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‘If you don’t like it…’
When I first came to prison in the 1970s, if you wanted to make a complaint about any aspect of your imprisonment you made that complaint to the landing officer. The answer you would usually get is – ‘If you don’t like it, don’t come to prison.’ You could also apply to make your complaint to the governor, and if you had no joy there, then your final move was a petition to the Home Office. The trouble with this system was that there was no overview, very little paperwork, and complaints were rarely even acknowledged by the prison system. A petition to the Home Office was rarely granted by the governor and if it was, you could wait a couple of years for an answer. Usually, negative. And that was your whack as far as making a complaint went.
This was why so many long-term prisoners began to study the law in order to be at least slightly armed, because the only real way of getting a result was to take the system to court. A battalion of ‘jailhouse lawyers’ sprang up in the system, prisoners who could advise you and help you deal with the County Courts.
After the Strangeways Riot of 1990, and the subsequent report by David Ramsbotham, prisoners were provided with an official complaints system. Suddenly we had a whole, organised system for dealing with complaints. And, for a while, it worked.
Unfortunately, we have had a series of right-wing justice ministers who think their brief for the British prison system is to put their own ‘hard man/woman’ stamp on everything, and make things much harder for both inmates and staff. Chris Grayling took away our right to sue for compensation in the County Court, which was one of the final arbiters in the complaints system. This resulted in inmates having to go through a complaints system so flawed that very few inmates have any confidence in it. Here at Inside Time, we receive a lot of correspondence about the failings of the official complaints system, and rarely anything positive about it.
The system is still in place, and we know from when it was first introduced that it can actually work if everyone was to tighten up and follow the right steps. My advice would be to always keep a record of your complaint. If your COMP1 form comes back without a serial number, take it to a senior prison officer and get them to give it an official number. The trick is to create a paper-trail that cannot be denied at a later date. Keep copies of all relevant documents. The whole system is in disarray, so your job is to preserve your complaint’s timeline. If you get no result or answer to your internal forms, do not be afraid to present your case, and relevant paperwork, to the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman. Also speak to the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB). Study the prison rules, and always make certain your complaint is not of a trivial nature.
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