Safety in Custody

Starting with perhaps the most worrying set of figures, the latest set of Safety in Custody statistics cover Deaths in Prison Custody to June 2025  and Assaults and Self-harm to March 2025. The headline findings are:

• In the 12 months to June 2025, there were 401 deaths in prison custody, an increase of 30% from 308 deaths in the previous 12 months. Of these, 86 deaths were self-inflicted.
• In the 12 months to March 2025, the rate of self-harm was 899 incidents per 1,000 prisoners (77,898 incidents), up 6% from the 12 months to March 2024 to a new peak, comprising of a 5% increase in male establishments and a 6% increase in female establishments, both also to new peaks.
• In the 12 months to March 2025, the rate of assaults was 356 assaults per 1,000 prisoners (30,846 assaults), up 9% from the 12 months to March 2024.

Prison performance ratings

The Annual Prison Performance Ratings 2024/25 presents an official assessment of prisons across England and Wales, assigning data-driven ratings from 4 (Outstanding performance) down to 1 (Performance of serious concern) for each measure in the 2024/25 Prison Performance Framework resulting in an overall prison rating.

• 12 prisons were rated as outstanding (DOWN from 13 last year)
• 48 were rated good, (DOWN from 56 last year)
• 37 were rate as “of concern” (UP from 35 last year).
• 22 were rated as of serious concern (UP from 15 last year).

The figures were published on the same day as inspectors published an Urgent Notification for Oakhill secure training centre which included the fact that in the nine months to July 2025, 23 staff members were suspended, of which 16 related to allegations about their conduct with children. Since 14 July 2025, seven more staff members have been suspended on the same grounds. 

The HMPPS Annual Digest for 2024/25 also gives us cause for concern, informing us that:

In the 12 months to March 2025 there were 26,348 incidents of drug finds, 13,014 incidents of weapons finds, and 12,166 incidents of mobile phone finds, increases of 25%, 12% and 14% respectively from the previous year.

Probation

Switching our attention to the probation service, the annual Community Performance statistics for 2024/25 reveal that only 2 of 12 regions are operating at a ‘good’ level (Greater Manchester & Wales), all other regions are rated as either ‘requiring improvement’ (6) or ‘inadequate’ (4).

Just over three quarters (76.3%) of people on probation had completed their court-ordered requirements by the time their community sentence expired.

Offender Management Statistics

I am afraid there is no respite when we turn to the offender management statistics for the first quarter of this year. From this bulletin we learn that:

There were 71,625 adjudication outcomes between January and March 2025 (almost 800 per day). This was a rise of 16% compared to the same period in 2024. Additional days were awarded as punishment on 1,683 occasions, totalling 26,433 extra days – 8% UP on the same quarter last year.

There were 10,101 licence recalls in this three month period, an increase of more than one third (36%) on January-March 2024. We don’t have data to show how many of these people were released early under the SDS40 provisions only to be recalled with a few days or weeks.

Conclusion

I feel like I should apologise for starting your week with this recital of dismal data but there appears to be no point to hiding from the extent of the problem. While it will obviously take years to turn our prison and probation services around, we live in hope that we can start to see some progress in the near future.