Mr Manknell found that many working at the prison, including senior management staff, were unaware that Belmarsh had a policy which meant racist prisoners should be marked as high risk and should only be placed in cells with prisoners of the same ethnicity. Following an inquest into Mr Ghuman's death, it was found that Belmarsh failed when carrying out Hilden's CSRA assessment in 2019 after he moved to the prison from HMP High Down.
Safety in prisons is being critically undermined by a drugs crisis which has reached endemic levels, MPs have warned, as drone sightings soar by 1,140 per cent. The cross-party justice committee has called for urgent action after finding almost four in 10 inmates admit it's easy to get drugs, with many prisons having a menu of illicit substances on offer.
Prisons are a closed world, and it was their word against the officers'. Who would believe them? And then, last December, a group of guards killed a man named Robert Brooks in a state prison near Utica—punching him, shoving a rag into his mouth, hitting him with his own shoe, and stomping on his groin. Unbeknownst to the officers, they had inadvertently videotaped their actions on their own body-worn cameras.
I recognise that, one, I'd like to see the number of prison officers increase, and we're only going to achieve that if prison officers feel secure, and there is a cohort of violent, pernicious prisoners with malevolent intent," he said. "I think I'm hoping, under my watch, we'll see stability in the system, so we won't need emergency measures.
A damning investigation found staff repeatedly missed opportunities to help Rajwinder Singh, 36, who took his own life 11 days after arriving at the south-west London prison in June 2023. The prison falsified records, ignored his call bell and did not check on him when his wife phoned with concerns for his welfare the day he died. A Prisons and Probation Ombudsman report said the prison "made critical and repeated failings in their duty of care to Mr Singh".
"We have a duty to ensure [trans female prisoners'] safety too, and beyond all peradventure, they would not be safe in a male prison but liable to serious sexual assault, including rape."
