Research forms an important part of our inspection evidence. We gather and analyse quantitative and qualitative data about prisons and other places of detention. These findings are triangulated with other forms of evidence (inspectors’ observations and discussion with staff and detainees) to come to judgements about establishments.
We conduct a detainee survey as part of every inspection. We analyse this and provide inspectors with:
- comparisons with previous inspections and surveys conducted at similar establishments
- breakdowns of the data by different protected characteristics
- thematic analysis of detainees’ written comments.
Find out more about our detainee survey.
We develop additional research activities for thematic inspections. These may include:
- literature reviews
- semi-structured interviews with detainees and staff
- focus groups
- analysis of case files or other establishment data
- secondary analysis of survey data.
We also analyse recommendations, notable positive practice and healthy prison area assessments to provide management information and consultation responses, and for publication in the Chief Inspector’s annual report.
Ethical principles
Ethical principles inform all our research activities. These activities include surveys, interviews, focus groups, secondary analysis of data, other desk-based research and the use of data to inform our practice.
All HMI Prisons staff conducting research activities must adhere to our ethical principles.
Find out more about our ethical principles for research.
The team
The Research, Data and Thematic (RDT) team at HMI Prisons is made up of 12 researchers. Nearly all belong to the Government Social Research Service, a professional body for social researchers in government.
HMI Prisons also employs undergraduate students to work as research trainees during their placement year.
Find out more about what research trainees do.
Project with Royal Holloway University of London
We have been conducting prisoner and detainee surveys for over 20 years. This has generated a unique database of historic survey data from at least 100,000 respondents, with more than 10 million analysable responses.
Although we have always published our findings, the raw data has not been available for further research purposes. Now, a research team from the Department of Law and Criminology at Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL), has obtained a grant from the ESRC’s Secondary Data Analysis Initiative to study this data for the first time.