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Nearly three quarters of prisoners held at HMP Berywn at the end of its first year of operation were English, a new report into the Welsh jail population has revealed.

The Wrexham ‘super-prison’ was holding 644 English inmates at the end of December 2017, out of a total population of 887 at that time.

And by March this year, a quarter of the Welsh convicts or remand prisoners being held there were from South Wales.

The findings, published by the Wales Governance Centre, also highlight that 39% of all Welsh prisoners were being held in English prisons in 2017, scattered across 100 different sites.

The research comes against a background of Ministry of Justice strategies to increase the number of prisoners being held in their local areas, to ensure when they are released they have access to community support programmes.

(Image: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

But the Wales Governance Centre said it found that a large number of the prisoners from South Wales being held in Berwyn are well over the England and Wales average of 50 miles from home.

And it found that provision for Welsh inmates, particularly in language terms, might still be lacking. It highlights that concerns have been raised about the recruitment of Welsh-speaking staff at HMP Berwyn.

A recent investigation by the Welsh Language Commissioner found that Welsh-speaking skills had not been “identified as an essential or desirable component” for any of the positions advertised by the National Offender Management Service at HMP Berwyn.

That finding, in 2018, came five years after then Welsh Secretary Daivd Jones claimed the planned Wrexham prison would “benefit prisoner welfare” by giving Welsh-speaking prisoners “more opportunity to speak the language in an environment where its cultural significance is understood”.

In 2017, North Wales Assembly Member Llyr Gruffyd raised concerns about the fact that if a high concentration of English prisoners made up the HMP Berwyn population, then Welsh families were facing lengthy journeys to see their loved ones over the border.

He said: “HMP Berwyn was sold as a prison for North Wales. The statistics show that this is not the case.

“The vast majority of prisoners in HMP Berwyn to date are from England, just 10 per cent are from North Wales. This is despite the fact that in June there were 228 men from north Wales being sent to HMP Altcourse in Liverpool.

“Even prisoners from Wrexham are far more likely to end up in Altcourse than in Berwyn by a factor of 10-1 - in June there were 69 Wrexham men in Altcourse and just seven in Berwyn.

(Image: Ian Cooper)

“I accept that the prison is still yet not at capacity but are the ratios likely to remain the same? If so, then Berwyn has been built to cope with overcrowding in English prisons rather than meet local needs.”

When HMP Berwyn reaches capacity, there will be 2,100 inmates in it. In February 2018, despite the Ministry of Justice saying it was “ramping up” the number of prisoners held there, the total number fell from 887 to 857 between December 2017 and January 2018.

By April this year, the prison had 999 inmates, a mixture of Category C men and Category B men on remand.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice said: "Closeness to home is considered when choosing where to place prisoners but we must also look at the length of sentence, crime committed and prison capacity.”