The Guardian has been granted unprecedented access to two prisons to see the impact of funding cuts. In the first of two reports, Amelia Gentleman finds broken windows and bored inmates at the UK’s most overcrowded jail

Ten days before Christmas, in the middle of the night, a drone crashed on to the asphalt courtyard that separates Wandsworth prison’s A-wing and the governor’s office near the estate’s outer perimeter. A white package measuring 20cm by 10cm by 10cm had been suspended from the drone with brown tape and string. It contained mobile phones and some drugs.

As soon as you enter Wandsworth prison, you notice that dozens of windows on this side of the four-storey A-wing have been smashed. This level of vandalism inside a prison is a bit startling, but it’s such a common problem that prison officers pay little attention to the scale of the damage until asked about it. Each cell window has three narrow transparent panels and most cells have at least one broken pane; prisoners have stuffed duvets and towels into the cavities, or patched them up with flattened milk cartons to keep out the January cold. The prison’s head of security believes that some prisoners are smashing holes in their windows in order to receive deliveries of drugs flown in by drones.



The drone that crashed in December was quite large and carried a camera to help its owner guide it to its destination. The flight was made at a time when the prison is most vulnerable, during the night hours when there are only seven prison officers on duty, responsible for the 1,600 prisoners locked in their cells. Since last February, the deliveries have become a fairly routine occurrence. Several other crashed drones have been discovered on the roof of the prison, similarly loaded with mobile phones and drugs.



Most striking is how unremarkable Wandsworth’s staff find these episodes. Running Wandsworth prison, the UK’s biggest and most overcrowded institution, is such a challenging job that drones, drug deliveries and broken windows are barely noteworthy incidents in the daily struggle to manage a vast Victorian building designed to house 963 men and currently squeezing in another 650. The last two years have been particularly bleak for Wandsworth, with 15 deaths in custody, seven of them self-inflicted, one murder of an inmate by his cellmate (who smashed the shared television on his head), and an excoriating inspection report that highlighted how overcrowding and “severe staffing shortages” compromised the prison’s ability to meet prisoners’ needs, leaving about a third of inmates routinely locked up for 23 hours a day.



The prison’s budget has been cut from about £30m in 2010 to £21m last year, and the number of staff per inmate has dropped by at least 15%. The prison’s new governor valiantly tries to make light of these cuts, suggesting there are some things his staff can do for free – smiling at prisoners, greeting them with a friendly hello – but he concedes that staff morale is probably hovering at around three and a half out of 10. (“Maybe four on a good day.”) The mood of the staff has been worsened by uncertainty about whether the prison is to close. The justice secretary, Michael Gove, has promised to shut “ageing and ineffective” Victorian prisons generally, but no indication has been given as to whether Wandsworth is on his list.



A two-day visit to the prison in January revealed an energetic new management team determined to improve conditions but still battling with all the problems described in last year’s inspection: too many prisoners locked up for too long and not enough staff to do their jobs effectively. Officers readily concede that their work is harder because there are fewer of them.



“We would love to be able to give prisoners a lot more time and care but with the cuts we aren’t able to give them that time,” says Adrian Thompson, one of the people in charge of preventing suicides in prison. With 12 self-inflicted deaths since 2010, Wandsworth is ranked joint third out of all prisons in England and Wales in terms of the number of suicides, according to the campaign organisation Inquest.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Inside Wandsworth prison. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

For the past four years, since cuts to the prison service were introduced, there has been very little opportunity to see how prison regimes have been affected. The former justice secretary Chris Grayling introduced an almost blanket ban on media requests to visit prisons. Gove has a more open approach, and granted the Guardian unprecedented access to both Wandsworth and the modern G4S-run prison Oakwood.



A tougher place

Staff acknowledge that the cuts introduced in 2012 have made this prison a tougher place, where inmates can spend longer locked up. Prisoners are no longer unlocked for breakfast or lunch, so those who aren’t working or studying only come out of their cells to collect an evening meal, and for a shower, association on the wing and yard exercise slots. Staffing shortages in November and December meant that there were a number of days when there weren’t enough people to supervise the flow of prisoners to work, or to let them out for showers and exercise.



“It drives you mad if you’re locked up 23 hours a day. You start going mentally daft, walking up and down your cell half the day, lying down for the rest. I didn’t smoke much before; now I’m smoking my lungs out,” a 27-year-old remand prisoner from Glasgow says of the past three months, his first experience of prison. Accustomed to working at his family’s kebab restaurant, he says he has been asking to work since he arrived, to alleviate the boredom of life in the cell, but has been given no job.



The new governor, Ian Bickers, understands that Wandsworth will have to change dramatically if it is going to meet the government’s new vision for prisons. “What Michael Gove wants to do is to provide opportunities for men to learn, to rehabilitate themselves, to have a second chance. I don’t think you can do a mega amount of that here,” he says.



He is determined to improve things, but it is clearly a monumental and often thankless task. “Would I want to lock two people up in a room that’s 12 by 10 with a toilet in the corner every day, which was designed for one? Probably not actually. It is what you become used to. It is the system that we work with.”



Ministry of Justice figures in January show the prison is running at 166% over the “certified normal capacity”. Bickers says: “I don’t feel it is overcrowded, but the prison wasn’t built to house 1,600 people, so the workshop spaces aren’t there, the education spaces aren’t there, the physical healthcare provision isn’t where it should be. In an ideal world I wouldn’t want to double prisoners up, but sentencing policy has driven much more custody time for longer than we’ve seen at any other point in history and we haven’t had a prison-building plan that keeps pace with that.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A prisoner in his cell. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Drones and drugs

The rise in what the prison service classifies (with only a hint of melodrama) as “drone attacks” shows how the resource-stretched prison is losing an unequal battle to keep drugs and other illicit items out, while criminal gangs are using increasingly sophisticated means to get them in. It’s just one example of a stark loss of control by staff. Until a year ago the main source of drugs into the building was through visits and the occasional “throw over” – packages hidden in rubbish, old drinks bottles or occasionally a dead pigeon, chucked over the fence using ball-thrower sticks designed for dog owners.

But over the past few months, night staff have often picked up the noise of something similar to the buzz of a garden strimmer over the televised security systems, indicating that a drone is hovering over the building. Staff attempt to manipulate the security cameras to work out where it might be headed, but they admit they are not always successful.

“We try to intercept them,” the prison’s new head of security, who started his job at the end of November, says in an upbeat way, before emitting a bitter snort and correcting himself. “We try to intercept them.” With so many prison windows broken, it isn’t easy, because often the package has been delivered and the drone has flown back to its owner, possibly standing on nearby Wandsworth Common, before staff have made it to the area.

“A high number of windows have been smashed. The cells have poor ventilation,” he says, explaining that in the summer people often punch a hole in the window to get fresh air, and that sometimes prisoners smash their windows simply because they are angry at being locked up for long periods at a time. But staff are increasingly convinced that the broken windows may be connected to the drones. “This is one of the concerns we have, is that it is to make this easier.” It costs more than £50 to replace a broken window, and the works team (contracted out to the private company Carillion) has not kept up with the pace of the damage.



Gove has said dealing with drugs in prison should be “the first priority of those of us charged with prison policy. Unless offenders are kept safe and secure, in decent surroundings, free from violence, disorder and drugs, then we cannot begin to prepare them for a better, more moral, life.”

But this is easier said than done. From the photographs on the head of security’s desk, the drone that crashed on the yard before Christmas looks like it is a Chinese-made DJI Phantom 3 Advanced Quadcopter with camera, which has 23 minutes of flying time and can be bought for about £720. Staff are confronted with high-end technology to bring drugs in, but are hampered by underfunded and malfunctioning equipment on the inside. At 3pm the clock in his cluttered office says 8.45; it hasn’t worked for months.

In the prison reception centre, where dozens of new prisoners are processed each day, there is a Boss (body orifice security scanner) chair, a metal detector that you sit on, designed to detect mobile phones or sim cards hidden internally. “Our Boss chair doesn’t work. We got it second-hand from another prison; it never worked,” a prison officer in the hot, windowless reception area explains, (with no discernible dismay), raising his voice over music on the radio.

Instead there is a large airport security-style walkthrough scanner, gleaming and occupying most of the space in the centre of the reception area – but it turns out that this doesn’t work either, and hasn’t been in use since it was installed six months ago because of concerns over whether it will be safe for prison staff to stand next to it all day. “It’s being tested at the moment. You can’t just turn it on and hope for the best,” the prison officer says. “We’re pretty confident that it will be safe. In a few years’ time when our hair falls out and we start glowing, then we’ll know for sure.”



Meanwhile, drugs are coming into the prison routinely, and often making prisoners ill. Later that day, the vast prison gates are opened to let an ambulance in to the courtyard, and three paramedics make their way to a cell to attend to a prisoner who has had a bad reaction to smoking synthetic cannabinoids.



Passionate staff

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The prison’s motorcycle maintenance course is over-subscribed. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Despite the challenges of austerity, many of the staff appear personable and committed to making Wandsworth a better place, and a number of good programmes are on offer here. The motorcycle maintenance course is popular and oversubscribed; the prison radio station, Radio Wanno, is run by enthusiastic prisoners, full of positive comments about the staff who have trained them. Graduates from the drug rehabilitation course Rapt (overseen by the Rehabilitation for Addicted Prisoners Trust) talk passionately about how they have been helped. In the education wing, a cheerful English teacher listens to prisoners reading out their compositions, praises their hard work and tells them that they should view words as their tools.



You want to see the good things, but it is hard not to get distracted by the things that aren’t going right. Inside the prison, the floors have been cleaned so meticulously by prisoner orderlies that they glow with reflected strip lighting. But outside in the exercise yard, there are squalid heaps of rubbish hurled by prisoners from the (broken) windows – old shoes, unwanted prison uniform, food wrapping. Lines of ripped-up green sheets are visible from a number of windows, some looped between windows – an illicit method of swapping contraband between cells. Officers pay little attention to them and shrug wearily when asked why they aren’t removed; staff shortages mean there isn’t always time.

Staff cuts and suicide rates

Some officers are quite clear that the cuts to staff have made it harder to do their job. Inquests into most of the suicides in Wandsworth are ongoing, but the deputy head of prisoner safety, Adrian Thompson, who joined the prison in September and is responsible for stopping inmates from killing themselves, recognises that colleagues have less time to devote to unhappy prisoners than they would have previously.



“The cuts in staffing potentially have an impact because we can’t spend as long with the prisoner as perhaps we could have done 15 years ago. Passing the time of day can make a prisoner feel better, just standing and chatting, letting the prisoner offload, without saying, ‘I’m sorry I have to stop you there, I have to go now’,” he says.



“Two or three years ago, the service saw a big change. That had the biggest impact in terms of the support we give to the prisoners. A lot of experienced staff have gone. It is not just the staff shortages, it is also the experience that has gone as well. The mentoring of staff – that doesn’t happen. There is less time for prisoners to be listened to and to share their problems. There is potentially less time out of the cell.”



It is striking how the surge in suicides at Wandsworth coincides with the cuts to staff, but Thompson argues that the causes are more complex. “We have more prisoners with mental illness who could be getting better care elsewhere,” he says. Prisoners who really want to kill themselves will often succeed despite the best efforts of the prison. The prison cannot put everyone on constant observation, and prefers not to take away clothing or bedding or put people into anti-ligature outfits because it is so undignified.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Green sheets hanging from a window. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

He resents how prison staff are criticised for every death. “We save people every day. We never get anything positive about us,” he says, pointing out that for every death there are dozens of lives saved. “It really upsets me that people never see anything positive about the prison service. All prisoners are behind walls, and no one cares what we do; no one sees what we are doing that is good. We’re like nurses, saving people every day. It’s our job and we do a good job.

“On a daily basis there are probably three or four acts of self-harm. The staff deal with it – giving people support, letting them talk to family, getting them a packet of cigarettes, or out to an education class, finding ways to calm them.”



Thompson feels staff should get more credit for the work they do helping “prisoners who have sliced their necks open, the officers who held the wound to stop the bleeding, cleaning the blood off the walls afterwards”, the female officer who helped staunch the blood after one inmate chopped off his own penis. “Recently a prisoner set fire to his clothes and his cell. Staff intervened and stopped him before it became another suicide.”

‘The traffickers will kill me anyway’

When he has the time, Thompson does what he can to support prisoners individually. A prisoner in his 20s trafficked into this country from eastern Europe and awaiting extradition has recently expressed a wish to die. He told staff he had waited until after Christmas because he didn’t want to ruin anyone’s holiday, but he has been found sleeping with a ligature, plaited from a bedsheet, around his neck and is just waiting for the right moment. A few months ago, a friend of his in the prison succeeded in killing himself.



It is awkward to be whisked down to meet someone called in without warning to give details of his suicidal feelings, and it is a profoundly uncomfortable conversation. Speaking in a side room in the basement segregation unit, where he has been given a job to get him out of his cell, he explains that he is terrified that he will be killed by his traffickers if he is sent home. His mouth twitches and he fiddles with a green piece of string plucked from his trouser hem. He is on the brink of tears. A huge portrait of the Queen dressed in tiara and party clothes smiles down on him benignly. In the corridor outside, the shouting from disturbed prisoners (some of whom have been incarcerated down in isolation for several weeks) doesn’t cease. “The problem is more serious than with the prison. They will kill me anyway,” he says.



So far, the interventions of the prison have kept him alive, Thompson claims. “We laugh and we joke. I will listen to him.” Each time they meet, Thompson makes the eastern European prisoner agree that they will see each other again in a couple of days and they shake hands; once he has extracted that promise, he feels more confident that things will be alright. For much of the past six months, the prisoner has been under constant watch through the night, checked by an agency nurse every hour, but it is a procedure that can be exhausting and isn’t a long-term solution. Thompson regrets that he cannot give similar attention to more vulnerable inmates.



The prison chaplain is also clear that cuts have made work here harder. “I have been concerned about whether the place is safe; last year in particular, this was a difficult place. There was quite a lot of bang up, and that just raises the tension for prisoners,” he says. “You can’t take a third of the budget out of the system and not take away some of the time that staff have with prisoners. This isn’t a place to warehouse people, we have to change their lives too.”



Prison officer pay, which starts at about £19,000, is no longer enough to fund most rents in Wandsworth, or anywhere in London, and more and more staff are commuting long distances to get to work. “I am concerned that the level of remuneration for people coming in at the bottom is insufficient to attract people of adequate calibre. People used to have a sense of vocation. There are people who are frustrated that they can’t deliver what they used to be able to deliver. We have had a lot of people leaving,” the chaplain says.



Prison officers acknowledge that there have been real problems with getting prisoners to the gym, library and to education and work. The prison officer in charge of reducing reoffending, Dominik Ceglowski, says: “There is a tremendous will to get the guys to education, but over the past three months it has been rather choppy. November was dreadful. December was quite bad. When there’s a shortage of staff, that impacts on education.”



Because staffing is so tight, anything unplanned can mean prisoners are locked up for longer. If a prisoner goes to hospital, he has to be accompanied by two members of staff, which means that over 24 hours (split into three shifts) the prison loses six members of staff. “We had five people in hospital, which means there were 30 members of staff tied up doing that, which meant classes were reduced,” Ceglowski says. Coroners court hearings connected with the 15 deaths inside the prison have also taken staff off site and led to prisoners being locked inside their cells for longer.

The difficulty of getting men out to work is displayed most starkly in the sewing workshop, a quiet room full of rows of antiquated sewing machines, so untouched by technological advances that the scene looks confected for a stylised 1960s drama. The line manager has a weekly target of 1,000 pairs of prison-issue blue cotton boxer shorts, but owing to a shortage of prisoners willing to sew and the number of days when work is cancelled because of short-staffing, currently they are managing only around 240.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The sewing workshop. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

In E-wing, where prisoners are housed on their first night, a 27-year-old kitchen porter has just had his first night in prison after being handed an 18-month sentence for ABH (assault occasioning actual bodily harm). Each year about 32,000 prisoners come through Wandsworth, about 6,000 of whom, like this man, have never been in prison before. He was not expecting a custodial sentence and is upset about not having had a chance to call his employers to explain that he won’t be coming to work for a while, or an opportunity to talk to his young children. He has had no sleep because the experience has been so strange, disturbed by the banging of doors and the constant knocking from other cells. The cell he is in alone should have a kettle and television but has neither, because the prison has a shortage. “I was praying for someone to come and let me out. I would love to speak to my family. I just want to speak to my son,” he says.

The wing’s most senior prison officer says he is disappointed that the prisoner hasn’t been given a chance to have a phone call, and surprised that he hasn’t been unlocked for exercise, but isn’t taken aback by the complaint about the missing television. The prison gets allocated 12 new televisions a month, which isn’t enough to replace those that get smashed or that simply break because they are so old.

‘Running prisons is very challenging’

Bickers, the governor, who started work six months ago, argues that you can’t blame all the prison’s problems on the reduction in staff – via a process called benchmarking, completed in 2012, in which the needs of the prison were analysed and a new, reduced quota of staff per prisoner allocated. He acknowledges that “benchmarking has made prison tougher in the sense that more people will be locked up for longer”, because there are fewer staff around. This is not unique to Wandsworth. “You have seen that across every prison in the country – resources have been reduced.”

He adds: “Running prisons is very challenging and it would be very easy to blame a whole host of things – organisational change, austerity cuts and government policy – for us not being able to do our jobs as effectively as we can do.”



Prison staff have a weekly “decency meeting” to assess whether prison conditions are improving, and carefully compiled charts show that things are moving in a positive direction. He invites the Guardian to return in a few months to see how he is getting on.

He mixes cheerful determination to makes things better with impatience about the things he has to deal with as governor. He thinks there is a toughness to prisoners that wasn’t there seven years ago, and argues that while it is very easy for the media to criticise prison staff for the state of prisons, “some of it is down to the prisoners inside”. He says: “I want my staff to say good morning, but if what you get back when you say good morning is ‘Fuck off’ or worse, it makes life very difficult.”

But it’s easy to see why inmates might feel inclined to swear at the governor. Numerous prisoners express their frustration at the limitations of the regime after the staff reductions. “You go mad inside your cell with nothing to do,” says a 24-year-old Lithuanian who has also been locked up for around 23 hours a day for the past seven and a half months waiting to be extradited on theft charges. He shares the cell with another Lithuanian, with whom he is now barely on speaking terms. In theory, prisoners are meant to be able to visit the prison gym once a week (down from three times before staff cuts). He has never been, and thinks staff have either no time or no inclination to take him.

His cellmate, who is watching television from the bottom bunk, says nothing. One step from their bed is the surface where they eat their meals, and next to that is the cell toilet, screened off by two orange prison blankets that they have strung up for privacy because the prison-issue screen is missing. “How are you meant to use the toilet when he is sitting watching television? He says ‘I am going to turn around’ but it is humiliating.”



He looks at his silent cellmate and laughs, not unkindly, “I am living with this person in here for seven months. I want to kill him.”