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Town prison is most overcrowded
Tuesday 25th August 2009, 11:23AM BST.
Shrewsbury’s Dana prison was today named as the most overcrowded jail in the country for the second year running. The prison is running at almost double its 177-capacity.
The Prison Reform Trust said overcrowding and high reoffending levels were in danger of being regarded by ministers as a “fact of life” and “too difficult to fix”.
According to official figures, the Dana is running at 179 per cent of normal capacity, topping the table of most overcrowded prisons, followed by Swansea and Dorchester.
Overall there are 8,865 more prisoners inside the prisons system than it was designed to hold.
A total of 88 out of 140 jails were over their certified normal accommodation level – defined as providing “decent” standards.
The PRT today warned “sentence inflation” meant too many people were being locked up.
Director Juliet Lyon said: “Simply building more prisons is an expensive dead end. The only way to reserve prison for serious and violent offenders is to cut out all unnecessary use of breach and remand and tackle sentence inflation and the growth of indeterminate punishments.”
Last month nine prisons were reached their absolute capacity. At the start of this month the prison population hit a record high, passing the 84,000 mark.
Liberal Democrat Justice spokesman Paul Holmes said: “These deeply troubling figures highlight the chronic failure of this Government’s prison policy.”
But ministers have pledged to increase prison capacity to 96,000 by 2014.
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “We will always provide enough prison places for serious and persistent offenders.”
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Here’s a good way round the discomfort and unpleasantness gentlemen….don’t break the law in the first place.
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Full of chav’s from Telford and Stoke thats why!!!!
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What a shame… if it gets any worse I might not want to go any more!
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ship them off to american prisons then, im sure thats much worse! for most people in there prison life is better than home, make it worse than home and maybe they wont want to be there.
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hang them
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DAVE said:
“Full of chav’s from Telford and Stoke thats why!!!! ”
From what I see in this paper every week Shrewsbury doesn’t do a bad job of keeping the cells full either!!!
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I have some sympathy for the people on remand “innocent until proven guilty ” but for the ones serving time i do not care one jot as long as there is no abuse let it be as uncomfortable as possible
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Ahh I do feet sorry for them having to share sells. I have heard that some prisoners have to sometimes wait days for their turn on the xbox or choice of channel on the sky tv.
Make these scumbags suffer as their victims did. Lets make prison a deterent again and not a holiday camp!
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Dave,
So it’s full of chavs from Telford is it?
I should have thought that a chav was exactly the sort of person who would add a superfluous apostrophe to a plural, and miss the need for an entirely necessary one in the shortened version of ‘that is’. Do you agree?
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Stephen Fry in his program on America, visited a Prison Farm. There are many inmates of Prisons in UK that would benefit from such Prisons.
Go to it and build such places in the UK.
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Good. They are supposed to be there as a punishment. It is not supposed to be too easy for them.
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When I visited the interesting exhibition at the Bear Steps about Shrewsbury Prison I thought thank goodness we are more educated and civilised these days. After reading these comments I am reminded that Shrewsbury can be a little oasis of parochialism and unpleasantness.
That we live in a town that still has a Victorian Asylum, a Victorian Prison,a statue celebrating a dubious so-called hero.
Howard was a great reformer and of course punishment has it’s place (losing your liberty and being locked up with strangers is pretty bad) he believed that people can change and should not be treated as animals.
Quite frankly if you were poor in his day you stood very little chance of justice or surviving typhus, rife in the prisons that existed then. This was the disease that ironically killed him in the end though this was when he was abroad.
Finally to think that a twenty one year old was hung as recently as 1964, I think is very chilling. Particularly as there were gruops of people, followers of hangings (ghouls) who treated these events like we watch Big Brother today!
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According to reports on the BBC the original capacity of the prison was 177 when it was built in Victorian times but alterations now mean the total capacity is now 316. It would appear that the Prison Reform Trust are making the statistics fit their cause.
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I suppose your attitude towards this depends very much upon whether or not you want to reduce crime. Clearly, the current overcrowding of our prisons isn’t doing anything to reduce reoffending – all the statistics show this. We can take a simplistic view, like that of Ken Eddy, and just bury our heads in the sand and hope the problem will go away, but I would prefer to think that as well as punishement we should be looking to support reform and rehabilitation – clearly there’s little scope for that in a prison where most are locked up for 23 hours per day.
We shouldn’t forget that many of the people in prisons are addicted to either drink or drugs, or mentally ill, and often are illiterate.
Whilst it’s easy to be judgmental about how they got to be in such a state, we are where we are, and suitable treatment, training and education can only help to reduce the likelihood of future crime. In order to do this, we need more staff, better facilities, and less overcrowding. Of course it’s galling to have to spend money, particularly in the current climate, but I believe in the longer term it would be money well-invested.
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This Labour Government have much to answer for, Prisons policy and the regimes under which they are managed and run being just one. The whole of our Judicial and Penal policies are a mess.
Prisons can be made to work, they did not work in the “old days” because even then, with a very strict regime and few privileges, little if any attention was paid to “training” and inmates left prison at the end of their sentences in exactly the same state as they were when they went in, albeit a little older. In short, the regimes were strict and training non-existent. Now we have the other extreme.
In modern times, great emphasis is laid on training (except in local prisons etc)and regimes are relaxed to the point of a laissez faire’, almost anarchic existence but with many “training” facilities, particularly for young prisoners.Inmates leave prison from these establishments possibly better educated (depending on the the length of sentences etc)perhaps with the ability to mend a leaking pipe or lay a line of bricks or with the rudiments of some other useful activity on release. In terms of discipline however, self and social, their needs are the same as when they went in. In short, training is catered for (as far as custodial limitations allow) and indiscipline is the order of the day.
I believe that in order for Prisons to be meaningful, hundreds of issues must rise to the fore but uppermost in these is a very disciplined regime with every single “privilege” worked for and responded to, couple this with a more sophisticated, varied and professional “training” and educational regime then we could turn around the depressing mess that our prisons and judicial system are in at the moment.
We have lost our way, our society is “broken” and at present our prisons are not doing their bit to mend it. It needs a new broom and a new approach because the evidence shows that this “soft” anything goes approach is just not working.
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If I stopped work and went to university it would cost me tens of thousands of pounds…….. If I commit a few crimes, I can get all of that for free, wouldnt have to buy my own playstation, TV, food or anything. I would have plenty of time to study as I wouldnt have to work. I would receive help and support, and a free bus pass when I finally ‘graduated’ …. sorry I mean released!
Lets remember….. Crime doesn’t pay! Although as a career choice and the CPS rates of prosecution even in the face of hard evidence I sometimes wonder!
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I have a simple solution – hang the lot of them! use the savings to cut my taxes
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The response to any article on crime and punishment is always interesting. One one side there is the frankly quite alarming levels of ignorance and intolerance; on the other side there is compassion, understanding, knowledge and realism. I prefer the latter in its broadest sense because I would like to see reduction in crime, criminality and victims of crime. To achieve those ends a more sophisticated approach is required. Our prisons are overcrowded and are struggling to fulfil the rehabilitation and therapeutic elements of their role. The current Labour government is proving to be more pointlessly punitive than any previous Tory regime with well in excess of 80,000 people now incarcerated in our jails. You can now be imprisoned for being drunk and disorderly (a none imprisonable offence) if found to be so whilst in breach of an ASBO or a CRASBO. We lock up tramps for being tramps (often mentally ill) and send them out to the same situation as they went in. All bar a small number of imprisoned criminals will be released back into our community. We need them to return as contributors – ideally – or supported and safer. Now we either become a society to be eternally ashamed of (most of the earlier posts would guarantee that) or we do something constructive. It needs work but has got to be worth the effort.
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Simon you talk sense, some of these posts have been ridiculous and narrow minded.
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Jeff, thanks. I find it a real shame that when the opportunity arises for reasoned and serious discussion it gets hijacked by a juvenile, immature and frankly shameful minority. The original article was with regard to an overcrowded establishment – as are most of our prisons – and should have resulted in an adult exchange of opinions. Alas some of the contributors appear to see the subject as a joke or not worthy of thought and proper consideration. Of the first 19 posts barely half a dozen were of a quality befitting civilised society. That to me is an awful reflection on Salopians or at least of contributors to this site. Some – Stuart and Peter – have previously identified experience of working in prisons, which must be respected. Others have merely demonstrated decency. Other contributors, such as the utterly childish Tory Boy and the rest of the “hang ‘em all” ilk (think it through…we could have Saudis condemming us) are quite frankly an embarassment.
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