The explicit viral video showing a Wandsworth prison officer having sex with an inmate in his cell is the latest example in the growing trend of behind-bars relationships.
In the three years to March 2023, 31 female prison staff working in male prisons were sacked, including one who gave birth to her inmate lover’s baby and another who had his cell number tattooed on her thigh.
It is more than 50 per cent rise on the 19 women sacked in the previous four-year period, and that figure doesn’t include incidents recorded at private prisons, run by companies such as G4S, Serco and Sodexo.
But according to those who have worked in the system, instances of sex inside jail like the shocking example at Wandsworth prison is just the tip of the iceberg.
One former prison officer, previously told the Mail: ‘The numbers will be much, much higher than the figures that have emerged because these events are swept under the carpet.
‘If a sexual relationship ever comes to light, then normally the prison officer is given the chance to resign. They don’t like this stuff to come out, it’s hugely embarrassing.’
To an outsider, it’s hard to understand what drives an officer to risk an affair with an inmate, knowing they could lose everything if they are caught. So what exactly is going on behind prison walls?
The case which brought the problem to the national spotlight this week involved Linda De Sousa Abreu, 31, who appeared on a Channel Four documentary about threesomes and orgies, revealed yesterday.
She is understood to have recently quit her job as a prison officer in the South London jail following the scandal.
Linda is seen wearing uniform during the explicit clip, which begins with her performing a sex act on an unidentified prisoner at the Category A Wandsworth jail in south-west London.
The footage, which understands to be recent, then shows her having sex with the prisoner while his cellmate films on a mobile phone. Footage of the cell shows a TV and piles of clothes heaped over a bunk bed.
The friend who is smoking while recording says: ‘Guys we’ve made history, this is what I’m telling you.’
The prison officer’s radio, left on a side table, crackles constantly with her colleagues heard on the other channels above the din of the other prisoners on the landing unaware of what is going on in the cell.
At one point, someone appears to try to come into the cell, at which the man filming, can be heard saying to the person on the other side of the door ‘give me a minute, one second.’
The prisoner filming tells his friend to carry on and then pans the camera round momentarily and, grinning, says: ‘This is how we roll in Wandsworth.’
And her sibling, who is a personal trainer from London, told yesterday how she had to block fans of her sister from her own social media after she appeared on the swingers show.
Linda is also believed to have an explicit OnlyFans account.
But she is not the only female prison officer to fall for the charms of a male inmate.
Take the case of probationary officer Ayshea Gunn, who exchanged more than 1,200 phone calls, including explicit video calls, with prisoner Khuram Razaq. She even smuggled a pair of knickers into his cell, concealed in her bra.
In a similarly sordid tale at HMP Berwyn in North Wales, her fellow officer Emily Watson performed a sex act on an inmate in his cell on Christmas Day.
At HMP Berwyn in Wrexham an astonishing 18 female guards or other female staff have been fired for illicit relationships with male inmates since 2017.
This includes Jennifer Gavan, 27 who was jailed for eight months in December 2022 following her relations with prisoner Alex Coxon, 25.
She had sent intimate photos of herself to Coxon on Snapchat and kissed him during the relationship between April and July 2020.
Gavan, from Wrexham, pleaded guilty to misconduct in public a public office at Mold Crown Court after she accepted £150 to bring in the mobile phone.
Roxanne Walker, 34, another female guard at the 2,100 medium-risk category ‘C’ facility, dubbed ‘Britain’s cushiest’ received a nine-month prison sentence, suspended for two years after engaging in ‘sexually explicit’ chats with an inmate.
This sexual impropriety is far from unique to HMP Berwyn in Wrexham, which calls cells ‘rooms’, blocks ‘communities’, and allows inmates to have their own phones and laptops.
There has been an alarming rise in the number of female officers from across the HM Prison Service found guilty of striking up illicit relationships.
The latest figures from the MoJ revealed that as of last September female prison officers now represent 42.1 per cent of the workforce.
In five years, the number of female officers working in prisons has risen by 3,519 – a surge of nearly 28 per cent.
The latest totals showed 16,199 females were employed, compared to 22,309 males.
Cases at other prisons of female warders crossing sexual boundaries includes that of Corinne Redhead, 29 who had an inmate’s baby following a secret year-long fling and was jailed for nearly two years in November 2022.
She entered the clandestine relationship with O’Connor, who was serving a ten-year sentence while working at The Mount Prison in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire – an all-men’s prison.
Aisha Golsby, 23, was working at HMP Portland in Dorset when she became involved with convict Deano Harrison.
She was jailed for 16 months last year for tipping him off about a cell search.
Joanne Hunter, 28, was jailed for three years for her relationship with Connor Willis while she was working at HMP Forest Bank in Salford.
Hunter – described as ‘naive’ and ‘vulnerable’ in court – believed Willis was ‘in love’ with her and agreed to smuggle packages, including cannabis, into prison for him. She also sent him explicit photographs, which were later found on her phone.
Prison nurse Elyse-May Hibbs, 25, was jailed for six months for having a fling with jailed drug dealer Harry Pullen at HMP Parc in South Wales.
Married Victoria Laithwaite, 47, was caught sending prisoner James Chalmers, 30, messages which suggested a relationship between the pair while he was banged up.
She was working as head of safer custody and equalities when the texts were discovered on a mobile phone found inside the prisoner’s cell at HMP Onley.
In March two female prison workers appeared at Bolton Crown Court, accused of having simultaneous relationships with the same inmate. Aleesha Bates, 30, and Jodie Wilkes, 27, exchanged thousands of messages with a prisoner in an illicit love triangle at HMP Buckley Hall, Rochdale.
Prison officer Bates was the first to start a relationship with an inmate who’d been jailed for drug trafficking offences.
She was so infatuated she sent X-rated messages and naked photos, and even planned their future together once he was released.
The second relationship, with operational support worker Wilkes, came to light in 2020 when a contraband phone containing ‘dozens’ of messages was found in the prisoner’s cell.
Both women admitted misconduct in a public office, with Bates sentenced to two years and eight months in prison and Wilkes handed a 12-month sentence, suspended for two years.
Professor Ian Acheson, a former prison governor, previously came forward to reveal the rising problem was being caused by the fact low-paid new recruits are being rushed through a training process which leaves them ill-equipped to properly deal with manipulative criminals.
Another insider previously told some female staff are so ill-prepared for the job that some turn up for a shift ‘glammed up’ with full make-up and even false eyelashes as if they are going for a night out.
And one inexperienced new female recruit even asked an older colleague ‘What do I do if I am attracted to a prisoner?’.
The dangers of manipulative male prisoners was illustrated in December when prison worker Ruth Shmylo, 26, from Pontypridd was prosecuted but then cleared after she revealed that she only had ‘phone sex’ with gangster inmate Harri Pullen after he made terrifying threats to harm her and her family.
Prof Acheson, an expert in the UK’s criminal justice system and specifically the prevention of Islamist and right-wing radicalisation, blamed the current situation on the culmination of years of staff neglect – and said: ‘In modern law enforcement men and women work together across the criminal justice system and prisons are no different. Nor should they be.
‘However, effective relationships depend on suitable and sufficient officers properly trained and well led. None of these conditions are met in today’s prison services.
‘Emergency recruitment has thrown barely trained youngsters into the maw of disordered and violent prisons across the country. This sets the scene for exploitation and corruption by experienced offenders.
‘We’ve seen the results in the statistics, particularly the rising number of female officers who enter sexual relationships with prisoners. The Ministry of Justice may argue that the data suggests that surveillance by counter corruption teams is working.
‘I think that’s a poor defence.
‘Unless there is a fundamental improvement in recruitment, training, and supervision this behaviour will continue.
‘While an illicit relationship between a female officer and a prisoner might seem relatively harmless, the impact on victims and the danger to prison security is very real.’
And he blamed what he called ‘criminally stupid austerity cuts’ for reducing the number of experienced staff and replacing them with naive younger ones.
Elsewhere, prison staff on the ‘shop floor,’ who walk the dangerous corridors and walkways of the UK’s jails, say female prison officers have no idea what they are getting into when they start.
Craig Wylde, 41, a former guard at high security HMP Durham prison, said: ‘There is a problem with some younger female prison officers who turn up to work in full makeup, glammed up and even wearing false eyelashes and bangle earrings.
‘Governors make them remove the eyelashes and earrings because of health and safety, but they still go onto the landings of a male prison looking like they are on a night out. There is the constant fear that they are sending out the wrong message in a place full of men who are banged up for years and sexually frustrated.’
Jane, a former female prison officer with more than 20 years’ experience, told of trying to deal with a naive recruit asking her for advice if she fancied a serving prisoner.
She said: ‘What do you say to that? I was blunt. I asked her to think about whether being a prison officer was for her.’
Cases of inappropriate relationships between female warders and inmates range from having sex in cells, sending suggestive pictures of themselves, smuggling illicit goods into jail for their lovers and even having their children.
Jane, in her 50s, who previously served in the Armed Forces, said that before retiring from the prison service she saw a startling change in the type of female entrant.
She said: ‘I trained with women in their 20s, most out of military service, who knew themselves and had the right attitude. They wanted a career.
‘Before I left, I saw some young women entering training that frankly I felt should not have been allowed out the house by their parents.’
She added: ‘I have had young girls crying on my shoulder and seen others walk off the job within weeks.
‘It is terribly difficult dealing with a self-harmer, blood everywhere or a suicide whatever your age. At 20-years-old, it’s almost impossible.’
Jane claimed that a ‘watering down’ of the recruitment process had resulted in less suitable candidates being given jobs. At some jails, more than one in four posts are vacant.
Corners being cut in the recruitment process include holding interviews on Zoom, as opposed face-to-face, which makes it harder to ‘gauge character’ and reducing the training period for prison officers from 12 to eight weeks.
She said: ‘Eight weeks training did not prepare them for their first day on the wings and the job took a tremendous emotional toll.
‘But let me make it clear that the vast majority of young, female recruits are doing a fine job under intense scrutiny and pressure.
‘However, the statistics don’t lie, and it is apparent that a small number make the life changing mistake of falling for a prisoner they should be locking up.’
Mr Wylde said that rules should be changed so that both male and female officers should not be allowed to join the service ‘until their mid-20s to ensure they have some life experience.’
And he added: ‘There is a feeling that some graduates are joining just to pay off their Student Loans and don’t have the desire to do the job. They are bright, but that isn’t enough.’
For Jane, who has witnessed the crisis first-hand, the increase in inappropriate sexual relationships between female warders and male inmates may also be down to deeper psychological reasons.
She said: ‘Most normal people will ask how the hell they make this jump? Don’t they understand they will ruin their lives?
‘Well, in my experience, some do realise the risk, but, for whatever reason, are willing to put themselves in that position. Maybe it’s just excitement?’
Experts who have studied the phenomenon have also pointed towards more underlying reasons for the worrying trend.
Kamalyn Kaur, a Psychotherapist and Anxiety expert with over 10 years of experience providing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) previously told that some women can find themselves powerless to stop themselves being drawn to unsuitable partners due to how the brain works.
She said: ‘There are certain traits associated with ‘bad boys’ such as confidence, risk-taking and assertiveness that would have been seen as advantageous in the past in terms of evolution. It suggests adventure and opportunity.
‘These are people that have not conformed to societal expectations and pressures and that can give off an allure of ‘bad boy’ energy.’
She added: ‘If you are someone who usually follows the rules, and quite ‘textbook’ then that whole allure of being with someone who is rebellious can give you tunnel vision suddenly. That person might represent everything you want to be but can’t be.’
One officer who spent seven years working in a Category B prison and recalls: ‘To many prisoners, the sex itself isn’t the goal — it is a way of getting the officer in their pocket for other things like smuggling in tobacco, drugs or mobile phones.
‘They know a sexual relationship or flirting is a way of hooking you — and hooking you is exactly the goal of the more cunning inmates.
‘Inexperienced officers, particularly younger women in a men’s prison, will feel like a fresh bit of meat on display.’
The prisoners’ motivations are clear. But why do officers fall for these tactics?
Some commentators have put the trend down to an unconscious compulsion to pursue unsuitable partners, repeating tired cliches about women lusting after a ‘bad boy’.
Of course, there is a complex web of factors at play, which may include attraction or an urge to transgress. But experienced officers claim there is often a deliberate pattern of coercion by the inmate.
The anonymous guard said: ‘You cannot show a single chink in your armour, or you are finished.
‘I would warn recruits to never even speak about their personal life on the landings because prisoners would listen in and use this stuff against you.
‘It might start off with something small; they might challenge you to a game of pool and say the winner gets a Mars Bar. Of course, you can’t give them chocolate and if you do then you’ve broken the rules, and they’ve got you.
‘The squeeze will begin. The next thing is they will ask ‘can you bring this in for me’ and the whole thing escalates from there.’
Once one boundary is crossed, others quickly follow and the power dynamic shifts from officer to prisoner. ‘The key thing is the inmate has nothing to lose — they are already in prison.
‘Whereas for the prison officer, their entire life is on the line.
‘If you’ve done something wrong and the inmate has the power to ruin your life, you’ll do anything to stop that happening.’
As for the logistics of an illicit physical affair between a prison officer and an inmate supposedly under constant surveillance —often, it seems, it’s all too easy.
‘There are actually lots of places they could potentially have sex,’ said the anonymous guard.
‘The cupboards, maybe, if they had someone to keep watch and give a signal if there was someone coming. Even in a cell, if they were happy to live dangerously.
‘There is a lock in there of course — we would call it ‘shooting the bolt’ when you put it on a latch.
‘And the officer could plausibly come up with an excuse, [saying] they needed to have a chat with this inmate, for example.
‘I would never go into a prisoner’s cell without another officer there, but I have known it to happen.’
A spokesperson for the Prison Service previously said: ‘The overwhelming majority of Prison Service staff are hardworking and honest and their professionalism and expertise should not be called into question because of the illegal actions of the small number who aren’t.
‘We are doing more than ever to catch the minority who break the rules, including bolstering our Counter-Corruption Unit with 140 new staff and strengthening our vetting processes to root out misconduct.’