The governor of Chelmsford prison has hit back at a report that dubbed the jail as still "at the bottom of the pile."

The report by the Independent Monitoring Board stated that the prison was still overcrowded and under resourced, which left it fourth from bottom out of the 135 prisons in the country.

But governor Stephen Rodford said that the report was actually based on the year leading up to the beginning of August, and since then changes had been made that had taken their rating up to being in the top 40 in the country.

He said that the rating was done by a weighted scorecard and points could be lost for the littlest of things, many of which they had since corrected, which in turn had led to them shooting up the table.

"Safety of life, the prevention of suicides and security are probably the most important three things to us and we recently scored 91 per cent on our self harming procedures and 81 per cent overall for security. It has been an incredible achievement by the people in the jail over the last four months," he said.

But Mr Rodford admitted that there was still room for improvement at the prison, with one of the most important things being visits.

"At the moment we have only 20 spaces available, but a new system I tried means we can have 60 visits a day, although this still isn't good enough. I have put in a bid (to the Home Office) for £1.5million for a new visitors complex," he said.

Mr Rodford said that one problem with the prison was because of its location, extending was a problem, but that the new healthcare centre was on course to be open by the end of the next reporting year.

This would then mean that the old centre could be knocked into the current visitors suite to make it bigger, if they got the funding.

Published Tuesday December 16, 2003

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