Violence at HMP Wandsworth is measurably down, a new reform wing is showing real results, and the prison’s governor allowed independent monitors to see it all, including the rats on the very wing he wants the country to copy.
For over two years, the Wandsworth Prison Improvement Campaign (WPIC) has documented a prison where every sign of progress has been accompanied by a death, a failure, or a broken promise. What the WPIC found on its third visit, on 4 February 2026, is the first credible evidence of change inside, and confirmation that a man had died there just weeks before.
That death has since been confirmed as Gulwali Stanekzay, 25, who died on 17 January 2026. We reported his death on 8 February as the 27th case referred to the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman connected to HMP Wandsworth. The PPO investigation remains open.
Governor Andy Davy’s figures, presented to WPIC during the visit, show three improvements since April 2025. Prisoner-on-prisoner violence stands at 267 incidents, down 70 on the same period the previous year. Assaults on staff have fallen to 151, a reduction of 99. Self-harm incidents total 373, down 78.
Understaffing was identified as a root cause when the Chief Inspector issued an Urgent Notification in May 2024, describing Wandsworth as a place of “deaths, drugs and despair”. The prison is now fully staffed, slightly above complement.
Two new units
The centrepiece of Davy’s reform effort is G-wing, opened in November 2025. It holds 120 men and runs on a Scandinavian-inspired model: a dedicated 15-officer team, selected and trained by Unlocked Graduates, with officers choosing to work there and receiving specialist preparation before they start. Men are unlocked from 8am to noon and 2pm to 5pm, plus one evening hour Monday to Thursday. WPIC’s report finds the regime working. A second unit opened at Pentonville this month.
G-wing also has rats. The WPIC report notes their presence in the very wing presented as a model of reform. The showers are in “disgusting” condition.
This is the Wandsworth Prison pattern that two years of coverage has documented: genuine effort coexisting with basic failures that could be fixed if someone decided to fix them.
A second specialist unit, for neurodivergent prisoners, opened a few weeks before the visit. Capacity 16; budget £1,500. The equipment was provided by the Wandsworth Prison Welfare Trust because the institutional budget was too small to cover it.
What hasn’t changed
The prison holds 1,478 men and has 1,188 activity spaces, a shortfall the governor acknowledges. Roughly 290 men have no allocated activity at any given time.
Staff are still hired through a national system with no local involvement and without ever visiting the prison first. WPIC’s report calls this “extraordinary.”
Men are still arriving from court at 8:30pm. Men are still being released with no accommodation. WPIC volunteers have watched prisoners leave the gate with sleeping bags and nowhere to go, a direct route back into the criminal justice system, at a prison that has been under intensive scrutiny for nearly two years.
The governor’s access and what it revealed
Governor Davy’s predecessor, Katie Price, resigned in May 2024 following the WPIC campaign. Davy has taken a different approach: WPIC has access, and during this visit, the governor shared his own data, walked monitors through the wings, and confirmed a recent death himself.
That openness makes the persistent failures more striking, not less. The rats, the showers, the recruitment system, the men leaving with sleeping bags: none of it is hidden. The governor is not unaware of them. They continue anyway.
The WPIC report records his words on the death directly: “Although this was very regrettable, his initial review of the circumstances indicated that the prison had not failed in its duty of care.” Putney.news has previously documented at least one case in which an initial “no failure” conclusion was later overturned by the ombudsman. The PPO investigation into Stanekzay’s death is ongoing. The Prison Service did not respond to questions submitted before publication.
The January 2026 Ombudsman report into Sebastião Lucas described a prison still failing to keep suicidal prisoners safe. The HMIP inspection in May 2025 found progress “limited and fragile.” The WPIC visit in February 2026 finds violence down, two units working, and the same structural failures in place. The question is whether reform to recruitment, activity provision, and release planning follows the cultural changes visible on individual wings.
HMIP is due to inspect again sometime in 2026. That report will show whether what WPIC saw in February is the beginning of something real.
How to get involved
The Wandsworth Prison Improvement Campaign welcomes donations of sleeping bags and tents for the Leavers Lounge, which supports men leaving the prison with nowhere to go. Contact WPIC via wandsworthprisoncampaign.co.uk.
The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman is running a General Stakeholder Survey, open to anyone, including families affected by deaths in custody. It closes 31 March 2026: smartsurvey.co.uk/s/GSS25-26.
Anyone wishing to monitor HMP Wandsworth’s progress ahead of the HMIP inspection can follow the inspectorate at hmiprisons.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk.
The WPIC report from the 4 February 2026 visit is publicly available at wandsworthprisoncampaign.co.uk. This is Putney.news’s 17th story in an ongoing series on HMP Wandsworth.
