Professor Emeritus Nick Hardwick, from Royal Holloway, University of London and former Chief Inspector of Prisons, draws on two decades of HM Inspectorate of Prisons survey to look at what the data reveals about male prisoners’ experiences of safety, and why this archive is a resource worth protecting.
For at least the last 25 years a prisoner survey has been part of almost every prison inspection undertaken by HM Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP).
After a ten-year project, and thanks to funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, a partnership between HMIP and Royal Holloway, and a lot of hard work by many individuals, these data from every survey in adult prison has been cleaned and structured.
The HMIP Prisoner Survey is now freely available for research use via the UK Data Service.
To my mind, these surveys are not only a valuable quantitative dataset but also capture the previously unheard voices of tens of thousands of individuals describing in detail their experiences and feelings during their time in prison.
The UK Data Service has already looked at how this dataset came to be repurposed for research. This blog post looks at what researchers have done with it since.
The surveys
Surveys take place at the start of the first week of an inspection. The inspectorate’s own professionally accredited independent researchers use the prison’s population list to select a random representative sample to whom they personally distribute the survey.
Prison staff do not decide or know which prisoners take part in the survey. Copies of the survey are available in different languages and the researchers will assist prisoners who have difficulty completing it.
Surveys are collected by the researchers by the end of the day and analysed so the results are ready for inspectors to use in the second week of the inspection. Information about the inspectorate’s current surveys and methodology is attached to each full inspection report on HMIP’s website.
Mass participation
There is a phenomenal 75% response rate in closed prisons which I think demonstrates prisoners’ trust in the process – and their desire to tell their story.
As Chief Inspector of Prisons, I often saw this trust in action – prisoners taking real care as they worked through the lengthy survey in their cells.
It was striking when we were exploring prisoners’ attitudes to making the survey results available as part of an initial feasibility study. Prisoners told us emphatically that they wanted their voices as expressed in the surveys to be heard as widely as possible. I hope the availability of the survey data will now allow this to happen.
New research
A recent study published in The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, by Professor Rosie Meek, Dr Kim Reising and myself, used the data to look at safety in men’s prisons between 2000 and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
The study examined the experiences of the 33,476 (39.7% of total respondents in this period) men who answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Have you ever felt unsafe here?’ and the 13,025 (18.5%) who between 2006 and 2020 answered ‘Yes” to the question ‘Do you feel unsafe now?’.
Of course, what prisoners mean by ‘feeling unsafe’ may be open to interpretation but the year-by-year rise and fall in the data closely follows the prison service’s own data about the rise and fall in the number of assault incidents.
We should not allow this finding to become normalised – it’s almost one in five prisoners telling us, with good reason, that on that day they felt scared.
What the data tells us about feelings of safety
The paper tracks how feelings of unsafety relate to wider trends in the prison system such as the loss of experienced staff and overcrowding, types of prison, the demographics of those least likely to feel safe, and men’s experience in prison – particularly early days.
The findings from this research provide both solid evidence for some long-standing concerns as well as challenging some assumptions that are often made.
It’s a good example of how administrative, inspection-driven data — never originally collected with research in mind — can be repurposed to answer questions that matter well beyond the inspection process itself.
Endless possibilities
When we were writing our prison safety paper I was constantly side-tracked by what else the data could tell us.
Other uses include prison library use for an Arts Council inquiry, investigating alcohol use by prisoners and examining prisoners’ health needs and experiences.
The experience of women prisoners is one of the most obvious examples. So is the impact on young adults moving from youth offender institutions into the adult estate, and how experience shifts alongside major policy changes and ministers’ terms in office.
The dataset is also large enough to say something meaningful about smaller groups of prisoners: faith groups, or patterns among prisoners who report being sexually assaulted by other prisoners or staff.
Unsurprisingly, we found that early days experience correlates strongly with feeling unsafe. I’d like to understand this further – what separates the prisoners who had a poor early days experience and went on to feel unsafe from those who had the same start but didn’t.
The list is endless really and I hope others will want to follow up some of these questions.
A resource worth protecting
Making this data available and using it has been a ten-year project.
I am grateful to my successors as Chief Inspector of Prisons, Peter Clarke and Charlie Taylor, and their research teams for supporting the project. Anthony Quinn, Janet Bowstead, Rosie Meek and Kim Reising actually did most of the work and right from the start we were supported and encouraged by the late and much missed David Denney.
The scale of the effort is a cause for gratitude but also for concern. The data needs to be continually updated and made available as new surveys are done. There is still data from other inspection types to be assessed.
Charlie Taylor’s term as Chief Inspector is soon coming to an end and there is no guarantee that all his successors – or the inspectorate itself – will maintain his commitment.
There is a real risk I think that at some point this huge archive and the stories it tells will lie forgotten and unused. I hope there will be other institutions and funders who will want to work with HMIP to make sure this does not happen and ensure the window the surveys provide on prisoners’ experience in the first quarter of the 21st century – and hopefully beyond – will remain open.
If any questions raised here have caught your interest, the dataset itself is freely available to explore via the UK Data Service. You can also read an additional version of this post, Prisoner voices, and the full safety paper.
About the author
Professor Emeritus Nick Hardwick has held a number of senior roles in the criminal justice system and was HM Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales from 2010 to 2016.
In 2016 he was appointed Professor of Criminal Justice at Royal Holloway University of London where he worked until he retired in 2024. He is currently Chair of Nacro, the social justice charity.
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