Prison Overcrowding & Staff Vacancies
Prison overcrowding combined with high staff vacancies severely undermining the ability of prisons to deliver rehabilitation and ensure safety.
12 items
1 source
2 inquiries
Source spread
Where this theme appears
Prison Overcrowding & Staff Vacancies has been flagged across 1 independent accountability source:
12 inquiry recs
This theme has been identified in one data source. As more data is added, cross-references may emerge.
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Inquiry Recommendations (12)
3 — Central funding for single-cell accommodation
Recommendation: If the resources currently available to the Prison Service are insufficient to produce a significant decrease in enforced cell-sharing, central government should allocate further funds to the Prison Service to enable more prisoners to be accommodated in cells on their …
Unknown
2 — Review resources towards single cells
Recommendation: The Prison Service should review whether the resources currently available to it might be better deployed towards achieving this goal, without compromising standards in other areas, and should set a date for realising this objective.
Unknown
1 — Eliminating enforced cell-sharing as objective
Recommendation: The elimination of enforced cell-sharing should remain the objective of the Prison Service, and the achievement of this goal should be regarded as a high priority.
Unknown
65 — Mandatory personal officer schemes
Recommendation: It should be mandatory for all establishments to have a personal officer scheme. That includes busy local prisons, although if time for personal officer work is limited, it should be used constructively.
Unknown
39 — Missing cell-sharing risk assessment form on arrival
Recommendation: If prisoners arrive on a wing without a copy of the cell-sharing risk assessment form, they should be placed in a single cell until the form is found or a new one completed.
Unknown
15 — Minimising mixed-status wings
Recommendation: Wings holding convicted and unconvicted prisoners together should be kept to a minimum, and should only be used when there is no operational alternative.
Unknown
10 — Guideline content: common background and interviews
Recommendation: The guidelines should proceed on the assumption that the lack of privacy which cell-sharing entails is more likely to be ameliorated if prisoners with a common ethnic and religious background share cells. But that should only be the starting point …
Unknown
4 — Placing at-risk prisoners with a cellmate
Recommendation: The Prison Service should retain its practice of placing prisoners who are at risk of suicide or self-harm, but who are not so vulnerable as to require being on suicide watch at all times or accommodated in a safer cell, …
Unknown
16 — Review young offenders on adult wings
Recommendation: The Prison Service should review whether the advantages of holding young offenders on the same wing as adult prisoners outweigh the disadvantages, and whether the practice should be extended to other establishments.
Unknown
12 — Guidelines on requests to share with named prisoner
Recommendation: The Prison Service should publish guidelines to assist officers in handling requests by prisoners to share a cell with a particular prisoner. Practical problems should not be treated as an insuperable hurdle preventing an otherwise suitable move of a prisoner …
Unknown
11 — Senior officer decides cell-share allocations
Recommendation: All decisions about who a prisoner should share a cell with should be made, if possible, by a senior officer. If that cannot be done, the decision should be reviewed by a senior officer at an early opportunity. The suitability …
Unknown
R2 — HMP Maghaberry lessons learned
Recommendation: Many of the problems of HMP Maze in 1997 arose from the fact that by then it was the sole prison in Northern Ireland holding the most dangerous terrorist prisoners. We are aware that HMP Maghaberry is currently the sole …
Words of: Owen Paterson, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, statement to the House of Commons, 14 September 2010 (HC Deb vol 515, col 744)
Gov response: There are three recommendations in the panel’s report. They cover the retention of prison records, whether any relevant lessons can be learnt for HMP Maghaberry, and whether a process similar to the Patten reforms of …
Noted
No update 2+ yrs