Booze and drugs trips for French leave prisoners

Between 9pm and 7am, just eight officers are on duty to control the 520 inmates in open, unlocked conditions.

And over the past year, reports Pauline Allen, chairman of the prison's Independent Monitoring Board, "the movement of prisoners around Ford and outside the perimeter fence at night has increased greatly in order to feed prisoners' 'needs for alcohol'."

The Gazette was unable to contact Mrs Allen or governor Fiona Radford over a national newspaper claim that prisoners "regularly pop out for alcohol and smoked salmon from Tesco".

A Prison Officers' Association official was quoted in the same report as saying that inmates liked to stroll beside the River Arun on their way to the supermarket. Drugs and alcohol were also left by the perimeter fence and collected by prisoners.

In her report, Mrs Allen states: "The board repeat what they have said on several occasions before: the staffing of Ford at night is not, in the board's opinion, adequate."

Despite the security problems, Mrs Allen gives credit to Mrs Radford and her staff for their hard work in improving Ford's position in a prisons' league table. From a lowly 132nd place out of 134, Ford had now risen to 43rd, reducing the threat of the prison being handed over to the private sector.

Mrs Allen repeats the concerns raised in her annual report last year, that Ford was still suffering from being sent "inappropriate", trouble-making prisoners, whose disruptive behaviour caused major problems for staff and other inmates. It was also a factor in the high number of prisoners absconding, which has risen to 11 a month.

Among the issues addressed to Home Secretary Charles Clarke, Mrs Allen says a refurbishment programme of former naval base huts at Ford has been dragging on for too long and, although due to be completed this spring, the delay meant that newly arriving prisoners were being housed in inadequate accommodation, with little privacy.

She also claims that Ford is "under-funded", with the same staff now controlling 500-plus prisoners, compared with 380 two years ago.