18 January 2018

HM Inspectorate of Prisons have today issued their first ‘Urgent Notification’ to the Secretary of State for Justice, demanding that he intervene on the “fundamentally unsafe” Nottingham Prison.

In two years there have been at least eight self-inflicted in HMP Nottingham, four of which took place in the same month. The majority of recent deaths were of men in the first night centre or on induction.
 
Deborah Coles, Director of INQUEST:
“There has been a total abrogation of responsibility at all levels of the prison service and government on the crisis across the prison estate. This goes far deeper than the government focus on staff shortages, drones, drugs and mini phones.
 
HMP Nottingham had long been forewarned about systemic failings by inspection and monitoring bodies. Most of the seven men who died in 2017 did so in the very same unit, raising very similar issues. Why was this not stopped in its tracks when problems were so clear and well documented?
 
That the inspectorate are still finding lamentable dangers and failings in care is reprehensible. This points to INQUEST’s ongoing concern abject failures in the mechanisms of accountability. This is a broken prison within a broken system.”

ENDS

NOTES TO EDITORS
For further information, please contact Lucy McKay on 020 7263 1111 or [email protected]

INQUEST is the only charity providing expertise on state related deaths and their investigation to bereaved people, lawyers, advice and support agencies, the media and parliamentarians. Our specialist casework includes death in police and prison custody, immigration detention, mental health settings and deaths involving multi-agency failings or where wider issues of state and corporate accountability are in question, such as the deaths and wider issues around Hillsborough and Grenfell Tower. Our policy, parliamentary, campaigning and media work is grounded in the day to day experience of working with bereaved people.
 
Please refer to INQUEST the organisation in all capital letters in order to distinguish it from the legal hearing.