Prisoners
(asked on 8th September 2015) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prisoners are held in open wings of closed prisons; and for which offences each such prisoner is serving their sentence.
Open units within closed prisons are a cost-effective means of providing regional resettlement opportunities for those prisoners who are risk assessed as been suitable for such accommodation. Progression to open prisons, or to open units within closed prisons, is never automatic, and prisoners must generally be within two years of release before they can be considered for allocation. Only those prisoners who are assessed as having reduced their risks of escape or abscond and risk of harm to the public and who are judged to be trustworthy in conditions of very low security will be allocated to open prison conditions.
The table below shows the offences for which prisoners held in open units were sentenced, as at 30 June 2015:
Number of prisoners held in open wings (1) of closed prisons by offence group in England and Wales as at 30 June 2015 | ||
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Offence Group | Number of Prisoners | |
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Total | 511 | |
Violence against the person | 130 | |
Sexual offences | 2 | |
Robbery | 47 | |
Theft offences | 74 | |
Criminal damage and arson | 4 | |
Drug offences | 155 | |
Possession of weapons | 13 | |
Public order offences | 2 | |
Miscellaneous offences against society | 36 | |
Fraud offences | 45 | |
Summary non-motoring | 2 | |
Summary motoring | 1 | |
Offence not recorded | 0 | |
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(1) This data includes prisoners held in open prisons that lie within a cluster of prisons. | ||
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Data Sources and Quality |
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These figures have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing. | ||