A prison guard at Pentonville Prison had both her wrists broken trying to separate two gang members during a fight.

Shay Dhury, who has been a prison officer at the Caledonian Road prison for almost five years, told the BBC about her injuries earlier this week.

She said that she believes gang-related crime is one of the main reasons there are so many people in prisons.

Pentonville Prison reportedly experiences up to 30 incidents a day – which often involve blood and violence, and sometimes even death.

There were seven suicides in the Victorian prison between 2019 and 2023, and 104 incidents of self-harm in March this year.

Shay said: “They go for each other - and when two people go, other people go.

“It ends up us just trying to stop the fight. It gets really messy sometimes - stressful, yeah.”

Last year, prison inspectors found that Pentonville Prison is an unfit place for prisoners to live.

The building was described as “crumbling and decrepit” by The Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) for Pentonville Prison.

The watchdog said that men were crammed, usually in pairs, into cells measuring 12ft by 8ft where they ate and slept, often with an unscreened toilet.

The prison is currently operating close to capacity – the safe maximum of prisoners it can hold is 1,205, despite originally being designed to for 520 prisoners.

More than 75% of Pentonville inmates are on remand, which means they are awaiting trial.

One 38-year-old prisoner who is inside for drug offences told the BBC he once woke to find his cellmate trying to hang himself.

He said: “It’s hard to rehabilitate yourself in a place where you've got gang violence, postcode wars, drug violence, money wars.

“[Staff are] trying to do this, this, this and this - but now you want help as well? So, it's hard.”

The BBC report comes a week before the Government is set to release thousands of prisoners early. Only 16 people are expected to be released from Pentonville.

But the prison’s governor, Simon Drysdale, said that this will alleviate some of the pressure.

He added that more people who’ve been sent to Pentonville can then be transferred on to other jails because they will also have more available cells.

He said: “Our total focus is on making sure that we've got space and capacity.

“That takes up a large proportion of our thinking space and a lot of the staff's time, and because of that we don't get as much time as we would like to think about things like getting men into more meaningful work.”