Exclusive: Ministers explore diverting male prisoners serving short terms or on remand away from tougher jails
Ministers are examining a possible upgrade of security at men’s category C and women’s prisons to deal with an overcrowding crisis across the England and Wales estate, the Guardian understands.
Officials have explored diverting prisoners on remand or serving short sentences away from category B “reception” prisons such as HMPs Liverpool, Manchester and Pentonville in north London.
Instead, they are assessing the feasibility of holding male prisoners in alternative sites, such as men’s training prisons or repurposed and emptied women’s jails, once security has been improved.
Andy Burnham asked the justice secretary, Alex Norris, this week to deliver a plan to free up more space in overcrowded jails. It follows intense pressure on the new government over how to block the early release of PC Andrew Harper’s killers.
Ministers have been advised that they can only move prisoners from category B to category C or women’s prisons if security is improved.
There are 30 men’s reception prisons across England and Wales. Also known as local prisons, they tend to be Victorian and severely overcrowded, holding remand and short-term prisoners.
They tend to have high walls and fences, often topped with razor wire, bars on windows, CCTV and controlled access and internal partitions.
Remand prisoners comprise approximately one-fifth of the total prison population in England and Wales, a proportion that has risen steeply in recent years because of court backlogs.
X-ray body scanners are deployed across category B local prisons and are used on many prisoners entering the estate to detect internal concealment of contraband including drugs, phones and weapons.
About half of England and Wales’s 86,000 prisoners are held in category C prisons, which specialise in preparing offenders for work and resettlement.
Prisoners in category C jails are assessed as a low to moderate security risk and are held in “closed” conditions but do not face high security such as razor wire and internal partitions. They tend to face fewer body scans and searches.
For more than a year, Ministry of Justice officials have been seriously examining schemes to divert female offenders out of jail.
But experts have pointed out that converting a women’s prison so that it could hold more men should also include a major security upgrade.
Mark Fairhurst, the national chair of the prison officers union, the POA, said converting the security of category C or women’s prisons will take too long to ease the crisis currently facing the Prison Service.