Chronic failings that led to foreign inmates walking out of jail without being considered for deportation still exist, the prison watchdog says today.

Anne Owers, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, said that there had been improvements in how the Prison Service dealt with foreigners, but serious difficulties remained in the immigration and nationality directorate.

Ms Owers said that there were “systemic failures” at all levels in the care of the 10,000 foreign citizens among the 79,800 total jail population in England and Wales. Her report highlighted the case of a Chinese woman who cried inconsolably for two days until an interpreter could be found and it was discovered that she feared being killed by a firing squad. In another jail five prisoners identified as foreign nationals were, in fact, British, the report said.

Prison staff highlighted tensions between Afro-Caribbean inmates and both Asians and Africans, and racism by East Europeans over black inmates.

Ms Owers said that the deportation debacle this year was “an acute symptom of the chronic failure of the prison and immigration services to develop and implement effective strategies for people who were not seen as a ‘problem’.” Much of her work for today’s report took place before the scandal of the release of 1,019 foreign criminals, including murderers and rapists, without their being considered for deportation. She said that further research as late as September showed that major problems still existed.

“The prisons are getting better at looking after foreign prisoners but the indications from work we did in August and September was that systems and liaison with immigration were not sufficiently good,” she said. Few jails inspected had an effective foreign national prisoner strategy and most did not even know with any accuracy how many, or which, foreign nationals they held. Communication with the courts, even in relation to court recommendations for deportation, is poor; as is communication within and between prisons, the report said. Jail staff called ineffective communications with the immigration and nationality directorate’s criminal casework team. “Messages went unanswered, faxes disappeared, and there were no clear lines of accountability and responsibility. Cases were often acted on at the last minute, with no . . . possibility of preparation,” the report said.

It added: “At all points in the process, effective systems did not exist, either within prisons, or between prisons and the immigration and nationality directorate, in order to manage, support and inform foreign national prisoners faced with immigration action.”

Top ten home countries of foreigners jailed in England and Wales

Jamaica 1,550

Nigeria 878

Irish Republic 719

Pakistan 443

Somalia 298

Turkey 283

India 259

China 249

Poland 191

Algeria 178

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