Almost exactly three years ago, the Human Rights Act came into effect, bringing into UK law the provisions of the European Convention of Human Rights. I was part of the Task Force, set up, with typical forethought, openness and enthusiasm by Lord Williams of Mostyn, whose premature death has left such a great gap in our political and legal life. The aim was prevention and dialogue, rather than simply litigation and conflict: to train public authorities, and discuss with them what amendments might be needed to laws and practices. These discussions were not just about compliance: they were driven by Francesca Klug’s description of human rights as a value system for a godless age, something that ‘does not require a belief in anything more than the dignity of each person.’ And in case anyone believes that these are alien concepts imported into the
prisons inspectorate by its latest Chief Inspector, this was the keynote quote in Sir David
Ramsbotham’s last annual report.

I want to talk today about the role of prison inspection in preventing, monitoring, disclosing human rights concerns; in carrying out a conversation with those responsible for our prisons, and the public, in whose name they are run; and to end with some reflections on the future of prisons inspecting.

First, though, a warning. If you have come to hear a learned and footnoted discourse on human rights litigation in relation to prisons, you should probably leave now. This talk will reflect my experience of seeing where and how those values are expressed in practice in our prisons.

When I left Justice to this job, one of the images that stuck in my mind was a scene from David Hare’s play ‘Murmuring Judges’ – one of his trilogy about the pillars of the English establishment: the church, the law and politics. In one scene, a young, black, radical woman barrister is berating an elderly, gnarled police desk sergeant about rights and justice. He looks up wearily and asks ‘And when was someone last sick on your wig?’. I cannot claim that anyone has yet been sick on any part of me: the worst damage was wet paint on my coat (and I do tend to see a lot of wet paint, both literal and metaphorical, when I inspect prisons.) But in the two years or so that I have been Chief Inspector, I have negotiated my way round a dirty protest or two; discussed her ‘voices’
with an articulate young woman, held in isolation in segregation, who had just tried to stab another prisoner; seen staff running at just sub-Olympic speed to cut down a prisoner who was already blue; and one of my inspectors, in a prison healthcare centre, was present while a prisoner gouged out one of his eyes and was just prevented by staff from doing the same to the other.

Those are the extremes. But we do well to remember that prisons can be extreme places; imprisonment is an extreme sanction. And some of those in our prisons present great risks to themselves, other prisoners and staff.

It is particularly the marginalised who need the protection of human rights: by definition, they may not be able to look for that protection to the democratic process, or the common consensus. And most of those in our prisons were on the margins long before they reached prison (look at the high levels of school exclusion, illiteracy, mental
disorder, substance and other abuse); and may be even more so afterwards (with difficulty in securing jobs, homes, continued treatment, and even more fractured family and community ties). Prisons exclude literally: but they hold those who already were and will be excluded in practice.

The Prisons Inspectorate has developed what we call a ‘Healthy Prison’ concept. It is based on the World Health Organisation’s four tests of what constitutes a healthy custodial environment; and that in turn is based upon international human rights principles, set out in the various UN and Council of Europe instruments and guidelines.
Those four tests are: that prisoners are held in safety; that they are treated with respect and dignity as human beings; that they are able to engage in purposeful activity; and that they are prepared for resettlement. And they are supported by detailed ‘Expectations’.

Those tests, I think, define the core business of a Prisons Inspectorate. Some of those tests, and some of our work, involve examining whether prisons are part of an effectively functioning criminal justice system and in particular whether what goes on in prisons is likely to help prevent reoffending. That is the subject of another lecture: unless you have two hours to spare. It involves examining the essential interfaces, not only between parts of the criminal justice system itself, but also between that system and other parts of society: dealing with crime prevention and social exclusion, getting buy-in from private and public sector bodies that can offer opportunities to ex-offenders; and developing real and active partnerships with the voluntary sector.

But those tests, particularly the first two – safety and respect - express what is specific to prisons inspecting. Safety and respect are the bottom lines of any custodial environment: they should be expected and demanded as things in themselves, whether or not they are ‘effective’ in process terms, or can be shown to prevent reoffending. That does not mean they are unconnected: treating people with respect, sometimes for the first time, can generate self-respect; by contrast, treating people as objects, or shutting them behind their doors, sets a model of anti-social behaviour.

But, irrespective of that, the dignity and safety of prisoners are absolutely central to a proper custodial environment and therefore to a prisons inspectorate. And that is why internationally, as well as nationally, there are obligations to have independent monitoring and inspection processes with the power to enter, observe and report on all places of detention; and why that monitoring is grounded in standards that are set outside and independently of current practice, prison standards, efficiency and performance. It is worth noting, for example, that the new Protocol to the UN Convention on Inhuman and Degrading Treatment and Torture, which this country is set to ratify, demands that states have in place independent monitoring and inspection of all places of detention – and partly for that reason, my remit is now extending into all places of immigration detention, including immigration secure holding centres, and the Military Corrective and Training Centre in Colchester.

When I had to train judges in the HRA, I was at pains to tell them that some of the requirements of the Act were things they had been doing already: that I did not expect that on 2 October 2000, they would for the first time go into court thinking ‘we must give people a fair trial from now on’. In the same way, it is clear that safety and decency are things that the Prison Service and government have signed up to. The Prison Service as a whole is committed to the decency agenda (even when this attracts censure in the Sun); and is now seeking to measure that qualitatively; and has actively promoted safer custody. It is also committed to performance improvement. Many prison staff, day in and day out, manage with humanity and concern a population that is damaged, difficult
and sometimes dangerous. And all of this is subject to ministerial and parliamentary control, to litigation under the HRA, and to the attention of very assiduous and knowledgeable pressure groups. Why then do we need a Prisons Inspectorate?

First, by definition prisons are closed environments. They operate outside the normal controls and processes of society; and it is often the case that society as a whole is less than interested about what happens behind their walls. We do not talk of 'our prisons’ as we talk of our schools and hospitals; politicians rarely feel the need to promise more prison officers, as they do more police or more doctors and teachers.

Because they are out of sight and out of mind, prisons need to have a light shone on them, so that society as a whole can know what is being done in its name. They need regular and constant monitoring – hence the vital role played by the Independent Monitoring Boards (previously Boards of Visitors), who provide crucial links to the community around and outside the prison. But they also need independent inspection: that detailed, external scrutiny, that can compare one prison to another, get into specialist areas such as drugs, education and healthcare, focus for a whole week on everything that is going on in a prison, produce and publish a detailed report with recommendations for action.

The closed nature of prisons also means that they can become self-referential; their own worlds, with rules that are there because they always have been, or because they are convenient, rather than because they are necessary, or right. That can be seductive, both to those working within and those monitoring prisons.

For example, prisons rightly need to focus on security, both perimeter security and the safety of those within them. But security can come to have the quality of the parental ‘because I say so’; the trump card, the excuse rather than the reason. It is important constantly to monitor this: to spot when ‘security’ is in fact a security blanket. Let me give you some examples: a women’s prison that allows women to have china plates but not china mugs, a men’s prison that bans denture fixative in case it blocks locks, one that allows tins of peas but not cans of hair gel for African-Caribbeans; a prison that on some wings routinely reads all prisoners’ mail because staff find it helpful to know what is going on in their lives.

Though it is certainly true that the rule of law does not stop at the prison gate, the principle of proportionality – that any interference with privacy or respect must be necessary and proportionate – sometimes seems to have a hard time getting past the gate lodge.

The treatment of children in prison is a classic example of where the application of domestic and international law principles relating to the protection and welfare of children has been counter-cultural, in a prison system that is designed around adult males. Inspections, carried out by inspectors with childcare experience, have held up
Prison Service practices to those standards, with the view that, if the Prison Service cannot provide conditions that are compatible with the Children Act, it should not be holding children. Evidence from inspections assisted the Howard League case that established that the Children Act, like the rule of law, does not stop at the prison gate.

While it is undoubtedly true that the culture, and the opportunities, in juvenile establishments have improved, inspections continue to ask testing questions of the system, as well as individual establishments. Can the detention of children in units of 60 and establishments of 400 really promote their welfare and development? What is the rationale or the proportionality of routinely strip-searching children on arrival in prison, particularly for a population more likely than the average to have experienced abuse? And if a child resists, can you justify him or her being held down by adults, in painful wristlocks, and forcibly undressed? Do procedures for adjudication and segregation sufficiently protect children? These practices are all governed by Prison Service rules written for adults (and largely for adult males) rather than for children. I welcome the fact that those rules are now being reviewed and, I hope, amended.

Inspections can also find that things that go to the heart of safety and respect have simply been forgotten, or are not noticed. All institutions have a default setting of institutional convenience, or inertia; and closed institutions can hide this from themselves and others. That, in my experience, is much more common than deliberate and calculated ill-treatment. We have come across places that are simply filthy, where prisoners do not get out of their cells and the basics of hygiene and care are not in place. At Kingston, the prison specialising in the care of elderly prisoners, some were held in small, woodpartitioned cells without natural light and where they were barely able to move. We have reported to at least two governors that, without their knowledge and against prison service orders, incoming prisoners were routinely squat-searched while stripped naked for stripsearching: and that included children. In relation to young prisoners, we have repeatedly revealed the fact that on the long journeys to and between prisons, without sufficient breaks, they were reduced to urinating in property bags or the escort van itself: on one occasion being made to clean up the mess before being allowed to leave the van.

Having said that, our reports also record the care and treatment provided every day by staff to some extremely difficult and damaged people; the occasions on which they save lives, persuade the seriously mentally ill to engage at some level, provide the first prosocial modelling for adolescents. In one prison we inspected recently, there had been five near-death incidents within the previous few weeks, prevented by the vigilance of staff: those are not recorded publicly, though the next death will be. Staff may not use human rights language to describe what they do; and some of them indeed would be scornful of it: but they nevertheless know what is right. And inspection performs an equally important role in validating that.

Congratulating a governor who is slowly turning round a culture of disrespect, in a process that he has likened to continually having to pull on an elastic band; observing that right relationships between governors and staff are acted out in right relationships between staff and prisoners; acknowledging the efforts of staff and governors at least to provide humane containment in the face of the corrosive effects of overcrowding: these are just as important as whistle-blowing in terms of ensuring that human rights are protected. It is something that very rarely surfaces in the national press – sadly ‘Good staff doing good work’ is unlikely to make a page lead - but it happens frequently.

I am aware that much of what I am describing would not found a successful human rights challenge in the courts; though some might. But my definition of human rights, like Francesca Klug’s, is wider than simply that which can be litigated: the irreducible bottom line of a continent-wide human rights obligation. It is about what, as a civilised and wealthy society, we ought to provide, without being so ashamed that we do not want to know. If you are a prisoner whose every movement, every possession, every trip to the shower is controlled, even apparently minor details matter. My previous Deputy, Colin Allen, will be known to many of you. His legacy to the Inspectorate was considerable; but his specific legacy to his successor was a large notice pinned above his
desk which said simply ‘underpants’: in the large picture of penal reform and the very serious issues that arise, do not forget the things that make us all feel human, or not.

But some things are by no means trivial. The segregation unit in a prison needs to be monitored with care, as good governors know. It can become a prison within a prison; and if it does, even though it may actually affect rather few prisoners, it infects the whole prison: prisoners know it is the ultimate sanction, the punishment for failure to conform and comply. That is why there was, and remains, such concern about what happened in
the segregation unit at Wormwood Scrubs. My predecessor’s report on Wandsworth raised major concerns about the unit there. And my inspection of Dartmoor revealed the ‘cage’ – the gated cell through which prisoners seeking counselling could communicate only through a perspex screen. That was symptomatic of a deeper cultural problem, in which alleged security and control (over prisoners who were after all in the second lowest security category) disguised attitudes and language that diminished or intimidated prisoners. That those units existed at all, in spite of internal controls and checks, is evidence, if any were needed, of the need for inspection; that they have fundamentally changed is evidence of its effectiveness: though they still need to be
monitored carefully.

Again, at the extremes, there are practices that are more than indignity or invasion of privacy: they can go to the heart of safety. The ultimate human rights issue is, of course, deaths in custody, in the face of the state’s duty of care to those whom it decides to detain. This is a growing area of concern in our overcrowded prisons. An inspectorate thematic report which focused on suicides and self-harm helped set a new agenda, the safer custody agenda, within the Prison Service. This has sought to tackle not only the symptoms, but the underlying causes. This involved risk assessment and monitoring, anti-bullying and child protection. But it also involves systems of safe and supervised detoxification, and mental health support for the many prisoners with substance abuse and mental health problems. And it requires the active engagement of staff, and the provision of sufficient activities for prisoners.

It is clear, and inspections continually demonstrate, that overcrowding undermines such an environment. Busy local prisons will have hundreds of prisoners to assess, monitor and house: Leeds was receiving 436 a month at the time of our last inspection. In many such prisons, they may experience 23-hour lock-up, two to a single cell with an unscreened toilet. The pressure on prisons, and consequences for prisoners, are huge.

And in a prison service where this year an average of two people a week have been killing themselves, it is critically important to monitor this. As 40% of those deaths occur within the first month, we pay particular attention to the early days of custody, including adequate detoxification. We always test the response to cell call bells, that may be signalling an emergency, and in some cases find that they are almost treated as background music. We have reported on prisons that fail to carry out cell sharing risk assessments (even after the deaths of Zahid Mubarak and Christopher Edwards) – in one case because they had run out of forms. In one women’s prison, we found observation panels in a segregation unit holding seriously mentally ill and suicidal women were routinely blocked. It is of current concern to us, and to the high security estate, that all recent suicides in dispersal prisons have taken place in segregation units, where distance between staff and prisoners is at its most pronounced, and control may take precedence over care.

Prevention, as well as the kind of post-death inquiry now demanded following the House of Lords judgment in Amin, is an essential part of the protection of human rights, and I believe that prison inspection, as well as the work of those within prisons, has saved lives, both by promoting good practice and highlighting bad. However, the judgment also opens the way to a variety of different independent models for inquiring into deaths in custody: from full public inquiries to independent and transparent individual investigations. I believe that there is a place in this spectrum for the inspectorate to be invited to carry out and publish inquiries where death, injury or disturbance indicates that there are systemic failures that need to be examined to prevent similar occurrences. Other prison inspectorates carry out this work, and I welcome the fact that this is now under active consideration by the Home Office.

I can think of few, if any, prisons that I have been involved in inspecting, where we have not found something – large or small – that was unknown to senior managers; or else something that had been flagged up by staff, managers or the Independent Monitoring Board, but was not being dealt with. One of the theories I have developed in the course of prison inspecting is the virtual prison. The virtual prison is the one that exists in the
office of the governor, or area manager, often expressed in regime monitoring statistics or performance target returns. It is the prison that is supposed to be operating, and indeed the one that everyone would like to see operating, but it is not always the one that is. Race is one area where we often see the virtual prison in operation: with an overall commitment from the service that is not always monitored in practice, so that even if all the right processes – race relations officer, committee and monitoring – are in place, they can be under-resourced, under-used and deliver too little to prisoners.

Inspection – that detailed process of being there, digging behind the surface, collecting and testing evidence from prisoners, staff, records and observation - defines the contours of the actual prison. It looks for outcomes, not processes; things that are delivered, rather than deliverable; interactions and cultures that cannot be caught in standards, orders or rules.

Some of the things we find are remedied before we are out of the gate. Others will be dealt with in the action plan the Prison Service produces within two months in response to our recommendations. And we will return, unannounced, a year or so after that to see if action has in fact happened. Increasingly, too, the Prison Service is using inspection reports as part of the way it assesses and seeks to improve prisons: a tribute to the quality of the inspection process and its importance in working for change.

Inspections concentrate on individual prisons, and I make no apology for that; we produced 80 inspection reports last year. The devil in prisons is in the detail – if not always the underpants. If human rights law is the application of general principles to an individual case, inspection is the process of painstakingly building up, from detailed qualitative and quantitative evidence, an accurate picture of the humanity, safety, purposeful activity and rehabilitation in an environment. Of course, we hope to stimulate more general change – as with children and safer custody – and thematics on women, lifers and healthcare have certainly helped to do that. But those thematics are often slow-burners, and it is again individual inspections that assist in keeping the flame burning.

You can also gauge the importance of inspection by reference to places that are not inspected. In 1999, we were given the responsibility for inspecting immigration removal centres, and have recently completed the first seven inspections. We have found that the same tests of a healthy environment apply to these custodial environments also, and that many fail. Those findings are the subject of another lecture. But what has also
emerged is the consequences of not monitoring and inspecting.

Immigration detention is not routinely supervised by the courts and until now has not been routinely inspected. What inspections reveal is that this lack of supervision can result in arbitrary or sloppy decision-making: detainees received without proper authorisation, cases not progressed efficiently – in one case two detainees literally lost in the system, three months into what was supposed to be an overnight stay in prison. We
have used child protection and welfare principles to question the detention of children. And we have revealed conditions that fall short of safety or respect. When some of the deficiencies were pointed out to officials, there was some reluctance to accept that things did not happen simply because policies had been drawn up. The inspection gap between the virtual and actual had not up till then been mapped in immigration removal centres.
It is now.

Most recently, we have undertaken the first joint inspection of court cells and escorts with the Courts Inspectorate. I have already mentioned the lengthy journeys and degrading conditions that some prisoners, especially women and young people, suffer in escort vans. It is from these conditions that newly sentenced or remanded prisoners reach prison receptions. The report is not yet finalised, so I cannot discuss its findings.
But I can confidently predict that it will reveal practices that are unsafe and disrespectful, but which had become accepted, or where responsibility was shrugged off between agencies. At the Military Corrective and Training Centre at Colchester, we have already helped the authorities draw up a safer custody and child protection agenda, and they have fully accepted the four healthy prison tests.

I hope that I have said enough to demonstrate the necessity, and the effectiveness, of our inspections of custodial environments in relation to our core business: improving the treatment and conditions of those held in detention.

Over the last year our work has been scrutinised and reviewed closely – both by the Office of Public Service Reform in its review of inspections generally, and more specifically in the review of criminal justice inspectorates carried out by the three criminal justice departments. The former has drawn out some broad principles of inspection. They are ones that we can subscribe to: indeed, in some, like the focus on outcome rather than process, we have been ahead of the game. The latter review has focused on the need for criminal justice inspections to monitor the system as a whole: to undertake joint work that reveals and can eliminate the gaps that prevent the process working effectively. I have no problem with this approach in principle: there is clear evidence that the silo mentalities of services can result in both unfairness and inefficiency. And the inability to focus on crucial interfaces between services can leave crucial areas uninspected. As far as those in custody are concerned, I have already mentioned the need to monitor courts and escorts. The other crucial area is of course resettlement, where whatever has happened in prison must be reinforced in the real world outside if it is to be of any longterm use; although that reinforcement needs to go far outside criminal justice and involve the statutory and voluntary agencies that can provide the practical resettlement needs of those leaving prison. But, for such inspections to be effective, there must be levers for change, structures that work, at those points of interface. You cannot inspect a gap; nor can you rely on inspectorates to make good the deficiencies of services in failing to work together.

The criminal justice review, as Baroness Scotland said in the House of Lords, may result in a decision to merge inspectorates (for example prison and probation into a joint correctional services inspectorate); or to create an overarching commission or commissioner.

I have been asked, and I have myself asked, whether the proposals are intended to dilute either the robustness or the independence of prisons inspecting, with the embarrassment this can sometimes cause for the government and the Prison Service. I have been assured that this is emphatically not the case, and I am clear that this is not the intention of the Home Secretary, the Commissioner for Correctional Services, or the Prison Service. However, I also believe that it is essential to take steps to ensure that it is not the consequence of what is decided: either immediately or in the future.

I fear the development of a single ‘inspectology’: which may be well-suited to inspections that rightly focus on the performance and efficiency of services, but which may not speak to the needs of an inspection process with captive consumers, whose conditions and treatment are at the heart of its work. During the course of the reviews, I have on many occasions had to correct misapprehensions about the role, focus, methodology and
effectiveness of prisons inspecting This has sometimes been treated almost as an irritation, or as Luddism: a block to the new streamlined approach. That is far from the case. As I have set out, my inspectorate is constantly refining and developing its approach, improving its evidence base and methodology, taking on new challenges and applying successfully the models of custodial care. We know a thing or two about that. And we are committed to joint work, where it is useful and effective. But, if I constantly have to bring the reality and the specific requirements of custodial inspection to the attention of those carrying out the review, I understandably have some concerns about whether they will be central to its implementation.

I have therefore set out four principles that I believe to be essential to prisons inspections, and to any proposed changes to current structures.

First, inspection must be carried out by independent criteria, not tied to the standards of the Prison Service, or entirely bounded by current government objectives. As I have already said, international law requires the inspection of places of detention, and there are overriding international principles governing it. Ninety-six of the detailed ‘expectations’ by which we conduct inspections are rooted in internationally binding human rights
instruments. Of course, safety, decency, purposeful activity and resettlement are something that both the government and the Prison Service are signed up to. But they might not be, have not always been, and in some countries are not. That does not alter what a prisons inspectorate needs to look for.

In addition, those principles and criteria may call for things that cannot yet be delivered. I have mentioned the conditions of prisoners, two to a cell, with an unscreened lavatory.

These are not conditions that the prisons, or the Prison Service, want to provide: but they are ones that are to be found throughout the prison system now. The Prison Service may not like these conditions, but its main task is to manage them and its standards must necessarily reflect what managers can realistically achieve. However, a prisons inspectorate that began to accept this as normative, because it was becoming normal, would be derelict in its duty. There are other examples of where the Inspectorate’s role is to highlight unacceptable practice; and where this has nudged change forward. I have already mentioned the treatment of children, and the safer custody agenda. I could also mention slopping out, the slow but appreciable improvement in prison healthcare, and many others; where what ought to be has gradually influenced what is.

Secondly, there must be no diminution in the present cycle of inspecting individual prisons. At present, we undertake to inspect all adult prisons fully every five years, with short follow-up inspections in the middle of that period. Of course, we can be more focused in deciding the scale and scope of a follow-up inspection, based upon
intelligence and an assessment of risk. But that cycle, I believe, is the minimum that is needed to ensure that places of custody are regularly and thoroughly monitored. It has frequently been said, in the course of the reviews, that many services feel that they are over-monitored, oppressed by the ‘burden of inspection’. I am afraid that I have little sympathy for that in relation to prisons. Imprisonment is the most extreme sanction the
state is allowed to apply; and it deserves the closest scrutiny. I doubt that there would ever be a time when it would be right to scale down the individualised focus on prison conditions; but if there ever was, it is certainly not now, as the prison population passes 74,000. And it is only by close attention to the particular that we can properly reflect the general.

Thirdly, there must be the power, and the resources, to undertake unannounced inspections on the sole authority of the Chief Inspector. The ability to arrive without warning is an essential part of our armoury, and a glance at recent inspections will show that it is often the unannounced ones – Liverpool, Wandsworth, Dartmoor, Parkhurst – that reveal where conditions have unacceptably deteriorated. However assiduously we seek to get beneath the radar, it is important sometimes to see prisons as they are, not as they have prepared to be; and it is important that every prison governor knows that at any time we can knock on the door. Unannounced inspections can also be used to check that prisons that are reportedly doing well are doing so even when they are caught unprepared. That was the case at Leeds, for example.

Fourthly, there must be real independence. There will always be doubts, for prisoners and the public, about an inspectorate that is headed by a government appointee, whose budget is determined by the Home Office. That has not, however, prevented any of us from being robustly independent; and I have been subject to no political pressure whatsoever to amend or control what my inspections find. I report directly to the Home Secretary; and though the overall inspection cycle is agreed with him, its implementation is entirely for me. I publish reports and now determine the timing of publication: thankfully, much sooner than before, thanks to some increased resources. If there were, for example, any oversight of the inspection process by a civil servant, this would
necessarily dilute independence; if not immediately, then by a process of attrition. There may be a need to facilitate and prioritise joint thematic work (though not to control its methods or approach): but that must not get into the territory of, or compromise, the core statutory responsibility to monitor the conditions in prisons and the treatment of prisoners.

I hope that those four principles will be clearly expressed and guaranteed if there are any changes to the current structure. But I also believe that, if there are to be fundamental structural changes, they should be achieved by statutory change, fully debated in Parliament. Prisons inspecting is important in maintaining public confidence in the invigilation of the prisons system: so it is equally important that any proposals for change reflect that accountability and are fully and transparently debated, and the evidence for them properly assessed.

It may be that my concerns can be addressed, and that a realignment of institutions is accepted as necessary to improve the efficiency of the criminal justice system and reduce reoffending. But it is for those proposing change to demonstrate that this can be done without blurring the focus that a specialised prisons inspectorate has been able to provide for decades. One model proposed is for a merged correctional services inspectorate. I
have no doubt that the Chief Inspector of Probation and I need to work more closely, in a different way, and with others to examine the resettlement iniatives that are, and should be, taking place; and that if the structure of correctional services changes, inspection will need to change to reflect that. But I have some difficulty in seeing how immigration removal and holding centres and the military detention centre fit into a correctional
services inspectorate: I fear they will hang off the edge, whereas they are central to an inspectorate whose focus is the conditions and treatment of those in detention. Being at the margins is not, I would suggest, the best way of protecting the marginalised.

The bottom line is that, in reaching for new and innovative ways of solving old and so far intractable problems, we must not lose what we have got. That is a prisons inspectorate whose robust independence is a model for other countries; whose inspections and inspection methods are increasingly valued and adopted here; which is
reporting on an alarmingly overcrowded and pressurised closed system; which has responded to the challenge of expanding its custodial remit; and which is being invited to consider other methods, such as inquiries. This is an essential part of the protection of the human rights of those held in detention. It is too valuable to lose or diminish.