WINCHESTER prison is falling apart amid “very high levels of violence” and needs urgent improvement, the prisons watchdog warned today.

Inspectors called for immediate emergency measures after finding that an inmate had been able to remove his own cell door.

Prisoners are being held in “dreadful conditions,” they said, with some cells “so damp and mouldy that inspectors questioned whether they were fit for habitation.”

The prisons inspectorate urged Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood to issue an urgent notification for the category B jail in Hampshire, saying that drug use is “rife” and a third of the prison’s CCTV cameras are broken.

Some 41 per cent of the around 690 men held at Winchester tested positive for drug use in August.

Nearly half reported that it was easy to get hold of illicit substances amid a “weak” approach to testing, inspectors said.

Drugs, debt and “prisoner frustration” led to the “highest level of serious assaults” on staff at any of England and Wales’s reception jails, which process new inmates into the prison system and hold people on remand and those who have been convicted but not yet sentenced.

It also had the second-highest rate of serious assaults on other inmates, while self-harm was at the third-highest level of all prisons of this kind, according to the watchdog.

Winchester is the ninth prison to be issued with an urgent notification since November 2022 and this is the second warning of its kind that the watchdog has given this month.

Howard League for Penal Reform chief executive Andrea Coomber KC said: “When conditions are so appalling that a wall can be prised open with plastic cutlery and when violence, drug use and self-harm are rife, what hope is there for the men who spend more than 21 hours each day locked in their cells?  

“There are many other prisons like Winchester. This is the fourth urgent notification since May, after Wandsworth, Rochester and Manchester, and there are likely to be more in the near future.

“It is time to put things right. The independent review of sentencing announced this week is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver a more humane and effective response to crime. We must grab it with both hands.”

Prisons Minister Lord Timpson said: “This report illustrates the scale of the crisis this government inherited in our prisons.”

Mark Day, Deputy Director of the Prison Reform Trust said: “Winchester is the fourth prison this year to have been issued with an urgent notification. Extraordinarily violent; little to nothing to occupy prisoners’ time constructively—fuelling frustration, drug use and debt; and people forced to live and work in dreadful conditions which inspectors questioned whether they were fit for habitation.
 
“Inspectors are right to lay the blame on systematic failings within the prison service and Ministry of Justice. This week’s sentencing review highlights a dawning realisation at the very top of government that a radical change to our approach to imprisonment is needed.”