Record suicides in prisons

A record number of people have committed suicide in the last year, a recent report shows

A record number of people, 119, killed themselves in prisons in England and Wales last year, according to official data published by the Ministry of Justice.

This is the highest number in a calendar year since current recording practices began in 1978. The previous high was in 2004, with ninety-six deaths by suicide.

Twelve women lost their lives through suicide in 2016 – more than double the number of women who took their own lives during the previous year.

Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: ‘It is official – more people died in prisons in 2016 than in any other year on record, and more prisoners died by suicide than ever before.

‘No one should be so desperate while in the care of the state that they take their own life, and yet every three days a family is told that a loved one has died behind bars.’

In total, 354 people died in prisons in England and Wales during 2016 – another record high and a thirty-eight per cent rise on the year before. Of those, 196 prisoners were recorded to have died of natural causes. Investigations into the deaths of a further twenty-eight prisoners remain incomplete.

The figures also reveal that there were 37,784 reported incidents of self-injury in prisons during the twelve months to the end of September 2016 – a twenty-three per cent year on year rise.

There was a twenty-eight per cent increase in serious assaults and a thirty-one per cent rise in assaults in total on the previous year. There were 6,430 assaults on prison staff – a forty per cent increase on the year before. The number of serious assaults on staff rose by twenty-six per cent to 761.

The Howard League and another charity, Centre for Mental Health, have been working together on a joint inquiry into preventing prison suicides. Research, published last November as part of the inquiry, found that the increasing number of prison suicides had coincided with cuts to staffing and budgets, as well as a rise in the number of people in prison, resulting in overcrowding. Violence had increased and safety had deteriorated.

‘Cutting staff and prison budgets while allowing the number of people behind bars to grow unchecked has created a toxic mix of violence, death and human misery,’ said Frances Crook. ‘The problems are clear for all to see.’

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