Theresa May and her prisons minister no doubt cheered the recent news reports that "there is no direct link between prison suicides and overcrowding in prisons".
However, there is a coincidence in this country between high prison populations, higher turnover and suicides. The summary of this academic study, clearly one of those to which the latest news story relates, concludes that though there is no demonstrable link between overcrowding and suicide:
Questions remain about the causal mechanisms underlying variation in prison suicides and the impact of the lived experience of overcrowding. Further research is needed to examine the relative contribution of prison and prisoner characteristics to suicides.
Suicide is only one symptom of a prison régime which is demonstrably not right. Intra-prison violence, drug-taking and recidivism rates are all too high. New prisons, replacing Dickensian gaols, are part of the answer - but only a partial one if they take convicts further away from their families, as super-prisons tend to do. Bringing staffing levels to the optimum, as the Howard League and Prison Reform Trust as well as the Prison Officers Association have called for, is another part, which in turn will contribute to the motivation of prison staff. Also, there are too many people in prison who should not be there.
1 comment:
Private Eye magazine reports that in Bridgend's modern Parc private prison where overcrowding is presumably not a problem, suicide is. The trouble is that, apart from insufficient CCTV to monitor vulnerable prisoners, there are not enough warders to ensure that the protection protocol can be observed.
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