Guardian headline writers can answer for themselves, but Professor Baigent and Dr Osman (Letters, 24 November) are absolutely wrong to imply our inspection report into HMP Elmley that you reported on 12 November “over-hyped” the level of violence.
It is not possible to exactly assess levels of violence in a prison in the way they want because it depends both on what prisoners report and on what the prison itself records. Neither tells the full story. We come to our judgments based not just on the official data, but also on what prisoners themselves tell us and what we ourselves observe.
Your correspondents refer to just the summary of our report. If they read the report as a whole they would see that recorded incidents indicated that there were 60% more fights and assaults in April 2014 than there had been in April 2013 and that reflected a steadily rising trend. The number of serious incidents had increased sharply over the same period; incidents of concerted indiscipline had increased; incidents of self-harm and suicide had become more frequent; 92 prisoners had self-harmed in the six months before the inspection; and there had been five self-inflicted deaths since the previous inspection.
We compared that data with what prisoners told us. In a representative survey, 56% of prisoners told us they had felt unsafe at some time in the prison and 25% said they felt unsafe at the time of the inspection; 44% said they had been victimised by other prisoners. This compared with 39%, 14% and 23% respectively at the last inspection. When we spoke to prisoners and staff individually, they said the same. Inspectors witnessed vulnerable prisoners being harassed without staff intervention. I can assure you, for those on the receiving end, it certainly felt like an increase in the total amount of violence.
On the basis of that combined evidence, we concluded that “there was a rising level of violence and the number of serious incidents had increased sharply”. It was a sound judgment and the recommendations we made as a result need to be acted on.
Nick Hardwick
HM chief inspector of prisons
