Face of Nation : Prison inmates have been resorting to throwing human waste out of their cell windows because of a lack of toilets, a report has found. The Independent Monitoring Board said it was “appalled at the lack of in-cell sanitation” at Surrey’s HMP Coldingley.
It said prisoners were forced to use buckets in their cells at night and some would “inevitably… dispose of human waste via cell windows”. The Ministry of Justice has pledged to “address this long-standing issue”. More than 350 men live in cells without lavatories or sinks at the Category C prison near Bisley, the report said.
HMP Coldingley was one of six institutions named as a “reform prison” in 2016, with governors granted extra powers in what the government called the “biggest shake-up of the prisons system since the Victorian era”.
Heather Cook, chair of the monitoring board at Coldingley, said the prison’s biggest problem continued to be the “poor state” of four wings built in 1969, which were “almost impossible to keep clean”.
It came alongside a commitment to spend £1.3bn to “replace decrepit, ageing prisons with modern establishments”. The board’s report said the “night sanitation arrangement” at the jail was “degrading and totally unsatisfactory”. At night, inmates had to press a buzzer and join a queue to be let out of their cell to use communal toilets.
The report said queues could be long and a prisoner’s “only other option is to use a pot in his cell and then to ‘slop out’ in the morning”. “HMP Coldingley, which was built in the 1960s, is one of the few prisons with shared toilets and installing in-cell facilities would cut its capacity in half.”
Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said the problem stemmed from prisoners being locked in their cells during the day and “sleeping through their sentences”, meaning they were more likely to be awake at night, needing the toilet.
A Prison Service spokesman said: “All prisoners have access to proper sanitation facilities and nearly 99% of them have access to in-cell toilets.
He said prisoners can access a toilet at all times during the day and night through the use of computer controlled electronic unlocking at night. “The overnight system is due to be upgraded next year,” he said.
