PRT comment: HMP Pentonville
Commenting on the findings of conditions at HMP Pentonville by HM Inspectorate of Prisons today (18 October), Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust said:
“The government should hang its head in shame over this damning report. Decency and rehabilitation are a pipe dream while conditions like this still exist. But there is no plan to end overcrowding and no plan to replace the many prisons that are as old and as disastrously unfit for purpose as Pentonville. Expecting people to live and work in such conditions is a disgrace. It’s time for ministers to explain when they will act to end this national scandal once and for all.”
Peter has also written a short article, which you can read below.
Understanding the chief inspector’s report on HMP Pentonville
If I were the Governor at Pentonville, I would be telling my colleagues that they had achieved a small miracle in the chief inspector’s conclusions about their efforts. Of course I’d be depressed by the evidence of some staff treating prisoners badly, and I’d worry that so many prisoners felt unsafe. But the report is littered with evidence of people acting with energy and imagination in the most demanding of environments. The chief inspector isn’t slow to call out poor leadership where he sees it — but it’s obvious that many people at Pentonville have been working incredibly hard to show some progress from when the prison was last inspected. There’s much to admire.
So why do I call the situation at Pentonville a “disgrace”?
The answer is simple and the chief inspector has called it right. Over 1,100 prisoners in a prison designed for 520, three-quarters of those people unemployed and spending all but an hour or so of every day locked in a shared cell designed for one, lunch served at 10.30 in the morning and an evening meal at 4 in the afternoon. Cells occupied despite having no furniture except a bunk, cockroach infestation, most prisoners unable to take a daily shower.
But it’s been worse in the past — things seem slowly to be getting better
Well, that’s also true. And it’s been true of many other prisons facing the same challenges as Pentonville and with a very similar history. But inspectors have been round this circle many times. They know that hard-won incremental improvement is all too often followed by rapid decline. The leaders who have pushed the boulder up the hill are either rewarded with another impossible challenge, or carted off exhausted to recharge their batteries. The staff and prisoners remain, condemned to the fundamentals of a prison built nearly 200 years ago holding twice as many people as it should.
Inspection isn’t about measuring effort and commitment. It’s about the experience of prisoners and whether the prison is delivering what it should. So it’s absolutely right that this latest inspection report on Pentonville doesn’t allow the evidence of hard work, skill and some limited improvement to mask the underlying truth — that conditions at the prison fall a vast distance below what a country like ours should consider acceptable.
Prisoners shouldn’t have to live in such conditions. Managers, staff and partner organisations at Pentonville shouldn’t have to work in them either. Yet the government doesn’t even have a policy intention to reduce overcrowding or to close prisons that clearly ought to be closed, still less a plan of how to get there. That’s why the situation at Pentonville is a disgrace, and why it’s the politicians of the last four decades who have allowed it who should be ashamed.
Peter Dawson
Director
