THE Bishop of Worcester, Dr Peter Selby, is urging society to take the welfare of prisoners more seriously.

Dr Selby condemned those who turned a blind eye to prison suicides, telling the House of Lords that most inmates were also "the victims of crime".

The Bishop went on to say that attitudes to soaring suicide rates in jails was tantamount to condoning capital punishment.

He told the Lords: "We live in a society that professes not to find capital punishment acceptable.

"We therefore have to take with great seriousness our complicity in a system that, whether we want it to or not - and we do not - leads many people to take their own lives."

Dr Selby, the bishop to prisons in England and Wales, said that he spoke from experience in his own Worcestershire diocese.

He has visited Brockhill and Blakenhurst prisons in the wake of suicides and said that staff coped much better when chaplaincy services were provided.

Dr Selby said that it was important to remember that most people in prison had suffered crime themselves. He said: "Of those who have not, certainly a vast number have been the victims of neglect and abuse that may fall short of the criminal, but probably not very far short."

He said: "If people committed suicide in your village or town in the same numbers as they do in prison, that village or town would, by now, be in crisis".