Alex South

A few months ago, I spoke to a man halfway through a life sentence for murder. We first met 12 years ago when I was a prison officer. We mused on the changes to the prison service over the last decade. He said it wasn’t just the days that had got louder, but the nights too. I presumed he meant the increase in violence, or the sounds of mentally unwell prisoners trapped in their distress, but I was wrong.  ‘No,’ he said. ‘The drones. This place is like an airport for them.’ During my career I found drugs, weapons, illicit phones, a bottle of Jack Daniels and even an iPad inside prison. Contraband certainly isn’t a new problem.

I met Daniel in a high-security prison, where I worked as a prison officer. He was just 21. We’d talked about him a lot before he arrived on the wing – we passed the security briefing on him back and forth, scrutinising his vacant mug shot and the endless red bullet points beneath it: Hostage Taker Staff Assaulter Bully Climber Climber wouldn’t ordinarily be a problem, but in prison it is. Daniel had scaled fences, walls and roofs in previous prisons. He’d staged one-man demonstrations in the scalding sun, shouting abuse to the news crews that congregated outside the jail, his pale white skin reddening as the hours wore on. And now he was here. His initial offence didn’t warrant placement in a high-security prison, but his behaviour inside did.