Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Home leave grants cancelled at prison
HM Prison Castle Huntly, near Dundee, has temporarily suspended letting offenders out for periods of home leave — which is designed to ease them back into society — while it carries out a review of its operations.
Prison chiefs said they want to ensure they still have the confidence of the public following a series of incidents where offenders have absconded while on leave.
The move comes in the week that James John Boyle, an inmate at the prison, was arrested for allegedly failing to return to Castle Huntly from home leave on February 8.
He was arrested in Glasgow after officers had issued an appeal to help track him down.
A spokesman for the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) said: “All new grants of home leave have been suspended for a period of 72 hours to allow SPS to carry out a review of our systems and processes to ensure that they are working as effectively as possible.”
Tom Fox, head of corporate affairs at the SPS, said the authority wanted to ensure public confidence in the system was being maintained.
He said: “We’ve taken this opportunity to review the processes currently undertaken.
“We have taken this decision to pause any home leave during this period. Things are likely to return to normal by Friday.”
However, he insisted that absconding rates at the jail were at an all-time low.
He said: “We are aware recent events have been drawn to the public’s attention and we want to ensure public confidence is maintained in the system.
“It is important to stress that open prison conditions checks are at their most rigorous and cases of absconding are at record low levels.
“This decision has been taken to ensure everything is still working.”
The prison has a capacity for 285 inmates, many of whom are lowsupervision men who are preparing for a return to society following spells in prison.
A TAYSIDE open prison is on a 72-hour lockdown after it scrapped all new home leave for convicts.