At a time of major crisis for prisons, the BBC’s Sima Kotecha is given rare access to HMP Pentonville.
A piercing alarm alerts us to what prison officers describe as an “incident”. There’s a cacophony of slamming metal doors, keys jangling, and shouts and screams from inmates as officers race to see what’s happened. We run behind as they head to where the trouble is.
Over the course of two days inside Pentonville this week, we were confronted with the stark reality of this crisis.The pressure on staff is immense. In just half a day, we hear six alarms. The day before there were more than 30. Prison officers don’t know what they’re running towards behind those locked and bolted doors. Blood, violence or even death are all possibilities.
HMP Pentonville was built in 1842 and is largely unchanged structurally in 180 years. Originally designed to hold 520 people in single cells, it now has an operational capacity of 1,205, with two prisoners packed into each cell. More than 80% of Pentonville inmates are on remand, which means they are awaiting trial. The rest have been convicted of serious crimes including murder, rape, and drug offences.
“I've been telling them about that for three weeks,” Tom says. “I could fix it - I'm actually a plumber - but it had no washers in there.” “I could tell he wasn't dead because he was still breathing, he’s still warm,” Lewis says, describing the wait for a prison officer to come to help.
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