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Prison assaults set to rise (1)

01 January 1991

Prison assaults set to rise
artdoc May=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unpublished prisoners involved in the Strangeways disturbances,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.

Statewatch vol 3 no 2 March-April 1993