In prison, of course we fancy the female guards – but I’ve only seen one inmate-officer affair

As Britain is gripped by a prisons crisis, The Telegraph is publishing dispatches from an inmate at a Category B jail – the second-highest level of security – to discover what life is really like inside. Recently, the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) found the jail to be chronically overcrowded and understaffed, with self-harm and drug use rife.

The inmate, a British professional and entrepreneur on the outside, is on remand awaiting trial charged with non-violent crimes which he denies. To protect his identity, he is not named. Other names and nicknames have also been changed.

The SO (Senior Officer) on my wing is Mr Jackson. He’s about my age – mid-50s, grizzled, a little heavier set than I am. Towards me personally, he went out of his way to be amiable and encouraging, perhaps sensing I was initially horrified at being in prison for the first time.

I have never seen him be other than entirely reasonable. I have seen him extremely angry, berating a former padmate for brewing hooch, but that was not unreasonable: because the greatest danger to his officers and to other inmates, he roared, arose when prisoners were high or drunk. The message, a no doubt oft-delivered performance, was received loud and clear.

Last week, Mr Jackson told me that when he joined the service 20 years ago, most officers had served 10 or 15 years. Today, he explained with a shrug, most officers have served 10 or 15 weeks. An exaggeration, perhaps – there are, thankfully, quite a few other experienced officers in the prison – but an illustrative one. It used to run like clockwork, he recollected fondly. He did not say what he thought it ran like now.

Being a new prison officer is a fast learning curve. New officers, I suspect, are more likely to be assaulted because they have not quite worked out what riles prisoners, and may lack the gentler tone of experienced turnkeys, assuming instead – a bit like new teachers – that authority equates with strictness. On average, on our wing, I would say an officer is assaulted somewhere between weekly and fortnightly, which can mean anything from a shove to ultra-aggressive acts such as strangulation. Some very nice officers have received nasty injuries in my time here.

It’s quite an event when an assault kicks off: the alarm is pushed (there are buttons every few yards all over the prison) and other officers rush, not in pairs but in dozens, often coming at a run from other wings, first to pin the offender to the ground, then to ensure that all other prisoners are pacified, which might mean shutting us behind our cell doors for a period. It’s easy to understand why: there’s a tinderbox atmosphere with prisoners looking on, usually from behind the bars which partition each spur from the rest of a wing, hooting and roaring like animals in the proverbial zoo.

Because there are just as many female as male officers, women are every bit as likely to be assaulted as men. I have been impressed by our female officers, who are pretty chilled and more than capable of running an all-male prison with minimal male involvement – indeed, there are several relatively young female SOs here. Some are butch (there’s strong lesbian representation in the profession and HMP Bullingdon has a rainbow flag flying at the reception entrance). Some, whatever their sexual orientation, are rather beautiful. A common prison conversation is about which female officers we fancy (it’s framed in slightly cruder terms). But only in one instance have I seen a relationship brewing between a female officer and a prisoner which crossed the boundaries of propriety.

It’s called conditioning when prisoners, sometimes over several years, soften up officers to the point that they become friends. The best officers, I sense, allow that process to happen knowingly: there are advantages which can work their way too, and prisoners are quite easily tipped into being informers. You might open up to the kinder, more reasonable officers when behaviour by other prisoners becomes disturbing. Or, if you fear prisoners more than officers, you might not.

The term by which most prison officers address us is “mate”, which reflects the fact we are all trying to get along, and generally do. Occasionally, one is even called “sir”, which I can’t help being amused by and feels, at root, a little sarcastic. But the social background which prison officers come from is pretty similar to the background of the inmates – the difference might be the extent of alcohol and drug addictions and the fecklessness of prisoners’ parents. Like prisoners, officers swear with gusto and sport tattoos and jewellery. And, like prisoners, a large contingent of officers are immigrants. Few are from the same demographic, however: I am yet to meet an Albanian prison officer, while an almost overwhelming proportion of new prison officers (and hardly any prisoners) are West African, prepared to do a job which either we native Britons are disinclined to do, or are not qualified for in sufficient numbers.

The mistake would be to assume that being a prison officer is a cake walk. Prisoners almost invariably disrespect the police, but few disrespect their prison officers. In a recent conversation, Mr Jackson presented the case for his profession being more demanding than that of the police. Knowing how much better paid the police are, I raised an eyebrow, but he won me over: “A prison officer has to be a hotelier, a psychologist, a bouncer, a paralegal and a paramedic, as well as a policeman.” Having come to view the police – from personal experience – as a largely paramilitary organisation entirely divorced from people and community, I liked, and had to agree with, the way he put that.

Next week the Secret Prisoner writes about guard shortages and drone drug delivery