Philip Davies – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Philip Davies on 2014-06-09.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prisoners in open prisons were returned to closed prisons in each of the last three years by (a) reason for their return and (b) type of offence originally committed.

Jeremy Wright

We do not centrally hold data on the individual reasons for determinate sentence prisoner transfers, including transfers following re-categorisation and when prisoners have been returned to closed conditions from open prisons. Where this is available, the information could only be obtained at disproportionate cost as it would involve a manual trawl through the records of every prisoner to identify if they have ever been held in open conditions and subsequently returned to closed conditions.

However, the information, in part, is centrally available in respect of indeterminate sentence prisoners.

Table 1 provides the number of indeterminate sentence prisoners who have been returned from open conditions to closed conditions and where the transfer occurred between 1 April 2011 and 31 March 2014, grouped by year and by reason for transfer. The data has been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.

We are unable to provide a breakdown of this information by index offence as this information is not held centrally; to obtain it would require a manual trawl through every case and this would incur disproportionate cost.

The main purpose of open conditions is to test prisoners in conditions more similar to those that they will face in the community. Time spent in open prisons affords prisoners the opportunity to find work, re-establish family ties, reintegrate into the community and ensure housing needs are met. For many prisoners who have spent a considerable amount of time in custody; these can assist in their successful reintegration in the community and protecting the public.

We make no apologies for taking a firm approach in returning prisoners to closed conditions wherever we need to do so.

The number of temporary release failures remains very low; less that one failure in every 1,000 releases and about five in every 100,000 releases involving alleged offending, but we take each and every incident seriously. The Government has already ordered immediate changes to tighten up the system as a matter of urgency. With immediate effect, prisoners will no longer be transferred to open conditions if they have previously absconded from open prisons; or if they have failed to return or reoffended whilst released on temporary licence.