What this is
A letter from the National Chair of the Independent Monitoring Boards to the Minister of State for Prisons, dated 27 October 2025. The IMBs are the statutory independent monitors of every prison and young offender institution in England and Wales; each board reports on its own establishment and the national chair writes when the pattern across them worries the service.
The letter sets out concerns about the direction of use-of-force practice and about the expansion of the weapons available to officers: PAVA spray into the youth estate, and tasers into the adult male estate. It draws on board observations, the 2024-25 annual reports and HMPPS’s own use-of-force data.
What it records
Young adults were the group most commonly reported as overrepresented in use of force.
Seven of the ten prisons with the highest PAVA use per 1,000 prisoners had a specialist young adult function. The highest ran at 769 uses per 1,000 prisoners over a 27-month period.
Prisoners with a recorded disability were 30 per cent more likely to experience force. At Brixton, 74 per cent of prisoners subjected to force were registered disabled, against 39 per cent of the prison population.
The letter notes that there was no taser use during the trial period.
How to read it
This is a regulator-adjacent body writing to a minister, not a court making findings, and it should be cited as such: the monitoring boards’ assessment of a trend, drawing on the department’s own data.
Its value is the pairing of two numbers that are usually kept apart. A disability disparity measured inside one prison, and a PAVA disparity measured across the estate, point at the same question: whether the people most likely to be sprayed are being sprayed because of what they did, or because of who they are.
It is also the document that records the expansion itself. PAVA into the youth estate and tasers into the adult male estate were decisions taken before this letter was written, and the letter is the monitoring service saying, in advance of the consequences, that the direction concerned it.
Where it stops
One letter, one date, October 2025. It reports on data periods that precede it and makes no finding about any incident or any individual officer.
The disability figures are recorded at one prison and cannot be read as a national rate. The 769 per 1,000 figure is per 1,000 prisoners over 27 months, not per year, and is not comparable to a single-year rate.
The letter is about prisons and the youth estate in England and Wales. It says nothing about police custody, mental health units or care homes, where the same questions are asked.
Sources
- Independent Monitoring Boards, open letter to the Minister of State for Prisons, 27 October 2025 · https://cdn.websitebuilder.service.justice.gov.uk/uploads/sites/13/2025/10/Use-of-force-in-prisons-and-YOIs-open-letter.pdf
- Independent Monitoring Boards, news item on the letter · https://imb.org.uk/news/imb-national-chair-writes-to-the-minister-for-prisons-expressing-concerns-about-use-of-force/
Where a service is reviewing when force is used, and on whom, our restraint reduction training covers the data a manager needs and the pattern to look for.
Reviewed 20 October 2026.