"Insufficient progress" made against drugs and alcohol at Erlestoke Prison
Recommendations were made after a report last year
A follow up report from Erlestoke Prison has found that insufficient progress has been made with drugs, alcohol and security in the last six months,
Last year, an unannounced inspection took place at the Wiltshire site by a team led by Charlie Taylor, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons.
From this, 13 recommendations were made to the prison on where they needed to improve.
In May this year, Mr Taylor carried out a follow up inspection to check on the progress.
It was found that Erlestoke had made "good" progress in four of the recommendations, "reasonable" in seven and "insufficient" in two.
One of these areas of concern was that prisoners reported that drugs and alcohol were easily available.
It was recommended that the prison should take robust action to reduce the availability of illicit drugs and alcohol.
There were frequent medical emergencies resulting from the suspected use of psychoactive substances and other unknown substances.
Many prisoners said that the availability of drugs made it difficult for them to maintain recovery.
The report says that after this, managers had developed good working relationships with the regional team, which visited the prison regularly to carry out detailed searches.
This had yielded some positives as in the previous six months, there had been 68 drug, 61 mobile phone, 34 weapon and 50 alcohol finds.
Enhanced gate security had also been introduced, which was intended to provide an airport-style level of searching on entry to the prison, although there was no X-ray machine to enable effective entry searching for staff and visitors.
However, there was effective use of a machine to detect drugs coming in through the mail, and of the body scanner to detect and deter the trafficking of illicit items into the prison.
Given the rural location of the prison and the long perimeter, items were thrown over the wall regularly.
It states that managers worked well with the police when this occurred, and work to tackle staff corruption was also good, however they considered that the prison had made insufficient progress against this recommendation.
Another recommendation made last year was that staff should be supported to positively engage with prisoners and where necessary to challenge poor prisoner behaviour.
It had found staff interaction with prisoners lacked consistency, leading to insufficient engagement and low behavioural expectations.
In the follow up, inspectors found that this had remained mostly the same, despite observing some positive staff interactions, and also considered it as insufficient progress.
In the report, Mr Taylor said:
"After a few years when Erlestoke had not been moving in the right direction, it was encouraging to see that it was now doing so across most areas.
"The improvements were in many cases recent, and resulted, in part, from new managers and newly funded roles."
The report found that Erlestoke had improved prisoners’ arrival to the establishment are decent and fit for purpose, managing behaviour, reducing the use of force, the day-to-day regime for prisoners in the segregation unit, reducing self-harm in prisoners, living conditions, equality and diversity, health care and the time prisoners spend out of cells.