UK: The chief inspector of prisons warned that an overcrowding crisis in Britain's jails was leading to an increase in prisoner suicides.Anne Owers called on politicians and judges to "be responsible" with sentencing, as the jail population of England and Wales reached a record high.
And she compared the current cell shortage in male prisons as "some sort of horrific game of musical cells", as prisoners were shunted between prisons and wings at short notice.
Prison numbers reached a record 76,897 earlier this month, while 95 people killed themselves in jail last year. There have been 50 suicides so far in 2005.
Ms Owers told the Independent newspaper: "If you lock up this number of people this is the consequence. This is what is going to happen: more people are going to die in our prisons but also our prisons aren't going to be able to do the positive stuff nearly so well.
Ms Owers went on to say that the current prison system was not making society safer in the long term. "The public is protected for a very short time while the person is in prison. Real public protection entails equipping prisoners for a life beyond crime. At the moment we are just recycling them."
She added that research showed people were more likely to be imprisoned than in the past and that custodial sentences were longer.
The Home Office has projected that the prison population could be 90,000 by the end of the decade. Ms Owers said: "This is what is happening. So everybody who is responsible - be responsible."
Speaking before two more prisoners were found hanged over the weekend - one male, one female - Ms Owers compared the treatment of the sexes in the prison system.
Highlighting a small reduction in the number of female prisoners in the past nine months, which had led to a "dramatic" cut in female prisoner suicides, she said: "If you look at what has happened to the male prison population, which has grown exponentially since April, we have had 35 suicides, most of them in local prisons at the front end of that pressure.
"[In contrast] the women's prison population has flattened out to the extent that there are now surplus places in women's prisons. Over the last six to nine months we have had very few deaths of women in custody. Only two."
Ms Owers puts this down to a recent focus on the damage caused to the children of women imprisoned for non-violent offences.
She says that message "has probably helped to create a climate where sentencers will quite rightly consider all the other options before using prison as a last resort."
Her warning comes in the wake of a tabloid backlash to the comments of the retiring [ruling class] lord chief justice last week.
[Ruling Class] Lord Woolf had called for more non-violent offenders to face "restorative justice" and fines rather than prison terms and for a shift in focus from punishment to rehabilitation.
He said that discovering alternative methods of punishing offenders was vital in order to cut reoffending, which was "costly to our societies in so many ways".
By Matthew Tempest posted 23 August 05
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