The prisons watchdog has finally realised its bite isn’t hard enough

“Is any progress going to really be made unless there is a significant independent investigation into what is happening in terms of suicide and self-harm?” asked the chief inspector of prisons on Tuesday morning, to a room full of journalists.

“Are we just going to carry on as we are or are we going to take a serious look at this?”

Peter Clarke was talking about the soaring rates of suicide and self-harm among inmates across England and Wales. He was visibly perturbed by his own findings that, yet again, more prisoners were harming themselves and taking their own lives than they were a year ago.

On average, more than 124 self-harm incidents are recorded in jails each day – marking a record high for the seventh year in a row – and, alarmingly, an inmate takes their own life every four days, according to this year’s HM Prison Inspectorate report into the stte of the prison system.

The watchdog found that the “deluge of drugs” flowing into prisons was fuelling debt and violence among inmates, and described living conditions as “appalling”, with reports of rubbish left lying around and frequent sightings of rats, pigeons and cockroaches on the wings.

The inspectorate also reported that thousands of prisoners were being released from jail without proper checks on the potential danger they posed, meaning those who were potentially a “high risk of harm” to the public were walking free without a full risk assessment.

It is not the first time the prisons watchdog has published a damning indictment on the state of prisons. In last year’s annual report, his team said prison conditions were the most disturbing they had ever seen. The year before, Mr Clarke warned that any hope for prison reform would be “in vain” unless the issues were addressed as a “matter of urgency”.

And Mr Clarke has acted on these concerns, handing out “urgent notifications”, which require ministers to publicly respond with action to improve a failing jail with significant problems, to three prisons last year. He has also placed a number of jails in “special measures” in a bid to drive their improvement.

But responses to urgent notifications have been “disappointingly slow”, said Mr Clarke, adding that he no longer had confidence that the special measures system was a reliable means of driving improvement.

Now, it appears, he is done with warnings. Launching his latest report, Mr Clarke took the unprecedented move of calling for an external inquiry into the rise in suicide and self-harm, and announced the introduction of independent reviews of progress (IRPs), designed to give ministers an independent assessment of how well failing jails are addressing his recommendations.

The prisons watchdog has realised its bite isn’t hard enough. Hard-hitting reports, special measures protocols and urgent notifications from the public body – which is appointed by the Ministry of Justice – have barely made a dent in the spiralling prison crisis.

Some might say the lack of action stems from the disinterest of the general public, most of whom have never set foot in a prison. But when you consider that amid the chaos in jails, potentially dangerous inmates are being released without a full risk assessment, it’s clear that action inside the system will make things safer both inside and outside the prison walls.