DORCHESTER Prison has wonderful staff who have achieved major improvements but they are still being let down by the system, according to a new report.

The Independent Monitoring Board had nothing but praise for the efforts of the Category B local prison and remand centre but said that overcrowding - which had left the national prison system 'bursting at the seams' - was causing specific problems at Dorchester.

Mentally disordered prisoners were a particular problem despite heroic efforts by Healthcare Centre staff, said the board.

It added: 'The real problem continues to be the lack of secure accommodation in the area and the inability of the courts to have any other option than to send people to prison who they will know from medical and psychiatric reports should not be incarcerated.

'Until that part of the equation is addressed then the situation will not improve.' The board highlighted the problem by referring to one prisoner with a mental age of five or six who was put in Dorchester on remand for an offence of violence.

The report said: 'He was unpredictable and dangerous, particularly to female staff. He did not know where he was. He spoke to no one. He often soiled himself and had to be cleaned up by prison staff.

'All his waking hours he sat looking at a cell wall. Efforts were made to find him a secure unit where he could be cared for by trained staff in a humane way. It was to no avail for a number of months.

'It is to the great credit of the staff that while he was here in Dorchester he was looked after in a caring and considerate way, but there is no way that this man should have been in the prison system in the first place.' The board was at pains to point out how 'friendly and positive' prison staff were.

The report added that the improvements made and the standards now reached meant there was 'no reason why Dorchester cannot go on to become the leading local prison in the country'.

It has already improved from 135th to 39th in the league table measuring the 'performance' of prisons against each other, moving from a Level 2 to a Level 3 prison defined as 'one that is meeting the majority of its targets without experiencing any significant problems and delivering a decent and reasonable regime'.

But the board said Dorchester was under-resourced compared to other South West prisons and its outstanding performance meant it deserved any help which could be found to enable rising standards to be maintained and improved.

The board said Dorchester was still a victim of the prison system and detailed one case of a bedwatch costing £1,200 a day where a prisoner transferred from Exeter to Dorchester had to go to hospital in Cardiff.

The report said: 'This waste of taxpayers' money is an absolute disgrace and other ways of supervising prisoners having to spend time in hospital should be urgently explored.' Elsewhere, the board said the visits area was just 'a badly insulated prefabricated building' and, while it was pleased to hear of plans for a purpose-built visits and reception facility, it was disappointed to hear that completion was 'unlikely to be in the foreseeable future'.