Dozen inmates on the run from Kirkham prison

The Gazette can today reveal half of the dozen men to flee the open prison and evade police ever since have been on the run for more than a decade.

Fylde MP Mark Menzies is now calling for a Government investigation into the types of prisoner kept at Kirkham.

He said: “It is clearly not acceptable to have prisoners absconding. Police should reveal who they are. They are fugitives, no matter how long ago they absconded.”

But details released by the force showed how prisoners serving sentences for crimes as serious as assault, firearms possession, robbery and drug dealing had been allowed to vanish without a trace.

The situation at Kirkham, where last year eight prisoners absconded in the space of just four months, has been branded ‘ridiculous’ with questions raised about how much effort and resources is being devoted to tracking down those who have gone missing.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), which runs the prison, repeatedly failed to answer The Gazette’s questions over the problem and didn’t respond to a final request for a comment by 6pm yesterday.

Details provided by Lancashire Police show one offender, serving five years for actual bodily harm, has been absent since absconding in 2000. He has now been missing for three times his total prison term.

Two other men have not returned to the prison having absconded in 2003 while serving six month terms.

Another man has been missing since 2004. He was serving three years and three months for the supply of drugs.

Two men who went missing in 2005 are also classed by Lancashire Police as ‘unlawfully at large’. One was serving three years and six months for conspiracy to steal, the other serving the same term for offences including blackmail.

Another prisoner went missing in 2007 while serving six years for possession of a firearm.

Missing prisoners on longer-term sentences include a man missing since 2014 having been jailed for robbery with an imitation firearm, another offender at large since 2015 having been jailed for 10-years for robbery and a man jailed for nine years for supplying class A drugs. He also absconded in 2015.

Coun Liz Oades, who represents Kirkham on Fylde Council, said: “It’s ridiculous to have prisoners missing for that length of time.

“But you have to ask what resources there are to track these people down and return them to custody.

“I simply don’t think we have the ability or the manpower to do that.”

“This is getting worse because of the constant cuts we are seeing.

“We are losing police officers, we are losing prison officers and it is happening in other public services as well.

“It has to stop somewhere.”

Lancashire Police said it will appeal to the public ‘as a matter of course’ to help find prisoners who abscond from prison.

However, the force has refused to name the 12 men who remain at large after walking out of – or failing to return to – Kirkham Prison.

The Gazette can today reveal the men’s original offences and the length of their sentence but not their names or faces because police say it would be ‘unfair’.

Lancashire Police today refused to comment further on the decision to withold the information, beyone the reason given in the initial response to The Gazette’s Freedom of Information (FOI) request.

In it, the force said: “Although these individuals are unlawfully at large and in some cases personal details will have been released into the public domain, due to the time lapsed, especially for the older records, we feel disclosure would be unfair to these individuals.”

Police also revealed they issued 10 media appeals to trace absconded Kirkham prisoners since the start of 2015, the majority of which have been successful. Only three of the men who remain at large absconded during that time. In its FOI response, Lancashire Police said: “Under the current management of absconded individuals, there will always be an appeal as a matter of course unless

the offender is arrested before we get the opportunity to do so.

“It is important to note however that this will not have always been the procedure and therefore in the case of those who have been missing for several years a press appeal may not have been conducted.”

A force spokesman today added: “The police and other agencies follow numerous lines of enquiry to try and trace persons who abscond from lawful custody to return them to prison.

“A public appeal can be a valuable tool and is always an option open to the police but it has to be considered in terms of being relevant, proportionate and necessary by investigating officers.

“When a public appeal is used we are always grateful to both the media and the general public for their support.”

The Ministry of Justice, which runs Kirkham Prison, has so far failed to answer questions over the problem of offenders going missing from the open prison.

As part of The Gazette’s investigation, a Freedom of Information (FOI) request was submitted to the MoJ, which failed to reply within the statutory time limit of 20 working days. No response had been received at the time of going to print, despite multiple requests in recent weeks.

However, publicly available figures show 97 people have absconded from the open prison in the last five years.

The number of absconded prisoners has fallen dramatically since the late 1990s and early 2000s. Last year, 12 prisoners absconded compared to 24 in 2014/15. Another 97 failed to return from temporary release, including two last year. Police declined to say how many times in the last two years it had been notified of prisoners absconding from Kirkham.