Deaths in Prison Custody in Scotland 2012-2022

9. Deaths in custody by prison establishment

Between 2012 to 2022, there were 17 prison establishments operating in Scotland. This figure includes two prisons that closed in 2014 (HMP Aberdeen and HMP Peterhead) and one that opened in 2014 (HMP and YOI Grampian). Different prison establishments hold different prison populations. Different population groups are required to be housed separately (e.g. remand prisoners, women, young people under 21), and others have specific management requirements (life sentenced prisoners, long term determinate sentenced prisoners). Therefore, the age, gender and legal status profile of prisoners varies by establishment.

Prison establishments also differ in capacity, so the number of individuals housed in each varies considerably. For example, the average daily population in HMP Inverness was 110 in 2021-22 whereas the average daily population in HMP Barlinnie was over 10 times that figure at 1,215. Establishment level information on the different populations held can be found in Annex A.

Figure 13 below shows the number of deaths occurring in the different prison establishments from 2012-13 to 2021-22. The highest number of deaths have occurred in the larger prison establishments. No deaths occurred in HMP Aberdeen or HMP Peterhead during the short time they were open during this period, so these establishments are omitted from the chart.

In any given year, the number of deaths per prison establishment is small, as shown in Table 1 below.

Rates of death in custody by prison establishment

With the exception of HMP Barlinnie, all prison establishments have an average daily population below 1,000. Therefore, in this section due to the small average daily population size within individual prison establishments, we have only estimated rates of death based upon the total number of individuals that experienced imprisonment.

Table 2 below shows the rate of death in custody per 1,000 individuals by prison establishment. In line with the scattered distribution of deaths in custody by prison establishment shown above, it is hard to discern a clear pattern. As per the overall pattern of deaths occurring, there appears to be a higher rate of death occurring in some establishments in more recent years but there are no clear trends emerging.