Prisons allowing inmates to binge-watch daytime TV because it’s ‘easiest option’

OFFENDERS are bingeing on daytime TV in jails like teenagers, according to the chief inspector of prisons.

Charlie Taylor said too many of the institutions had failed to introduce 9am-5pm work-style regimes after Covid lockdowns and had instead taken the “comfortable” option of keeping inmates in their cells for up to 20 hours a day watching TV because it reduced the risk of violence.

Accepting some prisons faced staff shortages, he said that governors should aim to replicate the normal working day so that offenders learnt rehabilitative skills or improved their education during the day and had “domestic” time in the evening.

Many spent two or three hours learning skills in morning workshops, followed by two hours locked in their cells for lunch, and then 1.5 hours exercising or carrying out domestic duties, he said.

“A lot of prisoners are completely out of the habit of getting up and going to work. It’s a bit like teenagers. If you allow them to sit around watching daytime TV, they maintain that option. Prisoners are out of the habit, but I think jails are also out of the habit of running a proper regime,” Mr Taylor added.

He said prison visits had revealed empty workshops and overgrown gardens. One dry-stone walling workshop that could train inmates to fill vacancies that paid up to £400 a day had enrolled six prisoners on its course.

Mr Taylor warned that without a job to go to, or education, there was a high risk of re-offending. “It feels as if the regimes are run expediently for the prison, rather than in the interest of prisoners. They will create fewer victims if they come out and work,” he said.

Prisons also needed to rethink their “hierarchy”, in which offenders earned more status and pay if they cleaned floors than if they learned to read.

“That hierarchy is a prison hierarchy and isn’t a hierarchy that applies to employment when you come out,” he said.

“There are far too many prisoners employed doing jobs like wing cleaning, which is considered to be quite a high-status and well paid job in a prison because you get to stand around on the wing leaning on a mop, getting the

‘It feels as if the regimes are run expediently for the prison rather than in the interest of prisoners’

gossip, chatting to other prisoners, to staff,” he said.

It was partly driven by the benefits of using prison labour to help run the jail but Mr Taylor warned: “That isn’t much of a preparation for working when prisoners come out.”

Staff shortages also meant new recruits risked being groomed to bring contraband into jails, he added.

“Prisoners are very sophisticated at grooming people to cross boundaries. It starts off with the officer being asked to bring in something which isn’t illegal, but can lead into bringing something against potentially illegal,” he said.

Centralised recruitment of officers should be scrapped and governors allowed to hire personnel, he added.