By: Paul Sullivan and John Roberts
Paul Sullivan and John Roberts report for Inside Time on progressive thinking and straightforward approaches used by the Scottish Prison Service
It has been one of the great successes of Inside Time that it has been inclusive of every prisoner in the UK, and prisoners at over 160 UK prisons and special hospitals have the opportunity to read and contribute to the newspaper’s monthly issues.
With the introduction of the insideinformation website, and the publishing of the book, we felt it was important to fully understand the Scottish system so that the information we provide is accurate and up-to-date north of the border. With devolution, the English and Scottish systems are drifting further apart in their aims and the way they achieve them. One area under significant change is the complaints process, which is about to get an overhaul.
Emma Gray, SPSO Communications Director, told Inside Time: “The Scottish Parliament will soon consider a Bill to transfer complaints from the Complaints Commission to the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO) with a transfer date occurring in 2010. This will make it more like the English Prisons Ombudsman system”.
Scotland has a new Chief Inspector of Prisons, Brigadier Monro, who said he is particularly interested in how prison affects prisoners’ families. Conditions in some Scottish prisons used to be dire, but they are improving slowly. He also said he is concentrating on dealing with drug addiction, education and preparation for release. All future inspections will now be available on our website.
As part of our visit, we were guests of the governors of HMP Glenochil and HMP Edinburgh. It is impressive how, at both prisons, the governors were prepared to take the risk of trying innovative new ideas and were clearly focused on rehabilitation.
At Glenochil, one thing that impressed was the Speedy Hire workshop where prisoners are trained to repair electrical tools by Speedy Hire staff, can download and print diagrams etc., and at the end have an opportunity for a job with Speedy Hire. An ex-prisoner now drives the van which delivers tools for repair. The governor saw no problem with this; can you imagine this at Whitemoor or Long Lartin?
The library and hairdressing facilities at Glenochil, have been combined. Whilst prisoners wait for a hair cut they can access the library facilities and read books and magazines; this encourages the less confident readers to spend time looking at books. Anyone who knows the English system would doubt that such forward thinking would be allowed here.
Glenochil has been completely rebuilt around the staff and prisoners. One result of the rebuild is a wonderful new visits room, with the best view out of the window of any UK prison. The staff told us that although they had great new visiting facilities, they were still underused and were looking at ways to increase visiting. The governor explained how Scottish prisons often have to take prisoners from a huge area, so visiting can be a difficult task for families.
Rona Sweeney, Director of Public Sector Prisons in Scotland, is aware of the problems for families visiting prisoners and is looking to improve things, including new Visitors’ Centres similar to those at most English prisons.
We met a group of prisoners who kindly agreed to spend an hour with us chatting about the newspaper and insideinformation, and gave us some great ideas on how to get Scottish prisoners more involved with the publications. One of the suggestions was a Scottish supplement which has been taken on board and is in the planning stages for February or March.
At Edinburgh, the whole prison has also been rebuilt and from the outside looks more like a modern shopping mall. A new visit centre has been built which is run by members of the Salvation Army who provide a friendly welcome as well as hot and cold snacks for visitors. Inside the prison, everything is clean and modern; some cells even have in-cell showers (but don’t tell The Sun or Daily Mail!).
Within Edinburgh’s new library, used by 1,800 prisoners a year, we were surprised to find laptop computers which prisoners were free to use and print from - although no Internet yet. This facility will allow the entire insideinformation book to be uploaded so prisoners can search and print out any information they want.
The library also had exhibitions of prisoners’ art; Inside Time hopes to be involved with the art project being run by the librarian.
With only 15 prisons in Scotland, and most of these fairly small, individual Scottish prisons do not have the scale of diversity which English prisons have to contend with; this does cause its problems, however, because when there is just a single Muslim prisoner in a prison, like Edinburgh, it makes the provision of special facilities very difficult.
As well as learning a lot about the Scottish system, it occurred to us a number of times how some of the excellent ideas we witnessed in Scotland could improve English prisons. As one governor put it; “Security has to be there but it should not be allowed to strangle routines and opportunities for rehabilitiation.”
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