David Hanson – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by David Hanson on 2016-01-11.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many incidents of attempted suicide there were in prisons in each of the last five years.

Andrew Selous

The national statistics on safety in custody use the category of self-harm incidents, defined as “any act where a prisoner deliberately harms themselves irrespective of the method, intent or severity of any injury”. They do not include a separate category of “attempted suicide”, because the intent of the prisoner is often unknown. Some incidents are more likely to result in a fatality than others, but the point at which a self-harm incident becomes an attempted suicide is unclear.

Summary statistics on self-harm in prison custody are published quarterly, and the latest annual figures, for the ten years to June 2015, can be found in Table 3 of the Safety in Custody statistics bulletin available at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/472712/Safety-in-custody-summary-q2-2015.xls

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