Ms Caron McCaffrey:

We have amended our open centre policy so it is possible for low-risk prisoners to go to an open centre at the beginning of the sentence. They do not necessarily have to serve a portion of time in a closed system. What we have found though is that the benefits of open centres are better for longer sentence prisoners, as opposed to people serving short-term sentences. When we were filling our beds in our open centres with short-term sentence prisoners we found many people were absconding. That is an issue of concern from a public safety perspective.

On the pathway to progression, Mr. Graham spoke about the work he did in a closed prison setting to move on to an open prison setting. For life sentence prisoners, we also need to be mindful of the fact that they might spend five, six, seven or eight years in an open centre. There is a management of a prisoner's sentence that allows them to best maximise their use in an open centre.

From my perspective, there is a step after an open centre, namely, independent living facilities. We are looking at that on both our sites at the moment. These facilities allow people to move from an open centre where they are not cooking for themselves or living in their own accommodation. As part of our capital strategy, we are looking at a further step within our open centres that will give us additional capacity but also prepare people better for eventual release where they can cook and shop for themselves, etc.