Conditions in jails ‘dangerous and frightening’ with system on brink of collapse
Staff and inmates at HMP Pentonville have described how conditions in the jail are worse than ever, as new figures show the country’s prison population has hit another record high.
The prison in north London is running dangerously close to capacity – with just nine places left out of 1,205.
It was originally built in 1842 to hold 520 inmates in single cells, but most now have two crammed into each.
One reason behind the soaring number of prisoners is gang crime.
Speaking to The Sun, inmate Mark Blower said the swelling population ‘is getting quite scary’.
He went on: ‘You’ve got all different members of different areas coming in. So you’ve got different postcodes coming in.
‘You can just sometimes feel the tension in the air.’
Figures from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) released today show 88,521 people were in prison as of September 6.
That is up 171 from 88,350 a week ago – the previous record – and a jump of 1,025 from 87,496 four weeks ago.
The sharp rise is likely to have been driven by the number of people remanded in custody or given jail sentences following the recent disorder across parts of the country.
A former chief inspector of prisons said he has felt concerned for his ‘personal security’ in prisons for the first time recently, with staff struggling to ‘keep control’.
Nick Hardwick told BBC Today: ‘I’ve been in a lot of prisons, what I’ve noticed in some I’ve visited recently is for the first time I’ve felt concerned for my own personal security – they’re dangerous and frightening places, and staff are struggling to keep control.’
Shay Dhury, a prion officer at Pentonville for nearly five years, told the BBC she recently had both wrists broken while trying to keep inmates belonging to rival gangs apart.
‘They go for each other – and when two people go, other people go,’ she said.
‘It ends up us just trying to stop the fight. It gets really messy sometimes – stressful, yeah.’
The Government is ‘considering anything’ to alleviate prison overcrowding, a minister said this morning amid reports some inmates could serve their sentences in Estonia.
Ministers are reported to be considering renting cells in Estonian prisons as a way of increasing capacity in the short term as jails continue to face a shortage of places.
According to reports in The Daily Telegraph, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood is expected to meet her Estonian counterpart Liisa Pakosta next week to discuss the leasing of cells.
Speaking to broadcasters on Friday, Home Office minister Dame Angela Eagle did not deny the reports, but said it was not part of her own ministerial responsibilities.
She said: ‘The last government closed loads of prison places and didn’t replace any of them, so I think that colleagues in the MoJ (Ministry of Justice) will be considering anything that they can to alleviate the problem.
‘What we cannot have is people who are convicted of perhaps violent or serious crimes not being able to be in jail.’
In July, Ms Mahmood announced plans to cut the proportion of sentences inmates must serve behind bars from 50% to 40% as the MoJ said overcrowding had pushed jails to the ‘point of collapse’.
The temporary move, which will not apply to those convicted of sex offences, terrorism, domestic abuse or some violent offences, will come into effect on September 10.
Mr Hardwick said: ‘That will remove the immediate pressure, I don’t think the Government had any alternative in the short-term other than to do these releases.
‘But it’s a bit like squeezing a balloon – you release the pressure in one place but the bulge goes somewhere else – and the real problem now is, first of all, some of those released will re-offend for certain, and some of those released, a lot of those released, I fear will end up homeless because there simply isn’t the accommodation for them.’
Ministers still have ‘important choices’ to stop the issues in prisons re-occurring, he added.
In the longer term, the Government is expected to bring forward plans to build more prison places in the near future.
The prison population in England and Wales has been increasing for much of the past three years, having dropped as low as 77,727 in April 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Before the pandemic, the figure had been above 80,000 since December 2006.
In the aftermath of the summer 2011 riots, the number climbed as high as 88,179 on December 2 2011, before falling back in subsequent months.
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