Probation: Death

(asked on 15th July 2019) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department takes to (a) monitor, (b) investigate, (c) learn lessons for prevention from and (d) respond at a (i) local and (ii) national level to deaths of offenders in the community on post custody supervision.


Answered by
Lucy Frazer Portrait
Lucy Frazer
Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
This question was answered on 31st July 2019

All deaths of offenders under supervision are the subject of an internal review by the relevant probation provider, which must consider from the circumstances whether any areas of probation practice could be improved. This includes the deaths of those being supervised after release from custody. Probation providers report annually to Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service on the numbers of deaths and their causes, and share learning points from the reviews that they have conducted. A small number of deaths under post-release supervision, including those that occur in Approved Premises, are independently investigated by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman.

The number of offenders who died under supervision increased from 704 in 2010/11 to 955 in 2017/18. The Offender Rehabilitation Act (ORA) was introduced on 1 February 2015 and resulted in an increase in the number of offenders on post-release supervision. While the total number of deaths under supervision has continued to increase, the number of deaths post-release fell by 8% in the last year, from 401 in 2016/17 to 367 in 2017/18.

The National Suicide Prevention Strategy identifies people in contact with the criminal justice system as a high-risk group, and we recognise that the time following release from prison can be a particularly high-risk period for suicide and for deaths from other causes. The primary role of probation is to protect the public and prevent re-offending, and people under supervision in the community are not in the care of HM Prison and Probation Service in the way that they are when in custody. While probation staff do everything they can to help offenders find access to vital services including healthcare, housing, and treatment for drug and alcohol problems, they do not have sole responsibility for caring for them. We are conducting a review of post-release deaths, which aims to identify what further actions may be appropriate to prevent them, while recognising that a range of other organisations share responsibility for their wellbeing.

We are also investing an extra £22m in ‘through-the-gate’ assistance for offenders, to help them find the support they need on issues such as housing, healthcare and employment, and they have the same access to these services as any other person in the community.

The number of deaths under post-release supervision during 2017/18, broken down by time elapsed since release and by cause of death, is in the attached table. The figures are taken from probation providers’ annual reports. Care is taken when processing and analysing them, but the detail is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system.

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