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Lack of psychiatric beds resulting in seriously unwell defendants being detained in prisons, MPs told

HEALTH professionals demanded action today to prevent defendants with serious mental health disorders being detained in prison due to a lack of psychiatric hospital beds. 

Consultant clinical psychologist Dr Sarah Allen, who oversees a healthcare unit in a female remand prison, told MPs that they had seen about five women in the last 12 months who had ended up in jail despite being given medical recommendations for detention in psychiatric hospitals. 

Due to a lack of beds the women, one of whom was a pregnant manic-depressive, were sent to prison instead, she said. “It’s absolutely outrageous, really risky and an affront to dignity,” Dr Allen told the justice committee of MPs. 

“I can understand why people end up in prison if they’re very unwell and you can’t let them out into the community, but nonetheless prison is not an appropriate place.” 

The courts can remand a person in prison “for their own safety” without them being convicted or sentenced for a crime. 

But Dr Allen warned that prisons should not be used as a place of safety, and that the issue “desperately needs to be addressed.”

Another psychiatrist, Dr Russell Green, said that it was “not infrequent” for people, partway through the process of being detained in hospital, to end up in prison due to a lack of beds. 

“It is tragic to see someone arrive in prison who should have been in hospital,” he said, explaining how this often results in week-long delays to their treatment. 

The justice committee is hearing evidence for its probe looking at the scale of mental health problems in prisons. 

It comes as a report by the Royal College of Psychiatry found that up to 8,000 people with mental health disorders are languishing in jail despite being eligible for treatment in the community.

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