Prisoners: Females
(asked on 26th October 2018) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will make an assessment of the implications for his Department’s policies of the findings of a report by Inquest entitled Still Dying on the inside: examining deaths in women's prisons, published in May 2018, that 93 women have died in custody in England and Wales since March 2007; and if he will make a statement.
We are very aware of the number of women who have tragically died in our custody, and we welcome the Inquest report that rightly draws attention to the figures and to the risks this population presents. I look forward to meeting Inquest soon to discuss the recommendations in their report. Our published statistics show that the 93 deaths from 2007 to 2017 to which the report refers include 41 from natural causes, 39 that were apparently self-inflicted and 13 other deaths, including 6 that have yet to be classified. The Government takes very seriously its responsibility to keep staff and prisoners safe, and we are committed to reducing the number of self-inflicted deaths in our prisons. This is why we have established a prison safety programme through which we are taking forward a comprehensive set of actions to improve safety in custody. This includes a workstream on women offenders, which has drawn on helpful reports from the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman and the Independent Advisory Panel on Deaths in Custody to identify and take forward focused work in women’s prisons. These are in addition to the measures that we are taking across the estate, which include rolling out revised and improved training for staff in assessing and managing the risk of suicide and self-harm amongst prisoners (which has already reached more than 17,000 staff); improving support for prisoners in their early days in custody; revising the ACCT case management process for those identified as being at risk; and renewing our partnership with the Samaritans by confirming a further three years' grant funding for their valuable Listeners Scheme. On 27 June we published our strategy for female offenders, which sets out our vision and plan to improve outcomes for women both in the community and in custody. We want to see:
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