Smoking and prisons



The POA prison officers’ union has long campaigned for smoke-free prisons, with tests carried out in 2015 showing staff were spending at least one-sixth of their time at work breathing in second-hand smoke levels higher than standards set by the World Health Organisation. 


In March 2016, the Court of Appeal (overturning a previous decision) ruled that the ban on smoking in public places does not apply to state prisons and other Crown premises in England and Wales. The decision allowed the Ministry of Justice to implement a voluntary, phased smoking ban across its 136 prisons rather than a compulsory, immediate ban. The long-running case (R (Black) v Secretary of State Justice [2017] UKSC 81) reached the Supreme Court in November 2017 but it unanimously dismissed the appeal, although “with considerable reluctance”. It held that parliament must have intended the Crown should not be bound by the smoking ban, since it would otherwise have made express provision for it in the Act.