Extra 2,500 prison officers to be recruited amid 'bloodbath' warning

An additional 2,500 prison officers are to be recruited to tackle a surge in crime, violence and drug use in Britain's overcrowded jails, the government announced.

Levels of violence in prisons have reached a new high, with official figures showing assaults on staff in the year to June jumping 43 per cent to 5,954, with 697 recorded as serious. There are 65 assaults behind bars every day.

Justice Secretary Liz Truss will announce the move today as part of a wider package of reforms to address the high rate of reoffending. More than half of offenders in England and Wales go on to commit another crime within a year of release, costing the government around £15bn annually.

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"Our reoffending rates have remained too high for too long," she is to say. "Prisons need to be more than places of containment - they must be places of discipline, hard work and self-improvement."

Prison staff numbers were cut as part of the coalition government's austerity programme and have fallen by more than a quarter since 2010 - around 5,200 staff, says the Prison Reform Trust.

However, the prison population has increased around 40,000 since 1993 to reach 85,108 inmates. In the past two months alone, numbers rose by more than 1,000 people and the prison service holds nearly 10,000 more people than it was designed to house, reports the Financial Times.

The Prison Officers Association said the shortage of staff has left jails in England and Wales facing "bloodbaths".

The Prison Reform Trust says the Justice Secretary is facing a massive challenge, with director Peter Dawson saying the government is grappling with "25 years of political failure to grip prison inflation and chronic overcrowding".