If you are worried about a prisoner, you can use an online form to tell the Safer Custody team
All prisons have a Safer Custody team. This is the department in the prison whose job it is to keep prison safe for everyone.
Each prison's Safer Custody team has a phone number where you can either speak to someone or leave a voicemail, but you can also contact them using a Safer Custody Contact Form.
Using the online contact form means there will be a paper trail of your message. This can be useful if you want to make sure there is a written record of what you said to the prison and when, or if you want to make it easier for staff to pass your message on accurately.
Finding the form
- Go to the Prisoners’ Families Helpline’s ‘Worried about a prisoner’ page and look up the prison that your loved one is in.
- From the prison’s page, select ‘Submit a Safer Custody Contact Form’. This will take you to the form you need to complete.
Filling in the form
Be clear, concise and factual.
- Complete the sections for your name, email, phone number, your loved one’s name, prisoner number or date of birth and your relationship to the prisoner.
- Select the nature of your concern by selecting one or more of the boxes (e.g ‘prisoner health condition’ or ‘prisoner debt or finances’). It’s ok to choose more than one topic.
- In one or two paragraphs, briefly describe your concern.
- Use bullet points to highlight the key issues.
- Give brief details of any previous contact you have had.
- State the risk – say who is at risk and how. If the issue is urgent, explain why.
- Say which department you want informed (if you know).
- If you want to send medical notes or further information, ask for a healthcare department email address.
- Say what you want to happen next or the outcome you are looking for.
- Offer to provide further details and say when you would be available for a phone call.
Submitting the form
- Read the form back to yourself or ask someone else to read it over. Make sure that the language is polite and sticks to the facts.
- Before you select ‘submit’, copy what you’ve said on the form into a document for yourself and save it in your own files. You might need this in the future.
- Select ‘submit’.
- You should receive an automatic email that confirms your form has been received.
Did you know?
Some prison staff say they prefer receiving written messages from families rather than phone calls or voicemail messages because written messages can be less emotional and easier to share with colleagues.
Once you click ‘submit’ on the form, it will automatically generate an email that gets sent to the inbox of the Safer Custody department.
The first person to read your message will probably be an administrator, not a safety specialist. It’s their job to send your message to the right department in the prison.