EnglandWales & Scotland: Deaths in Custody
01 November 1999
There were three suspected suicides in Scottish prisons in November 1999. Between 1989 and 1999 there were 115 suicides in Scottish prisons, including eight between March and November 1999. According to the Scottish Sunday Post this means that more people have died in Scottish prisons in the last ten years than were executed by the state in the course of the century. There were 34 executions between 1900 and 1964. Most of those taking their own lives were prisoners on remand. Up to March 1999 there were 107 suicides, 65 (61%) of whom were on remand. In the previous year there were 15,000 prisoners remanded in custody compared with 18,000 convicted prisoners. Clive Fairweather the Chief Inspector of Prisons has pointed out that:
"every Monday, up to two hundred prisoners are received at Barlinnie prison in Glasgow. Many will be suffering withdrawal symptoms from drug use, fears for the future, and possibly depression. It is nigh on impossible to screen them all quickly and decide who is at acute risk of suicide."
There have been parallel debates in England and Wales concerning deaths in custody. In September the governor of Brixton indicated that there had been 26 incidents of self harm in the prison during the month while in August there had been 11 incidents of self harm with four attempted hangings. ln October more than two hundred people took part in a demonstration highlighting the names of the 1,350 black and white people who have died in prisons, psychiatric hospitals and police cells since 1990. Five hundred and fifty of these deaths were in police cells while seventeen black people died in custody between January and October 1999. In the same month an inquest into the suicide of a male nurse at Walton prison heard that other members of staff had threatened him after he complained about the behaviour of the night staff at the prison. Two other nurses who had made similar complaints about the bullying of staff and prisoners had been on sick leave for several months. The government has refused to release the results of the internal inquiry into the allegations. Louise Ellman the local MP argued that: "this matter must not be swept under the carpet. It raises serious concern about the way the health service operates in prisons".
These issues come on the back of a number of reports published earlier this year on deaths in custody. In March, the Parliamentary Commissioner upheld a complaint brought by Inquest on behalf of the family of Kenneth Severin, one of three black people to die in prison following the use of restraint by prison officers. The Ombudsman concluded that the "complaint on behalf of Mr Severin's family was fully justified" and added that there were failings:
"Largely attributable to operational shortcomings on the part of PS (Prison Service), in the form of, respectively, inadequate local arrangements to ensure that incidents involving prisoners in the health care centre were managed by health care staff, and inadequate local and national arrangements for training regarding the risk of positional asphyxia following restraint. Whether Mr Severin's death would have occurred in the absence of those failings must remain a matter for speculation."
As Deborah Coles of Inquest pointed out "this damning criticism by the Parliamentary Ombudsman is a vindication of what Inquest has been saying for years about the secrecy that surrounds the investigative process following a prison death and the failure of the prison service to learn the lessons. It is the first acknowledgement by a public body, that responsibility for the death of Mr. Severin rests with the prison service". These issues follow on from a number of reports published earlier in the year. In April, the Chief Inspector of Prisons published his report Suicide is Everyone 's Concern. The report noted that the rate of self-inflicted deaths in custody had more than doubled between 1982 and 1998 and that "in contrast to the falling rate of su