PR 259: PRISON OFFICERS DID NOT SIGN-UP TO BE ‘PUNCHBAGS’ UNION TELLS MPs

The Chair of the trade union that represents the UK’s 32,000 Prison Officers told MPs of the intolerable pressures faced by staff working in the country’s prisons and the impact it is having on prisoner rehabilitation.  

Mark Fairhurst, the Chair of the Prison Officers’ Association, appears before the House of Commons Justice and Home Affairs Committee inquiry into Prison culture: governance, leadership, and staffing.

In a scathing written submission to the committee, the Union said, 

“Soaring violence, overcrowding, understaffing and haemorrhaging of experience over recent years due to austerity cuts have led to the loss of any meaningful opportunity to develop these relationships (with prisoners), making rehabilitation practically impossible.” 

With 28 assaults on staff each day the union said,

“Prison Officers are expected to be turn-keys, police constables, firefighters, medics, mentors, role models, teachers, therapists and more – often on a daily basis. But what our members did not sign up for was to be punchbags, which too often feels like a role forced on them by the Ministry of Justice and Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service.”  

The Union also raised serious concerns about recruitment practices and the number of staff leaving the service, with attrition rates of up to 40% in some establishments. A situation exacerbated by a decade of pay erosion and the expectation that Prison officers will have to work in such a hostile environment until they are 68 years old.

Mr Fairhurst said,  

“Rather than accepting that violence in prisons is inevitable and to be tolerated, all reasonable steps should be taken by employers to minimise workplace violence. This is not happening at the moment. Violence remains out of control, with no credible strategy in place to reduce it.

At the same time, our members' pay has failed to keep up with inflation and has been eroded year on year. And just to rub salt into the wound Prison Officers are expected to work until they are almost 70 years of age. 

We need both urgent and longer-term action to address the multiple crises playing out across the UK’s prison system.”

 

ENDS


 

 

For further information, contact:

POA Press Office                                                020 8803 0255 Option 7

 

Representing over 30,000 Prison, Correctional and Secure Psychiatric Workers, the POA is the largest UK Union in this sector, able to trace its roots back more than 100 years.