Coping with Covid in Prison: The Impact of the Prisoner Lockdown

Even before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, prisons were operating under tremendous strain with budget cuts, staff shortages, deteriorating infrastructure, an expanding prison population and record high levels of violence, suicide,
and self-harm. The emergence of Covid-19 represented an additional crisis involving almost unprecedented risk to the lives of the incarcerated. In response, prisons in England and Wales implemented a ‘lockdown’ that involved confining prisoners to their cells for over 23 hours a day. This decision probably saved lives under extremely difficult conditions. However, as the voices in this report recount in detail, the lockdown had considerable risks of its own, including on prisoners’ health, mental wellbeing, and rehabilitation journeys. Throughout the pandemic, those in prison have effectively had no voice, and indeed little is known of their lived reality during this extraordinary period. With funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, this project sought to provide an opportunity for these voices to be heard through a unique peer-led research
model involving prisoners surveying their fellow prisoners. This research challenges some of the prevailing narratives about life in prison during the pandemic put forward by prison management, staff and leadership, which has
occasionally suggested that the lockdown has been a ‘success’ in bringing peace to prisons. Instead, the message emerging from the lived experiences of over 1,600 people across 9 prisons in this study is one of widespread trauma resulting from an extended period of solitary confinement on a system-wide scale.