Violence, self-harm and disorder have fallen sharply on HMP Wandsworth’s reform wing, six months into a pilot that changed only one thing: who runs it.
Assaults are down 45 per cent, self-harm down 57 per cent and disorder down 62 per cent compared with the rest of the prison. Staff sickness has halved, and officers are staying in the job at rates far higher than elsewhere in the prison; almost no drugs reach the wing at all.
Those figures are interim results from a randomised controlled trial, independently evaluated by the Policy Institute at King’s College London. Unlocked Graduates, the charity that selects and trains the wing’s officers, is paying for the trial and the training; the researchers say the trends have not yet reached statistical significance, and a final report is due in December 2026.
The stark improvements should be seen in that light, but even if the final results are less impressive, they do still point to significant improvement. Notably, the prisons themselves have received no extra money from the Ministry of Justice or HMPPS for the project, so resource constraints are not a reason to limit rollout.
The wing, known officially as G-wing and to campaigners as the Vanguard wing, opened at HMP Wandsworth last November. Nothing about the building changed, and the prison did not add staff: the ratio of officers to prisoners is the same as on every other wing. What changed was who those officers were and how they got there. Existing Wandsworth staff had to apply, and were picked for qualities including how they build relationships with prisoners and whether they actually believe people can change. They visited a high-performing prison elsewhere, get training from Unlocked Graduates every fortnight, and have more say over how the wing is run day to day.
Every man on G-wing is automatically given the extra privileges normally reserved for good behaviour, and is out of his cell for around eight hours a day, against four to six hours typical elsewhere in the prison. Most have a key worker among the wing’s own officers, and when someone misbehaves, staff say the response is a conversation, not a stripped privilege. There’s a day room with a television, a book room borrowed from the library, and hot breakfasts the men eat together rather than alone. Prisoners are allocated to the wing at random from reception, not as a reward for good behaviour, so it can’t be accused of holding just the easier men.
Improvements noticed
The prison’s own inspectors have noticed too. HM Chief Inspector of Prisons Charlie Taylor visited G-wing and said relationships there had been “transformed”, the regime was “unrecognisably good” and behaviour was “far better”.
We reported on the wing’s early results in March, when it had been running for only a few months and the prison’s governor, Andy Davy, was already pointing to it as a model for the rest of the estate.
Now, according to the Wandsworth Prison Improvement Campaign (WPIC), the calmer conditions appear to be spreading. The campaign group says it has had a report from inside the prison suggesting some of what makes the Vanguard wing work has rubbed off on the neighbouring H-wing: men there are said to be out of their cells for around nine hours a day, with a new kitchen where they can cook their own food, and at least one officer reportedly more approachable since moving across.
That claim rests on a single account, relayed by WPIC from someone inside the prison and there has been no official statement that anything on H-wing has actually changed but, again, early signs of improvement are there. Wandsworth’s governor has told campaigners that violence across the whole prison, not just G-wing, has also fallen over the past year, even as it has risen nationally.
None of this erases the rest of Wandsworth’s record: prisoner deaths remain under investigation by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, and a finding in September showed two-thirds of its cells still can’t detect fire. Wandsworth Prison has an appalling record and is repeatedly one of the worst prisons in the country for overcrowding, deaths and violence. It has also been at the centre of a number of scandals in recent years.
But the Vanguard wing’s early results are the most promising sign yet that something inside the prison is actually working, even if the people running the trial won’t call it proven yet. Whether it holds up, and whether it spreads further, officially or otherwise, is what happens next.
