MPs seek action on alternatives to custody

8 Jun 06
Serious consideration should be given to alternatives to custody for certain prisoners in order to alleviate prison overcrowding, senior MPs said this week.

09 June 2006

Serious consideration should be given to alternatives to custody for certain prisoners in order to alleviate prison overcrowding, senior MPs said this week.

The Public Accounts Committee urged the National Offender Management Service to learn the lessons of 2002, when a sudden surge in demand for prison places caught the service unawares.

PAC chair Edward Leigh said overcrowding undermined many of the objectives of custody, providing a fertile environment for prisoner unrest. '[Noms] now needs to have in place detailed contingency plans for working with reliable and competent contractors to build at short notice cost-effective and secure temporary accommodation which has been properly pilot tested,' he said.

'Another way of relieving the pressure is to think long and hard about practical alternatives to imprisonment for some key categories of prisoner: such as those on remand, those with mental health problems and children.'

The PAC's report, published on June 6, noted that the prison population has been increasing since the early 1990s, reaching a peak of 77,800 in November 2005. Of these, 13,000 were on remand, of whom 30% did not receive a prison sentence following their trial. The MPs said further space could be made by greater use of alternatives, such as electronic tagging, for remand prisoners.

The construction of temporary accommodation has been neither cost-effective nor well planned, said the report.

Contracts were let to contractors with insufficient experience and the temporary units chosen had not been tested or used for prison accommodation before. Security requirements allowing contractors to work in prisons also slowed down construction.

Leigh also added his voice to criticism of the Home Office over the scandal of foreign prisoners released without being considered for deportation.

'Around 13% of all prisoners are foreign nationals,' he said. 'It was an astonishing error by Home Office officials that 1,019 were released without any thought being given to whether they should be deported from the UK.'

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