A senior member of staff was jailed last year, another officer has been told to stay away from work after allegedly supplying drugs to an inmate with the possible involvement of accomplices, and Home Affairs was angered recently when the media were leaked claims of lax security while a convicted child sex offender was staying in hospital, which the committee rejected.
The most-recent annual report on the prison stated that disciplinary offences had nearly trebled, while long-standing concerns remained about mental health services and accommodating children in an adult custodial facility, at a time of increases in the total number of inmates and the number of more complex cases.
Home Affairs president Marc Leadbeater said the prison authorities would be open to an independent review of the whole prison but only after the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman had identified any lessons to learn from the deaths in custody, including one by suicide.
‘Would I be resistant to an independent review of the prison? No, I wouldn’t, and I don’t believe the prison governor or the head of probation would either,’ said Deputy Leadbeater.
‘We have just had an independent review of the fire service, we are having independent reviews into these serious incidents [the deaths in custody] and we could probably take some learnings out of them.
‘Then the committee can have a look, and if we have the budget and the ability to do something, then it’s not something the committee would be averse to.’
But he dismissed any suggestion that his committee was facing a crisis at the prison.
He said that an independent review would not have foreseen or prevented misbehaviour by any individual member of staff and that recent events had at least shown that ‘justice will be done’, regardless of the employment or status of offenders.
He accepted there was room for improvement in some services at Les Nicolles but called it ‘a shining example’ when compared to many prisons elsewhere.
‘I have got total confidence in prison management and probation management. They are very experienced,’ said Deputy Leadbeater.
‘There is some really, really good work going on within the prison which gets overlooked when we have these incidents.
‘You can look at social media and think it’s some sort of hell hole if you take all the comments on there as read. But there is a different side. There is some great work that goes on.’
The most-recent annual report, which covered 2024, said that gaps in mental health services at the prison were felt particularly at primary care level, but that improvements were ongoing in partnership with Healthy Minds and Guernsey Mind.
Deputy Leadbeater believed that all of the island’s mental health services were under strain, and it was not a problem affecting the prison specifically.
‘It’s across the board in Guernsey, as I know from personal experience,’ he said.
‘My son is under the care of adult disability services. It has been three years this month since the previous psychologist left. There has been no psychologist in post for three years. We have just managed to re-engage with the service after a three-year break, but via Teams with a psychologist in the UK.
‘Mental health provision in Guernsey is where the crisis is. I don’t think we have necessarily got a crisis at the prison.’
There were 86 prisoners as of Friday last week – 67 convicted and 19 on remand.
The average population in January was 89.
Categories of offence among current inmates
Sexual – 26
Drugs – 20
Violence – 17
Property – 11
Driving – 6
Fraud – 3
Public order – 2
Miscellaneous – 1