2. Establishment and Population

Establishment

2.1 HM Prison Barlinnie is located to the North East of Glasgow, some four miles from the city centre and adjacent to the M8 motorway and A80 junction. Acquired in 1879, four of its accommodation blocks were completed by 1886, whilst the fifth was added in 1894.

2.2 The prison is Scotland’s largest and at any one time holds approximately one fifth of the entire penal population. Additionally, there is a very large turnover with over 20,000 admissions per year. Being primarily a local prison, its main functions are:-

• To provide reception and holding facilities for young offenders (YO) and adults who have been remanded by the local courts.

• To house short term prisoners - ie those serving under four years - including fine defaulters.

• To hold convicted prisoners who are outwith normal classification, either on temporary transfer for visiting purposes or in the Segregation Unit, which is a national facility.

• To hold a number of LTPs on a temporary basis until such time as they can be allocated to other prisons.

2.3 Until very recently there had been little or no change to the basic structure of the prison for over a century. However, a £25 million rolling refurbishment programme was now underway and had started with the emptying of ‘D’ Hall in early 1996 to enable contractors to instal integral sanitation in the cells. An extra accommodation block, Letham Hall, had been erected as a temporary but smaller replacement, this being possible because of vacant patches in the large area of ground occupied by the prison. However, the closure of a main accommodation Hall had occurred at much the same time as the national prison population had begun to rise and so exacerbated the chronic overcrowding which has bedevilled the establishment for many years.

2.4 Barlinnie (or "the Bar-L" as it is widely known throughout Scotland) is an extremely busy establishment; it also acts as the ‘hub’ for the SPS as it feeds many other establishments, including Longriggend, Polmont, Low Moss, Greenock, Shotts, Glenochil and Perth, as well as the three open prisons. At the time of inspection, a total of 584 staff was managing 1266 prisoners.

Population

2.5 The prison is normally designed to hold 917 prisoners. However the closure of ‘D’ Hall (186 places) and its replacement by Letham Hall (76 places) had reduced the effective design capacity of the prison to 807 at the time of inspection. The population on 12 May 1997 stood at 1266, accommodated as follows:-

13 prisoners were located in the Hospital and 11 were held in the Segregation Unit.

2.6 Of the total population of 1266, there were 288 prisoners on remand, of whom 263 were adults and 25 were YOs, and 11 convicted YOs awaiting transfer. A breakdown of the sentences being served by the convicted adult population was:-

2.7 All of the remand population were classified as security category ‘B’, whilst a breakdown of adult convicted categories was:-

2.8 In the year prior to our inspection, there had been two escapes and one prisoner had been liberated in error. Over that same period there had been five suicides, seven attempted suicides and one death from natural causes. There had been one serious assault on a member of staff and ten serious assaults on prisoners by other prisoners.