Prisoners

Baroness Quin
asked Her Majesty's Government:

What information they hold concerning the numbers and proportion of prisoners in (a) young offender institutions, and (b) adult prisons who had been in care during their childhood years. [HL1521]

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting
This information is not collected centrally. The best available data come from the Office for National Statistics psychiatric morbidity survey (1998). This study found that a quarter of adult-sentenced male and female prisoners had been taken into local authority care as children. The figures were slightly higher for prisoners on remand (33 per cent for males, 29 per cent for females).

Analysis of a sub-sample of young offenders (aged 16-20 years) found that 29 per cent of male sentenced prisoners, 42 per cent of male remand prisoners, and 35 per cent of female sentenced prisoners had been taken into local authority care as a child. Too few female young offenders on remand were sampled to enable reliable analysis for this group.

Sources: Psychiatric Morbidity Amongst Prisoners in England and Wales (ONS, 1998). Mental Disorders Among Young Offenders (ONS, 2000)