High Down scrutiny visit 2021
Report for High Down Prison
Summary
Progress had been too slow to provide prisoners with purposeful activity 12 months into COVID-19 restrictions. Most prisoners still had only one hour out of their cells each day, sometimes less when time in the open air was cancelled. It had taken five months to launch in-cell education packs. About 350 prisoners had a full-time job, but there were no clear plans to provide the rest of the population with work once the pandemic ended. The work of the offender management unit was fundamentally undermined by the decision to reverse the prison’s change of function. There was little contact between prison offender managers and prisoners and there was a large backlog of assessments of prisoners’ risk and needs. Inspectors also identified several priorities for improvement, including The monitoring of telephone calls for public protection was ineffective. No calls had been listened to for many months and it was planned that only a random sample of calls would be checked in future. This meant that potentially important risk information, such as prisoners continuing to threaten or harass their victims, could be missed.