Failing Prison With ‘Squalid’ Living Conditions to Receive Urgent Support

The sun shines through high security fencing surrounding Norwich Prison in Norwich, England, on Aug. 25, 2005. Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

A failing prison with “squalid” living conditions where the majority of inmates are not involved in meaningful activities will receive urgent support, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has said.

Priority works to cells and living areas and extra training and support for staff are among the measures announced by the MoJ on Monday for Rochester Prison.

In early September, the Kent prison became the first category C jail to receive the worst possible rating under the HM Inspectorate of Prisons’ (HMIP) inspection framework.

It received an Urgent Notification following what HMIP described as a “decade of systemic failure and decline” with the latest inspection, conducted in August, finding “endemic” drug use, self-harm, “decrepit” conditions, and a lack of activities to prepare its inmates for release.

Minister for Prisons, Probation, and Reducing Reoffending Lord James Timpson said: “This report is yet another example of the prison crisis we inherited. Violence and illicit drug use is at dangerously high levels and cells are in squalid conditions.

“We are taking immediate action to improve conditions at HMP Rochester, offering additional support for our hard-working staff and addressing the drivers of violence.”

Rochester became the seventh prison to be issued with an Urgent Notification since November 2022, the others being Bedford, Bristol, Exeter, Wandsworth, Woodhill, and Cookham Wood Youth Offenders Institution.

Urgent Notifications were introduced in 2017 to allow immediate, urgent action to be taken when serious issues are raised by inspectors.

Urgent Refurbishments

The Rochester Prison report had documented concerns over the estate, with inspectors describing “some of the worst conditions seen in recent years.”

Inspectors described “infestations of both rats and mice plaguing older buildings,” with inmates forced to make barriers out of cardboard to fill gaps under doors to keep the vermin out of their cells.

The government said that urgent refurbishments to showers, windows, and priority cells would begin immediately.

Rochester is a Category C prison, which are training and resettlement prisons meant to prepare inmates for reintegration into the community and to provide inmates with opportunities to develop their skills before release.

But the inspection found that  HMP Rochester was failing in its rehabilitative purposes, with only one-third of inmates in education.

Since the assessment, the MoJ said the prison was developing a new curriculum to get inmates into education and training, which will help them find work on release.

The Prison Service will also conduct a full assessment of Rochester Prison’s security measures into how it tackles illegal drug use, and staff will receive extra training, such as on how to support inmates at risk of harm.

Early Prison Release

The urgent deployment of support for Rochester Prison comes as the Prison Service struggles with a growing number of inmates.

In July, Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood announced that the government would enact plans to cut the proportion of minimum time served for some inmates from 50 percent to 40 percent, in a bid to tackle prison overcrowding.

Last month, 1,700 were released in one day, on top of the usual 1,000 released every week. A total of around 5,500 inmates are due to be released early under the scheme, with hundreds more to be freed early in October in the second stage.

The government had promised that those convicted of serious crimes, such as offences related to domestic abuse, terrorism, or violence, would not be released early.

However, last week the government admitted that 37 inmates had been let out of prison early by mistake, with the MoJ saying it was working with police to return them all to jail.

A technical error had meant that prisoners prosecuted under an old harassment law were not labelled as being ineligible for early release and were let out of prison.

Chief Inspector of Prisons Charlie Taylor said that while most of those released early under the government scheme would settle back into normal life, it was “inevitable that some of these prisoners will get recalled to custody and it’s inevitable that some of them will go out homeless.”

Taylor said this was due in part to the pressures that releasing so many prisoners in such a short space of time has on the prisons and probation services, meaning some former inmates would fall between the cracks and not get the right support they need to reintegrate into the community.