Earlier this month, MP Chris Bryant put forward two amendments to the Domestic Abuse Bill, stated that female prisoners must be screened for acquired brain injury, including concussion, within two weeks of starting their sentence.
Bryant also put forward an amendment that women who have been the subject of domestic abuse should be screened for traumatic brain injury.
Ramsbotham is in touch with Bryant and has told NR Times he will take the amendments through the House of Lords, propose them at second reading and follow them through to the committee stage.
“I’m looking forward to the Domestic Abuse bill coming to our house in the autumn. I think they will have a lot of support because there’s a lot of cross-party interest in all these issues,” he says.
Testing female prisoners for brain injuries when they come into a prison could help to improve staff members’ understanding of what treatment the prisoners will need, and could help give rehab efforts sharper focus, he says.
Ramsbotham says he first became an advocate for improved support for prisoners with a brain injury when he was chief inspector of prisons in the late 1990s, on a visit to young offender’s institute HMP Glen Parva in Leicestershire.
“I found a 16-year-old boy sitting on his bed, rocking. He’d suffered a brain injury when he was three months old, when his dad picked him by the ankles and swung him against a radiator. The prison could do nothing for him.”
Ramsbotham then visited a brain injury unit at St Andrews hospital in Northampton.
“I discovered there that the treatment of brain injury was completely alien to what was going on in prisons because the treatment at St Andrews required stimulation – not being locked up in a prison cell for 23 hours a day.”
In a follow-up report at the time, Ramsbotham called for assessments, arguing that they help shed light on which part of the head has been hit or damaged, which can help staff predict a prisoner’s behavioural outcomes. But it was turned down.
There hasn’t been any progress in legislation, he says, since then-prime minister Theresa May dropped the government’s commitment to a prison reform bill in 2017.
“So when the criminal justice and acquired brain injury interest group asked me to be their chairman, I leapt at it because it seemed it was the place for which I could continue my campaign,” he says.
Ramsbotham hopes the reform will come soon, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the ‘unacceptable’ conditions in prisons, where mental health, he says, has come to the forefront, particularly those with brain injuries, he says.
Ramsbottom is strongly in favour of link workers going into prisons and making contact with people with brain injuries during their time in prison and for six months following their release.
“I don’t think the probation service is yet attuned to the needs of people with acquired brain injuries. We no, at the last count, only 18 per cent of community commissioning groups realise they have any responsibility for funding probation. I would wish to get that amended, too.”
The second reading of the Domestic Abuse bill in the House of Lords yet to be scheduled.
