HMP Maidstone

What we found

Maidstone is a category C prison holding foreign national offenders. Prison leadership was in a state of flux with a third governor in 18 months recently appointed. The new governor had made a number of improvements including the management of prisoner applications, complaints and external hospital appointments, and a new foreign national prisoner training package was being rolled out to staff. Whilst there were now enough education staff to deliver a suitable curriculum, there was still not enough full-time purposeful activity and prisoners were allocated to unsuitable activities. The prison also did not offer any of the offending behaviour programmes required for many sentence plans.

Points to note

The specific needs of the prison’s foreign national population were not yet met and there were ongoing concerns with safety. Sadly, there had been two self-inflicted deaths in the last five months, with lessons to be learned about shortcomings in support for prisoners anxious about their immigration status.