The prison was given a full inspection in December 2025, the full report can be read on the HM Inspectorate of Prisons website, just follow the links below. In their latest report the inspectors said:
HMP Maidstone is a category C training prison and the dedicated resettlement prison for adult male foreign nationals, holding 526 men from 94 different nationalities against an operational capacity of 583, run by HM Prison and Probation Service. Inspectors rated safety reasonably good, an improvement from not sufficiently good, and purposeful activity not sufficiently good, an improvement from Poor, while respect remained reasonably good and preparation for release remained not sufficiently good, both unchanged. Even with safety moving up a band, use of force had almost doubled since the last inspection and there had been three self-inflicted deaths, so inspectors were cautious about calling it unambiguous progress.
Eighty-eight per cent of prisoners said most staff treated them with respect, well above the comparator average, and 82% said their visitors were treated respectfully too. Self-harm had fallen and was lower than at the other two dedicated foreign-national prisons, and the multi-faith chaplaincy had been extended to include Romanian Orthodox and Albanian Muslim chaplains who also help with interpretation. The Shannon Trust’s peer-mentoring scheme for literacy and numeracy was praised for its individually tailored support.
Inspectors nonetheless found weak gate security and minimal CCTV had let drugs into the prison, with a 27% positive rate on random mandatory drug testing, and only around a third of the intelligence-led tests that should have happened were actually carried out because of staff shortages. Professional interpreters were under-used despite being available, a particular concern given the almost entirely foreign-national population, and living conditions were poor, with outdated buildings and obsolete windows. Release planning was not robust, partly because Home Office decisions on removal or release were not made in time, leaving too few proper resettlement reviews.
Charlie Taylor
HM Chief Inspector of Prisons
January 2026
To read the full reports, go to the HM Inspectorate of Prisons website or follow the links below:
| Inspection report (PDF), Report on an unannounced inspection of HMP Maidstone by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons (1–11 December 2025, published 23 March 2026) | Easy read summary of the 2025 inspection report |
| Action plan, HM Prison and Probation Service action plan in response to the 2025 inspection of HMP Maidstone | |