By Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs)

Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs) monitor and report on the conditions and treatment of those detained in every prison in England and Wales. They have specific powers and responsibilities in order to effectively monitor the conditions and treatment of those in CSUs. Boards are notified when a prisoner is segregated, can speak to prisoners in CSUs in private, are invited to attend segregation review boards (SRBs), and can access and review all records.

This report provides an overview of outcomes for men in closed adult prisons with mental health needs who are being held in CSUs. It is based on:

• A survey completed by IMBs at over 30 closed adult men’s prisons in England for four weeks during late Autumn 2022

• A follow-up survey six months later in Spring 2023 was completed by IMBs who had previously identified segregated prisoners waiting for transfers to more appropriate secure settings.

• Findings from IMBs’ most recent annual reports.

• Several IMBs’ recent correspondence to ministers, senior HMPPS officials, and healthcare bodies raising serious concerns over the care of prisoners with mental health needs in CSUs.

Key findings

• In recent years, almost all IMBs monitoring in prisons holding adult men have repeatedly raised concerns over CSUs not being a suitable or appropriate place for prisoners with mental health needs.

• Prisoners with mental health needs were often held for prolonged and long-term periods in CSUs. IMBs found that this was mostly due to:

  • Men struggling to cope or refusing to reintegrate back onto the residential wings (referred to as ‘normal location’)

  • Lack of capacity in prison healthcare units or prisons with specialist functions

  • Delays in referral, assessment, and transfer to a secure hospital

  • There being no alternative, often because of a lack of diagnosis or men not having met the threshold for admission to a secure hospital.

• Although most IMBs understood why CSUs were deemed the most appropriate place for these men to be held out of the limited locations available in prisons, there were still widespread concerns that CSUs were the only alternative for those who were acutely unwell and in need of specialist care.

• For men who were already struggling with their mental health, their well-being and behavior often deteriorated further while being segregated for prolonged periods.

• Prisoners with mental health needs were often moved between different CSUs, healthcare units, or were returned to wings for short periods which made it harder to track the cumulative time some prisoners spent segregated.

IMBs, 2024. 18p.

By Matthew Ohara

Reflecting on INQUEST’s groundbreaking work, this report outlines how it has remained true to its roots; working alongside bereaved people, exposing the violence and neglect of the state and its institutions and failing systems of investigation and accountability. Without INQUEST this would go unchallenged.

United Kingdom, London. INQUEST. 2023. 72pg

By Brian Bailey

FROM THE COVER: From the appointment of the infamous Jack Ketch in 1663 to the abolition of the death penalty in 1969, England saw three-hundred years of hanging for a multitude of crimes from stealing a loaf of bread to murder. Public hangings drew vast crowds and the hangman himself became an almost mythical figure of fascinated revulsion. Certainly the men who undertook this gruesome duty were an unusual breed. At first they were often recruited from the same prisons as their victims, and perhaps unsurprisingly they ended up, like John Price, 'dancing the Tyburn jig' at the end of the same rope.

Barnes and Noble. NY. 1989. 230p.

By John J. Dilulio, Jr.

FROM THE COVER: The American prison, in conventional wisdom, 1s doomed to be filthy, violent, and unproductive. It is a breeding ground for crime rather than a punishment for it, an institution where lawless inmates and abusive guards confront each other in riots that erupt in response to oppressive conditions. Now, John J. Dilulio, Jr., already considered one of the most original thinkers about prisons in a generation, challenges all these accepted notions about incarceration. Dilulio argues that-far from necessarily being hellish traps for society's refuse-prisons must and can be safe and humane, despite overcrowding, budget limitations, and racial polarization. The key is good government.

The Free Press. London. NY. 1987. 357p.

By Julian V Roberts, Gabrielle Watson, Rhys Hester

Members of racial, ethnic, and Indigenous minorities have long accounted for disproportionate percentages of prison admissions in Western nations and of prison populations. The minorities affected vary between countries. Discriminatory or differential treatment by criminal justice officials from policing through to parole is part of the problem. Much media and professional attention focuses on sentencing, where the decision-making is most public. An emerging body of research identifies sentencing as a cause—or, at the very least, an amplifier—of minority over-incarceration. Solutions aiming to reduce it have been implemented, with varying but modest degrees of success, in the United States, England and Wales, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand. Progress toward reducing minority over-incarceration has been slow. Most US sentencing commissions have failed to determine the extent to which their guidelines contribute to the problem. The Sentencing Council of England and Wales has taken the limited step of warning judges about racial disparities, without suggesting remedial steps to be taken. Courts in Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand have taken more activist approaches, mitigating sentences when offenders adduce evidence of discrimination or abuse by criminal justice officials.

Crime and Justice, Volume 52. 2023

By Benjamin Justice

Researchers have written a good deal in the last two decades about the relationship between public education and criminal justice as a pipeline by which public school practices correlate with or cause increased lifetime risk for incarceration for Black and Latinx youth. This article flips the script of the school-to-prison pipeline metaphor by reversing the question. What are the effects of criminal justice on public schooling? Reviewing recent social science research from multiple disciplines on policing and incarceration, this article describes the relationship of criminal justice to public education as hobbling, a social process by which the massification of policing and incarceration systematically compromises the ability of target demographics of American children to enjoy their rights to a free and appropriate public education.

Annual Review of Law and Social Science, vol. 17, 2021. pp 31-51

By Gerald Gaes and Julia Laskorunsky

This study examines the response of the Colorado Board of Parole to the COVID-19 pandemic.

To mitigate the spread of the virus within correctional facilities, it increased the parole grant rate, expedited case review, and utilized special needs and fast-track parole programs for non-routine releases. This response provided an opportunity to evaluate the Board’s decision-making processes and to investigate the role of early release mechanisms in reducing prison populations.

Several factors expedited early release including: pressure from the governor and legislature; board member’s sense of responsibility to safely release as many individuals as possible; and the availability of early release authority. Our findings show that to release more people, the Board slightly changed its release standards, placing less emphasis on risk scores but continuing to heavily emphasize readiness for release. The Board reverted to its previous release patterns a few months into the pandemic, highlighting the difficulty of reducing prison populations through back-end mechanisms.

Special needs and fast-track parole were the mechanisms used to promote early release. Special needs parole releases are typically people who have severe medical problems, long sentences, and serious commitment offenses. Targeting them in Colorado substantially decreased time served. The fast-track releases were mostly low risk people with shorter than average sentences. Targeting them had no effect on reducing time served. This demonstrates that early release mechanisms that target “safe bets” – that is, individuals who would have been released quickly through routine mechanisms are not an effective way to reduce prison populations.

We also discuss the importance of grant rate standards, suggesting that jurisdictions establish empirically based ranges contingent on risk and readiness composition of the release population. Future research should investigate how much parole grant rates can be increased without compromising public safety.

This study was conducted as part of a larger project which examined how state prison systems responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was generously supported and funded by Arnold Ventures. While we hope the findings from this study are useful to the parole board and funding partners, the views and opinions expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of Arnold Ventures.

St. Paul, MN: Robina Institute,,,,2023. 29p.

By Natasa Mavronicola

This open access book theorises and concretises the idea of ‘absolute rights’ in human rights law with a focus on Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). It unpacks how we might understand what an ‘absolute right’ in human rights law is and draws out how such a right’s delimitation may remain faithful to its absolute character. From these starting points, it considers how, as a matter of principle, the right not to be subjected to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment enshrined in Article 3 ECHR is, and ought, to be substantively delimited by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Focusing on the wrongs at issue, this analysis touches both on the core of the right and on what some might consider to lie at the right’s ‘fringes’: from the aggravated wrong of torture to the severity assessment delineating inhumanity and degradation; the justified use of force and its implications for absoluteness; the delimitation of positive obligations to protect from ill-treatment; and the duty not to expel persons to places where they face a real risk of torture, inhumanity or degradation. Few legal standards carry the simultaneous significance and contestation surrounding this right. This book seeks to contribute fruitfully to efforts to counter a proliferation of attempts to dispute, circumvent or dilute the absolute character of the right not to be subjected to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and to offer the groundwork for transparently and coherently (re)interpreting the right’s contours in line with its absolute character. Winner of the 2022 SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship.

London: Bloomsbury/Hart, 2022. 221p.

Edited by Bev Clucas, Gerry Johnstone, and Tony Ward

Not so long ago, the only respectable question for philosophical, legal, and political scholars to ask about torture was how to ensure its effective legal prohibition. Recently, however, some leading lawyers and legal theorists have challenged those who are absolutely opposed to torture, arguing that, in some circumstances, torture may be morally permissible or even required. This has provoked a range of responses, from outraged dismissal to cautious concessions that the law has to adjust to new realities. This volume contains writings by some of the leading contributors to these debates. Distinctively, it supplements the discussion about the morality of torture - and the morality of discussing torture - with essays which provide important legal, sociological, and historical analyses of this appalling human practice and of the attempts to control it. With an international and interdisciplinary authorship, Torture: Moral Absolutes and Ambiguities will be essential reading for legal and political theorists, philosophers, sociologists, historians, and indeed anybody interested in serious and informed thinking about this most disturbing phenomenon.

Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, 2009. 215p/

By Emily D. Buehler

This report describes substantiated incidents of inmate sexual victimization by another inmate or by staff. It presents data on the incidents of sexual victimization, such as location and time of day. It also provides characteristics of the victims and perpetrators of the victimization. The report details services provided to the victim and consequences for the perpetrator. In part, it fulfills BJS’s mandates under the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA; P.L. 108–79).

Highlights

• During 2016–18:

• Half of both inmate-on-inmate and staff-on-inmate sexual victimization incidents occurred in an area not under video surveillance.

• There were 2,886 victims of inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization and 2,496 victims of staff-on-inmate sexual victimization in adult correctional facilities.

• About 25% of victims of inmate-on-inmate nonconsensual sexual acts and 43% of victims of abusive sexual contact were female.

• The victim was given a medical examination in 61% of inmate-on-inmate nonconsensual sexual act incidents and in 36% of abusive sexual contact incidents

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2023. 36p.

By Jacinto AzevedoI, Maria Vieira-Coelho, Miguel Castelo-Branco, Rui Coelho, Margarida Figueiredo-Braga

Introduction: Aggression is a clinical symptom of various psychiatric disorders that can be conceptualised as a physical act towards another person with the intent to cause harm. In antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), aggression is a frequent manifestation that differently compromise therapeutic and prognostic goals according to its impulsive or premeditated categorisation. ASPD is characterised by high levels of impulsivity, psychopathic traits, and a high prevalence of co-morbid substance use disorders (SUDs). Aggression in ASPD patients may determine long and recurrent imprisonment thus representing a challenge clinicians and legal experts face. Objectives: Our aims were to characterise impulsive and premeditated aggression in male ASPD offenders as well as to determine the potential role of SUDs, impulsivity, and psychopathic traits as predictors. Materials and methods In this cross-sectional study we evaluated a sample of ASPD offenders with a battery of clinical and psychometric, standardised instruments: the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), the European Version of the Addiction Severity Index (EuropASI), the Barratt Impulsivity Scale Version 11 (BIS-11), and the Impulsive/Premeditated Aggression Scale (IPAS). Results: We used a total sample of 134 offenders, all of whom were male. ASPD patients (n = 96) had a 71.9% prevalence of impulsive aggression and a 28.1% prevalence of premeditated aggression. ASPD patients with impulsive aggression had significantly lower scores of total PCL-R (p<0.01) factor 1 and interpersonal facet 1 (p<0.05), compared with ASPD patients with premeditated aggression. ASPD patients with impulsive aggression and ASPD patients with premeditated aggression had comparable BIS-11 mean scores, and exhibited an equal prevalence of SUDs. The interpersonal facet 1of the PCL-R predicted the aggression type (p<0.05) in ASPD patients, and the exponential beta value for facet 1 was 1.42 (CI = 1.03; 1.95). Conclusions The aggression type that is associated withASPD is mainly impulsive in nature. ASPD patients who have higher scores of psychopathic traits have a lower probability of exhibiting impulsive aggression and a higher probability of exhibiting premeditated aggression.Although ASPD patients have high levels of impulsivity and a high frequency ofSUDs, these two variables were not predictors of the aggression type.

PLoS ONE 15(3): 2020. e0229876.

By Ujjwal Kumar Singh

From the general editor’s introduction: “….The essays are also intended to be fairly detailed and empirical in emphasis, so as to stand in regard to the introduction in something of the relationship of evidence to interpretation. The project is directed both at specific problems and at a number of fundamental debates on the nature of discourse; and yet it is not intended primarily to generate new theory but rather to make its contribution by approaching questions from a new direction. Part of the dissatisfaction which lies behind the project is with Eurocentric terminology. This is not because we deny the possibility of there being any universal terms, nor because we think all knowledge produced by Europeans essentially the same and equally corrupted by power. It is because we are impressed by the need to avoid all essentialism, and by the importance, both intellectually and in practical situations, of an appreciation of difference. It is because we are uncertain how large categories may properly be constructed. Similar concerns are expressed in various ways in many disciplines, and constitute a crisis of interpretation…”

Delhi. Oxford University Press. 1998. 313p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAINMARK-UP

By Andrea Pitzer

FROM THE COVER; “A Smithsonian Magazine Best History Book Of The Year” For more than one hundred years, at least one concentration camp has existed somewhere on earth. First used as battlefield strategy, camps have evolved with each passing decade, in the scope of their effects and the savage practicality with which governments have employed them. Even in the twenty-first century, as we continue to reckon with the magnitude and horror of the Holocaust, history tells us we have broken our solemn promise of "never again." Beginning with 1890s Cuba, Andrea Pitzer pinpoints the histories of concentration camps around the world and across decades. From the Philippines and Southern Africa to the Soviet Gulag and detention in China and North Korea during the Cold War, camp systems have long been used as tools for civilian relocation and political repression. Through telling the stories of individual prisoners swept into detention across the past century, One Long Night shows how camps became brutal and dehumanizing sites that claimed the lives of millions. Featuring a new afterword that places US border detention and family separation within the context of this dark history, One Long Night exposes our collective failure and its continued toll.”

New York, Back Bay Books. Little, Brown And Company. 2017. 494p.

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By Annie Samuelli

FROM THE PREFACE: “From 1949 to 1961, I was one of a large community of women held in the political prisons of Communist Romania, all harshly convicted, not for their misdeeds but for what they actually represented. Since the advent of Communism, citizens who upheld faith, justice and the principles of democracy-from former prime ministers to simple peasants and confused members of the working class-now were convicted of treasonable activities on just those grounds. The elementary freedoms of opinion, speech, movement, religion and charity, hemmed in by arbitrary government decrees, had been virtually abolished, any transgression being paid for by long imprisonment. Persecution was directed as much against the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, ostensibly the chief targets of class warfare, as against any person, irrespective of origin, who consciously or not expressed criticism or the slightest opposition to the regime. For instance, spouses, parents, children are likewise incriminated as accessories after the fact, and whole families went to prison for having failed to denounce or for having harboured a fugitive from justice for his political beliefs or for violating one of the all-embracing Communist laws.

Thus the women's prisons were filled with representatives from all ranks of society, from the intellectual down to the illiterate. As I shared their lives day by day, night by night for twelve years, I had the opportunity of studying them closely, and it is mainly on them that this book is based.”

Washington, D.C.. Robert B. Luce, Inc. 1967. 241p.

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By Oleg V. Khlevniuk. Translated by Vadim A. Staklo. With editorial assistance and commentary by David J. Nordlander. Foreword by Robert Conquest

FROM THE FOREWORD: “Although it is sometimes suggested that the Gulag was in some way derived from an older Russia, one has only to read about Dostoevsky's experiences as a political prisoner in The House of the Dead to find many differences. By the early twentieth century a number of Russian people--far fewer of them in any case than in Soviet times--were either in prison or in "exile." The latter penalty, whose victims included Lenin and Stalin, simply meant forced residence at some distant village, with a monetary allowance, sometimes with wives, but with no barbed wire or penal labor. The Gulag is only one example of how the Soviet regime represented a huge decline in civilization in Russia. But it is a revealing one. Areas of the Stalinist experience still remain obscure…”

NY. Yale University Press. 2004. 449p.

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By Karlo Stajner. Translated By Joel Agee. With An Introduction By Danilo Kis

AUTHOR'S NOTE: “I was born Karl Steiner on January 15, 1902, in Vienna. After moving to Zagreb, the capital of the Yugoslav Republic of Croatia, in 1922, I adopted the Serbo-Croation spelling of my name, Karlo Stajner. In 1932, I emigrated to the Soviet Union, where I remained until 1956. Because of my Austrian origin, I was accused of being a Nazi agent and condemned to ten years at hard labor; a second ten-year term was later added to my sentence. After my release from prison in 1956, I returned to Yugoslavia and continued calling myself by my Serbo-Croatian name: Karlo Stajner. K.S.”

NY. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1988. 408p.

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By Cairine Petrie

FROM THE FOREWORD: “During the last two decades in the United Kingdom, we have increasingly locked up children who are difficult or delinquent. This study explores the uses and consequences of custody for young people. Cairine Petrie compares a number of boys held in a unit of maximum security with a similar number of delinquents resident in an open training school. The book also provides interesting insights into the workings of the Scottish List D schools which, unlike institutions for young offenders in England and Wales, still remain the responsibility of the central authorities. South of the border since 1969, persistent delinquents have been sheltered in community homes and are in the care of the local authorities. Those who cling to the myth that effective reformatory schools have been swept away by permissive legislation will gain little comfort from this book.”

London. Saxon House. 1980.

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By Debra Smith

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “After being anti-privatisation (and I am still very concerned about how much of all this is real and will last) I am coming to a positive view of this private prison. In the short term it is certainly better for the prisoners in the long term I don't know what safeguards are there that it is maintained. But it is a 20-year business plan and contract so if I'm still here in 2017 I guess I' be able to make a judgement.' Ididn't make it to 2017 - in September 2004 I received a letter terminating my contract: services no longer required…..”

Adelaide, Aus. Ginninderra Press. 2008. 129p.

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Edited by Beverly R. Fletcher, Lynda Dixon Shaver, and Dreama G. Moon. Foreword by George Henderson. Illustrations By Lisa J. Billy

FROM THE FOREWORD: “Perhaps nothing captures the debilitating effects of sexism more vividly than an in-depth study of women incarcerated in our correctional institutions. Beneath the statistics lie a human tragedy of a magnitude most people cannot fully comprehend: a disproportionate number of women are wasting away in nonrehabilitative institutions that perpetuate rather than correct criminal behaviors. The editors and contributors to this book capture cogent slices of life of some of the role players in the prison drama. And they do so with the sensitive touch of social surgeons who carefully lift and examine one layer of human behavior and then another. But they do not stop there. They also examine some of the attitudes, beliefs, and values of incarcerated women and their keepers (prison staff). The total work is an insightful glimpse of a neglected subculture.”

Westport, CT. Praeger. 1993. 202p.

by Solitary Watch and the Unlock the Box Campaign

The watchdog group Solitary Watch and the advocacy coalition Unlock the Box released a groundbreaking joint report showing that at least 122,840 people are locked daily in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails for 22 or more hours a day. Calculating Torture is the first report to combine the use of solitary in local and federal jails in addition to state and federal prisons. It is based on analysis of data recently released by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) as well as by state prison systems that did not report to BJS, and data from a survey of local jails conducted by the Vera Institute of Justice.

These report numbers come closer than have any previously published figures in accounting for the total number of people in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails. Previous counts have largely focused on prisons, failing to include jails. In some cases, earlier data also omitted some states, and/or counted only those individuals held in solitary confinement for more than two weeks. For these reasons, previous reports have offered an incomplete picture of how extensively the discredited practice is used and the number of people it affects.

Solitary Watch and the Unlock the Box Campaign, 2023. 16p.