Attacks on prison staff have risen to their highest level in more than two decades, with around 10,000 attacks recorded in one year.

The number of incidents in the 12 months to June in England and Wales rose by 30% to 10,281, compared with 7,907 a year earlier.

This is the highest level recorded in any 12-month period since 2003, according to an AP news agency analysis of Ministry of Justice (MOJ) figures released on Thursday.

Protesters branded the figures “shocking” as the prisons minister warned that rising violence behind bars against “working staff” had reached “endemic levels” and illustrated the extent of the “crisis” in the government’s legacy prisons.

The union representing prison officers said its members were “fed up of being used as punching bags”.

Separate figures show that more than 13,000 prisoners in England and Wales were released early under the previous Tory government and the move is likely to have contributed to a sharp rise in the number of criminals recalled to custody for reoffending or breaching release conditions. their.

In the past year, nearly 1,000 of the attacks on staff were classified as “serious”, which includes incidents requiring medical treatment or travel to hospital, or injuries such as fractures, burns, extensive bruising, black eyes, broken noses and teeth , cuts, bites, temporary or permanent blindness and sexual assault.

The rate of serious assaults on staff increased year-on-year by 24% to 11 per 1,000 inmates (974, up from 746).

The number of assaults among inmates also increased by 21%, from 15,917 to 19,285. The rate of inmate-on-inmate assaults in the last 12 months, 221 per 1,000 inmates, also increased by 15%.

Self-harm incidents in prisons also hit a 20-year high, reaching the highest level in any 12-month period since 2004, after 76,365 occurred in the past year. This is up 19% on the same period in the 12 months to June 2023, when 64,380 such incidents were recorded.

The number of prisoners self-harming rose 16% to 13,605 in the 12 months to June from 11,764 – another record – while the rate of incidents per person rose slightly from 5.5 to 5.6.

Union the Prison Officers’ Association said the levels of violence and self-harm were “unacceptable”. The figures revealed that staff “work in one of the most dangerous environments in modern society” and “highlight the failures of HMPPS (HM Prison and Probation Service) to protect prisoners and staff”.

Prison officers are prohibited by law from taking industrial action, but the union added: “If HMPPS does not take action to reduce this spiraling violence, the POA certainly will.”

The Association of Prison Governors described the levels of violence as “indicative of the current crisis in our prisons”, adding: “Prisons must be safe places to live and work if they are to serve their primary purposes of punishing offenders, protect the public and be places of rehabilitation.

“We are failing at this and without focus and investment from government we will continue to do so.”

Pia Sinha, chief executive of the Prison Reform Trust, said: “These shocking figures highlight the very human consequences of the severe pressures the prison system is under.”

Prisons minister Lord Timpson said the figures “illustrate once again the scale of the prison crisis this government has inherited and how prisons are failing in their core function of reducing crime”.

“Attacks on our working staff have reached endemic levels and the rate of self-harm has reached a depressing peak – both indicators of the system’s failure to rehabilitate itself.

“This new Government has already taken urgent action to save the prison system from the point of collapse and we will now make the necessary reforms to make prisons safer and make better citizens, not better criminals,” he added.

The Ministry of Justice report said the “substantial” prison population should be taken into account when calculating the number of incidents. Figures show there were 87,726 prisoners behind bars in England and Wales at the end of June.