The first category C prison has been issued with an urgent notification to improve after a “decade of decline”, the prisons watchdog has said.

Rising violence and self-harm, decrepit conditions, and widespread illicit drug use were all found at HMP Rochester, during an inspection.

In light of the many issues, HM Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) has written to Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood to invoke an urgent notification for the improvement of the prison.

This requires a response and action plan from the government within 28 days.

The training prison was inspected from 12-22 August and is the seventh prison to be issued with an urgent notification since November 2022.

It comes as there was only 100 male prison spaces left last week, amid the ongoing crisis.

HMP Rochester was found to have suffered a decade of successively poor and declining inspections, HMIP said, adding that the prison has been previously warned about inspector’s concerns.

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Conditions inside the prison were described as “squalid” and “decrepit” with infestations of rats and mice plaguing older buildings, the inspectorate said.

Prisoners resorted to creating barriers from cardboard to try and block gaps under cell doors to keep vermin out.

It was some of the worst conditions inspectors had seen in recent years, the report added.

As safety was said to be deteriorating, wings were described as “chaotic” and the rate of prisoner assaults rocketed, up 67% in the last year, as self-harm rose too.

Since the last inspection, there have been two cases of prisoners taking their own lives.

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Drugs were endemic within HMP Rochester, with 42% of prisoners testing positive when randomly tested.

More than half of men told inspectors it was easy to get drugs – including those prescribed to other prisoners.

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HMP Rochester was “fundamentally failing” at its focus of getting inmates into education, work, and training to improve their lives on release, HMIP added.

Reflecting on these and the plethora of other failings, Charlie Taylor, HM chief inspector of prisons, described HMP Rochester as “a prison of concern for many years”.

He continued: “This decade of decline, which has accelerated in the past 18 months, shows a shocking level of neglect.

“It is particularly concerning that a category C prison, the workhorse of the prison service, should require an urgent notification for our concerns to be taken seriously.”

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Prisons and probation minister Lord Timpson said: “This is a deeply concerning report and yet another example of the dire state the last government left the prison system in.

“We owe it to our staff, doing their best in squalid conditions and under the threat of violence, to drag the system out of this chaos.

“This started with the immediate action the new Lord Chancellor took to end the overcrowding crisis in our prisons in July.

“In the 20 years I’ve worked with the prison service, I’ve never seen things so bad.

“This new government will grip this crisis and ensure that prisons like Rochester, that have been left to decay, stop breeding crime and start cutting it.”

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