SUICIDE rates among prisoners reached record levels last year as jails struggled with chronic overcrowding, drug use and high staff sickness levels, according to a report today by the Prison Reform Trust.

The survey shows that there were 105 suicides in prisons in England and Wales in 2002-03, at a time when the average number of prisoners sharing cells reached a record of more than 20 per cent of the jail population.

The highest number of suicides was at Durham, where there were six. There were other suicides in 52 of the 136 prisons in England and Wales.

An average of 14,800 prisoners out of a total of more than 70,000 had to share a cell. At the end of June, eighty-five prisons were overcrowded, including nine of the thirteen jails built in the past decade. The most overcrowded was Shrewsbury, where 91 per cent of prisoners shared.

The Prison Service tests a proportion of inmates each year for drug use. Since 1996 the percentage of positive tests has been falling from 24 per cent, but last year it began to rise for the first time to 11.7 per cent. The target is 10 per cent. Among individual prisons, Leeds had the highest positive proportion, at 28 per cent. Albany, a category B prison on the Isle of Wight, and East Sutton Park, a women’s open jail in Kent, both recorded no positive tests.

The trust said record numbers of staff were reporting sick as they coped with the highest prison population seen in England and Wales. The average time taken on sick leave was more than fourteen days a year against a target of nine days. The service has failed to reach national targets on sickness levels for the past four years. The trust found that the Prison Service had failed to meet eight out of nineteen national targets last year, and said that it was being severely hampered by the record prison population.

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