News

Inspectors returning to HMYOI Werrington found worryingly high levels of violence continued to dominate the institution, with a number of serious assaults taking place even during the brief period of the review.

HM Inspectorate of Prisons has today published a report from an inspection on Manston in Kent, carried out in July 2022.

HMP Channings Wood - good progress but inconsistency in care

Inspectors visited courts across Lancashire and Cumbria and found good progress since the last inspection in 2013.

Historic HMP Pentonville has received a series of poor inspection results over the last 10 years. This inspection found that recent progress will be very difficult to maintain while this ’Victorian relic’ continues to be plagued by overcrowding and poor living conditions.

A review of the experience of immigration detainees held in prisons has found that they were markedly disadvantaged compared with those held in immigration removal centres (IRCs), with many in custody for long periods with little or no progress in their cases being made by the Home Office.

For a number of years, HM Inspectorate of Prisons had considered Guys Marsh a high-risk prison, and in 2014 we described it as “out of control”. We observed some improvements during our inspection in 2019, and findings at this latest inspection continued the trend of gradual progress, although key issues around safety and purposeful activity still remained.

Parc, a large prison in Bridgend, South Wales that holds 1,623 prisoners, sustained its reputation as a safe and decent prison in this most recent inspection, in which outcomes were rated as good or reasonably good in all our healthy prison tests.

HMP/YOI Woodhill near Milton Keynes and HMP Swaleside on the Isle of Sheppey are similar-sized men’s prisons that are part of the long-term, high-secure estate. Both house prisoners mainly from London and the South East who are often serving long sentences. Both jails have recently been in the headlines: Woodhill has been forced to close temporarily its high security separation centre, where prisoners are moved to prevent them radicalising other inmates. Swaleside, meanwhile, experienced serious, concerted indiscipline requiring the intervention of specialist tornado teams to restore order.

Inspectors returned to Chelmsford for the first time since the August 2021 inspection, when findings had been so disturbing that the Chief Inspector decided to invoke the Urgent Notification Protocol. At this independent review of progress it was encouraging to find that leaders had made good progress stemming the flow of illicit drugs, improving living conditions, and providing better treatment of prisoners by staff.