North Sea Camp (HM Prison)

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HMP North Sea Camp
Opened	1935
Management	HM Prison Service
Prison type	Adult Male/Category D
Prisoner figures	306 (2006)
Location	Boston, Lincolnshire
Governor	Norman Warwick
Information	www.hmprisonservice.gov.uk
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HMP North Sea Camp is an open prison on the boundary between the parishes of Freiston and Fishtoft, near Boston, Lincolnshire, England.

1 History & development
2 The prison today
3 Notable prisoners
4 External links
5 References

[edit] History & development

It opened as a Borstal in 1935, having been established by a group of Borstal Trainees who had been marched cross-country from Stafford. They set up a campsite, and immediately began work building a sea wall to protect the site from the North Sea. Once this was complete, they began reclaiming land by building a further sea wall - that land then became the prison farm. Until the sale of adjacent land in 2004, the prison had the biggest prison farm in the United Kingdom, much of which was on land reclaimed from the The Wash.

[edit] The prison today

Today, North Sea Camp is an adult male prison, holding 306 prisoners in August 2006. Activities include prison education, workshops, laundry, and a number of prisoners work outside the prison on day release. The prison also has a small terrace of self-contained houses for life sentence prisoners who are coming close to parole.

In August 2006, the BBC reported that 49 prisoners absconded in the previous twelve months, and that a total of 339 had absconded since 1996^[1].

In April 2007, Channel 4 TV's Dispatches documentary series broadcast film secretly recorded at North Sea Camp by a prisoner, Dafydd Evans.[2] Evans's filming showed prisoners taking drugs and smuggling alcohol. He also demonstrated apparent weaknesses in the prison's security procedures and described the escape of a man with convictions for robbery and arson which he blamed on security failures and collusion by fellow prisoners. Lord Ramsbotham, a former Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, was quoted in the programme as saying: "It is not secure; it’s under-staffed, it’s under-resourced and you’ve got a lot of people who quite frankly should not be in those conditions. the system of sending people to these places has broken down." Responding to the programme, the Home Office said open prisons played an important role in rehabilitating offenders and all those transferred to such conditions were risk-assessed.[3]