Recommendation 1
What will the minister do to reduce the backlog in court hearings and so reduce the time that men are held in prison without being convicted or found not guilty and released?
Source · IMB Annual Report
Birmingham
AI-generated report summary HMP Birmingham shows sustained improvements in its culture and positive trends in safety, including reduced self-harm and segregation stays. However, severe staff shortages significantly hinder regime delivery and key worker sessions, contributing to high use of force incidents. Key challenges include lengthy remand detentions, the indefinite holding of foreign nationals post-sentence, and persistent issues with missing property.
Year: 2022
Published: 2 Nov 2022
Type: Prison · Cat reception
Population: 977
Recommendations: 8
Key concerns
Positive findings
Safety statistics
| Indicator | This year | Previous |
|---|---|---|
| Deaths in custody | 4 | 6 |
| Use of force | 698 | — |
| Drug finds | 65 | — |
Positive findings
AI-generated summaryHMP Birmingham has demonstrated sustained improvements in its ethos, culture, and facilities, along with positive trends in reduced self-harm incidents and shorter segregation stays. The Board commends the innovative pre-release team, effective multi-agency resettlement work, and the success of the peer-led 'Inside Job' initiative. Healthcare access is comparable to the community, with strong mental health provision and proactive chaplaincy support. Significant progress has also been made in addressing neurodiversity needs and in the re-establishment of education delivery.
Key concerns
The backlog in court hearings is resulting in lengthy remand stays in prison for men who are not convicted. There are, at the time of writing, 34 men held on remand for lengthy periods, most of them for up to two years, six having been detained in 2019 and the longest being on remand for three years.
The Board notes that certain foreign nationals continue to be held in prison under immigration powers after completion of their sentence.
Staff shortages, either through illness, often Covid-related, or through a consistent and relentless rate of attrition, have exacerbated the challenges of recovery. The prison has prioritised staffing the wings and running the regime but this has involved reduced staffing in other areas and redeployment around the site. In the last 12 months, 60 officers have left.
Missing property is a year-on-year, seemingly never-ending problem. The failure to resolve the problem is a continuing source of frustration and constitutes unfair treatment.
The use of body-worn video cameras (BWCs) continues to be inconsistent, as in the last report. This undermines confidence in the system and results in a lack of evidence in some incidents.
In reality, most prisoners are still gaining no more than one and a half hours each day out of cell, because 80% of the population is on remand and as such cannot be required to engage with purposeful activity.
The Board does not consider cell sharing to be appropriate accommodation, all the more so given that cells, where men eat their meals, contain a shared toilet with minimal screening. This represents a lack of personal dignity and respect.
Prescription medication is an illicitly tradeable item within the prison. At least half the prison population visit the medications hatch at least once a day and many of these even two or three times a day. This is a major issue for the prison.
As with the previous reporting year, the levels of spontaneous use of force (UoF) incidents have remained high and are high relative to comparator prisons.
Asian and mixed-race men were disproportionately represented on the basic level of the incentives scheme at the end of the reporting year.
It is concerning that despite the significant finds of drugs and hooch there are relatively few reports of officers finding men under the influence of either substance. The low number of MIRs is raised repeatedly and yet it seems, given the number of items found, that too much activity related to illicit items goes undetected or possibly, at worst, unreported.
Recommendations
Recommendation 2
Will the minister publish the annual statistics of the number of detained foreign nationals held in prison beyond their sentence expiry date?
Recommendation 3
Will the minister publish the annual statistics for the average length of time that foreign nationals are held in prison beyond their sentence expiry date?
Recommendation 4
Does the minister accept that imprisonment beyond the completion of a sentence is inhumane?
Recommendation 5
In what ways can the prison service motivate or incentivise men on remand into meaningful activities to avoid prolonged periods of inactivity which seem counterproductive to the rehabilitative culture?
Recommendation 6
What will the prison service do to finally resolve the matter?
Recommendation 7
Will the prison service employ or contract to a single dedicated baggage transferring company so that parcels can be more easily tracked and located?
Recommendation 8
Will the prison service increase the rate of pay to prisoners for work?
Applications to the IMB
| Category | Current | Previous |
|---|---|---|
| Accommodation (including transfers) | 121 | 104 |
| Canteen | 72 | 49 |
| Education/work | 3 | 1 |
| Family contact | 6 | 9 |
| Healthcare/mental health | 21 | 37 |
| Other | 107 | 89 |
| Property | 274 | 276 |
| Regime | 11 | 10 |
| Release/resettlement | 13 | 7 |
| Total | 628 | 582 |
Related inspections & investigations
Safety 2
· Respect 2
· Activity 1
· Release 2
Safety 3
· Respect 3
· Activity 1
· Release 2
Dean Collins · Natural causes
Martin Casey · Other non-natural
Saul Thomas · State Custody related deaths | Mental Health related deaths
Dean Boland · State Custody related deaths
Yohannes Kidane · State Custody related deaths
Other reports for Birmingham
Population 993
· Self-harm 878
· Concerns
Population 988
· Concerns
· Self-harm 528
· Concerns
· Self-harm 676
· Concerns
Population 948
· Concerns