The below Parliamentary question was asked by Andy Slaughter on 2016-02-09.
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many hostage situations have arisen in each prison and youth facility in each month since March 2014.
Andrew Selous
The vast majority of incidents are minor in nature and resolved quickly and professionally without injury, damage or disruption to the running of the prison. Each incident is investigated fully to ensure lessons are learnt and best practice in managing incidents is shared across NOMS.
Many incidents at height are relatively short in duration, lasting less than 15 minutes, and take place on netting or over railings. Hostage incidents are relatively rare and in many cases of hostage taking collusion between the perpetrator and victim is suspected. We do not tolerate violence or disorder in our prisons. Prisoners who take part in violent incidents can be referred to the police for prosecution or receive additional time on their sentences following internal adjudication.
The tables attached provide numbers of incidents at height and hostage incidents in each month between March 2014 and December 2015 and broken down by establishment.
Note: These figures have been drawn from the NOMS Incident Reporting System. Care is taken when processing and analysing the returns but the detail collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. Although the figures are shown to the last case the figures may not be accurate to that level.
