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Home Office

Answer

Mr. Stinchcombe: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many suicide attempts have been made by inmates of Holloway Prison in the last year. [177495] Paul Goggins: In the calendar year 2003, there were 851 recorded acts of self-harm involving prisoners at HMP Holloway. Suicidal intent is not easy to establish. The reasons why people self-injure are highly complex, and it is difficult to distinguish between acts of self-harm that were attempts at ending life, and those that occurred for other reasons. It is not possible, therefore, for the Prison Service to determine from the general figures recording incidents of self-harm those acts that could be described as attempts at suicide. The figure above therefore includes all acts of self-harm, however serious. Women prisoners are to benefit from a specifically targeted and separate suicide prevention and self-harm management strategy being developed for them. This builds upon a number of interventions including: individual crisis counselling for women prisoners who self-harm; the continued development and evaluation of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, which is currently being trialled at Durham, Bullwood Hall and Holloway prisons; investment and planning to ensure progress on the detoxification strategy in women's prisons; and the introduction of a new training pack for all staff working with women in custody, which includes a module on the health and well-being of women prisoners. £1 million from the Department of Health has been allocated to women's prisons to be spent on the recruitment of psychiatric nurses.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

177495; 422 c876W

Session

2003-04

Subjects

Prisoners Suicide HMP/YOI Holloway Self-harm

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk