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Written question asked by Paul Maynard (Conservative) on Wednesday, 1 December 2010, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Friday, 3 December 2010. It was answered by Crispin Blunt (Conservative) on Tuesday, 7 December 2010 on behalf of the Ministry of Justice.

Prisoners: Location

Question
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice how many prisoners are held (a) up to and (b) more than 50 miles from their normal place of residence.
Answer

Information on a prisoner's residence is provided by prisoners on reception into prison and recorded on a central IT system. Addresses include a prisoner's home address, an address to which they intend to return on discharge and next of kin. To analyse the population as a whole, if no address is given, a prisoner's committal court address is used as a proxy to determine the area in which a prisoner is resident. This is required for about 40% of the population and these figures are included in the answer. No address has been recorded and no court information is available for around 3% of prisoners and these figures are excluded from the answer.The following table shows the number of prisoners as at 24 September 2010 who are held up to and over 50 miles from either a recorded residential address or proxy, as described above.

Up to 50 miles Over 50 miles
Recorded address 29,253 19,574
Proxy address 22,973 10,722
Total 52,226 30,296

These figures include male and female prisoners, adults, young offenders and juveniles and those who are sentenced and on remand.

Secondary information

Type
Written question
Reference
28941; 520 c203-4W
Session
2010-12
Subjects
Prisoners Location
Contains statistics
Yes
Link
View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk