News

Inspectors to HMP Berwyn, a category C training prison in North Wales, found a strong leadership team providing decent outcomes, but improvement was needed in purposeful activity and rehabilitation and release planning. The prison, one of the newest and largest in the estate, held 1,835 men at the time of the inspection.

The inspection of HMP Featherstone, a category C training prison near Wolverhampton, found a safer prison with a reasonably good regime. However, its 661 prisoners were let down by poor offender management which limited their opportunities to progress.

Inspectors to HMP Lewes, a category B prison in Sussex, were disappointed by a lack of progress in safety, respect, and purposeful activity. The 520 men held in the jail were spending long periods locked up in dirty conditions, with very limited access to work, education, or activity.

Inspectors to HMP Wayland in Norfolk found a prison struggling to recruit and retain staff and unable to provide adequate conditions in which prisoners can live, learn, and work. The category C jail held 890 men at the time of the inspection and had recently been labelled a ‘black’ site for staff recruitment, enabling an uplift in starting pay for officers.

Two centres holding nine men who could not be managed in mainstream prison environments were providing safe and reasonable conditions, but were not focused enough on changing prisoners’ behaviour, according to HM Inspectorate of Prisons. Inspectors visited the separation centres in HMP Frankland, County Durham, and HMP Woodhill, Buckinghamshire in April 2022.

Inspectors to HMP Spring Hill, an open prison in Buckinghamshire, found a safe and reasonably respectful establishment, but the prisoners held there were underemployed and unmotivated by the work, education, and activities programmes which were central to the function of the prison.

Today, there are fewer than 500 children in custody in England and Wales. This is down largely to the success of diversion schemes over the last 10 years and, more recently, the impact of the pandemic. While this decline in the population is positive for children and society in general, it has created its own set of challenges, notes Angus Jones, Team Leader for Children and Young People.

Inspectors to HMYOI Parc found a safe and stable establishment providing good outcomes across all our healthy prison tests for the 20 young people in its care.

Inspectors returning to HMP Woodhill found an establishment struggling to make progress due to severe staffing shortages. The staffing position was no better than it had been at the time of the inspection in 2021, with as many staff leaving the prison as joining. Inspectors were concerned that the staff shortages, inexperience and high turnover were limiting what the jail could achieve and were negatively affecting outcomes for prisoners.

The prison service must do more to make sure prisoners spend more time out of their cells in purposeful activity and it needs to recruit and retain high-quality staff., according to the Chief Inspector of Prisons in his annual report for 2021–22 published today.