Pounding out music from a sound system, watching TV and brazenly filming TikToks inside their cell – this is the luxury life of a prisoner behind bars in Britain.
The footage, understood to have been shared by an inmate at drugs-blighted HMP Maidstone, in Kent, is the latest incident to expose the epidemic of phones being smuggled into prisons across the country.
The Prison Service has launched an urgent investigation, warning the inmate at the Category C prison that they could have their sentence increased.
In a series of videos, the inmate repeatedly brags about his cushy life behind bars, showing off a range of luxury items inside a cell.
In one video, he films a TV screen with loud speakers playing and says: ‘Look at the speakers on the shelf, man.’
He then pans the camera around to show boiled eggs on a plate, a landline phone above the bed and a Big Ben model clock he has built.
‘This is the cleanest cell on the f***ing wing,’ he says. ‘Look at the floor, shining baby. Look at the phone hanging by the bed.’
In a second video, captioned ‘It’s all mad’ on Snapchat, the inmate shares footage of a shoe collection, featuring Nike trainers, on shelving he has erected in the cell.
The camera pans around to them listening to BBC Radio 1 Xtra through huge speakers.
In a separate video, captioned ‘canteen day’, the prisoner shows off his hoard of food – featuring custard creams, eggs, fizzy drinks and noodles.
Former prison guard Lee Davies told the Daily Mail that ‘phones are absolutely rife’ in jails across the country.
He added: ‘Phones obviously to people outside can seem fairly trivial if someone’s just putting videos on TikTok but the sinister side of it is crime is carried on. Crime is orchestrated from prison cells.
‘There are phones literally everywhere.’
Mr Davies was jailed himself in 2010 after smuggling phones and drugs into Lancaster Farms young offenders institution.
The now rehabilitated offender warned: ‘Nowadays, it’s that rife in the Prison Service, people are just having their keys taken off them and being sacked on the spot which again pales into insignificance when you are trying to tackle the problem.
‘It seems the Prison Service pay a hell of a lot of the lip service to the media but they don’t actually act upon that, they are not putting enough resources the problems of phones, drugs etc. I just don’t think enough is being done.’
A Prison Service spokesperson said: ‘We are aware of these videos and are investigating them and the identity of the offender in question.
‘Any offender caught using a phone or social media in prison will face punishment, including extra time behind bars.’
It is the latest incident of footage being shared on social media from inside a prison cell in Britain.
Just last week female prison officer Charlotte Winstanley, 27, pleaded guilty to smuggling in contraband including phones to inmates she was having improper relationships with at HMP Lindholme, near Doncaster.
Meanwhile, in January, former Wandsworth prison officer Linda De Sousa Abreu, 31, was jailed for 15 months after a film of her having sex with an inmate was shared by an inmate online.
Earlier this year, HMP Maidstone was thrust into the spotlight when it emerged it had been banned from installing CCTV cameras on its perimeter wall as it is Grade II listed.
The prison wall and the two-centuries-old entrance has been on Historic England’s National Heritage List since 1973.
The 600-capacity men’s prison once held Reggie Kray and Soviet spy John Vassall.
A justice system insider told The Sun in March that prison bosses hoped to install cameras away from the listed walls.
An Independent Monitoring Board last year said it was ‘regrettable’ that full CCTV coverage was not in place ‘due to restrictions related to the historic nature of the prison walls’.
The watchdog said throw-overs, where outsiders simply throw parcels over the walls to prisoners, are the main route of entry for illegal items and local police do not resource operations to deter them.
It added that reports of cannabis smells had ‘increased markedly’ and may have become ‘accepted’ and ‘normalised’ and that the main challenges at the prison include the use of cannabis, with occasional use of spice and cocaine.
In April last year, a couple were jailed for a combined seven years after they were caught flying a drone over HMP Maidstone as part of a drug smuggling operation.
Sajad Hashimi and his wife Zerka Marana made more than 100 drone drops into 11 jails and young offenders’ institutions in just over a year.
Throw-overs have been an ongoing problem at the Category C prison and in 2019, 15 parcels of smuggled items, including drugs, were found thrown over the wall in just one night.
In September, Sasan Rabat was convicted of murder after an attacking an inmate at the Kent prison with such ferocity police said it was ‘almost indescribable’.