The prison was given an Independent Review of Progress in March 2026, 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 Pentonville is a category B local and reception prison in Islington, London, run by HM Prison and Probation Service, holding around 1,189 men against an operational capacity of 1,205. A full inspection in July 2025 triggered an Urgent Notification, rating safety Poor, a decline from not sufficiently good, respect and purposeful activity both unchanged at not sufficiently good and Poor respectively, and preparation for release declining to Poor, down from not sufficiently good. This Independent Review of Progress, carried out in March 2026, checks progress against the concerns raised in the Urgent Notification rather than re-scoring the four healthy prison tests.
Inspectors found good progress on leadership, on support for prisoners in their early days in custody, and on sentence management, where a backlog of sentence-calculation errors had been cut from 76 cases to 9. Reasonable progress had been made on safeguarding and care for prisoners at risk of suicide and self-harm and on staff-prisoner relationships, helped by new “floorwalker” roles and an extended officer induction programme, alongside improved reception processes and a new digital induction record for each prisoner.
Inspectors nonetheless found insufficient progress on time out of cell and access to purposeful activity, with around a third of prisoners still unlocked for only a fraction of the day and only around 15% engaged in activity during core-day checks. Reception delays of five to six hours persisted for some new arrivals, and the quality of self-harm monitoring documents remained inconsistent. A new “golden hour” unlock period had been introduced but many prisoners said it was too short to complete basic tasks like cleaning, laundry and applications.
Charlie Taylor
HM Chief Inspector of Prisons
March 2026
To read the full reports, go to the HM Inspectorate of Prisons website or follow the links below:
| Independent Review of Progress report, HM Inspectorate of Prisons review of progress at HMP Pentonville (16–18 March 2026, published 27 April 2026) | Inspection report (PDF), Report on an unannounced inspection of HMP Pentonville by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons (30 June–10 July 2025, published 30 September 2025) |
| Easy read summary of the 2025 inspection report | |