The Prison Service has been developing a system to compare the performance of prisons using both quantitative and qualitative data. Each prison is scored on a green, amber and red basis for a variety of criteria, in order to identify those prisons that are under performing. It is this system that identified Liverpool and Dartmoor in April 2003 and Reading and Leicester in December 2001 as 'failing' prisons. For this study, we have generated a similar traffic light system but incorporated two surveys into our results. MORI undertook one, investigating prisoners' perceptions of safety and decency and the other was a survey of prison officers we carried out during our field research.
The categories we selected for grading in our traffic light matrix included: escapes and absconds, Prison Service Standards rating, security rating, a qualitative rating based on Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons reports, Area Manager reports and the reports from the Board of Visitors, assaults, Mandatory Drug Tests (MOTs), purposeful activity and the staff and prisoner surveys. A summary result appears in the Executive Summary and a more detailed table appears in Figure 10.
We outline below, in general terms, the methodology adopted for deciding which prisons acquired a red indicator for each of the categories we selected for our matrix.