Drug dealers are breaking into jail to provide mollycoddled inmates with their fix, it’s been reported.

A prison officers’ leader has claimed prisoners are actually passing up the chance of escape because they prefer to spend time behind bars where life is easier and the drugs are cheaper.

Glyn Travis told the Daily Mail that staff can’t handle the tide of illegal drugs coming in, and laid into Labour’s approach to prisons.


Mr Travis, assistant general secretary of the Prison Officers’ Association, told the paper: “Drugs are coming into prisons at a rate that’s so dramatic that drugs in prisons are actually cheaper than on the outside.



“There’s a classic case in Yorkshire where members of the public were climbing over the prison walls to take drugs into the prison.

“They put up ladders to climb over the walls, but prisoners were so comfortable in the environment they were living in that none of them tried to climb up the ladders and escape.”

He went on to describe how inmates are provided with breakfast in bed, satellite TV and free telephone calls.

He added: “They get cash bonuses for good behaviour, and prison staff are forced to deal with them in such a subservient way it’s ridiculous.

“Prison is no longer a deterrent. It is merely an occupational hazard.”

Tory justice spokesman Nick Herbert savaged the prison system in light of Mr Travis’s comments.

He told the paper: “Prisons should be places of hard work and restoration, preparing offenders to go straight. Instead we have over crowded jails where drugs are rife, prisoners are too often idle and there is little purposeful activity.

“It is time for a fundamental shake-up of our failing prisons system.”

A Ministry of Justice spokesman defended the conditions in prisons, saying “harsh” regimes would not lead to a reduction in reoffending.

He said prisoners who misbehaved could have their TV access taken away and those who had sets in their cells paid £1 a week to rent them.

He said the average wage for a prisoner was under £10 a week.

“All prisoners are provided with a breakfast pack each evening which they eat in their cells in the morning.

“If a cooked breakfast is provided, prisoners have to collect it from the wing servery and take it back to eat in their cells.

“The punishment of the court is loss of liberty – harsh regimes do not lead to rehabilitation or a reduction in re-offending.”