Prisoners given tents to sleep in on leaving jail
AN INQUIRY examining some of the country’s highest prisoner reoffending rates has heard of inmates being given tents on their release because they have nowhere to live.
Members of North Yorkshire County Council partnerships scrutiny committee said they were stunned by the disclosure and also by the revelation that drug addict prisoners are routinely given additional amounts of drugs before their release in a process dubbed “retox”.
The action to acclimatise addicts was launched, the meeting heard, followed the deaths of exinmates in the Leeds area, after their release, but was unlikely to help cut the likelihood of prisoners re-offending.
The committee’s chairman, Coun Derek Bastiman, said following an inquiry into release arrangements, including visits to prisons in North and West Yorkshire, he had concluded the Government needed to take urgent action to tackle reoffending rates.
He added that one inmate had told the committee how he had been homeless on the first night after being released from Kirklevington Prison. The prisoner revealed how almost all of the £47.50 he was given on release from had been spent within hours on bus fares to Richmond and Darlington.
Coun Bastiman said: “We’ve learnt that prisoners are even being given tents to live in. They need bricks and mortar and a solid roof to live under. They have served their time and we should look after them when they come out.”
Latest government figures, which were published in October, show that 52 per cent of prisoners in the Humberside, Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire Community Rehabilitation Company area reoffend, a figure second only to the Durham Tees Valley area.
The Humberside, Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire Community Rehabilitation Company said: “We’ve a strong record of reducing re-offending, managing people safely in the community and of providing an effective and efficient service.”