Prisoners

(asked on 15th June 2021) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask Her Majesty's Government how many category C prisoners with an Imprisonment for Public Protection sentence are currently held in category A prisons.


This question was answered on 29th June 2021

The total number of Category C prisoners with an IPP sentence that were held in Category A and Category B prisons as of 31 March 2021 is shown in the table below.

Security Category

Number of IPP Prisoners

Category A

20

Category B

91

As of 31 March 2021, there were a total of three Category A prisoners with an IPP sentence that were serving a sentence on recall.

A prisoner’s individual needs in relation to offending behaviour and resettlement, or their individual circumstances (such as medical requirements) may result in an individual being held in a prison of a higher category than their own approved category. Prisoners will not be allocated to a prison of a lower security category than the security category assigned to them personally.

The information needed to provide a comprehensive answer to the final question (How many prisoners with an Imprisonment for Public Protection sentence and given a category A status have been released?), could be provided only at disproportionate cost as central data was not stored in a way that allowed for pre-2015 data to be obtained. Between 2015 and 2020, there were fewer than three releases of Category A IPP prisoners. The exact figure is not being provided as the release of some of this information would risk identification of the individuals concerned. However, it should not be assumed that the actual figure represented falls at any particular point within this scale.

Notes for all figures:

  1. These figures have been drawn from the Public Protection Unit Database and Prison-NOMIS held by Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. As with any large scale recording systems, the figures are subject to possible errors with data migration and processing.
  2. These figures include recalled prisoners.
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