Andy Slaughter – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Andy Slaughter on 2016-02-23.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many concerted indiscipline incidents of each type have occurred in each prison establishment in each month since May 2005.

Andrew Selous

Violence in prisons has increased in recent years. The nature of offenders currently in custody and the widespread availability of new psychoactive substances have both contributed to making prisons less safe. There is no single, simple solution to the problems we face but we are making progress.

We have launched a two year Violence Reduction project to help us to gain a better understanding of the causes and characteristics of violence. We are also trialling the use of body worn cameras in prisons, training sniffer dogs to detect new psychoactive substances and have made it an offence to smuggle new psychoactive substances into prison. However, ultimately the only way to reduce violence in our prisons is to give governors and those who work in prisons the tools necessary to more effectively reform and rehabilitate offenders.

Many Concerted indiscipline incidents vary widely in nature and duration and many of these incidents are relatively minor and of short duration and cause little disruption to the prison regime.

Note: The figures included in the table attached, have been drawn from the NOMS Incident Reporting System. Care is taken when processing and analysing the returns but the detail collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. Although the figures are shown to the last case the figures may not be accurate to that level.