2012 Annual Report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner
“In last year’s report I outlined that I hoped to report a reduction in the
number of poorly performing prisons and therefore this year I am pleased to
report that the number of poorly performing prisons has reduced by almost a
half.”
I outlined earlier in this report that a traffic light system (red, amber, green) has been adopted
for the recommendations that emanate from the inspections. This enables prisons to prioritise
the areas where remedial action is necessary. This year 545 recommendations were made by
my inspectors during the prison inspections and this is an average of 6 recommendations per
establishment. Figure 21 shows the breakdown of recommendations by colour.
Figure 21 – Recommendations from 2012 Prison Inspections
Red
15%
Green
41%
Amber
44%
The percentage of red and amber recommendations has reduced slightly this year to 59%.
Although 48 of the prisons inspected received red serious compliance recommendations
from their inspections, it is important to make the point that in two thirds of these cases the
establishments only received 1 red recommendation. In these establishments the serious noncompliance issues were therefore confined to only one area of the process and a good or
satisfactory level of compliance was found in all other areas. This year 8 prisons emerged poorly
from their inspections and 45% of the red recommendations emanated from these prisons. Two
of these prisons are in Northern Ireland and I have been assured by the Director General of
the Northern Ireland Prison Service that the necessary remedial action will be taken. Of the six
prisons in England and Wales, five improved markedly on re-inspection in 2012 or early 2013.
The remaining one prison has provided an assurance that they will improve their standards, and
they will be subject to another re-inspection in 2013.
The red recommendations fitted into three distinct areas; offence related and / or intelligenceled telephone monitoring, record keeping (monitoring logs) and retention periods. Each of these
areas will be discussed in the next sections.
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