Prison overcrowding is contributing to a sharp rise in the number of prisoners who have committed suicide in prisons in England and Wales, the Chief Inspector of Prisons said today.

So far this year, 50 prisoners have taken their own lives, compared to 67 in the whole of last year.  Of these 50, 17 have been on remand awaiting sentencing and 6 were women.

Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, said that the recent overcrowding crisis had seen newly-convicted prisoners housed in police and courthouse cells, where they do not have access to the support proper jails offer at their time of greatest vulnerability.

Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: "These 50 desperate deaths must raise urgent questions about why we lock up so many vulnerable, mentally ill people in the bleakest conditions within a system overheating from the pressure of overcrowding.  It is the hopelessness, isolation and uncertainty that gets to people."

Anne Owers told the BBC Radio 4's Today programme that "prisons over recent years have put a lot of effort into reducing self-inflicted deaths in prison with some success, by putting in place some good first-night procedures, better detoxification, better support for those who are suicidal.
"What the prison population pressure from rising numbers does is put enormous pressure on those systems as prisoners are moved from prison to prison and moved away from home and so on.
"One of the crucial factors in reducing suicide has been reducing them in the early days in custody.  It was the case a couple of years ago that around one-third of deaths in custody occurred in the first seven days someone was in prison.  Prisons put a lot of effort into supporting people at that vulnerable time. 
"What has been happening this year, until very recently, is that many prisoners have been spending their first nights not at a prison at all, but in a police cell or even worse as court cell, where of course there are none of these support mechanisms and they arrive at prisons already more vulnerable than they were.
"Inevitably, while prisons are operating under the pressure they are, all the systems operating in prisons are under huge stress - staff are under stress, prisoners are under stress and that means the most vulnerable won't always be able to get the support that they need."