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Hello and welcome to this special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm James Hill and I'm joined

today by Charlie Taylor, who is HM Chief Inspector of Prisons. Now Charlie, there have been figures

released this week saying that there were 91 accident releases between April and October of this year.

Can you just tell us why that is? Well, it comes as absolutely no surprise and we saw 262 in the year

before and a big increase in the year before that. What it's really a symptom of is a couple of things.

First of all, it's the amount of churn that we've seen in terms of changes of policy when it

comes to release. So under the Conservative government, we had the early release of 18 days,

then it went up to 30 days, then it went up to, I think, 40, then it went up to 70. And then this

government came in and they introduced what was called SDS 40, where in the past, prisoners used to

serve 50% of their sentence. They're now expected to serve 40% of their sentence. So the system has just got

much more complicated over the course of the year. And for people in prison, they've sometimes

failed to keep up. And the other thing I think is the lack of experience and lack of training

that we see in many prisons. And in the old days, the way that training used to work in prison

is no one gave you much formal training.

But what happened is there was a very experienced person around there and they would sit next to you and they'd say, you're getting that all wrong. This is how you do it. But unfortunately, we don't have the experienced person sitting next to them anymore. In which case you've got very inexperienced people leading very other very inexperienced people and that's been a cause of

lots of these issues that we're saying not just when it comes to releases but also another bits of

the system as well and that lack of experienced staff is that due to staff retention the rates

collapsing or yeah it's due to staff retention which has been poor for many years where where there's

a push to fill the pipeline at all time prisons are recruiting like mad but they're not always recruiting people who are going to stick around for very long. And one of the things that I've complained about in my time as chief inspector is the fact that governors have no say over the people who come and work in their prison. So the first time you meet new officers when they walk onto the wing for the first time. And governors often say, look, these guys aren't going to make it. You know, I can tell from very early on that this person isn't up to it. So it means you then go through a process of that person going, another new person arrives. That makes a lot of sense. And in terms of the sort of staff being hired, are there enough people in the right jobs on the estate? I mean, overall staff numbers have gone up over the past 10 years or so. Yes, indeed. I mean, it's interesting because you go to private sector prisons and some of those actually have lower staffing levels, but they can be more successful. So probably the best prison in the country is actually HMPOakwood, just north of Wolverhampton, where they have some economies of scale. It's the biggest jail in the country, and it's relatively new, so it's a decent Nick. But actually, it's also, as well as being the most successful country in prison in the country, it's also the least well-funded prison in the country as well. And why is that it's so successful? What lessons can we learn from somewhere like that? Well, I mean, I wish the prison service would ask this question themselves as well, because there's a huge amount that can be learned. I mean, I think what Oakwood are able to do is to innovate, so they're able to take risks to do things differently in a way that I think sometimes the prison service is very nervous about doing. For example, when it comes to visits at Oakwood, there's an opportunity to be able to bring your dog in if it's very well behaved. If you're a prisoner who's proved that you're really well behaved and you're going to do the right thing. So I came across when I visited the jail, there was a guy, ex-service's guy, he got himself into trouble. He was doing two years for whatever he'd done.

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