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Prison assaults set to rise

01 March 1993

A confidential Prison Service "business plan", the first of its kind, has been obtained by the Guardian and shows that the persistent rise in assaults in prison is likely to continue unabated. The business plan lays the foundations for the Prison Service as a semi-privatised government agency via target-setting and performance indicators. The intention is to give policymaking and organisational control to the Prison Service with further privatisation of prison management planned by Autumn 1993. Despite previous political assurances to the contrary the plan accepts that the 1992 reduction in the prison population is about to go into reverse. The priorities for "performance" are: reduction in overcrowding (there are still over 7,000 prisoners sharing three to a cell), in assaults (there were 4,463 recorded cases in 1992) and in escapes (nearly 400 in 1992).

The plan states that assaults have risen by over 20% in three years suggesting that the increase is due primarily to prisoners having longer periods of association and to the higher proportion of violent prisoners in custody. It is pessimistic in attempts to reduce assaults, concluding that they "may be irrational, unprovoked and difficult to anticipate" with "ability to prevent assaults ... therefore limited".

There is no mention of assaults by staff on prisoners or the practice of using prisoner assault and intimidation as a form of control and regulation. While much of the prisoner evidence to the Woolf Inquiry was given in camera to an academic and remains unpublished prisoners involved in the Strangeways disturbances, as with many of those interviewed in Scotland after prison protests in Peterhead, argue that much of the climate of fear is at best condoned and used and at worst provoked by prison staff. Once again the violence within prisons is identified as being solely a matter of a relatively small but growing minority of difficult or disturbed prisoners. The clear evidence of institutionalised violence is absent from the report.

Guardian 8.3.93.