Prisons chief’s shock at ‘lunatic asylum’ cells for the mentally ill

Notorious: Hogarth’s 1735 depiction of inmates at the Bedlam asylum
12 April 2012

Mentally ill prisoners are being kept in conditions as bad as "Victorian lunatic asylums", the Government's jails watchdog warned today.

Nick Hardwick, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, said he had seen inmates living in "squalid" and "chaotic" cells that had left him shocked and distressed.

He added that the sights he had witnessed during a visit to Brixton Prison had conjured up images of "Bedlam" — the nickname for London's once notorious Bethlem Royal Hospital for the insane — and had left prison staff struggling to cope.

Mr Hardwick said: "It is the most distressing thing I have seen in all my time here.

"I went to Brixton and staff were at their wits' end because there were relatively young people who had been sectioned, who were seriously ill,
and there were no places in secure hospitals.

"There was a prisoner who was seriously ill, the prison knew it and the staff were doing their best, but they couldn't move him because there was nowhere for him to go.

"He was obviously very ill, his cell was chaotic and squalid. Bedlam was what it looked like, if you imagine what it must have been like when they ran Victorian lunatic asylums."

Mr Hardwick said he was not criticising staff at Brixton and warned that what he had witnessed at the jail, where about half a dozen seriously mentally ill inmates were awaiting secure hospital accommodation, was typical of other prisons.

He said the answer was to divert more mentally ill inmates from the prison system into specialist secure hospitals and expressed optimism that plans to do this, recently announced by the Ministry of Justice, would result in increased capacity within the NHS.

He said that although this would be an added expense for the Department of Health, it would lead to savings within the prison system, where the burden of coping with such inmates consumed a "huge" amount of resources. For less seriously ill prisoners, Mr Hardwick said that more should be cared for in the community, although he cautioned against repeating the "mistake" of earlier policies under which mentally ill people had been released without adequate support.

He added: "There are people who could be managed more effectively in the community than in prison, but we have got to make sure that community support is there."

Mr Hardwick urged businesses in London and elsewhere to help the Government in its drive to ensure that more prisoners were given work while in jail.

He said such jobs, combined with a more structured and purposeful prison regime, could help reduce re-offending once inmates completed their sentence and make the public safer."

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