Recommendation 27

When infections take hold in prisons they can be very serious, so we were relieved to hear that the scale of the pandemic in prisons had not been as bad as was predicted at the outset. The Ministry and HMPPS nonetheless needed to make changes to the prison estate to try to reduce infection rates in prisons. The Ministry told us that it had worked with Public Health England to identify how best to respond to the pandemic within the prison estate. This included measures such as compartmentalisation and ‘reverse cohorting’ – making sure that new or transferring prisoners were separated from others for 14 days. The Ministry told us that while it initially thought that it would need to release a “fairly dramatic” number of prisoners, the measures it had taken meant this had not been the case.58 The Ministry also created extra prison capacity by using shipping containers as temporary cells.59 HMPPS told us that the dedication and excellent performance of working across prisons and probation could be clearly seen throughout the pandemic.60 The Ministry agreed that the quality of care and staffing provided by prison and probation staff during the pandemic had been extraordinary.61