2013 Annual Report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner
staff conducting the monitoring. In some instances these audits showed that not all of
the calls made by the prisoners subject to offence related or monitoring for other security
purposes had been listened to. Failure to monitor the communications of prisoners who
pose a risk to children, the public or the good order, security and discipline of the prison
could place prison staff in an indefensible position if a serious incident was to occur
which could have been prevented through the gathering of intercept intelligence. More
frequently our inspectors identified that the calls had been listened to, but not in a timely
fashion. This is of concern and could result in a significant piece of intelligence being
gathered from a telephone call which was made a week or two earlier and by this time
the opportunity to react to it may have been missed. It is vitally important for calls to be
monitored in a timely fashion in order to evaluate properly the threat posed by prisoners.
7.25 Third, the staff conducting the monitoring of prisoners communications should
complete monitoring logs to provide an audit trail of the interception that has taken
place and assist to inform the review process. In a large number of cases the monitoring
logs were not completed to a satisfactory standard and recommendations were made to
bring about improvements.
7.26 Fourth, failings were identified with the procedures in place for checking the
contact numbers provided by prisoners subject to public protection measures (for
example, those identified as posing a risk to children, those remanded or convicted of
an offence under the Protection from Harassment Act or subject to a restraining order
or injunction etc.). In the majority of cases the failings were in relation to the record
keeping requirements. However, of more concern, a number of the establishments did
not have robust procedures for checking these prisoners contact numbers. It is obviously
vitally important for sound procedures to be in place to check the contact lists provided
by these prisoners to ensure that victims and other members of the public are protected.
7.27 At the end of each inspection, each individual prison is given an overall rating
(good, satisfactory, poor). This rating is reached by considering the total number of
recommendations made, the severity of those recommendations, and whether those
recommendations had to be carried forward because they were not achieved from the
previous inspection. On the latter point, 94% of the prisons inspected in 2013 had fully
achieved all or the majority of the recommendations emanating from their previous
inspection.
7.28 Figure 14 shows that overall the proportion of prisons achieving a good level of
compliance has steadily risen in the last three years. Comparisons with previous years
are difficult because the prisons being inspected are not the same. However the average
number of recommendations per inspection has fallen slightly in the last 3 years.
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