- The Guardian, Wednesday 24 October 2007
The decision to dedicate two small jails solely to foreign nationals was taken after the crisis which cost Charles Clarke his job as home secretary last year, when it was revealed that 1,023 had been released without being considered for deportation.
Canterbury, which holds 284 inmates, was a male training prison but had very few training facilities.
Bulwood Hall, which holds 184 prisoners, was a women's prison but was converted for foreign nationals by putting two rolls of barbed wire around the perimeter fence.
The two dedicated prisons have not got the largest populations of foreign inmates - Wormwood Scrubs holds 561 and Wandsworth 426 - but the fact that they deal exclusively with foreign prisoners means that they can provide better translation and support facilities.
Meanwhile, a report by the chief inspector of prisons, Anne Owers, on the mental health of prisoners published today shows that too many jails have become the "default setting" for those with a wide range of mental and emotional disorders. She says that the quality and extent of their treatment inside prison has declined since 2002, when 300 NHS psychiatric nurses went into prison hospitals and were seen as the cavalry coming over the hill: "When mental health in-reach teams rode to the rescue of embattled prison staff they found a scale of need which they had neither foreseen nor planned for."
Ms Owers says that screening tests by the prison inspectors showed that 50% of prisoners going into jail indicated primary or secondary health needs - much higher levels of mental distress than identified by current processes to screen offenders.
The infusion of trained healthcare professionals and the direct involvement of the NHS has had a direct effect on the care of patients, but has also established "the scale and complexity of the need".
The number of people transferred from prison to secure NHS hospital beds has increased from 620 a year in 2000 to 900 in 2005, but such transfers are severely limited by the shortage of secure NHS beds. The inspectors also found significant weaknesses in court diversion schemes designed to keep out of prison those who should properly be cared for in mental health hospitals.
Only two out of 23 primary care trusts examined knew about the existence of such schemes. "Unless these gaps are filled, mentally ill people will continue to fall through them, and into our overcrowded, increasingly pressurised prisons," said Ms Owers.
