitation and the smooth running of our prisons.  It can, however, be abused.

  G4S have told us that IEP is central to their running of prisons, and will be at the heart of the new HMP Birmingham.  So far so good.  Great, wonderful, perfect.  But let's examine how this is likely to work.  We've all read the articles in the tabloids about prisoners living in luxury, en-suite cells, telephones in cells, Sky TV.  You see,  IEP can be used in two ways.  You can use it, as we have historically, to control the worst prisoners, (Basic-no TV less association time.) and use them as an example of the consequences of poor behaviour.  You can then use the highest level (Enhanced- more money, more association time) to give the better behaved prisoners a little bit extra, to show them you appreciate their efforts, and respect them for their conduct.  This makes it a useful tool, and a significant part of how we do our jobs.

  There is another way.  First, you massively increase the privileges available on the higher levels.  Then you make IEP all important.  It has now become a game of psychological manipulation- prisoners cooperate in order to get Sky etc, they are so keen to get all the great stuff that there's less trouble, you can reduce staffing and hopefully the prison becomes safer.  The problem with this is a moral one.  How much is it right to give prisoners?  You end up with a situation in many prisons where prisoners actually have higher disposable income, better TV packages, more free access to gym facilities etc than they can afford on their fixed incomes outside.  Why would they cause trouble? Would you?  Prison becomes the holiday camp that the tabloids paint it.  Private companies can throw money at Sky TV and in cell phones because it's cheaper than paying the staff required to control a prison population where the prisoners are given a robust, challenging regime preparing them for release.  As I've said before, I'm not a hang-em-and-flog-em type of person, but I find it impossible to morally justify these luxurious conditions.  The old hack "they're in prison as punishment, not for punishment" is laughable to your modern career criminal, as I've discussed before.  It makes a great line for politicians justifying the news stories, but it is intellectually unsound.

  This is the future of HMP Birmingham under G4S.  We await it with interest.

Last Day

  Today is the last day any of us at HMP Birmingham will wear the unifom of Prison Officers. 

  Tomorrow we belong to G4S.  In some ways it is a relief to finally complete the process, but now comes the long hard road of protecting our safety against the pressures of "efficiencies".  I don't really feel like there's much more I can say today, the energy and drive is gone for now, but I know it will come back.  There's a lot to do.

Ken Clarke and our "broken penal system"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/05/punishment-rioters-help (This is worth a read before you read my post).

Kenneth Clarke (who I can only assume must be a subscriber to this blog...)  makes some interesting points in this article that echo many of the points I made in my last post.  I won't bore you by reiterating my previous comments on criminal culture etc etc, I'm more interested in what he has to say further on in the article.

"I am introducing radical changes to focus our penal system relentlessly on proper, robust punishment and the reduction of reoffending. This means making our jails places of productive hard work, addressing the scandal of drugs being readily available in many of our prisons and toughening community sentences so that they command public respect."

On the face of it, it is impossible to argue with these points, they are clear and can be agreed by almost everybody. 

A few practical points, however.  Our prisons simply DO NOT have room to give every prisoner a full time productive job.  By this I don't mean that our working practices must change, or that the evil unions are blocking it, I'm talking about actual physical room.  Very many of our gaols are Victorian, like Birmingham, and the emphasis is on cell spaces.  We have a certain plot of land, which is already full, with no space for significant numbers of extra workshops etc.  We don't even have room for our prisoners to eat their meals outside of their cells around tables, let alone somewhere for them to complete productive tasks. 

 The issue of drugs is in my opinion down to the levels of both drug testing, and the lack of "intimate search" powers of prison staff.  Everything Clarke says (maybe even including the untried payment-by-results) is wonderful and great.  NONE of it can be done without spending MASSIVE amounts of money.  You would have to replace a large proportion of our existing prisons with brand new ones, with their architecture designed around work for prisoners.  Adequate amounts of drug testing would cost a fortune.  Lets get realistic here.  Rehabilitation needs to happen before people enter the penal system.  It's cheaper and more effective.  So from that point of view, Clarkes point about community sentences is encouraging.  I just wonder why he feels the need to blame our prisons then?  I'm guessing it's a softening up of public opinion prior to the next round of privatisations.

As for making prisons places of "robust punishment", well, this would require the rolling back of the Ministry of Justice's "Decency Agenda".  This agenda is not, of course, about decency at all, but about appeasement of prisoners to keep them compliant, rather than spending money on staff to ensure discipline.  I have been amused recently by some representatives of G4S saying to us that "good staff prisoner relationships" are what helps them keep discipline in their gaols with low staffing levels.  Translate that to "don't tell them off or make them do anything they don't want to".  Most Prison Officers have excellent interpersonal skills and get on wonderfully with the majority of their charges.  But bust up someone's drug gang, and they hate you, doesn't matter how good your interpersonal skills are.

Why do they riot on our streets?

  So, 30 years of training up consumers in our free-market economy has reached it's ultimate conclusion.  I want a Burberry cap, I take a Burberry cap.  And a TV. And a mobile phone.  Three generations of permanent unemployment has led to whole communities of criminals.  When fathers were in prison, mothers and kids used to say "Dad's working on an oil rig".  Now they're proud to have a dad in prison, a tough guy.  The criminal family on the street used to be shunned.  Now the balance has shifted, and they are admired.

  It is impossible to rehabilitate people in these circumstances.  Non-criminals are the outcasts, the wierdos in their community.  I see countless intelligent, well spoken and able prisoners get released from prison.  You would never believe, if you had not worked in a prison, that they would come back.  They do.   Everything they value is commercial, branded, cash based.  Everyone around them sees crime as normal.  Many even express anger and outrage that police/prison staff interfere in their criminality.  They actually believe that they are entitled to commit crime.  It's what people do.  How else can they get all the stuff they feel they're entitled to.  It would be unthinkable simply to live on minimum wage, doing an unpleasant job to get just enough money to pay bills and eat.  I really mean this - they find it UNTHINKABLE.  We have seen over the last few days that there is quite a large number of people who only behave within society's norms when they feel they can't get away with taking/doing what they want.  Don't make the mistake of thinking they're stupid.  Many are just as smart as you - they're making a choice.

  Theres just one possibility, an unthinkable plan. 

  We could make prison an unpleasant place to be. 

  We used to understand that people make cost- benefit analyses of their behaviour.  We used to respect criminals enough to realise that they are human beings, capable of making choices.  If they want "stuff" more than they fear the justice system, they will commit crimes.  If they fear the system, they will not.  Works on me.  Am I so much better than them?  Sure some people will carry on.  There will always be crime.  But we used to have 50,000 people in prison, now it's creeping towards 90,000.  You can plot a graph, improvement in the conditions in prisons, a rising prison population.  I didn't riot as a kid because I was scared shitless of the police and my mum.  It might be time to bring back the fear.  Food and shelter, sure.  Healthcare, definitely.  Protection from violence, certainly.  TV's?  Playstations?  Being called "Mr?"  Time to play pool and mix with other criminals?  They say that people are sent to prison AS punishment, not FOR punishment.  That would work on you, with your mortgage, and your job, and your middle class friends. 

  IT DOES NOT WORK ON THEM.

New Prison closures.

HMP Brockhill and HMP Latchmere House have recently been marked for closure.

"The MoJ said it hoped staff displaced by the two prison closures would be absorbed elsewhere in the system."

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14141708)

Unfortunately, this is not strictly true.  HMP Brockhill is not actually a separate prison, it was clustered recently with HMP Blakenhurst and HMP Hewell Grange to become HMP Hewell.  Some of the job losses due to the privatisation of HMP Birmingham were to be absorbed by staff transferring before the G4S takeover to HMP Hewell.  It seems likely now that these posts will be taken by staff from the closing Brockhill section of HMP Hewell.

The job losses will therefore simply be shifted to Birmingham staff as they are left here to be made redundant later.

Privatisation stitch-up?

Something we didn't know: 

  During the "bid" process for HMP Birmingham, it has recently come to light that in the comparison of the costs of all the bids, the prison service had a "premium" attached- an artificial inflation of their cost in order to reflect the existing infrastructure of the Prison Service (or something like that), in order to make the process really really properly fair.  Basically, they take what ever the Prison Service says they can run the prison for, and add several percent.

G4S, as an organisation, is, I believe, actually larger than the UK Prison Service, (please correct me if I'm wrong- I don't think I am).  It runs quite a few prisons across the world, including several in the UK, so presumably has its own infrastructure for prisons specifically, in addition to the obvious payroll, IT etc.

I'm not even sure why they have bothered with this apparently transparent stitch-up.  The slow dripfeed of information we have had over the last few weeks has confirmed to us that the G4S bid was quite a bit more expensive than the Prison Service one.  "So what?" you might say.  "Maybe their bid was higher quality, more innovation, better offending behaviour programmes and so on."  This might be arguable, (in better economic times), were it not for the fact than the G4S personnel wandering around the prison for the last few weeks have made it apparent that they know pretty much bugger-all about the prison, or what running it involves.  They keep telling us they are still learning about the prison.  Senior members of their staff have told us that they cannot tell us what the prison will look like after the takeover in October.  The impression they are giving is that now they are now doing the analysis and planning that we might have expected them to do over the two years of the bid process.  To be specific, they cannot answer simple questions like "How many staff will my wing have on a daily basis in October?".  Questions that I have personally been asked by their staff indicate a really superficial understanding of the prison that you would not expect from people who had made an effort to win it through a bid.  But then they have also admitted to us that they did not expect to win (I mean they have actually said this in meetings).  The feeling I've got from these statements is that they did not "want" to win.

Obviously, G4S are delighted to be the first company to take over a public prison in the UK, with the obvious cachet this gives, as well as the invaluable "proof" of ability for future public prison bids.  When I say they did not "want" to win, I mean the feeling is that they had to bid, in order to be in with a shot to get Featherstone II, the brand new Wolverhampton prison, the gaining of which required a bid for Birmingham - an open secret.  What they did not do, in my opinion, is put in a truly competitive bid, and the government have awarded the gaol to them anyway, to G4S's shock and delight.  I will not labour the neoliberal privatisation agenda here, suffice it to say it seems the taxpayer will be paying out rather more than they might if privatisation was not a "faith" commitment of the Tories.

Please note, this blog is a sert of personal opinions coloured by the information available to an Officer at HMP Birmingham.  Should anyone wish to dispute these opinions, please provide some actual documents or factual information for once, and I will happily retract anything inaccurate.

I wait with baited breath.

I love my job.

  Just a thought,but some of my previous posts may have lead you to believe that I don't like being a Prison Officer. 

  I absolutely love it. 

  Some of us can't sit behind a desk (I've tried).  I love the challenge, and I probably shouldn't say this, but I love the danger. Adrenaline is a drug, and it's addictive.  I've seen things that most people will never see.  I've drunk tea with murderers, I've faced down gang members twice my size.  I make life and death decisions every single day. 

Saying "No."

I get asked for help by prisoners all the time.  From simple advice about regimes and domestic issues, to much more complex offender management issues.  Often, a prisoner asks me to do something for him which I could do quickly and easily, and I say no.  This is not because I am lazy or mean, but because I have to think beyond what's immediately in front of me to the larger issues.  An experienced colleague once put it into words better than I ever could:

"Do you remember that old Oxfam advert?  You know, 'give a man a fish, he can eat for a day, TEACH a man to fish and he can eat for the rest of his life'.  That's what we're supposed to be doing here.  I'm not going to solve that problem for that prisoner, I'm going to show him how to solve his own problem."

Prisoners do not like this approach.  Nor often do Governors. (Or Inpectors).  The prisoner may not like me, but I'm doing him a favour.  Shortcutting processes for prisoners may be the easy route, but he'll leave prison a dependent, but with no Personal Officer to help him out.  Rehabilitation isn't all about being caring and lovey-dovey.  It's about challenging people, giving them skills and sending them out better able to deal with the real world than they were when they came in.

When I'm assaulted...

  So it occured to me today that violence is something many people simply do not experience in their lives.  Prison Officers experience violence or the potential for violence on a daily basis, not something a lot of people can readily understand.

  No, it's not like it is in films.

  Let me explain.  As a Prison Officer, it is my job to control a large population of prisoners, in short, I have to get them to do the stuff they're supposed to, and not do the stuff they're not supposed to.  In general, I use my interpersonal skills to achieve this.  Unlike what you see in films, this does not generally involve shouting and bawling at prisoners in a Shawshank Redemption style, partly because this is cruel and unfair, and partly because it is stupid and doesn't work.  The majority of prisoners, like anyone else, will generally do the reasonable things they are asked to do by a reasonable person, in a reasonable fashion.  Being generally reasonable and polite is a highly effective strategy that works 99% of the time.  As you can imagine, with maybe 160 prisoners and 6 Prison Officers on a wing, I have to have dozens of these interactions a day.  There is, therefore, that 1% to deal with.

  You usually know it's coming.  His voice is getting louder, his body language more aggressive.  You want to match him, puff up your chest, make youself look bigger, raise your voice, a natural reaction.  Instead you deliberately soften your voice, use open and non-threatening body language, talk reasonably, be polite, explain.  Often this works, but you can tell this time it's not.  Adrenalin, which in most people would already be sky-high, now starts to flow.  You try and remember where your colleagues are.  Is there anyone around, are they coming to see if you're OK, or are they on the phone in the office?  You could look around, but you don't want to lose sight of the prisoner, and you know it makes you look weak, nervous, which will make the prisoner more confident, he'll escalate his behaviour.  Then it happens.  A punch, a grab, whatever, you've just been assaulted, again.  At this point it gets hazy. Adrenalin causes tunnel vision, makes your brain concentrate only on what's vital, memory works poorly.  If you manage to raise the alarm, then hopefully someone will come, the prisoner will be restrained, and hopefully you've not been hurt.

  You then have  -I've added them up just now-  6 written forms (8 if anyone's injured, several more if there was more than one prisoner), and two database entries to complete.  You need to do these as soon as possible after the incident, so you don't forget things, but not so soon that your hands are still shaking from the adrenalin comedown.  Any mistake could lead to consequences ranging from the prisoner who assaulted you getting away with no punishment, right up to legal action against you.  No pressure.  Management will ask you how you are, be polite and considerate, maybe get you a cup of tea.  They will then tell you that it is not acceptable for you to cease the days tasks or affect the regime of the prison by taking time in an office to do your paperwork.  The prisoners need to be let out of their cells to play pool and make phonecalls.  You will not get paid overtime to do the paperwork either.  You know that you should spend at least an hour calming down, you are in no fit state to be dealing with prisoners, your paperwork, or really doing anything.  Everyone will be really nice to you for about ten minutes, you will then be expected to go back to work, hoping that in your heightened state you will not overreact to what the next prisoner says to you.  The prisoner has been checked over by a doctor or nurse, whether they're hurt or not.  Prison medical staff are not allowed to examine or treat Officers (though some ignore this rule) so if you're injured you have to take yourself to A&E.  If you wish to report this assault to the police (and you should), you will get no help to do this either.  After your hours in  A&E you will have to take youself to the nearest Police Station, where they will show absolutely no interest whatsoever.

  That night, the anger and remaining effects of adrenalin will ensure that you do not sleep.

  If you're really unlucky, the prisoner will accuse YOU of assaulting HIM, and you will  have to go through months of investigation, with levels of resources that will not be available to the investigation of the assault on you.  The punishment, if any, that the prisoner receives is likely to be fairly mild. In a prison Adjudication, he can get legal representation.  You cannot.  He may afterwards be moved to another wing, although you will probably still encounter him round and about.  If they claim to have "issues" with prisoners on other wings, they may not be moved at all.  You will be expected to deal professionally with his issues and concerns if he brings them to you as if nothing has happened.  It has become clear to you over the course of this incident that the prisoners are much, much more important than you.

Assault