Prisoners

(asked on 4th December 2014) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the (a) current and (b) certified normal capacity is of the prison estate in each region; what estimate he has made of the prison estate's capacity in 2021; and what the proportion is of the prison population originated in each region.


Answered by
Andrew Selous Portrait
Andrew Selous
Second Church Estates Commissioner
This question was answered on 10th February 2015

We will always have enough prison places for those sent to us by the courts and have a range of contingencies in place to manage temporary or unexpected increases in the population.

Prison population projections are a useful tool in our strategic management of prison capacity but do not offer a definitive picture of future population levels. Decisions on the number of spaces required in 2021 will depend on population trends and projections over the coming years.

The table below identifies the in-use certified normal accommodation and total operational capacity by National Offender Management Service region (and Wales) and the number of male and female prisoners by region of origin on the latest dates available.

Region/Country*

19 Dec 2014 In Use Certified Normal Accommodation

19 Dec 2014 Total Operational Capacity

30 Sep 2014-12-09 Population by region of origin***

Proportion of the prison population originated in each region by %

East Midlands

9,023

10,472

6,733

7.86%

East of England

8,146

9,102

6,075

7.09%

Greater London

8,915

11,243

17,611

20.60%

Kent and Sussex

5,780

6,275

3,778

4.41%

North East

4,846

5,522

4,043

4.72%

North West

10,837

13,055

13,522

15.80%

South Central

4,534

5,382

4,216

4.92%

South West

5,358

6,108

5,280

6.20%

Wales

2,329

3,279

4,729

5.52%

West Midlands

8,840

9,812

8,111

9.50%

Yorkshire & Humberside

8,150

9,866

9,463

11.04%

Unknown

2,137

2.25%

Total

76,758

90,116

85,698

99.91

* Contracted and High Security prisons have been allocated to the geographical region in which they are located.

** Total operational capacity of a prison is the total number of prisoners that an establishment can hold taking into account control, security and the proper operation of the planned regime. Useable Operational Capacity of the estate is the sum of all establishments’ operational capacity less 2,000 places. This is known as the operating margin and reflects the constraints imposed by the need to provide separate accommodation for different classes of prisoner i.e. by sex, age, security category, conviction status, single cell risk assessment and also due to geographical distribution. This margin is applied to the whole estate but is not segmented by prison function or region.

*** Region/country of origin is based on prisoners’ recorded residences. Information on prisoners is provided by them on reception in prison and recorded on a central IT system. Reported addresses can include a home address, an address to which offenders intend to return on discharge or the address of their next of kin. If no address is given, an offender’s committal court address is used as a proxy for the area in which they are resident. No address has been recorded and no court information is available for around 3% of all offenders.

Individual prison population and capacity information for every prison in England and Wales is published monthly on the Government website:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/prison-population-figures-2014

As far as possible, NOMS endeavours to place prisoners as close to their home area as possible. However, a number of factors are considered in the allocation of each prisoner, including; location of prisons, court appearance, security concerns - both for the individual and for others at the establishment, suitability of establishment to prisoners’ needs (such as those set out in their sentence plan), regimes and services offered. It may therefore not be possible or desirable to keep prisoners close to home. For example, some specialist interventions and offending behaviour programmes are not available in every region.

Under the Government's Transforming Rehabilitation agenda most prisoners will serve the last 12 weeks of their sentence and be discharged from a Resettlement Prison in their home Contract Package Area where they will receive tailored interventions and support.

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