I was a prison governor for 10 years. This is why corruption is engulfing our criminal justice system
I was a prison officer and governor for a decade in the 1990s. During this purple patch for the service, the men and women who wore the uniform largely did so with pride and either had years of 'jailcraft' experience to draw on or came to the landings from other walks of life with the requisite emotional maturity to conduct themselves properly. Was it a perfect institution? No. Indeed, the fundamental stressors of the job – working in an environment where anything bad could happen and often did remained. We employed racists and people who caused prisoners and their colleagues no end of difficulty by misusing their immense discretionary power. But these miscreants were in a distinct minority, and staff corruption was either deeply concealed or driven out by an esprit de corps that is so important and so badly missing from today's service.
Outside Whitehall, nobody is blind to the multiple lurid stories that have emerged in recent months and years with an uncomfortably common theme: female staff being caught in sexually compromising situations with male prisoners. Jails are places saturated with risk and trauma. Officers and prisoners are locked away in an environment that is far from normal, where sexual predation, conditioning and coercion is baked into the fabric. But I think these recent stories are symptoms of a much larger and more worrying problem than was ever the case when I worked inside.
Here is an emblematic example. In June 2024, a female prison officer at HMP Wandsworth (where I was head of security in the 1990s) gained global notoriety after a video filmed inside the prison showed her having sex with an inmate. The footage, which went viral online, led to her arrest. Linda De Sousa Abreu was jailed in January having pled guilty to misconduct in a public office. This officer had passed the HMPPS recruitment security vetting process despite having a publicly available OnlyFans account and being previously featured on the Channel 4 series Open House: The Great Sex Experiment. Neither of these activities is illegal, but only an imbecile would say they were compatible with a front-line security role near seasoned and manipulative criminals. Part of the footage was recovered from her body-worn camera. You couldn't make it up.
De Sousa Abreu was hired as a result of a rushed process to get boots on wings denuded of staff as a result of utterly destructive Conservative austerity cuts that drove experience out and allowed in people patently unsuitable to the job. HMP Wandsworth, a major London prison, is falling apart in plain sight. Yet, it is a 20-minute cab ride from HMPPS Headquarters, where thousands of bureaucrats labour in roles that seem to make no difference to the abject state of our penal slums.
On some occasions, up to 40 per cent of officers at Wandsworth were routinely unavailable for a workplace that was drowning in filth and drugs where staff could not routinely account for the whereabouts of prisoners. This sort of environment, where leadership and even basic supervision are absent, is ideal for illicit relationships to flourish.
The state is not in charge at Wandsworth. When I was head of security there, we were the biggest gang in the jail. There was a sense of discipline in the organisation that is now sneered at and deprecated by the cartel of activist groups and academics that have far too much influence on prison operational policy.
These long-dead attributes meant it was almost impossible for blatant abuses of power to occur.
Order and control are foundational to prison safety and legitimacy. Where this has foundered, and we have hugely inexperienced youngsters badly selected, poorly trained and unsupervised all sorts of corruption will flourish.
The rot extends far beyond prison officers too. Female prison psychologists and teachers have all been exposed in illicit affairs with prisoners. Male staff in female prisons have been jailed for relationships with particularly vulnerable women. Prisons without even elementary security screening processes allow both men and women in uniform and other staff corrupted by sophisticated and well-heeled offenders to run drugs and phones into prisons.
The quantities of these items delivered to offenders, who should be doing rehabilitation, not lines of coke, simply cannot be explained by drone deliveries alone. The rampant drug economy flourishing in our prisons unopposed is the lubricant or by-product of much of the corruption we are now reading about.
Prof John Podmore, who used to run the counter-corruption operation in the prison service, put it like this: 'Serious organised crime is increasingly well organised in prisons. Control over so many jails has been ceded to highly profitable criminal enterprises.'
I feel for the thousands of decent and effective female staff who pull on a uniform every morning and who, on top of all the other stresses of the job, must endure the humiliation of being associated with a minority of their colleagues who have brought the service into such disrepute.
I do not accept the formula the spinners at the Ministry of Justice increasingly rely on – that the number of staff being detected means that counter-corruption strategies are working. Something else is going on. Over a third of prison officers now have less than one year's experience in uniform. Many of these recruits will learn on the job as I did and become effective officers doing a vital job for society. But they won't have any of the experience and numbers of colleagues I had to lean on. Too many others will be unsuitable for a uniquely complex job and their immaturity will put them at risk to themselves and security. This law enforcement agency has lost its way. Ministers know this and are helpless to act.
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Without this, employers will continue to escape their legal duties to improve rights for workers. Jennifer Savin is Cosmopolitan UK's multiple award-winning Features Editor, who was crowned Digital Journalist of the Year for her work tackling the issues most important to young women. She regularly covers breaking news, cultural trends, health, the royals and more, using her esteemed connections to access the best experts along the way. She's grilled everyone from high-profile politicians to A-list celebrities, and has sensitively interviewed hundreds of people about their real life stories. In addition to this, Jennifer is widely known for her own undercover investigations and campaign work, which includes successfully petitioning the government for change around topics like abortion rights and image-based sexual abuse. Jennifer is also a published author, documentary consultant (helping to create BBC's Deepfake Porn: Could You Be Next?) and a patron for Y.E.S. (a youth services charity). Alongside Cosmopolitan, Jennifer has written for The Times, Women's Health, ELLE and numerous other publications, appeared on podcasts, and spoken on (and hosted) panels for the Women of the World Festival, the University of Manchester and more. In her spare time, Jennifer is a big fan of lipstick, leopard print and over-ordering at dinner. Follow Jennifer on Instagram, X or LinkedIn.
