---

Prisons: Suicides

rose to call attention to the rate of suicides in prison, and the effect of overcrowding on vulnerable inmates; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, this debate is taking place at a time when another important event is taking place not far from your Lordships’ House. I refer to the memorial service for Lady Blatch. Our thoughts and prayers are with her family. Our criminal justice system is in a mess. How else can we explain the fact that the present prison population is the highest ever, at 77,622? Prisoners are being held in police cells because there is no room in local gaols, despite previous assurances from the Home Secretary that this would not happen. The prison system is now only 653 cells short of capacity in the 139 gaols in England and Wales. We can of course consider building more prisons or providing more prison places, but that simply means that we will fill them more quickly. It does not answer the question of how the end product of our criminal justice system has produced a prison population that is so high. We are now obliged to look at other alternatives; for example, expanding the home detention curfew scheme, the executive release of offenders more quickly or release with an electronic tag. Any alternative to prison is welcome. The problem of overcrowding has been getting worse rather than better. At the root of the problem is the fact that more people are being convicted and a higher proportion sent to prison. Sentence lengths are also increasing. Ministers’ pronouncements on being ““tough on crime”” have not helped. There must be a clear message that we should be aiming to send fewer people to prison. We need a determined effort on the part of politicians to secure a decisive shift in the public perception of crime and punishment. It is not revolutionary or controversial to say that courts should send to prison only those whose offending makes any other alternative unacceptable and that those who are sent to prison should not stay there any longer than is strictly necessary. Let us look at the women’s prison population. This stood at 4,559 on 23 September 2005. It increased by 173 per cent over the decade to 2004 even though the nature and seriousness of women’s offending has not been getting worse. The men’s prison population rose by 50 per cent over the same period. These women are rarely serious, violent offenders and they generally pose little risk to public safety. The most common offences for which women are sent to prison are theft and handling stolen goods and the evidence suggests that the courts are imposing more severe sentences on women for less serious offences. So what are the consequences? The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights published a report at the end of 2004 on deaths in custody. It raised particular concerns about women, highlighting that, while women represent just 6 per cent of the prison population, 15 per cent of self-inflicted deaths and over half of prisoners resuscitated following serious self-harm in 2003 were women. The committee’s recommendations included feedback to judges and magistrates on sentencing decisions, including self-harm and suicide, and a cross-departmental expert task force on deaths in custody. I have often spoken about children in our penal institutions. The Howard League for Penal Reform, the Prison Reform Trust, Inquest and NACRO—I declare my interest as president of that organisation—have produced detailed briefings and I am grateful to them. I remain extremely concerned about the record number of people being sent to prison and the shockingly high numbers of those who take their own lives once there. Since 23 May, when I last raised this issue on the Floor of the House, a further 40 people have taken their own lives in our prisons. I know that prison staff do their utmost to help out those in distress. However, their ability to provide proper care and treatment for the suicidal is fatally compromised by the volume of new arrivals from courts. Another area of serious concern is the self-inflicted deaths of immigrant detainees. The number of self-inflicted deaths in immigration detention has significantly increased—seven immigrant detainees took their own lives between January 2003 and September 2005, yet there were only four such deaths between 1989 and 2003. The most recent death occurred on 15 September 2005, when Manuel Bravo from Angola apparently took his own life in the family unit at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre, where he was detained with his 13 year-old son. The state has a responsibility to protect the human rights of those it detains. So what should we do? First, we should focus on making necessary changes to the legal framework for detaining asylum seekers and migrants under immigration Act powers, to ensure that detention powers are limited by accessible and meaningful legal safeguards. Secondly, we should improve the investigative process if a death occurs, to ensure that wider lessons for policy and practice are identified and implemented, particularly in the absence of friends or family of the deceased in the UK to apply pressure. The number of self-inflicted deaths in prisons in England and Wales last year totalled 94—the highest recorded number for a year. The number has risen from 65 in 1997. Expressed as a rate per 100,000 prisoners, the rate rose from 111 per 100,000 prisoners in 1997 to 127 in 2004—a wholly unacceptable figure. We all know that the Prison Service has an unenviable task in attempting to tackle this problem. It is accommodating a population of people who are significantly more likely to attempt suicide then the general population. Around 20 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women entering custody have previously attempted suicide. Over the years the Prison Service, led by its Safer Custody Group, has adopted a wide range of measures designed to identify potentially suicidal prisoners and to take the necessary steps to provide supervision and support for them. Yet the number of prison suicides has continued to rise. Why are we failing? What more needs to be done to check and reverse that distressing trend? First, particular attention needs to be given and support provided to prisoners who have recently been received into prisons. More than half of suicides last year—57 per cent—were by remand prisoners, and almost one-third of suicides occur within the first week of a prisoner arriving in custody. Is extensive use of remanding in custody necessary? All establishments that receive prisoners from the courts should have first night in custody schemes and follow-up arrangements to support prisoners during that particularly vulnerable time. Secondly, research on prisoners who have made unsuccessful suicide attempts has found that most suffer mental health problems that contribute to their attempts. Many of them—and this is particularly true of female and young prisoners—describe memories of physical and sexual abuse as a key factor in producing the mental state that leads them to attempt suicide. Nearly two-thirds of those who commit suicide in prison have a history of drug abuse and nearly one-third have a history of alcohol misuse. It is crucial that high quality services should be available for prisoners with mental health problems, addiction problems, and a need for counselling and support to cope with past experiences and abuse. Thirdly, high suicide rates are associated with low levels of purposeful activity in prisons. Research into prisoners who have unsuccessfully attempted suicide has found that those prisoners emphasise the importance of greater access to work and activities both in and out of their cells. That provides a distraction from distressing thoughts and memories and gives them a greater opportunity to get informal support from other prisoners. Fourthly, everything possible must be done to design or modify cells in ways that reduce opportunities for suicide by eliminating ligature points which prisoners can use to hang themselves. Between 1998 and 2004, the overwhelming majority—around 92 per cent—of prison suicides occurred by hanging. The most common ligature points were windows, which were used in 59 per cent of cases, with the second most common being the bed, used as a ligature point in 17 per cent of cases. Fifthly, prisoners serving life sentences are over-represented in the suicide figures. Between 1998 and 2004, 21 per cent of suicides involved life sentence prisoners, who constituted 8 per cent of the prison population. Prisoners facing a long sentence are likely to face particular problems of depression, but when that sentence is not only long but also indeterminate their uncertainty over when, if ever, they will be released can only add to prisoners’ sense of anguish. That is yet another powerful reason for reviewing the necessity of the mandatory life sentence for murder, so that courts can use determinate sentences in cases where the circumstances of the case make this the proper option. The sixth and crucial point is that the Government must make determined efforts to reduce the prison population. There is a clear link between overcrowding and the number of suicides. A recent research study found that 10 of the 20 establishments with the highest incidence of self-inflicted deaths were also in the top 20 for turnover of population. Overcrowding damages the Prison Service’s attempts to reduce suicides in several ways. First, it makes it more likely that signs of depression and suicidal intent will be overlooked when staff are struggling to cope with an excessive number of prisoners. Secondly, it makes it harder to provide a full regime for prisoners and makes it more likely that prisoners will be held in their cells in idleness for long periods. That can worsen depression, reduce prisoners’ opportunities to get support from staff or other prisoners and help to tip the balance towards suicide. Thirdly, overcrowding makes it more likely that staff will miss signs of bullying and intimidation of weaker and more vulnerable prisoners, which is an important element in some suicides. Fourthly, it increases the pressure on prisons to move prisoners to prisons far away from their families and friends, making visits and family contact harder, which can increase the isolation and depression of potentially suicidal prisoners. If we are to give the Prison Service a real opportunity to combat the rising toll of prison suicides, we must reduce the excessive use of imprisonment. It is particularly unfortunate that the Home Secretary has chosen to abandon his predecessor’s commitment to the targets set out in the Carter review to reduce the projected rate of increase in the prison population from 93,000 to 80,000 and to require sentencing guidelines to take into account the capacity of the prison system. It is not too late for the Home Office to think again about these measures. By reducing overcrowding in the prison system, they would not only help the Prison Service to rehabilitate prisoners more effectively but would also save lives. I beg the Minister to look at the proposals made by the joint Women in Prison/Fawcett Society’s recommendations. They make sense, and I look forward to the Minister’s written response on these matters. I also commend to the Minister Barry Goldson and Deborah Coles’ publication In the Care of the State. It is about child deaths in penal custody. It would be helpful to receive the Minister’s written comments on their recommendations also. It is still possible to detect attitudes among politicians that the best thing to do with the criminal is to lock him up in our unpleasant institutions and throw away the keys. We forget that almost all but a handful of prisoners will be released from prisons one day. It is better to release people with a renewed measure of self-respect and a range of skills rather than allowing them a greater sense of grievance against society for the indignities, real or imagined, suffered during incarceration. The inmate is in the care of the state from the time the sentence is announced. We should hold the state responsible for what happens to him during that period. I beg to move for Papers.