Pentonville independent review of progress 2023
Report for Pentonville Prison
Summary
we found that outcomes for prisoners were not sufficiently good in our healthy prison tests of safety, respect and rehabilitation and resettlement planning, while purposeful activity was assessed as poor. As we reported then, Pentonville has habitually been one of the more challenging and troubled prisons with a succession of poor inspections and, while the last full inspection identified some positives, many concerns remained. There had been some improvements to safety, but significantly there had been seven self-inflicted deaths since 2019 and the care for those at risk of self-harm was not good enough. Fundamental weaknesses in offender management and the provision of activities were identified and living conditions were poor. 1.4 These concerns were further exacerbated by the impact of limited time out of cell and more than 60% of the population living in overcrowded cells. As I said at the full inspection, if the prison was to make further progress, national leaders needed to accept the limitations of an establishment that has to work harder than most to battle through its entrenched problems. Report of an independent review of progress at HMP Pentonville 3 1.5 At this independent review, we considered the progress leaders had made against nine of our concerns and two themes identified by Ofsted. While we did not identify sufficient evidence to report good progress in any of the areas reviewed, we did identify reasonable progress in five concerns, with insufficient progress identified against three. Ofsted found that there had been reasonable progress in both themes reviewed.