(Title Image: Daily Post)
A new report from Cardiff University’s Wales Governance Centre (pdf) has revealed that 543 prisoners in Wales were released during 2018-19 without any fixed address to return to. This had led to calls for prisoners to be reconsidered as a priority need for housing, which was removed in the Housing Act 2014 in Wales.
Additionally, the report found that people with black ethnicity were six times more likely to be imprisoned per-head-of-population compared to whites. Asians were just under two times over-represented in the prison population, while mixed-race inmates were over-represented by 2.7 times.
Elsewhere, alcohol finds increased by 57% in the year to March 2020, while 18 weapons were found at Wrexham’s HMP Berwyn for every 100 prisoners. Prisoner-on-prisoner assaults at Berwyn reportedly increased by 143% in 2019.
The report’s author Dr Robert Jones said: “Wales continues to have one of the highest rates of imprisonment in western Europe when using either ‘home address’ or ‘in country’ calculations. Average custodial sentence lengths continue to rise, and the number of drug, alcohol, tobacco and weapon finds have climbed further.”
Criminal justice – including policing and prisons – is currently non-devolved and run (in Wales) by the UK Home Office and UK Ministry of Justice. The Thomas Commission called for the devolution of criminal justice in its report published in October 2019.
