North Sea Camp Prison
| Location | Freiston, Lincolnshire |
|---|---|
| Security class | Adult Male/Category D |
| Population | 378 (as of April 2011) |
| Opened | 1935 |
| Managed by | HM Prison Services |
| Governor | Paul Yates |
| Website | North Sea Camp at justice.gov.uk |
HM Prison North Sea Camp is a men's open prison (Category D), located on the edge of the parish of Freiston (near Boston) in Lincolnshire, England. North Sea Camp is operated by Her Majesty's Prison Service.
North Sea Camp 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 Wash.
In August 2006, the BBC reported that 49 prisoners had absconded from North Sea Camp in the previous twelve months, and that a total of 339 had absconded since 1996.
In April 2007, Channel 4 TV's Dispatches documentary series broadcast film secretly recorded at North Sea Camp by a prisoner, Dafydd Evans. 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.
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