NORWEGIAN PARLIAMENTARY OMBUDSMAN National Preventive Mechanism against Torture and Ill-Treatment ANNUAL REPORT 2015 36 After the visit The report from the visit was published in November 2015, and the prison is to inform the Parliamentary Ombudsman about its follow-up of the report’s recommendations by 1 April 2016. Kongsvinger Prison 25–27 August 2015 Announced visit Kongsvinger Prison’s ordinary capacity is 120 places, divided between 72 high security places and 48 lower security places. Since December 2012, Kongsvinger Prison has been established as a special prison unit for foreign inmates. The prison is exclusively for male inmates who are to be expelled and deported from Norway on their release or transferred to serve their sentence in their home country. The prison staff received good feedback from the inmates, and there were relatively few undesirable incidents in the prison. Inmates felt protected against violence and harassment. None of them accused the staff of abuse or of using physical force or speaking to inmates in a degrading, discriminating or offensive manner. However, the prison should improve its information work, particularly during the arrival phase. The inmates did not always receive verbal and written information about the rules and procedures at the prison in a language that they understood. The prison was equipped for video interpreting, but the equipment was not used for admission interviews. With the help of an interpreter, the NPM was in contact with several people who neither spoke Norwegian nor English, and who had a great unmet need for information. It is important to have good reception procedures in place, including information, so as to identify any special needs and any risk of self-harm, suicide, violence, threats and other factors that have a bearing on safety. The quality of administrative decisions concerning the use of security cells and exclusion from company was unsatisfactory. Several decisions lacked a concrete description of the basis for the decision and a description of which alternative measures had been considered or tried. In some cases, the administrative decision itself was also missing. This constitutes a serious breach of the inmates’ due process protection. A review showed that one inmate had spent more than six days in a security cell in 2015. The long duration gives cause for concern. Isolation can have a serious impact on the mental health of inmates, and security cells should only be used as a last resort and for as short a period as possible. Information obtained indicates that inmates were routinely stripped and placed in the security cell naked, with only a suicide prevention blanket to cover themselves. It was unclear whether the inmates were always allowed to put their clothes back on or were given suitable alternative clothing. According to a supervision log, one inmate had spent more than 24 hours naked in a security cell. The available information indicated that not all inmates underwent a medical assessment on arrival. The inmates also found it challenging to access psychological/psychiatric follow-up in prison. Moreover, the request forms used to contact health personnel were not designed in such a way as to protect the inmates’ confidential health information. It gives cause for concern that one person was in handcuffs during a dental examination. The use of handcuffs during medical examinations is potentially problematic and entails a risk of ill-treatment. Among other things, it was pointed out that some inmates spent much of the day locked in their cells with less than eight hours out of the cells, that people with mobility impairments had inadequate access to premises for communal activities, and that there were building-related challenges in connection with the oldest part of the prison.