PRT comment: HMP Rochester receives Urgent Notification

Commenting on today’s urgent notification by HM Inspectorate of Prisons for conditions at HMP Rochester, Pia Sinha, chief executive of the Prison Reform Trust said:

“With squalid conditions; rising levels of violence and self-harm; widespread drug use and less than a third of men in education, work or training, it’s hard to picture an environment less suited to helping people to prepare for a better life on release from prison. The immediate priority will rightly be on ensuring that Rochester is brought back from the brink. But today’s urgent notification should also prompt some deep soul searching from within the prison service as to how conditions were allowed to become—and remain—so bad for so long.

“The prison service’s familiar response to such damning findings—to appoint a new (temporary) governor to stabilise the situation—is undermined by giving that same governor the additional challenge of reopening and managing Cookham Wood in a scramble to provide much needed additional prison capacity.

“Rochester is the latest example of a prison that is overwhelmed by what it is being asked to deliver, yet forced to remain open. The government urgently needs to reset our approach to tackling crime, and breaking our addiction to imprisonment, if we are to avoid more prisons following the same path.”