Inside Britain’s prisons: Rising violence and soaring suicide rates

Reuters / Stephen Hird

A rising wave of assaults, murders and suicides in Britain’s jails indicates a state-wide prison crisis is imminent, Shadow Secretary Sadiq Khan warns.

Khan’s comments follow figures released by The Ministry of Justice on Thursday, which revealed a marked increase in violence inside English and Welsh prisons.

Grievous assaults have soared by 30 percent, and three separate murders have occurred in the past twelve months alone. The data also reveals a stark 69 percent rise in #suicides - the most dramatic since 2005.

Prison governors throughout the state have persistently warned that British jails are struggling to deal with increasingly crowded conditions, with a record prison population of over 85,000. Budgets cuts of almost 25 percent implemented over the past three years have also compounded matters, the governors’ say.

According to recent figures, almost a quarter of the UK’s 126 prisons have been issued poor performance ratings. The most recent state-monitored performance tables illustrate that the conditions inside 28 prisons are now considered to be a matter of concern. One jail, Brinsford youth prison in Staffordshire, has been categorized as a “serious concern”.

Reflecting on the Ministry of Justice statistics, justice secretary, Chris Grayling said the rise in fatalities in custody was being taken seriously by the government, as was the surge in assaults.

“As with any significant period of change – coupled with prison population increases higher than expected – it has been a challenge. We are responding to and managing the additional pressures but prisons are still running safe and decent regimes," he said.

Grayling said there is no simple explanation for these increased levels. With the trend apparent in both public and private prisons, it was not linked to the government’s 'benchmarking' exercise that reduced staff in some jails, he said.

A general view shows C wing at Wormwood Scrubs prison in London (Reuters / Paul Hackett)

 Despite the Ministry of Justice’s figures, Grayling defended the government’s current policies, insisting the coalition had introduced major reform across the state’s prison and probation sectors tailored to improved public service at a reduced cost to British tax payers.

But the shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, dismissed Grayling’s claims, emphasizing the Ministry of Justice’s official statistics were a damning indictment of the government’s policies:

“The true scale of the growing crisis in the country's prisons is revealed by the government's own data. Violence is up, deaths in custody are up and the number of prisoners going on the run is up. The government is trying to hide the sheer scale of the failings in the ministry of justice from the public by trying to pretend there's not a problem, let alone a crisis," he said.

A progressively violent atmosphere in Britain’s prisons is accompanied by a notable decrease in the number of inmates completing specially designed rehabilitation programmes.

Between March 2013 and 2014, the number of sex offender treatment programmes plummeted from 2,757 to 2,576, in the face of a sharp increase in the number of sex offenders imprisoned.

Similarly, the Ministry of Justice’s figures reveal the number of inmates who completed drug rehabilitation programmes had also fallen.  RT