Thematic reviews and research

Reading for rehabilitation

The report follows reviews in 2022 and 2023 which identified serious deficiencies in the teaching of reading across the prison estate. Depressingly, they found that prisoners with the most need received the least support, education providers were doing little to address low achievement, library opening hours had not recovered since the pandemic and few jails had any sort of prison-wide strategy to promote reading for every prisoner.

However, the 2025 visits revealed that some prisons had made huge strides in addressing these problems and that it was possible, even in the most challenging places, to transform the reading offer for prisoners and promote it as an essential component of rehabilitation.  

Time to care: what helps women cope in prison?

The rate of self-harm among women in prison has rocketed in the last 10 years and is now 8.5 times higher than in men’s jails. Rather than specific health care interventions, this thematic focuses on what support officers and leaders can offer women to reduce the likelihood of self-harm.

The paucity of regimes, the difficulties in enabling visits, and the lack of training or support for officers all contributed to a failure to help women cope. Staff spent a lot of their time helping women suffering acute crises, leaving little time to provide less intensive yet vital support for other women.

‘Just passing time’: A review of work and training provision in adult prisons

The lack of adequate purposeful activity has been a failing in prisons for many years, and since the pandemic outcomes have deteriorated further: in the last three years HMI Prisons has rated provision in 94 of 104 closed prisons as ‘poor’ or ‘not sufficiently good’.

This thematic review, reveals that, despite pockets of effective provision delivered by dedicated, creative staff, too many prisoners spend their days locked in their cells, and overcrowding, a lack of workshop space and instructors, equipment failures and ageing infrastructure have compounded the situation.

Making prisons purposeful

• Purposeful prisons: time out of cell
• Improving behaviour in prisons
• The quality of reading education in prisons: one year on
• Easier said than done: resolving prisoner requests

Detention should not cause further harm

• The long wait: A thematic review of delays in the transfer of mentally unwell prisoners
• Weekends in prison
• The experiences of adult black male prisoners and black prison staff

Meeting children in custody’s needs

• Children in custody report 2023–24
• Building trust: the importance of positive relationships in young offender institutions
• A decade of declining quality of education in young offender institutions: the systemic shortcomings that fail children
• Separation of children in young offender institutions – review of progress
• A thematic review of outcomes for girls in custody

Preparing for release

• The quality of work undertaken with women
• Minority ethnic prisoners’ experiences of rehabilitation and release planning
• Youth resettlement – final report into work in the community