Prison officers and inmates tell how jails are struggling to cope with overcrowding
PRISON officers and inmates have told how jails are struggling to cope with overcrowding.
HMP Pentonville in North London is now at double occupancy and has only nine places left out of a possible 1,205.
The Catgory B nick was originally built to house just 520.
Gang fights have soared as the population has risen.
Inmate Mark Blower, 32, said: “It’s getting quite scary and quite mad how full it’s getting.
“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.”
Meanwhile, general alarms can sound up to 20 times a day as rates of self-harm have soared.
And prison officer Sacha Berg, 24, said she was assaulted by a lag upset about low supplies.
She said: “When the capacity is at such high pressure, violence increases, you don’t have a lot of buffer room.
“If two prisoners have fought, we have very minimal spaces to separate them and keep them apart, so it has been testing.
“When it’s busy, when we’re at that operational capacity, there’s just not many places for that pressure to go, and most of it ends up coming out in the form of violence.”
The Government plans to ease overcrowding with thousands of early releases next week.