Report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner - July 2016
the effectiveness of the monitoring. We again found this year that the necessity and
proportionality justifications for invoking or reviewing monitoring in the risk assessments
and authorisations had frequently not been made out to a sufficient standard to the
extent that it was difficult to see how a Governor had been able to make an informed
decision as to whether the monitoring was necessary and proportionate based on the
information in the authorisations alone. This concern was particularly prevalent in relation
to prisoners who pose a risk to the public e.g. those convicted of harassment offences or
those identified as a risk to children.
10.19 During the inspections we compare the monitoring logs against the call records on
the system to check that all of the necessary monitoring had been conducted by monitoring
staff. In some cases we identified that not all of the calls made by the prisoners subject to
monitoring were being listened to or that the calls were not being listened to in a timely
fashion. This is of concern because a significant piece of intelligence could be missed
completely or not reacted to promptly, leading to a serious incident occurring which may
have otherwise been prevented. Consequently we made a number of recommendations
including for the managers to undertake regular audits to check that the necessary
monitoring is taking place. The inspectors also made a number of recommendations for
prisons to improve the quality of the monitoring logs completed by staff. On this point
the new PSI (04/2016) requires logs to be completed electronically rather than by hand.
It is important for monitoring staff to complete good quality summaries of a prisoner’s
communications in the logs as this will help to inform subsequent reviews about whether
it is necessary or proportionate to continue monitoring.
10.20 21% of recommendations related to prisoner induction and awareness of the
monitoring procedures. In particular IOCCO inspectors commonly found in 2015 that
prisoner and staff awareness of the full range of confidential access organisations (e.g.
MPs, HMIP, Samaritans, Criminal Cases Review Commission) was insufficient. A number
of recommendations were made for staff to draw prisoners’ attention to the list of
confidential organisations when they sign the communications compact and to ensure
adequate signage on the pin-phones67 and mailboxes. A further 8% of recommendations
concerned legally privileged or otherwise confidential calls and again the focus was on
increasing staff awareness about confidential access organisations among those who
administer the pin-phone system to prevent possible occurrences of confidential access
telephone numbers being enabled on the “open” side of the system, which would result
in the calls being recorded and potentially listened to.
10.21 Under Prison Rules the intercept product (i.e. copies of calls and mail) can only be
retained for three months unless its ongoing retention is authorised by a Governor. 4%
of the recommendations concerned the storage, retention and destruction of intercepted
material. In the main these related to those prisons who were still utilising DVDs to backup
the recorded calls and had failed to overwrite DVDs containing content older than three
67 The pin-phone system is the telephone system which prisoners use to make telephone calls. Each
prisoner has his or her own account on the system which is accessed by a pin number. Prisoners are
only able to call those numbers enabled on their account by staff. If the number relates to a confidential
access organisation it is placed on the “barred” side of the system which means the call is not recorded
and cannot be listened to by staff.
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