As a former prison officer, I witnessed a system that is not just containing violence, but actively perpetuating it. The rising tide of murders behind bars is traumatising both inmates and staff, creating an environment where safety is a fading memory. Yet, even within these walls, violence is not an inevitable outcome.
The Morning the Cell Bell Rang
You don't expect to hear an alarm bell first thing in the morning. But at 6am in late 2018, that's exactly what happened in my office on a residential wing of a high-security prison. All prisoners were supposed to be locked in. The chronic overcrowding in UK prisons, however, meant three men were crammed into a cell designed for one – a proven recipe for disaster.
I arrived to find a colleague poised outside a cell door, key in lock. The control panel showed a blinking orange light. Inside, the scene was one of horrific stillness. One man trembled on the top bunk. Another stood with a blood-spattered T-shirt. The third prisoner lay prone and barely conscious on the floor.
The subsequent urgency was a blur of radio calls for an ambulance, evidence preservation, and moving the perpetrator to a stark 'dry cell'. The victim, a man in his 60s serving a short sentence for burglary, was rushed to hospital with injuries a doctor compared to a high-speed car crash. He survived, but the brain fluid leaking from his nose was a grim testament to the attack's brutality.
The assailant, already serving a life sentence, faced no additional charges. The impact, however, radiated far beyond that cell: to the brave man on the top bunk who pressed the bell, and to the staff for whom such images are indelible.
A System Showing Contempt
This incident haunted me a year later, sitting in a Manchester conference auditorium. We were being lectured on trauma in men's lives, a topic painfully obvious to anyone on the landings. It felt condescending and pointless. When were we, with prisoners banged up for 22 hours a day, supposed to identify and address these deep-seated issues?
Around me sat officers from jails across England and Wales, their name tags telling stories of their own. HMP Berwyn, with its inexperienced staff and corruption problems. HMP/YOI Feltham, a mini war zone of rival gangs where education was often lost to logistical staggering. HMP Full Sutton, a high-security jail where an officer had been taken hostage and, just weeks before this conference, a convicted paedophile had been murdered.
"I was on scene," said Neil from Full Sutton, stirring his coffee. His quiet admission underscored a brutal truth: all prison officers witness violence, but the level of depravity was escalating. When I joined the service in 2012, prisoner murders were rare. Now, they are grimly regular headlines.
I transferred from one prison just weeks before a young man was stabbed to death on my old wing. My luck ran out at the next jail, where I was on shift for a murder. I wasn't first on scene, but walking away as paramedics worked, I knew I'd never forget it.
The Human Cost on Both Sides of the Door
The job changes you. It makes you cynical, paranoid about safety. But it also breeds a conflicted empathy. You meet men who have done terrible things but are not always terrible people, their lives built on flimsy scaffolding where help never arrived.
I saw this conflict starkly when informing a prisoner's next of kin of his death from a drug overdose. Her tears were not of grief, but of bitter relief. The 'quiet man' who caused us no trouble had terrorised her with a baseball bat. Her freedom only came when he was inside, and with his death.
Meanwhile, the system showed contempt for its own staff. We sat in cheap uniforms, listening to solutions from those who'd never implement them. Peer support schemes crumbled under chronic prison understaffing. Wellbeing teams promised to respond to critical incidents within two hours; in a decade facing riots, murders, and suicides, I never saw them.
In 2024, it was reported that officers are assaulted nearly every hour. Drones deliver flick-knives. Officers carry Tasers. High-profile errors, like the mistaken release of convicted sex offenders, are dismissed as 'human error' rather than recognised as systemic failures.
Violence is Not Inevitable, But Change is Essential
The government's response often feels like empty rhetoric. Justice Secretary David Lammy touts "the strongest release checks … ever," while plans advance for enormous 1,000-inmate prisons where governor visibility – cited as crucial by a Lords inquiry – is impossible. The same inquiry stressed the need for education to reduce reoffending, yet spending on prison education faces cuts of up to 50%.
Recruitment is done online, training is virtual, and retention is low. The new government inherited a crisis, but its proposed solutions seem disconnected from the grim reality described by every officer in a cheap zippered jacket.
Yet, there are glimpses of a better way. I witnessed two men, one of whom had attempted to murder the other, sit in a chapel and talk. They reached an agreement to coexist. This happened in one of the country's better jails, with a decent regime and eight hours out of cell. That time for purposeful activity – education, workshops, the buzz of a full classroom – is transformative. It is also vanishingly rare.
The eight prisoner murders in 2023, including two at HMP Wakefield in less than a month, are not isolated events. They reverberate through landings, leaving staff with the sound of boots running, alarms looping, and the sight of a coroner's van in the early hours.
Prisons have become places that not only hold people who commit violence but now actively breed it. Without decisive, systemic change that prioritises staffing, safety, and purposeful activity over cost-cutting and overcrowding, the bell will keep ringing, and more lives will be fractured beyond repair.
