PRT comment: NAO report on drugs in prisons

Commenting on today’s National Audit Office report ‘The costs of tackling drug harms in prisons‘, Pia Sinha, chief executive of the Prison Reform Trust said:

“Fixing the inherited capacity crisis within our prisons has been the priority for this Government since the election. But this report exposes the scale of the damage that the prison system has sustained while attention has been focused elsewhere. The increase in both the demand and supply of drugs, the squandered resources to tackle them, and poor coordination between health and justice are all indicators of a badly broken system. The Sentencing Act should stabilise the capacity crisis, but the Government will no longer have anywhere to hide—it will need to urgently and systematically fix the escalating harms caused by drugs in the prison system. This requires effective partnerships, better use of resources and a strategy that focuses on addressing supply, demand and recovery in prisons.”