On the 24th of October 2024, The HM Inspectorate of Prisons issued HMP Winchester with an Urgent Notification in light of serious findings about conditions inside the prison. The Inspectorate found the prison to have the highest level of serious assaults against staff of all reception prisons, concerning levels of self-harm and inadequate mental health support for prisoners and rife drug use with 41% of men testing positive for illicit drug use in August and 47% reporting that it was easy to get hold of illicit substances.
The environment inside the prison was reported to be appalling with prisoners forced to sleep in damp, mouldy and cold cells often with defaced walls and broken furniture.
The prison itself was reported to be ‘dilapidated’ and the environment ‘filthy’.
Responding to the Urgent Notification issued to HMP Winchester, Nacro CEO, Campbell Robb said:
“The recent findings by the Chief Inspector of Prisons on HMP Winchester lays bare the bleak reality of living conditions inside a prison on the brink of failure. With disturbing levels of violence, self-harm and drug use rife across Winchester prison, and accommodation standards unfit for human habitation, it is right that the prison was issued with an Urgent Notification.
This Urgent Notification should serve as an impetus for an internal investigation within the prison service as to how such conditions were allowed to become—and remain—so dire for so long.
The systematic failings detailed in HMP Winchester are not isolated, they reflect a broader pattern we are seeing in prisons across England and Wales.
This report shatters any illusion that, in their current state, prisons are places for rehabilitation. Reports such as those out of Winchester, ought to serve as an arresting call to the Government, for the urgent need to reform our prisons so that they that they can begin to function as places of rehabilitation to reduce crime in our communities.”
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We operate in more than 40 prisons and provide services across England and Wales. We help 28,000 people across our services each year and run the CAS-2 service for the Government housing people coming out of prison on bail or licence. We work with people at every stage of the criminal justice system, from liaison and diversion services in police custody and courts, to resettlement into the community after prison. We use the insights from our services and the experiences of the people we support to campaign together for a criminal justice system which better serves us all. We’ve been working in this field for more than 50 years.