Suicide vigil plan may pay prisoners

PRISONERS SHOULD be paid to carry out 24-hour suicide watches on fellow inmates, the Chief Inspector of Prisons said yesterday. Sir David Ramsbotham said prisoners should be paid by the hour to work shifts as "observation aides" in a round-the-clock vigil on vulnerable inmates.

In a report published yesterday, Sir David outlines his concern about the alarming number of suicides in jail. His proposal is based on a project in the United States, where prisoner-observers, paid around 25p an hour, have had a major impact in reducing suicides. The Prison Service's director-general, Martin Narey, is also anxious to bring in anti-suicide measures pioneered in New York, where the suicide rate is one-fifth of that in jails in England and Wales.

Mr Narey said in an interview with The Independent earlier this week that the current situation was "dreadful". He has ordered an increase in "safe cells", designed so that prisoners have no way of securing cords or sheets to hang themselves, and has promised an end by next April to the use of strip cells for vulnerable prisoners.

Sir David's thematic review, Suicide is Everyone's Concern, castigates the Prison Service for its treatment of the bereaved families of inmates who take their own lives. He says families should be allowed into prisons to see the place where their relative died. He calls for prison chapels to be used to hold memorial services for suicide victims.

During his 18-month review, the Chief Inspector met several families of suicide victims and was "shocked" by their treatment at the hands of the authorities. One parent told him: "I was given bin-bags with my son's belongings shoved in them. As these were handed over, I heard one officer say: `Another one bites the dust'. After that there was no contact at all with the prison."

A record 82 people, almost all men, killed themselves in prisons in England and Wales last year, and the rate has remained at the same level in the early part of this year.

Half of those who died last year were being held on remand. The Chief Inspector said the rate of remand prisoners taking their own lives was 490 per 100,000 - 28 times higher than the national suicide rate for men.

He pointed out that 73 per cent of those who died were being held in "local" prisons, which are the most overcrowded in the jail system. Local prisons are used to hold people who are waiting to go to court or who have recently been sentenced and are due to be allocated to a prison.