HMP/YOI Isis – young men spending too long locked up
Isis is a modern prison in south-east London, with an unstable and challenging population; around 80 new prisoners arrive each month, many of whom are involved at some level with London gangs. On this visit, inspectors were impressed with the governor and her commitment to improvement, but there were some disappointing findings, particularly in the area of rehabilitation and release planning.
This inspection resulted in an unusual set of scores that reflected a mixed inspection. The challenge will be for the governor and her team to continue to improve levels of safety while providing a much more suitable regime and education offer for the population. There will also need to be a concerted effort from leaders to improve public protection arrangements and make sure that sentence progression and key work are at the heart of the offer at Isis.
Isis was not providing adequate release planning to prisoners. Although a third were identified as high risk of harm to others, public protection measures and support in the community were not set up until much too close to release. Inspectors could not be sure that relevant restrictions were in place for prisoners who presented a risk to children.
Not enough resettlement work was being delivered, such as support with managing finance and debt. Staff shortages were severely hindering work to reduce reoffending and prisoners were often not progressing in their sentence.
Prisoners were kept in separate cohorts to avoid gang and other conflicts, but this meant that they were not getting enough time out of cell and their access to work, education and training was too limited. The quality of teaching was not consistently good enough.
Despite this system of cohorting, violence was high at Isis.
The prevention and reduction of violence pervaded every part of the prison, including the organisation of education, work, training and even family visits, yet there was no coherent plan for tackling the problem. This had led to a regime that had similar restrictions to those imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with many prisoners only out of their cells for 2.5 hours a day. The regime was designed to prevent prisoners from different parts of London from mixing and there was consequently much too little activity for this group of energetic, young men.
Notes to editors
- Read the HMP/YOI Isis report, published on 9 December 2022.
- HM Inspectorate of Prisons is an independent inspectorate, inspecting places of detention to report on conditions and treatment and promote positive outcomes for those detained and the public.
- HMP/YOI Isis in Thamesmead, south-east London. It opened in July 2010 as a public-sector training prison for convicted men from London. In September 2021, it began holding solely young men aged 18–27. In 2018, Isis was one of 10 prisons identified for investment to improve security and decency.
- HMP Isis is a category C training and resettlement prison for young adult men.
- At the time of this inspection, the prison held 595 prisoners.
- Inspectors identified six examples of notable positive practice during this inspection.
- This inspection took place between 23 and 16 September 2022.
- Please email media@hmiprisons.gov.uk if you would like more information.