Serious failings found at suicide prison

The Home Office has disclosed that there were serious failings at a prison where six women took their own lives within a year.

The induction wing at Styal Prison in Cheshire, where five of the women died, was "isolating and forbidding", according to a report that criticises four members of staff for their actions on the night of the first death and recommends that disciplinary hearings be considered.

Paul Goggins, the Home Office minister, said yesterday that the report of the Prisons ombudsman Stephen Shaw, Prisons and Probation, concluded Styal had inadequate provisions for mental health treatment and inadequate facilities for dealing with drug-dependent prisoners. The report has not been released.

Pauline Campbell, the mother of Sarah Campbell, who was three days short of her 19th birthday when she killed herself at Styal last January, said the report was a "damning indictment" of Styal and had identified "serious inadequacies". But she and the Howard League for Penal Reform expressed disappointment that it did not seem to draw attention to the unsuitability of prison for some women who need mental health care. The Howard League estimates that 500 prisoners in need of mental health care remain in prison because there is inadequate provision.

Between 1990 and 1995, seven women committed suicide in prisons in England and Wales, an average of 1.2 a year. In 2002, the figure increased to nine and last year the toll had risen to 14. Another two women killed themselves in the space of nine days earlier this month, at Edmunds Hill Prison, Suffolk.

A spokeswoman for the Howard League said: "Many women at Styal will be drug addicted and separated from their children. I am surprised that we have had no analysis of whether prison is suitable for some of these women."

The ombudsman's report focuses on the death of Julie Walsh, 39, a convicted thief from Liverpool, who died from an overdose on 12 August 2003. But it also examined five other deaths at the prison since August 2002. All of the women died within their first month of custody at Styal. Two died after being in prison for only one day, two died within their first week, one after eight days and another after 25 days. Mr Goggins indicated that the report was critical of the induction wing. He said: "The ombudsman criticises the regime on the wing, which has little association space off the landings."