Frankland inmates cost £172 EACH per night

IT costs £63,000 to keep EACH prisoner behind bars for a year at notorious HMP Frankland, new figures show.

The £172-a-night cost at the category A jail, where terrorists, murderers and rapists are imprisoned, has risen up from an average of £60,359 per inmate in 2016-17.

By contrast, you could book a weekend break at luxury hotel and spa Slaley Hall, near Hexham, Northumberland, next month for a mere £142, leaving spare for a massage or a pedicure.

You could also go one step further and stay at the Langley Castle Hotel, with dinner and breakfast in a ‘ castle view lodge’ room for £170.

Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe and Soham murderer Ian Huntley are among the criminals who have been locked up at HMP Frankland, which has been dubbed ‘Monster Mansion’.

Overall, it cost £51m to run Frankland in 2017-18.

In nearby HMP Durham, the cost of keeping an inmate rose by 9.9% to an average of £31,765 a year.

Across England and Wales, it cost an average of £37,543 a year to keep each prisoner in jail last year.

That was up 6.1% from £35,271 in 2016-17.

Campaigners have labelled the rising cost a symptom of the “crisis” in the prison sector.

Mark Fairhurst, national chairman of the prison officers union the POA, said: “The prison service is in crisis across the sector. Assaults on staff are at a record high and serious assaults are even worse.

“That, combined with the maintenance costs and the number of people getting sent to jail, means rising costs. If they reviewed the sentencing guidelines and sent fewer people to prison that would help.

“You can’t run justice on the cheap. You need to fund us adequately.”

Mr Fairhurst said while prisons had recruited an extra 3,000 people, that didn’t fully replace the 7,000 staff lost since 2010, and higher wages and bonuses had been needed to attract staff, meaning higher costs.

Growing maintenance costs in old crumbling public sector prisons added to the problem, something he said contracted prisons with newer buildings were avoiding.

Overall the total expenditure on running prisons in 2017-18 was £3.18bn, compared to £3bn in 2016-17.

A Prison Service spokesman said: “We are investing tens of millions extra in prisons to ensure they remain places of rehabilitation and safe for prisoners and staff.

“This includes the recruitment and training of more than 3,500 new prison officers in the last two years, which has increased our spending on prisons.

“This investment ensures prisoners have a genuine chance to turn their lives around and ultimately protects the public from crime.” HMP Frankland Prison in County Durham and, inset, two of the prison’s infamous residents, murderers Peter Sutcliffe and Ian Huntley