Report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner - March 2015
monitored in a timely fashion in order to evaluate properly the threat posed by prisoners.
11.27 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.
11.28 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.
11.29 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, just over 80% of the prisons inspected in 2014
had fully achieved all or the majority of the recommendations emanating from their
previous inspection.
11.30 Figure 16 shows that overall the proportion of prisons achieving a good level of
compliance has remained fairly static in the last 3 years. However, it should be noted that
comparisons with previous years are difficult because the prisons being inspected are
not the same.
11.31 A more reliable way to gauge whether compliance is improving is to compare each
prison’s level of compliance from its 2014 inspection to its previous inspection rating:
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•
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64 inspections resulted in the level compliance remaining the same, with 56
prisons continuing to achieve a good level of compliance, 6 satisfactory and
2 poor.
16 inspections showed that there had been an improvement, with 8 prisons
moving from a poor level of compliance to a good level, 7 from satisfactory
to good, and 1 from poor to satisfactory.
20 inspections found that compliance had worsened, with 9 prisons moving
from good to satisfactory, 8 from good to poor and 3 from satisfactory to
poor.
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