Prison work and paranormal stories from HMP Shrewsbury

Hi, I'm Keegan Carrie, host of the Evolving Prisons Podcast, and I'm here at Shrewsbury Prison today to look at its history and find out what it was like to work here as a prison officer. Shrewsbury Prison is said to be one of the most haunted prisons in the world and it was an operational prison for around 220 years. I'm here today to talk to former prison officer Graham and Joel, the CEO now that it is a tourist attraction.

So, Graham, how did you manage to separate your personal feelings for what a prisoner had done with your professional duty to be on these landings and actually care for them and help them turn their lives around? It's never an easy thing to do and it's something you get better at as you go through the service because you learn these things.

But I always remember once when I first joined the service, I was at Gloucester Prison and I was sent onto a wing by the training officer, said, I want you to go in there, I want you to read every record that you see. Take time, take a cup of coffee there, probably in there for an hour and a half, two hours. And I was absolutely looking at stuff really wide eyed now. And when I went to see him after, he said, what do you think? I said, I'm shocked.

I'm shocked at what I saw and I'm stunned by what I saw because I was reading all about those offenders, the sex offenders, child sex offenders. And he said, good, I'm glad he said, he said, don't ever open another record to read a prisoner's record unless you have to, to do your piece of work. He said, don't take this home with you. It's not your job. It isn't your job. Your job is to manage prisoners and that's all they need to be to you until you get into the job further up.

Yes. I read more records later on because I was becoming a parole officer. A parole officer writing parole reports and doing life of reports for prisons. So you have to know their background. Yeah. Because you've got to start balancing up about what they tell you and what you're writing and stuff like that. So it was probably the single best bit of advice I was ever given. Wow. Certain. Yeah, absolutely was, yeah. And did you manage to separate that?

So when they say don't take this stuff home with you, it's very difficult to just put it out of your mind. Did it go home with you when. I first joined the service, you young. It does because it plays on your mind because you come into a job where you think you're going to be the ultimate power, of course, and that's what you're taught, that you are in charge and you're going to control these prisoners.

Nothing's that simple in life, not even when I joined in the 70s, even though it was much, much stricter. So the reality is you do feel like sometimes you've been had over, or you do go home and worry about things because you think, did I get that right? Oh, dear, you know, am I going to have a problem with this tomorrow? You're worried about the next day, about the reaction you might get from. Because things work. But that's a learning experience that all staff probably go through.

When you get to be in the job, probably at least five years down that line, and you start moving on, you learn to manage things differently, but you learn those skills about being more proactive and seeing these things take place because you're getting used to it and stepping in sooner than later. And it does make a huge, huge difference. Experience is everything in this job. Competence is everything in this job. Before anything else, you need confidence before experience and stuff like that.

So, yeah, it's. It's something you do. And, and the trouble is we've lost that now because we don't keep officers in the job anywhere near as long as we used to. And that means we're not gaining this 15, 20, 30 years of experience for the younger staff to manage and get on with. So where is the incentive today to be a prison officer because we don't have enough prison officers?

How. How do you think we incentivize it and make it a career that people want to do, especially when it's not seen as a high st latest job in society. I didn't want all these difficult questions here. The reality is, like I said, people join for all kinds of different reasons because they think it's a secure job, because they want to do the right thing and be involved and stuff like that.

And it's really difficult to encourage them in now because they see a danger in prisons that didn't exist before. So that's going to be difficult to recruit people because they go, not for me, thank you very much. I know what goes on in jail, and they do to a degree, simply because there's so much more media around today.

So when they're seeing a lot more stuff on the Internet, true or false, doesn't matter, and reading stuff that, you know, everybody's writing on there and talking to people that, I think it puts a lot of people off. I think it Puts a lot of people off. I saw adverts on Facebook for the Prison Service and I go, if you need to advertise on Facebook to get people into this job, you got a problem with recruitment.

My mind was that big in a newspaper, that's all, that's all I saw was a piece of advert that big in the back of a newspaper. And there was never a problem. When I joined the job, 14 of us went to Birmingham to win some green to do the exam. Only four of us passed. Of the four that passed, only two ended up in the prison service training the other two. So 40, so two out of 14 passed.

I think that the other way around these days, I think that they've dropped the criteria a little bit because the trouble is when you struggle to get people into a job that you must have in a job, there's a danger that you'll drop the criteria to get people to pass that system, to get people up on landings, to keep those numbers up. But that's not a good way, as we know. It's not a good way at all. So, Graham, why did you decide to become a prison officer? You know that?

Been asked that so many times and, and there's no distinct reason why. I was an engineer by trade. I served an apprenticeship as an engineer. I did that because it was wats town at the time, you know, you did what was everybody else did. And while I was an okay engineer, I never really enjoyed it, it never was my thing. But I was actually working in Hereford in Bulmer Cider Co. And I was just sitting there and I saw a little advert for the Prison Service, just a tiny little one in the newspaper.

And I looked at, I thought, God, I never really thought about that much before. When I went and spoke to my sister, she said, anna, my friend's husband works in Long Larton, which is the high security jail. So I had a chat with him and he said, you know, he gave me. He said, yeah, yeah. He said, you may well enjoy your Graham. He said, it's hard to tell. Everybody has to try it before they decide whether they're going to be for them to do. He said, but what have you got to lose?

He said, if you can't, if it doesn't fit you, he said, you're still an engineer, you can still go out and get yourself a reasonably good job. And I took it step by step, filled in the application, read the glossy magazines, went for the interview, passed the exams, went for the health, did that, did the interview, passed that one and topped off to the training school. So it was all done in small steps all the way through. And I would think it was just lucky as well.

I think the service was exceptionally well run when I joined in the 70s. Went to Huell Grange, which was a borstal, really, run quite strictly. But. We'Re recording in an actual prison, which is a tourist attraction. I know there's people wandering around. Well, there will be when they. But it's authentic. It's quieter than it would be with us. Oh, absolutely, yeah. There'd be music blasting around the place and shouting and balling all over the place.

Yeah. So when I came out of the training school, interesting enough, when I went to the first prison, and this is a story that all prison officers would used to tell, and they said, how did you enjoy the train? They said it was brilliant. I really loved it. Three months. It was great. They said, good, now you can forget all that. They said, because prisoners do not read the books that you do. They are these people.

You're going to have to manage these people and you can't do that until you're standing right in front of them. He said, the rules are there for you as a backdrop. That's your last option as a support network other than that. And that was very, very true. But I was lucky to join a service that was very well run. There was good discipline for staff and for prisoners. Yes, it didn't come out of cells as much, but that's about controlled movement.

And they went to work and they had education, they did all the things that we currently do today. And so I was. You fall into it. You fall into it. And how many years ago would it have been now that you joined the service? Because I want to know, what do you think? Has it changed how we view the prison officer? Because now they talk about being the forgotten service. Nobody appreciates them, nobody thinks about them. What was it like back then?

Because I feel like it's not really a high status role in society. What was it like? Was it different? Magna? No, no, it was very much the same. You went in and did the job and basically you never really worried too much about what the public thought about what was going on, because it's all behind closed doors. It's out of sight, out of mind. And that's true of the people that work in jail as much as the people that are serving their time in it.

So public don't really focus on prisons because it doesn't come to their attention. I've always said they worry about nurses and teachers and doctors and police officers and all those people because they affect their everyday life, but prisons don't. So that's why they know very little about the reality of working in prisons. So from Huell Grange I went up to Guardry. Garchy was in a high security prison up by Market Harborough.

So I dealt, I was up there for just over three and a half years and then I come to Shrewsbury in 1988. Okay, that was then obviously a cat B prison, running mostly doing the courts. That's what local prisoners do, they hold short term sentences, people going in and out of courts. And our job then is to allocate them out. So we're going to allocate them out to their training prisons, life of prisons, long term prisons, whatever. That takes a long time.

But it never took a long time in the 1970s and the 1980s because we had more capacity, we could move people to where they needed to be very quickly. These days and probably since 90s onwards, we found this overcrowding is what they call bed blocking. Prisoners are spending longer in jail in the training prisons and it's harder now to move people out. So it can take months and months and months to move a prisoner on.

And by then they go, I've only got two weeks left to serve, boss, nearly done my sentence. We say, but you've got to go, why? Because you're now a cat C prisoner and not a cat B. And they go, I got to go for the last two weeks. Yeah. So that doesn't help anybody's game, does it? Because they're going to be wound up, I suppose. Yeah, they're not going to be too happy in the next jail. They're not too happy in this one before they go.

So. Yeah, but, but I've noticed that there's a lot of reasons why the prison service in my opinion has started to lose that. What we had when I joined in the 70s and through the 80s as well, a lot of things have been government policy haven't helped at all really. But I don't know whether you want to hear those reasons now. Yeah, absolutely. I mean we'll go into it, but I'm happy to, to talk about it just now. Yeah, yeah.

Well, when I, when I joined the job, I came into the job, it was really quite. Remember prisons like these didn't have toilets in them. They didn't have toilets when I got here till the 90s. They didn't have water in their cells. They got one shower a week. So there was a time when you Were stepping back to sort of Victorian times, which wasn't a healthy way to be because of hygiene for prisoners wasn't good and that routine, you know, the smells weren't good in prisons with pots slopping out.

It wasn't a great experience. So they started to do some really good things in the mid-90s. They had this big review after the Manchester riot. So we look at health and safety, put toilets in cells, hot and cold running water. They started building shower units so they could put showers in units and all that. And that was all good stuff. That was all good stuff. Prisoners then could be a lot more hygienic and stuff.

But then they started doing things that didn't help the things that happened next because they decided then they said, we used to give prisoners a hot drink at their cell, then we allowed them to fill up flasks in boilers so they could take a hot flash back to their cell. And the reality with that is then after that they decided to give them all kettles. Now, the problem with that is most prisoners use kettles properly. They do. That's not the problem here.

It's always the minority that spoil it for the majority. It's always the minority that can be dangerous to the majority. So those people that are inclined to violence in and out of jail, boiling water is a weapon for them. Mixing it up with sugar, turning it into what they call, what we call it, Bam. It's a nickname in prison. It's gluey, it's sticky. Life changing injuries, folks. So does it not. Sorry, does it not take off the top layer of skin?

But it'll burn its way through if it's boiling when it hits you. And they usually aim for the face when they can because that's the most exposed place. When you're walking around a jail for prisoners, when you think they're mostly wearing tracksuit tops and bottom, you're going to aim for the face. So the problem with that is that's going to be life changing injuries for staff and for prisoners.

So that was one step that allowed people that were inclined to violence to be violent and more violent where it wasn't really an option before in the same way. And then they did things like hand them out all razors. Because we used to control shaving. They used to have about 30 minutes in the morning if they were wet shaving because they could buy batteries if they wanted them. They would lock it in, the blade would be locked in. They would go and shave. They had about 30 minutes.

That blade had to come back we put it back in their pouch after they cleaned it. And then when you got all the blades back, people could leave the wing. When you give them all disposable razors, it's practically possible to manage that. Yeah, it was all about speeding up the processes and not giving staff time to do those safety things. So when you did that and then you got a problem with blades, now that minority again will take them out, melt them into toothbrush handles.

I saw a picture the other day of a toothbrush, you know, the toilet brushes, and it was a plastic one and they'd taken all the bristles off it and they'd literally melted blades all the way around it. Because it comes to a point like that. Wow. So you can either stab people with it or slash a face. You're going to rip somebody's face wide open with that. So that created a problem that really didn't exist as much as it did before. Yes, there was violence before, but not in the same way.

We sort of opened the doors. And then you got the problem of self harm. Yes, 95% of prisoners that harmed themselves harm other prisoners and members of staff do it with things that we hand to them in their cell. From the things like buying tins of tuna and tins of fruit. Sharp metal, soft metal, easy to fashion into a ship. Ceramic plates, ceramic cups, glass jars. Now it's CDs that come into prisons. They're allowed CDs in their cells with their music.

So these things are all potential weapons. And I've always said our obligation in law is to protect prisoners, to keep them as absolutely as safe as possible and the staff so we can get on with other stuff. And that's not happening now. We're chasing our tail all the time, managing all these situations of self harm and violence and you know, all those other things. So. But then they decided to open all the doors and let them all out at the same time.

Do you think that self harm has gotten worse over the years? It's historically high. A number of reasons. First of all, there's more incidents of people harming themselves and mental health issues within society anyway. So that's coming through our doors and that has to be managed. And there are some prisoners that will get caught up in self harming when it wasn't an issue for them out there, because they've got to live in here.

Remember, it's not me they're frightened of, it's each other that's the problem. And when you decide to let all your prisoners wander around a jail Very few staff supervise them. You're going to get that element of violence and drug gangs and all the different gangs that run around, you're going to get that element of raised violence. If they can't cope, they're likely to start self harming for a number of reasons. One, they can't cope.

Secondly, to bring attention to themselves, to hopefully get themselves moved somewhere or something to help them out. And that hasn't really gone away. Yes, we brought in initiatives I call suicide prevention and safer custody and self harm and all these things. But it's still historically high because they still have the means when they're sitting in their cells and their heads are gone. Yeah. Staff do not have the time to sit there talking and monitoring prisoners.

You can monitor them at the very base level. In other words, you keep an eye on them over certain periods of time. You might have heard this before. It can be every couple of hours. It could be right down to five times every hour. That's once every 12 minutes, day and night for days, weeks and months. You've got the constant watch cells. All this stuff takes time.

And staff are having to attend to that in a time when I first joined to the 70s and 80s, when I didn't have to attend to that in the same way, so I had more time to be doing other things. And the trouble is, as the prison population rose, the staffing levels never rose to be equal in the same way. So staff are trying to squeeze more work in with less staff than the population of the prison. So you can say something goes, something gives. Absolutely.

And that is a problem that we're facing now is that there's not nearly enough staff to deal with. The other thing to say to that, it makes a difference between the prisons you're in. Not all prisons are bad. Some are running very well today in that country. But there are some prisons that are struggling really hard. And it's not the staff's fault. There's staff, there's teachers, there's nurses, there's prison officers. It's not because they're lazy, they just can't be bothered.

It's because they're not being given the means to manage this properly. And that's the problem with it. So small jails are far, far better. Why? Because I know everybody. I know prisoners, they know me. I can't build relationships in a big jail of 2,000 people when I'm being moved around different wings because they're short staff and I don't know half the staff that I work with. I never See health care because they're in a big jail far away, whereas I see them every day here.

So I communicate with healthcare. Me, the prisoner. I communicate with them, the education, because we're passing each other all and working together as a proper team. And big jails. You know, I worked in Featherstone and I don't think I saw some staff for months and months and months, Months, which you can't help but do here. Avoiding you grow. They were like, he's on the ship. Yeah. Do you think that there's might have been that?

Yeah. Do you think there's as much incentive to be a prison officer today as there was back when you joined? You know, I've never really looked at what. What incentivizes them to be a prison officer today. I've never really spoke to young staff and said, why have you chosen to be a prison officer? Because we all choose for different reasons. Some people do. It's a job security. Some might think it's relatively well paid. Others might decide that it'll do it.

It's a passing phase while they look for something better because it gives them a guarantee because they may be working in a much lower paid job than they've got now with less security. Whatever you say about a prison service, if you can survive it, it's secure. So there's something drastically wrong when people come to a job that's very secure for the rest of their career, if they want it to be, and leave after 6 to 12 to 18 months and struggle.

Not all of them, but I'm talking about a much, much higher turnover rate. It was actually officially, I've checked it up some years ago, 1.2% when I joined the job. And that was all from retirement and ill health for older staff leaving. That's not true today. Definitely not. When they brought out the. In what they call the increments scheme. You got four increments when you first joined and that was your incentive. Learning more, getting a bit better.

And then you didn't get another increment until you'd done 12 years. Wow. And they give you a long service increment and they give you your last one at 15 years. They already knew that they were likely to keep. Most people up to that time already knew that. And that was your 15 years. There's your incentive because we don't think you're going anywhere now. Yeah. And then you're in now because you're already into your pensions, you're already established.

Well, you obviously, if you stop for 50, you're not going far. And the reality with that is they go, we got you for 25 to 30 years. Yeah. And you've got all that experience, but that's not happening anymore. No, I'm sure last year in England and Wales, 13.1% turnover rate they had. Yes. That's horrific. Yeah. In a job that should be managed. The pay used to be a lot better though, in the sense of. In proportion to living costs.

It was back when usually the gravitas of being a prison officer or working in a prison, back before when healthcare was within the prison, education was in. The prison, psychology was in prison for it. Privatized. Yeah. There was a gravitas around while you were civil servant. Oh, yes. Yeah. The government grouping and actually the pay was pretty good, depending on where you were. And the pension schemes were pretty strong. Obviously that will change. Yes, yes. Well, it was, it was stronger.

Remember when I joined, it was really considered that you come in as a career and I think that's changed now to becoming a job to do. And I'm not sure the government are all that bothered about whether you stop for a career because it just saves huge sums of money on the pension payouts at the very end. But I go, they lose out because of the lack of experience. The world's changed. Oh, absolutely. The world is no longer. Yeah. Start a job.

Yeah. And this is my career and this is what I. When I joined, like you said, they had the increments. They also had housing. So you had what they call staff quarters. Yeah. And so you. And if you were single, they would give you a single staff quarters as well. Until such time as you either got a relationship and ended up. And. And you have, you know, you went into quarters and that was. So the base pay was not great, but the conditions around it were. And then there was all.

There's always overtime in jobs like this. Just by the very nature of working a 365 day, 24 hour job, they will always be happy to do overtime. So you did have a chance to build those. I used to get premium time on Saturdays and premium time on Sundays. They changed all that in the late 80s and it's just a base salary now which covers all those shifts, all the Christmas days and everything. So by definition now when I joined it, sorry, my pay in 2010 was only.

It's only about just over two and a half to 3,000 pound more today than I was only 2010. Wow. Inflation, natural inflation should have took it up to about much more. At least seven to eight thousand pounds. More than they're on today. And that may not be the great incentive. Absolutely. So let's talk about when you came to Shrewsbury. So when I've looked at Shrewsbury, I've heard that people say that when they come in they feel a heaviness in the prison and they feel. It's quite eerie.

I didn't get that personally, but I've not been around the prison yet. How did you feel, what was it like for you coming in here? Well, remember, Guardi was a 1960s built prison, but I'd been into Birmingham and I'd been in other jails because you do escorts and work, attached you to them. So I was accustomed to a Victorian style building, but coming in here, no, I never really felt because I'd been in the job nearly 12 years, so I was already accustomed to this sort of atmosphere and people.

So you come in a lot, which, when you're brand new and you come into jail, like you may feel, which seems a bit dark and a bit austere, but in small jails it's easier to settle because you're around those staff more often. So you settle a lot better. But, but no, it was the, it was what was going on here. There were no toilets in the cells, no water, no showers. You know, shower once a week if you were lucky. So the regimes were much tighter.

They were locked up a lot more often than they were in Gartree. Gartree is a high secure jail. We unlocked the doors at 7:30 in the morning and didn't lock them up till 8:00 at night. But there were a lot more staff and there was a lot more security. Yeah. So prisoners moved about their business but under a controlled environment. Whereas here we locked them up because we got such a high turnover. Prisoners here, in and out the courts, in and out, you know all that.

Prisoners coming to these jails are much more volatile generally when they first come to jail. Why? Because they still got the problems with the mental health that hasn't been managed or possibly not effectively. It's coming to jail, it's going to be changed because they've got the self harming issues, they've got the mental health issues. They're coming to a jail. I've known prisoners come in and say, boss, can I, can I phone, can I phone my Mrs. She doesn't know where I am.

Some people come to jail and they don't know their families. Don't know where they are. Yeah, don't know they come to jail. So you can see there's A lot more volatility for all different reasons. Drug addiction. They have the coming off the drugs. They haven't got a settled regime running in jails, so they don't know where they stand, where they man, what's happening to them. Sometimes they don't even know what all the charges are going to be because the solicitors haven't spoke to them.

So they can be really quite volatile compared to when you perhaps know what's happened to you. There you go, you got two years, you've got 12 months, you're off to Featherstone, you're off to wherever you're going next. So they know what's happening, they know when their end result, when they're getting out of jail. It's one of the first questions prisoners ask you when they come back from court. Can you work out my actual release date, boss?

Because there's a process to work it out right down to the day. Yeah, it's done automatically on computers now. It goes. But fair. So I'm guessing the prisoners that were here were in for all sorts of crimes then? Yeah, there was no. The only exception here, we were never built to hold what they call technically a Category A prisoner. They only go to high security jails, even as remands. They're potential categories, but we should identify them at the court and they should never ever come.

We had one once come through these doors and we couldn't get them out of reception because we had to put them back in a vehicle and send them out to a prison that could hold a potentially remand Category A prisoner. So we couldn't hold them because we don't have, I suppose, the license or the security to do so. Other than that, people have been here charged with murder, serious drug offenses, right down to the lowest level of a crime that you can imagine why somebody might be remanded.

Okay, yeah, take them all. Yeah. So what would a normal day look like here then? Because as you say, it's not one of those prisons where they're there for years. They're going to work. How would a regime look here when you work here? Are you talking about roughly today? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, once we started to modernize and have them out ourselves more, they've always gone to work. So we'd unlock the doors at 7:30.

Now we don't worry about getting them in and out of cells to slop out and we don't give them breakfast. It's a pack that's given to them the night before. So we just open the doors that's their time. We give them one hour to either go out on an exercise yard to walk around for fresh air, have their showers, have their shaves, eat their breakfast, come down and get medication. About 25 to 9, we call education labor. They'd all go out to.

All those that were going to work, would go to work or wherever they're meant to be. So there's more than just the two workshops. There's about five workshops, small ones here, so they go where they've got to be. The others that don't have work or there's a reason why they need to be in their cell. In other words, they go behind their door. Because you don't have the facility to let prisoners walk around landings.

There's only one officer on each landing here during the daytime, so you still might have anywhere from possibly 10 or 12 prisoners on each landing locked up because there's no place for them to be. Or they're waiting to start a visit, like a legal visit. So they're not going to bother going to work. They're just getting ready to go to their legal visits or doctor's appointments and things like that. So. So that's a fairly normal day until they run up to lunchtime.

You know, lots of things will happen in between. People will be collecting prisons at a workshops to go to healthcare and doing different things, going to visits. But they'll come in. In a prison like this, we used to lock them up for meals. Okay. Lack of space. Okay. Yeah, you're Gonna have nearly 400 people on here. 370 people on here. And, you know, there's no real space for them to beat.

And it's an odd thing, many prisoners have said to me because they come on the tours and I've been to this years ago. I never minded being banged up at lunchtime in tea time. Boss. Why give us a break? Slowed the place down. Wow. Because I went to Featherston and they're unlocked from 7:30 till 7:30 at night then. And what happens is not only are they around us all the time, they're around each other all the time. So there's no breakdown time.

So they used to say in this cell for an hour and a half. Give them a chance to chill out, to do whatever. And if they're having problems too, it gives them a chance to find that space, but it also give us the opportunity to deal with any particular problems because now we got them locked up, we've got the availability of staff, we go and deal with those issues when we and Then we unlock the doors in the afternoon. And the same thing used to happen in the evening.

They'd have their evening meals go behind the door and unlocked again for the evening session and all that. And I never heard prisoners moan about that at all. And many have said. Yeah, preferred that because even they need a break. Yeah. And it's not easy to get a break when everybody's around you. For what? All the reasons that prisoners get up to also the ones that get up to all these different things. You can't get away from situations, can you, in a prison.

No. And it's a completely different environment. Were they by themselves, like, were they single cells? No, no. They're literally all double cells. Okay. There'd be occasion when you'd have to use a single cell because a prisoner's got perhaps serious mental health issues where they cannot be housed with another prisoner. And other reasons. You'll notice down stairs there's a couple, what they call single cell. They literally built for single cell accommodation.

But generally in most prisons like this, they'd be looking to put two prisons in a cell. They were built for single cells. They were building cells. Yeah, they built them for. This prison was built for 178 prisoners. Yes. Yeah. And that's the problem, isn't it? Isn't now we put far too many people in them. We now think they're double cells. But as you see, they're. That was their memorable standard at one point, didn't you? On some of the floors. Yes, yes. Not just here.

You could have gone to Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and all. They'd have three, sometimes four prisoners squeezed into a cell originally designed by Victorian said that's the minimum space because all Victorian jails were roughly about the same size. Slightly different, might be slightly smaller doors and all that, but the cell itself wasn't much different. They were all designed for single cell, relatively silent regimes. That's how it worked in the Victorian times.

Okay. And earlier in your career, did you have the same issues with mental health? So today we put too many people in prison who should be in mental health establishments. Was it the same? Well, there's two issues. First of all, it's what you know you can recognize. So with better knowledge, you recognize things you may not have recognized in the 70s or 80s. That's the reality.

But I do believe there's a much, much bigger issue with mental health issues today than there was in the 70s and through the 80s. For me, yes, there would have been prisoners coming in that had mental health issues.

But remember, we were Dealing with mental health issues in society differently then, too, we brought out things called care in the community, which I think is a wonderful thing, because in the right place for the right people, it keeps them connected to their families, it keeps them connected to their work. But there are always going to be people that fall through the net and the top with that, they go, where do I put you now?

So we get lots of people in jail that we look at go, shouldn't be here. I've had prisoners on landings telling me about voices in their heads. Some of these people are undiagnosed when they walk to these doors and you don't see it until they become. Because, remember, living in this environment is likely to fire up any kind of paranoid schizophrenia. Yeah. And I've had people telling me they don't see me, they don't see prisoners.

You know, I remember one incident, it took five staff to put a prisoner back in his cell and we made him worse, not better. Why? He doesn't understand why you're doing what you're doing to him. How do we manage that? Our training doesn't cover psychiatric problems. No, hardly at all. You know, for practically nothing. Training's already changed in 40 years, to be honest with you, when it should be 10 times longer. Education hasn't changed in 40 years. Well, true. Well, it is, but. Yeah, yeah.

And so, sorry. So with. With mental health, then, do you think that, like. So was healthcare quite involved back then? Like, would they be doing a lot for them? Were you able to do any rehabilitation work or were you really containing these people until they were released? Because drug. Drugs weren't the big issue. They are in jail before. Yes, there was a bit of stuff around. Nobody denies that.

Might have been a bit uppers and downers, might have been a bit adult floating around the place, but there wasn't the drugs. But they weren't on the streets in society. Society either, in the same way. So healthcare was basically, first of all, it was run by healthcare officers and not what they call outside nurses. They were trained by the prison service and they would go there and prisoners would go in there and they would be the base stuff, feel, well, do that.

Anything that was serious, they get to see the doctor or they might need to go to hospital. That hasn't changed. It's just staff, like professional, what are called fully qualified nurses, come in. Now, that process is roughly the same. It's just now the queue for the medication is 10 times longer because there were about 10 people outside that door when I came to this jail. When you shouted sick parade.

And now you'll find it starts here and it gets down to that office and there'll be a queue there half as long going into the detox unit. These things. Remember, detox was cold turkey when I came to prisons. If anybody was not as many, because like you said, it wasn't as common. But the queue is now. It's all detox units and stuff like that. So they have upgraded what they do for prisoners that whether they've got it, enough staff to do it efficiently is another thing again.

Yeah, there's a real danger with prisoners here. They go on the detox unit. The trouble is, you let them out and I go, where do you think they're going? They're going back to the places they come from. Yeah. They're going back to the same streets, the same people. If there isn't that big support network that's really working for them out there. Not unusual to do what you're used to doing in the absence of something to distract you.

Yeah. So they do come back and I see them standing there and after six, nine months, they're not. You're back already? Yeah. You know, boss, I go, no, I don't. But I can understand how these things are not working once you step through these doors. Yeah. You know, and that's the reality. So I'm not saying that it doesn't work here, that detox unit doesn't work. It's not that. It has to be the whole package, doesn't it? There's no point starting something that you can't finish. Yeah, I know.

They do try outside. That's not the problem. This is about resources. This is about how the government decide they're going to manage prisoners when they come out and fund it, you know and do. Have you noticed drugs changing? So now prison officers are at risk from Spice? They get the secondary impact, they're hospitalized. Has it changed, do you think, Stafford? Absolutely.

You got spice, you got Mamba, you got monkey dust and probably many other what I call kitchen sink drugs going around the place. And then you've got the classics. You've got the crack cocaine and heroin and stuff like that. But the trouble is, with a lot of modern drugs now, they're not just one drug anymore. They're a mixture of things. And remember, they're mostly psychoactive, so they're much, far more dangerous for prisoners to take. But they're also probably much more addicted.

Remember, they banned smoking in prison some years ago. Banning smoking in prisons, to me was probably the single Single thing that helped increase other drug use in prisons. Wow. Why? Why? Because prisoners never OD under tobacco and they rarely, if ever, assault anybody under the impulse tobacco they had to smoke behind their cell doors. As far as safety goes, it was as pragmatic as a prisoner could be go. It's the safer.

It's the lesser of two evils to let prisoners smoke behind their cell doors because it's a legal drug for them to buy. Yeah. There was a bit of dealing going on, but we know it was a source of currency. We understand all that. But at that level, it was here. Whereas the other drugs, now your spice member cause addiction. Debt gets worse. Then you got prisoners, then you possible, you know, you don't pay your debts. You know, you can be expecting effects far worse. Oh, absolutely, yeah.

Oding everywhere. Yeah, yeah. And now all that. So you can see the problem with that. It did. It's not the whole story, but it's one of those stories that said you got rid of one thing. Don't be surprised if some of these persons, not all of them, some, will get on and give up smoking and go on to vapes. Some of them will swap one addiction for another. Yeah. And they've been encouraged to do so by the prisoners. Try a bit of this, mate. This will take the edge off for you.

Yeah. You know, not all prisoners are strong characters. Yeah. Many of them are really quite insecure when they come to jail and they're just trying to get through a prison life the best way they know how. And that isn't easy to do because you can't get away from situations in prison. There's nowhere to hide. Absolutely.

And as you see there, you know, people talk about infamous prisoners and we have this thing in society where we think that they are big, hard people, but as you say, a lot of them are very vulnerable, insecure people. But from memory, is there any prisoners that stick out for you as ones that were either really difficult to deal with or that just really had a difficult time here?

You can't pick who you think might be a difficult prisoner because they come to a different environment, their behavior may change according to the environment they're living. And some of those people can be really difficult people. That doesn't mean they say they're going to be violent, but they can be very, very difficult to manage. And other people that you think are going to be a problem, you crack on. Crack on, lad. Get on with them. Yeah, no problem. You can't pick any individual.

There's sometimes people can come in for the smallest of crimes and they lash out very, very quickly because we have no idea what's going on in their lives. Because people don't tell us when they come to jail what their external problems are, they'll tend to bury them. And the danger with burying problems like that, the frustration of being in jail and not being able to manage those problems outside as effectively as they might there is going to build, isn't it?

Relationship problems, children problems, all the usual things, you know, money and debt and all those things are still sitting. They don't go away out there but for the prisoners. So you can see they get moved away from being able to do any. Manage them. So yeah, it's, it's going to make it difficult for them to do so. You know what's one of the most difficult things that you've ever had to deal with in Shrewsbury?

Is there anything, if somebody says to you, ask you anything about your career, is there any moments that really stick out for you as being. There'll never be more difficult things for to me personally than any officer will do is having to go into a cell and find somebody has either taken their life, taking their life, whether it be by hanging or by cutting themselves, because it's not like tv. TV cleans all this stuff up for public consumption.

These are really stressful things to go through, really stressful things to go to. And they affect all people in a different way. Of course they do, but it's not because you can't just go and go, oh, and walk away. You're there and remember you've got support of other staff, that's not the issue. But you've got other staff, but they are highly stressful things to manage and all that. And part of the problem today is there's a lot more self harming going on than there used to be.

So officers and staff and prisoners are all exposed to this a lot more. And that can upset what you call the sort of psychological flow of a jail, because it's happening literally all the time or a lot more. A lot, lot more than it used to. So staff are coming under pressure, having to deal with these things all the time.

I remember other prisoners are around that are seeing these things happen, who may already be quite on the edge of possibly, you know, that element and they find it, you know, it's. I don't know if it's what a knock on effect, but you can. We did find here when somebody took their life, what you do is you put everybody up to the next stage of suicide. Self harm. Everybody gets escalated up once because they say there's a, there's evidence to show that one thing's happened.

It upsets some prisoners so much that it puts them into that really panicky place where they might start increasing their, their, their, their harming. So everybody sort of gets escalated to the next level up for X amount of time. Then we look at it and pull it back down because it can leave a prison in a really strange place for quite a long time after. Quite a long time after when you get a death in custody. Yeah, I bet. And then there's a danger with the rumors, of course.

Okay. You know, prisoners talk, staff talk about what happened there and who did it and what, you know, you can see how the rumor mill works in prison like that. So, so those things have to be managed and they are, you know. And what about staff? How, how would staff deal with it after something like that? Because in, in the prison service, police, et cetera, there's a macho culture where you don't talk about your emotions. How would you deal seeing things like that? What would be the aftermath?

It probably still exists. There are some staff that would try to bluff their way through it, get on with it, and other staff be quite open. You know, we've always, you always encourage staff to go, listen, there is no shame to this. There's no shame in struggling with something like this. Don't get that in your head. They're difficult things to manage with. You're just like everybody else on the street. They affect you in the same way. Don't think you're expected to be any different.

Okay. That's not your, you know, that's the way it is. You don't have to be a tough guy in jail. You don't have to display being tough and all that. That's really good because I had this belief that, or I think I've read this and talked to people where years ago prison officers would not talk, whereas now they're opening up a bit more. But you're saying that it was years. Ago, it was happening a lot, lot less. Yeah, true. So now it's happening more and we recognize it's happening more now.

We've got the suicide on the cell farm, what they call the safer custody stuff taking place. Staff are more aware of those networks that are working, so they get exposed to it more and understand that it is what it is. We, you know, I obviously don't make. We had an officer that was really, really affected by two suicides. He found in a short Space of time. And it took him off work for a while. And this wasn't an officer, I would say he was use a poor expression, man's man, nothing.

And he was a great officer. Prisoners respected him as well. And he was off for quite a long time. And prisoners started asking, Where's Mr. So? And so. I said, oh, he still could. No, no, no, I wouldn't do that. No. I said, Where's Mr. So? And so. I said, no, he's still off. I said, no, send him our regards. Send him our regards. And when he did finally come back, they went up, shook his hand, said, welcome back, welcome back, boss, nice to see you back. And that's a huge move from the 19.

That's in the 1990s. That was from the 1970s. A huge move. Okay. Yeah. People don't tend to realize that we find quite regularly, isn't it, that prisons are a reflection of society? Absolutely, to a degree, yeah. Society's moving and changing. The same thing happens in prison. You just. Some of it is amplified. Yes, it is, because you have. Yeah, yeah. Prison is generally. Everybody is a criminal within this. You have a faction. Yeah, it's across. It's across.

It's. It's concentrated and you're right, it's concentrated. So that creates the pressure. Yeah, yes. When you look at, I think the leading cause of death for males in 45 is suicide. And when you have 90,000 prisoners with 78,000 of such will be male. Yeah. It's going to be a portion of suicide and it's going to be slightly higher. Yes. In society because. Yeah, it is, yeah. Drug use, when we spoke about that.

Yes. One of the things we've spoken about before is the fact that you now have an aging population coming to us. And so you've now got heroin addicts in their 60s, 70s and 80s. The average age is increasing and a lot of it is because of what they call lifetime drug addiction. They always say, you never lose an addiction, you just learn to manage it. And I've seen people coming in their 40s and 50s. When I first joined the service, prisoners come in.

Let's talk about the 21 upwards, the adult jails, not the young offenders. They come in at 21, 22. By the time they were coming up to their late 20s, a lot of them were moving on. They'd settled down, they'd done the stupid stuff and they were moving on. And then you found out by the time they were in their 30s, but by the time we got to their mid, late 30s, there was a very small percentage of them over that age or much smaller than it is today.

But that's because there wasn't the same drug addiction going around the place as there is today. And possibly the same attitude towards crime might have changed as well, of course. So what you've got is people that are caught up in the drug addiction, they're in and out of it, and they may be in and out of it for many years longer than they would have been had they not been down at that addiction level from the sort of 60s, 70s and 80s and stuff like that.

You know, a lot of these drugs didn't hit the streets until the 90s. Yeah. Crack cocaine, heroin and all the varieties of them. Five, six years time. It might be six years time. You'll start to get. I think it's that age group. You'll start to get prisoners coming into prison. They'll be in their 20s. Yeah. They wouldn't have been able to smoke because it would have been illegal for them to smoke. Yes. Tobacco thing will kind of disappear at the beginning part.

It will obviously take, you know, decades still for it to phase out. You'll still have all the other drugs. Yes. Oh, you'll have more coming. Yeah. Maybe something. Something you don't want. Yeah. Oh, yeah. There are people that come to jail that are not bothered with drugs, but will start to, for whatever reasons, they might choose to take them. They might be encouraged. Remember, peer pressure is still a powerful thing. Many of these prisoners would be possibly in their early 20s.

So like all of us, we're always subject to peer pressure more when we're younger than we are. You know, group identification, group allegiances, all those things. So they're more likely, possibly. And the jail situation may be sort of not lending itself to it. Lending itself? Yeah. Do you think you've become institutionalized from prison? And I ask because I speak to a lot of officers who say that their mental health has been impacted to a degree because of everything that they've seen.

And they might go into a restaurant and sit with their back to the wall or they're very hyper vigilant. Do you notice any quirks that you have? I must be honest, I think there's a little bit of conditioning goes on. It'd be sort of wrong to say it happens in a lot of jobs anyway. I'm not sure about institutionalized. I always. My social life was always. There was only one other prison officer. I socialized with all the rest of my people. I just.

And, you know, people out on the streets So I made a point of that. It's in your first, probably four to five years, you can take the job home with you because it's such a different job to do. If a prisoner gets one over on you, which they will, you know, they might get a little one over you there. Sometimes it becomes more important and it worries you more when you're. When you're. Because you think you've lost your authority.

When you get in the job a while you go, oh, okay, so it's not the end of the world that one, is it? It is what it is, you know, so they get. But you get a bit more realistic about it. So you tend to switch off a little bit more of not worrying about the fact that prisons had one over on you or something like that. And I gotta get it back. Yeah. And sit on the rules. You don't sit on the rules as much when you've been in the job a while.

You learn then to be able to see stuff coming and try to head it off, which once again is good in a small deal. Proactive or deal with it differently. And that's where you start to earn respect from prisoners without jumping on the old nicking sheet. You do it quite a bit when you're young because you don't have that experience of dealing with prisoners. So. So you see, so. And it's about, you know, setting the mark. I will if I have to, but I can't remember.

I don't think I give anybody a naked sheet here in the last 15 years I was here. Wow. But I managed things. They don't say, I didn't have a problem. But you learn to know people. Remember knowing people, you know, I know how this prisoner is likely to react if something goes wrong there up about landing. If I got to tell them things they don't want to hear or whatever, I got to tell them. And I know those relationships that are taking place because I see prisoners move around landings and I go.

And a lot of all the officers are good at that, doing that. Something's not working here. Something is unusual here because when you get a routine running like any relationship, small things get noticed. Oh, you know, little things you notice out of people's habits. Well, we're no different here. So you see things and you pick it up a lot faster. So you can step in and perhaps manage those things. And you know, and there's a system of reporting what they call security information reports.

And if all staff put it in, our security teams are looking at that and building that picture. Up. Particularly for the potentially big problems. The little stuff you just deal with as you go along. You do. Yeah. Prisoners swear at me. I've been. I've been insulted by professionals. It is what it is. It's not the end of the world, is it? You do have more vigilant eye, though.

I remember when we've done like music events here in the past or we've had overnight events, when we've had different things happening. And think about some of the Halloween events we've had. And you know when we've got security teams here and such. Yeah, professional security teams. And with any officer, any ex officer that we've employed, you can see they just have that look. You've done this many times. We've sort of looked. Keeping on that one. The security do it.

And you know, you're always able to pick out. I said, in trouble, your deals, you're. Always able to see. It's not that. I mean, I've done it at airports, I've sat there at airports and you watch around the place and I might say they just about have a bit of a big argument, those two. Yeah. You can just see the expressions on their face. You can see the whole man. But a lot of people can do that. It's just that we tend to pick it up as a sixth sense much, much quicker.

Of course, because you drink it all the time. Of course. Yeah. We went on different days to Wrexham, but I went to Wrexham when they would take us around on the tours and I sort of stood back from the group a little bit. They were all having a look. They were all sort of chatting about something and then just suddenly I could just see that the guys, the officers were taking us around. They just suddenly changed and that posturing sort of changed. I was like, what's going on over there?

And. And they just moved in a different way. One of them moved in between us and they could just tell that something happened. Something was potentially just about to go. It's either going to, nor it is happening. Yes. See that whole approach change. Yeah. Just knew. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was building it. It was getting.

The only thing I say is that in a smaller jail, and I've worked in big jails, of course, is that you tend to see it quicker because remember, there's only one big wing here and there's another small wing, so you've got your staff on here. You see things quite a lot going on. Remember prisoners, like anybody else, when you live in an environment long enough, you stop seeing what you just do what you got to do. Like who. Who notices the cameras when you go shopping? But they're everywhere.

Yeah. Nobody looks up. You just go. So that's the reality inside as well. So you do pick up things. I've worked in big jails and the danger with that is because of staff shortages, you might be moved around house blocks or wings a lot more often. So you never really settle with the prisoners. They never have a chance to get to know where you are and where they are. Yeah. And that's. That's to be a prison officer. That's the be and end all. We are the ones that see them the most.

Our job is to manage prisoners. Okay. Ones. Happy ones, if you can say happy in prison. And the difficult ones. And the better you know them, the easier that's got to be. It's just like anything, really. But. So the recommendation was made after the Manchester riot by Lord Justice Wolfe on the Wolf Report. I don't know if you've read it. I have. It's good. His first recommendation, one of his most important, was no prison should hold more than 400 prisoners.

They already recognized in 1992 that small jails operate differently. Yes, we have our problems, but you suppress them faster and tick along better. Yeah. But then the government completely ignored it because in the 90s, we were locking up about 12 to 1300 prisoners and started building prisons. 2000, Wrexham, 2106, Wellingborough, 1700. But it'll probably be capable of 2000. There's a private one going up in Leicester, on top of the old Leicester Glen Parva. That's going to be up for 2000.

So. Because they look at cost and they don't look at efficiency. Yeah. And I make no apology if anybody sees this. I hope that MPs are watching this at some stage. I make no apology for that. They've gone for cost over efficiency. Yeah. And we pay for that in the long run. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Hopefully Lord Timson may have. Because he's in the House of Lords, isn't he? But he's the Justice Minister. He may have some. Hopefully some authority to be able to start to move things onwards.

But he has to accept that he'll be pushed on budgets. And I go, that's the problem. We spend far too much on jails and not enough on prevention. Yes, I completely agree. So let's talk a little bit then about Bel Shrewsbury now. So there's. You do tours and things. Paranormal activity. It's supposed to be one of the most haunted prisons in the world. But mate's talking about prison, mate. How many people have died here over the years? In what way? As in how many people were executed here?

We know that there were seven from 1902 up to 1961, which was the last one. So not a lot really, but it would be proportionally higher if you go to Manchester, Leeds and London. Proportionally higher and stuff like that. As far as other deaths in custody. Yes, there's been quite a few over the years. There would be for all different reasons. Of course that was a. That was what we call. There was a heart attack that was turned.

There was a double cell turned into a palliative care suite because that was an older generation coming to prisons. So therefore there was a need to have pallet square. That's why there's all the electrics in their own shower. So that's an element in all jails that rises and then you've got that more problems with things like self harming and relatively more violence. There's always been difficult prisons, there's always been violence in jail.

It's just more common and it's much more difficult and it's much more vicious and there's a lot more gang elements than there ever was before. The death element kind of spins into I guess three, two, three spaces because you have prisoners that have died through committing suicide actually. Or through this. Actually very few deaths I think in prisons which are the result of another. Prisoner murders in prison. It happens but it's not, it's not overly common. It's quite a small.

Yeah, there's obviously suicides and then. Yeah. And self harm. There's obviously prisoners that do pass away through ill health. Yeah. Or doing drug addiction as well. And then obviously there's the execution side. So if you go back pre 1965 effectively, but for here, 1962 then obviously you have the execution. So we had seven executions in the last execution room. That's here at Shrewsbury.

Prior to that there was another execution room at the site which is long since being demolished and another building stands in its. In its stead now. So that would have been from, I think 1940, something like that, all the way back from how far back? It goes back to 1868 when this. Prison was built originally. We go back to the 1793, back. To some 200 years ago. They were being executed on the front gates. And how were they executed? The ones that you've been talking about, the most recent ones.

How, how was it done? When. Okay, so not firing squad here. No, that was only ever reserved for the military executions. But that was done away with in the military many, many years. Many, many, many years ago. Squad one, that still remains. This kind of. In the more recent years was when Shatima prison was an American military jet during World War II. And they executed seven. With so many numbers in my head. Sorry, 16, I think.

Altogether they executed nine prisoners and two of them were final shot and the other seven were hanged. And they did that because the. The prisons that were shot in Chateau Mallet, the locals complained about the Norway. It's Sunday morning. Yeah, Sunday morning. Okay. Well, there's actually quite. This is crazy. There's quite a dark story about what they did with those American soldiers after they were executed.

Okay. They were originally taken out and they were buried in a field on whether a military cemetery on the other side of the hedge, face down, facing the other way. Wow. That was their punishment because they weren't heroes. Wow. And then later on they were taken up and they were taken over to France into a military prison. But the same thing happened to them there. They were buried, not within there people with the headstones. No headstones.

And later on somebody found out who they were and in this, an American, of course. And they ended up with a number. They were given a number, not a name, and that number was placed on the ground. So if anybody that had a connection to that family could find out who it was. But there's only actually a number where that people are. But they're still buried on the other side. They were still wanted. Buried in disgrace. Wow. Yeah. Quite a die. I read all about it when I was doing some interview.

Yeah. Virtue. We've got. We've got Black History Month running. Black History Month's running at the moment in Shetland. We've got an exhibition operating in Shepton Mile Prison and it's all around the black GIs that were the war, the connection with white English women and then children being born and such like that. But the prisoners that were executed in Shetton that were in the military, were all black or Hispanic. Yes. And some of the cases, if not all, are very. What's the word?

I mean, controversial. Well, if they weren't, it might still be classified as unequal justice. So tell me, have either of you had paranormal experiences in the prison? No. Good start. Not in 25 years or 30 years. Now there's plenty of prison officers that have experienced things. Because you had an officer that refused. To work on Seawing. Yeah. Okay. Said something was going on there. And they said, I never work on Seawing on nights Again. But what, what did they experience?

They said that the 10 to 12 year old boy sitting in the stairwell when there was a small wing so they were doing their patrol and they usually put the lights right down on the landings. You don't, don't leave them bright up. And he was convinced that he'd seen it and refused point blank to work on the nights. Again, wow, unusual. Have you had any experiences? Yeah, I have.

And they're always, they're always, I say funny or weird to tell because I think you naturally wander around these buildings. Because I'm not, I'm not a believer necessarily in ghosts, but I'm not a disbeliever. I kind of sit on the fence. I think you do as well to a degree. You sort of sit offense go. If I've seen it and I've experienced. It, it's Marmite, mate. Either doing it.

Yeah. And I think the thing with spirits and buildings like this bearing mind, I've spent hundreds of hours, thousands of hours in this building and by myself. That you get yourself to a point going, did I see that? And you also find yourself trying to go, am I trying to selfie? Am I trying to experience it? So every time I do experience something, the first process I go through is trying to debunk it and trying to go a whole dollar second. And I have seen it many, many, many times.

When I can remember one of the very first paranormal investigations we had. Somebody's like, oh my God, there's a cold spot right here. And suddenly this person was like stepping forwards and stepping back, literally only a couple of feet away. And it was this cold spot. And then other people joined them and they were stepping into this cold spot. And instead being so much colder, I was like, is this, is this real? Is this real? And I stepped into it. I was like, my God, it is colder.

And it was noticeably a few degrees colder. I was like, this is. Well, when I started getting into this whole thing, go, oh my God, this must be like where somebody's died or something must have happened here. And I sort of stepped back and I then took a few more steps. I started wondering and sort of having a look. I noticed that cell windows were open. Yeah. And my hand came off coming straight through in one line in that spot.

Actually, if you walked the other way in the line, you stayed in the cold spot. I was like, do I tell these people that this is what it is and do I let them keep believing it's that? But I've certainly experienced things here that are harder to explain. I think the one that I saw the most was just on the landing above us. And it was daytime. So it's one of those funny things. Ghosts always come out at night. Okay. People always. It has been night time. Yeah. Night shifts on me.

And I came out of a cell down here, further down the line. And we were actually prepping for a bank holiday weekend on in the August. And I came out of a cell after sweeping it. We're just sweeping the cell systematically. I came out of the cell and I looked down the landing and I just saw a shadow figure. Like very, very clearly. Shadow figure. Quite a big figure. So that of what I thought was a man just goes straight into the cell right at the end. He just walks straight into cell 43.

Wow. And I was like, oh my God, I've just seen a ghost. He was so clear. Just the shadow figure just disappearing in. I was like, oh God, I've just seen a ghost. And then I got really excited because like, oh my God, I've seen a ghost. This is amazing. And started shouting for the rest of the staff that were around a different one. So I've just seen a ghost just in a ghost. And it turned out.

And other people have seen it since and other people have seen it before and we've had to do a lot of backtracking. And Graham's really useful from working here in the past to try to find out actually what stories and what things. Connections. When it was. When it was a working person because we took over Coles. So there was nothing that we knew really in that sense. And there are other people have seen it and then there's a lot more people that have seen it since then.

Which always brings that suggested theory of, you know, am I saying. Because it's suggested. But it has been seen quite regularly. It's. It's been called Shadow man or he's been called Shadow man. And it's thought it's more like to be an officer rather than a prisoner. And it gets seen always at this end of the building and either on that floor there or the floor we're on. Always walking across here. And why an officer? Why do people think it's an officer instead of a prisoner?

My. My feeling on it is based on the way. This will sound really weird, but based on the way it sort of moves and based on the size and the shaping. And also, I guess if I was going to fully believe in spirits, the way I would look at it is that buildings become. Get imprinted in terms of the spirits so you can hear the walking bones.

The way I would explain it is when we first took over this building, and Graham will appreciate this because he came around with me when I first took over, it was empty. It was. I wouldn't say derelict, but it was desolate and it was very cold and it was summer, so it wasn't cold. Busy, but it felt very cold. Like you wandered through. And it just felt like a dilapidated. No energy to it. It just felt a bit like.

I know that when these guys joined us, we had four prison officers originally, four ex prison officers, all they had worked here for a number of years. And they all said how sad it was that a place that they'd, I guess, worked out, called home work, that. Had life in it was so lifeless. And what happened when we started opening up, and I remember these guys saying to me, they were like, it's really nice because people coming through is bringing life back into the game.

And, you know, we started off with tours of 25 people and 30 people and 32 people. And then we'd have paranormal events with sort of 50 people on the education in education. Then we'd have productions, and productions would bring like 80 to 100 people. And as this was going on very quickly over a few weeks, you could just feel that building change in company. You know, it always reminds me of a slightly funny story.

I was stood just there behind those gates, and I think it was either Hobie City or Time was being filmed up on the landing gear. And I was just stood there back, and there was a guy there with the headphones on. And I said, oh. And I. I looked at all the people there. They got two principal actors, I said, and I counted them all. I said, you know something? He said, what? I said, you've got maple. More people standing around there. I said, then we opened this prison with. To run it for a day.

Wow. There were 35 staff. Everybody counted, and we unlocked this prison with 34. Wow. To run a whole prison for the day. I remember you dislocated your shoulder. Yeah. Unbelievable. And another quick story, if you don't mind. No, of course. There was an officer stood just behind there. Originally, this was all open, just like those landings were. This has been added since. And there was a big gate, that fence went down there. And that officer screamed and woke up every prisoner of the jail.

A new lad. He'd only been here a little while. And that's because when he was walking around at night and the lights were out, he was doing his patrols. Staff had nicked up there and they dropped a dummy over the top on a piece of string. Oh, no. Just. Just to scare him. Yeah, yeah. Literally walk the prisoner. This place makes a noise when you're the only one squealing. I bet. I think they're sitting there. There's so much energy in this place and not always good energy, but it.

Was used, lived and breathed and it. Was so much energy. And there would have been a lot of tension, there would be lots of high emotion. And the way I look at the paranormal world is a building effectively absorbs that and what most ghosts are or most spirits that people see, which is why you always see them in the same thing, doing the same thing. It's almost like a scratch and a record. It's a repetition of the building just repeating something that's happened.

Which is why I think prisoners have that, that real feel at paranormal and why they get most instances. Because what you hear a lot of is footsteps along the landing. Yeah. I mean you think about it over the 220 odd years, millions, you standing so many. First it is uncomfortable because as a prison officer you'd just been doing that. Yeah, yeah. And then prisoners doing the same. Yeah. And it's similar with hospitals because obviously again in hospitals it's a very repetitive environment.

I think that's why, you know, prisons, hospitals, churches, for example, asylums as they used to be called. Certainly the older ones, they always have that paranormal element, which is funny because mortuaries don't like even already dead. Yeah, yeah. For a start, I hope. Yeah, they should be. But also because they're sort of slightly more modern in that way because back in the day here people would. There was a mortuary here, but it was literally a slab.

And then they would just get bagged, mag tagged effectually and buried under. Buried under in the prison in the back corner. Yeah. So, yeah, so I've certainly had those things. I've definitely been here in the past where there's been doors slamming. I've definitely been here when I've heard footsteps above me. Have I ever seen an actual spirit stood like these guys are around us or sort of sat there as you are being able to really clearly make out all features.

No, but I've certainly seen things, experience things and I definitely have been in corridors. And I always say the corridor down to our restaurant is one of the classic ones because it's a really long corridor and it's always pitch black. There's no natural light in it whatsoever. So you can stand at one end and you can see your Reflection in the glass on the door. And you can see behind you children as you go to a door. You're like my buttons easily walk past. And like.

So I've spent thousands of hours. I'm probably one of the very few people in this prison's history that spent so many hours in here by myself because it would have never been empty. So I probably spent more time in this prison as an individual by myself, locked in it, than anybody else in this history. I never thought about that. That's bizarre, isn't it? And what about visitors? Like, so you do. You do stay overs. People can sleep here. You have paranormal investigations here.

Have you heard anything from visitors? Have they fed back things that they've seen that maybe you've not so many instances. I think there's probably been less from the sleepovers because when you have 75 people staying over in a prison in an environment, they're quite excited. There's quite a lot going on. So there's a lot of residual noise, there's a lot of movement. So I think it's not until sort of three, four in the morning when it goes quieter that you get those kind of elements.

So the paranormal investigations, and they happen pretty much twice a week, every week do about 100 of them a year. Quite a few people on my tours will mention start what kind of stuff? Well, they just, you know, they'll come around. It's very often we go towards the execution room and onto what they call the old woman's part. To prison, all that. They'll say, oh, this didn't feel right to me. Didn't feel right to me. Yeah, yeah. And wow. And again, really interesting.

In Seawing, only women were for hair pulling and being pushed and only in certain spaces never hear it from men. And that's again believed to be the type of prisoner that does it. And then the reasons behind his climbs. You get people that will be in different places who will feel paints their necks. Sometimes I'll just, you know, you know, when we, when we did the overnight ones, I used to do the overnights for. You didn't come in overnights.

And I remember sitting on the threes and I was there just to keep an eye on everybody. Everybody sits, but there were quite a few people. I was sitting on the stairs and there was about five or six people. They were just asking me questions. We were telling stories. And there was a young woman there just etching, literally just taking a picture. And she was right next, right next to the stairs there. And cell number 13 is just past it and she's okay. I said, well that's nice and all that.

And the reason she was there, she was sleeping in cell 13. And she said, because that's where my cousin brother, that's what my brother took his life. And she said I went to sleep in there because I could feel him. Oh my goodness. Wow. She stayed in there, didn't she? She used it almost like a bit of a muse. Yes. Yeah. Used as inspiration. She just drew charcoal drawings. Yes, she did. Yeah. She was very good too. She's really. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, there's.

There's loads of reports and Holby City is a great one that Graham mentioned earlier because we were, we were downstairs, we were at the front of the jail. It was early in the week earlier when, when they'd been filming here. So we were at the very, very front in the courtyard and they were using the governor's office as their like production studio effectively. And the head of locations was in there and he was a great guy. He's brilliant as he saw everything up and everything like that.

And he walked out of the governor's office. Oh yeah, yeah. He saw a woman walk past him in a big Victorian dress. Wow. And he just sort of was like, hold on, why is a. Why is the essays here? Like one of the supporting actors here. And what are we filming? He was like, what's going on? And as he double took, he just saw her down these stairs and he said basically she looked like she walked downstairs and disappeared through the floor.

And he came out into the courtyard and he was white as a sheet and he was sweating. He was like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. We were like, what? He's like, I've just seen this happen. We were like, really? And it took him a little while to walk and he was shaking. He started crying and he got. He was just like, I don't know what's going on. And like everyone sort of crowded around. He was talking us through this and I don't understand that. They were walking through Keith.

It was one of the other officers. Well, there is a set of stairs underneath there. And he was like, no. He was like, yeah, there's a set of stairs because he used to be the governor's house. Okay. And below it is effectively a basement governor's wine cellar. Effectively also used to connect him to the old prison. And exactly where he then showed us where this lady in wall, there's still a set of stairs. It's just been covered over. It's just had Literally a floor, put it over the floor.

And he was like. We would go, well, the only person that would have been there in that kind of dress and that kind of time would have probably been a governor's wife. Yes. Yeah. Or one of the servants or a maids or he was governess. He was like, we're moving a production office. I don't want to be back in. Really. So shaken by the whole thing. I think you can, yeah, you can see, you can definitely see the instances that are so real for people that they're just like.

And he was happy to come back in the building but didn't want to go back into that space. And it wasn't necessarily he was scared, he was just really perturbed by it. Yeah, that happens. And I think what I would say with anybody, we get it a lot. We get lots of people who say, well, we don't believe in our stay in there overnight. No problems at all. Generally it happens to be guys normally on social media, I'll stay in there, it's absolutely fine. And I say this to Graham as well.

He'll probably disagree with me, but I don't care who you are and how big and how tough you are and what you've sort of been through. If you're here by yourself at 3:30 in the morning and you're having to walk up the wing and all the lights are off and you have to turn, you have to close the jail. And there's not anybody else here done it. You walk down this building quicker than you will be during the day. I used to come out and just.

I used to come back into a wing but all the lights were off here. Literally it was pitch black and I didn't have a torch because I know my way around the jail. I know exactly where buildings are, but I'm walking and even I'm walking up there and I'm used to it and I'm walking at a normal pace and I'm still thinking. I wonder you do you start thinking about it, you start thinking about something might just jump out at me, I don't know. But I just said that and it.

Sets in and then suddenly you just find yourself going a little bit quicker and everybody does it. I've never known anybody not to do it. And even those that go, no, no, I'm fine, I'll be dying. It's the unknown. Everybody's frightened. That's the thing. And you know, we speak to so many people that do really heavily believe in ghosts. Absolutely. It's definitely the Opposite end of the spectrum as well.

Heading to the opposite end of the spectrum where they totally don't believe and loads of people in the middle and actually for us it's more about people be able to have an experience and go through it. So those who don't believe it goes well, come and have a look and you know that's, that's great. You don't and see what you think afterwards. Many come back in with cameras and do do a self guided tour where they can walk around their own leisure and do these things.

Why do you think some people see them and some people don't? Do you think it just happens to be luck in that moment? Lsd, acid man. It's flashbacks. They're having flashbacks. Edit. Edit. Yeah. The paranormal world would explain it. Based on how prepared and open you are and certainly in parallel investigations they will say if you're open to seeing something then you have the opportunity to. If you're completely closed off from it, you probably won't. I'm not sure about. Quite true.

I think that there's, there's definitely moments and again you have to kind of read into this what you will where the building feels different. So if we look at February 6th, I think it is February 6th, February 6th, where the day before the last execution happened here which was 1962.

And you know we've spoken to prison officers that were here when the execution took place and they said the noise on the landing and that was even being reported in the media how loud it was because every single prisoner back then they had like tin cups was. Banging on their door and just saying Free George. Free George. Free George. All night. This is so loud. I've never experienced what it's like in a prison when prisoners are kicking off at night.

But you say the biggest time would always be on New Year's Eve. Obviously prisoners are in their cells by then and it's all relatively quiet because they've got TVs. But I'll guarantee you you're sitting there and it's gone real quiet and you're just sitting there and you're just thinking all of a sudden it'll go bing bong. Is it very overwhelming when oh, you. Sit there and you cross your fingers say I hope these doors hold. Yeah, they're really just banging the doors.

But now they're all steel doors, see so they're much noisier than the old wooden doors used to be. And they're doing. That's just their way of seeing in the new year it's not. It only goes on for what a couple of minutes at the pushing just on the back. But the sound is all mance you can with productions. Yeah. Hyperdoches here with like 80, 100 people and they. And they go, right guys, we're going to recreate the prison sound. They all get them kicking fences and shouting and it is loud.

Yeah. Really? Yeah. So we do have days where like almost sort of anniversaries where it does feel a little bit different. And I think sometimes you'll get people that will come to visit specifically on those days to feel how different it does. And I don't think there's necessarily a rhyme or reason in answer to your question as to why some people do and some people don't. Perhaps. I think it's. There probably is an element of being open to it, not being closed off from it.

But I think that, you know, the repetitiveness of spirits in a place. Yeah. The problem with something like that is it's when you look at people and you look at how chemicals work in a brain. Because some people have hallucinations, of course, and they're as regal as they are for anybody else. So you never know where you're crossing the boundaries of a mind that may be open or not or expecting or thinking something's real.

Where that power of the chemicals of the body will start to create those semi images. Even if they're just fleeting images for them. You never know. You'll never ever find that answer out about why some do and some don't. What is. Not that lots of people won't see anything. Yeah. But they will hear. Certain.

Yes. And when they start using equipment, especially in a paranormal investigations, if they start then using different equipment to look for spirits, that normally yields quite a big result. So everything from a cat's eye, which is a small ball that you put in a space and if it moves, it will start to flash. That happens quite regularly. You can just put it in a cell and it'll be steady for 5, 10 minutes and then suddenly it will start going off.

Or if you're speaking to somebody it will start going off. And if you're in an environment where you have. Where you're. Where you're calling out for example to spirits, then sometimes you'll get nothing back. Sometimes you will do. Certainly Ouija boards will have different instances where people experience things, K2 meters in terms of identifying the electrical signals and such like that that are happening. And one of the things that we always find interesting with the K2 meters.

And again we do our best to debunk everything, to give people a realistic experience so they can really go, oh, that's. That's right. Is whether they're pointing at electrical sockets. They're wrong. And it's actually on both sides where they're picking up on a different electrical signal and atmosphere. And I think the. I'm not exactly sure what they're called, but basically there's like a green zone.

So what it does is it projects green specks across the area, and then you can see if those lasers are broken. So all of those different bits of equipment, all the different ways that people try to communicate with spirits, that generally really yields different results. And again, different cells on different days. And it's impossible to kind of go back to the reasoning as to why will that I'll do something on a certain day, but not on another. And that's quite a common thing.

And that's something that's been witnessed and seen and documented by individuals, but by two people, three people, four people involved. I've seen 50 people here, all experience exactly the same thing at the same time. And that's when it's kind of quiet. And they're all sort of. One person's talking to a spirit and they're asking them to call out or they're asking to make noises. And I've been here when there's just those people in.

On the landing like this, and they'll all be quiet, everyone's quiet. And they'll say, yeah, if you can hear us make a noise or knock or bang or whistle or do something to let us know you're here, it'll go quiet and that will happen. And everyone's like, whoa. And everyone there looks at. Did you hear that? Did you hear that? Did you hear that? Yeah. And then there's that whole process, right? Everyone check everyone next to them, make sure they're not making noise. And they'll do it again, why?

But it will be coming from three stories up. And then the question is always asked, is there anybody else here? It's like, that was just you guys. Wow. And that's where people then start getting fascinated. I'm not sure what then works and when they'll go, right, I'm going to go chase down the noise. I don't think that works. But those certainly. Even that door squeakers, you can hear it there. I don't know if you pick up on the mics, but that type of stuff happens a lot.

And when the building's quiet and it's just, you or just a small group of people, you all in the same place and you start hearing those squeaks. Okay, what's that? And then you start to sort of investigate and ask and probe. And I think that's where the energy comes from is if you're willing to do that and you have the energy to do it. And kind of when people get excited, I think the people get most excited about looking for spirits tend to then find positive things happening.

And they do again in the paranormal world. The paranormal circle still talk about. It's about energy because that's ideally what it is. You put energy back into a building and it repeats back. And you know, I look at it very similar to a record player. If you don't turn it on, the power, you don't give it the energy, it can't do anything. You need that to come back. Do you think it's got anything to do with paranormal activity? I know you're seeing with the repetitive movement.

Do you think it's got anything to do with the place as well, like the suffering that has occurred? For me, it will be the emotional piece that is what attaches to it. Because anywhere that's up high place of emotion naturally has an ability to hold it more. Which again is why in churches, hospitals, prisons tend to be the more haunted locations like that because of the heavy emotion.

If you think of those prisoners, obviously there's a. Graham can obviously talk about more like it's a heavy burden for prisoners to be in jails. And these guys always say that prison's not overly difficult physically. It's very hard mentally because, you know, you're in an environment, you can't do anything, anything on the outside world. So that becomes really difficult. Churches, highly emotional spaces. Hospitals, highly emotional spaces. You only go to hospital if you're sick.

Like, so it's. Yeah, highly emotional places. And I think that's where the spirits effectively connect to into a building. That would be my interpretation. No, talk about Star Trek. No, there's more reality. It is exactly that. Different people do. Graham's works here for 29 years. No, 25 of the 38. You must remember, with a place like this, I've heard noises all the time. So I hear the wind blowing, I hear the doors creak, and I hear the quiet footsteps somewhere else.

And you hear little noises obviously coming in on ourselves. So you just get so accustomed to hearing these noises. It doesn't matter to me, they're just noises now because you couldn't stand there walking through a jail going, oh, ah, oh. What's that? What's that? Put the light on. Put the light on. Yeah, you just couldn't do that. So you just. It's like all things, I think a lot of it be about expectations.

I think people come to all buildings with expectations and I don't know what drives their thoughts. Once again, I would go back to. We don't know how the brain truly works and what drives their thinking, as opposed to somebody coming in and go just all a lot of nonsense, you know, you don't know. It's about expectations sometimes.

So old buildings like this will drive expectations, as will hospitals and particularly derelict hospitals where there's been a lot of death and bad people and stuff like that. Churches and we've got, we've got staff across the board that some fully believe in paranormal, some don't believe in paranormal and everything in between, just like we do with people that visit. And that's, that's why we look at it very much.

The buildings here come and experience in the way that you want to and if you experience something that's great, documented, we'd love to hear about it. And if you don't, you don't believe in it, that's also great and that's fine. And why do you do an escape room that's like. Yeah, but we've got three prisons that we own and we operate and each of them has different paranormal connections.

And I think the one that has the least parallel of connections, coincidentally enough, is the one that's never executed to anybody. Executions, mate. So yes, people have died in there, but it's been through self harm or potentially through a very rare occasion on murder. Whereas the prisoners that have had executions tend to have more parallel activity.

And the pattern, the execution rooms and actually the drop rooms underneath, which is always interesting for us, have more activity and the drop rooms tend to have more activity because that's actually where people lost their life. They don't lose their life in the execution room, they drop through effectively into what's called the drop room.

And I think with Shattamallet prison, I mean that's 400 years old, so it's the oldest prison in the world and it just spans back and back and back and back and back and back. And when you think that Shrewsbury is 220ish years old now, 200 years more than that, I mean, it was a prison when Shakespeare was still alive in writing. And the amount of history that has got in that space just literally seeps out of the walls and therefore everything that's happened in.

It naturally brings more supernatural kind of instances. So. Yeah, that's why I think with Chateau Malik prison, it's the oldest prison, like, say, in the world, and it's the most haunted prison in the world. It certainly has the most documented instances of paranormal encounters from. Yeah, from all sorts of people. People. You know, I. I always, always enjoy it when people come, like, I do not believe this person. Do not believe in ghosts. I do not believe it.

And they leave in, like, oh, my God. I totally believe in it. Because sometimes it's just a feeling, isn't it? People will walk into a cell and they'll just have a feeling. They go, that doesn't feel right. Yeah. But as you say, even if you don't believe, you wouldn't want to be here at 3am by yourself. Literally. Yeah. Yeah. Even if they are, they move a little bit faster. Yeah. Graham, do you miss being a prison officer? No. Okay. No, I don't.

Because I think the reason I retired, when I come to the Anna's Shoes Featherstone, I didn't feel like it was a fit for me. But then I realized that I'd done 38 years at this, and I'd seen and done all the things I'd ever need to see and do and never needed to see and do again. And what I was going into was a prisoner. Prisoners just keep repeating the same old stuff all the time. And that was the time that I said to the governor, I've decided to retire because I can't.

I can't buy into the program in the same way now. It's just become so repetitive to me. And all that and all the things I know is going to happen. I said, it doesn't make me. It's not going to make me a good officer. It's not good for me, it's not good for prisoners, and it's not good for you, Governor. It's time for me to move on. It's somebody else's turn to move in. So. Really? Yes. I knew I'd done enough. Somebody said, do you miss it? I go, I don't miss it at all.

Not for a nanosecond do I miss it. I miss the people that I bumped into my life, all the friends that I've made, all the colleagues that I've made. Because there is a common thread between staff that work in prisons. There is. It doesn't matter which jail I go to, I can talk to. I've seen ex officers come here. Literally. I've seen current prison officers come on My tours, and we'll have a good old chat somewhere along the line at the end of the tour.

And there's still the common thread going through it, as I said to you, more about the book from 1850 to 1972 and also from 1972 at the Modern days, there's still the common thread about prison officers that run through it all the way through. Nothing has changed from our perspective in, you know, because one of the problems they do is they try to bring out prisons and they look at custody and they look at security and they look at reform and rehabilitation. And I said, that's a really hard one.

But nobody ever talks to staff about how they're going to manage when they bring in rehabilitation. They never go. We need to give staff specific training now. Why? Because they're going to have to deal with prisoners in a different way when you let them all out to these landings, you're going to have to manage prisoners at a much different way than when you were just putting them in and outdoors all the time. So it takes new skills. But they didn't.

They just opened the doors and let us find out, probably as best we could. Now, some people did it good and some people didn't do so the danger of that, it's not a good way to go about your business. You're changing something fundamentally in the prison service, but you're not changing the staff that are the ones that are prime people that are going to be having to manage it. And that's happened repeatedly within its history, folks, and we're still in that same place today.

So a question for both of you. I appreciate this question could go on very long, but we'll try and keep it succinct. What would you change in the prison service first in order to make it more effective today? I'll let you go with that one first. Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I can say my perspective. Well, you can put it from a public's point of view, can't it? I think looking at the European systems and specifically looking at the Nordic systems, that the.

We should be looking more at rehabilitation and starting much earlier in schools, actually, before crimes be affected, which is why we do our education program the way we do it. And Graham is absolutely right, I think in the sense that smaller prisons are better and they should be run more like communities in that sense, to bring rehabilitation. I think the Nordic systems have shown that, unfortunately, that's probably never going to happen in the uk, and that's quite a Sad thing.

So we therefore have to make the best of what we have. And I think from that perspective. It'S extremely difficult. The same as every public system, because prisons are a public system. It needs more money, it needs more cash to be able to do these things. We're broadly in the same place, because I've always been a believer that prevention is always better than the cure. Healthcare will tell you that. Prevention, let's stop it happening before it becomes a problem.

Well, prisons are no different in that way, or crime and justice is no different. And so it's about prevention. And that's not easy to do because we've gone so far down the road. Very often at a political level, all governments have been allowed themselves to be what they call. They're telling people what they want to hear because you get a lot of information coming out.

Because they're looking at their position as MPs, and they're coming up with policies that really are trying to placate a public. And that's not their job. Their job is to manage society. And sometimes you have to do difficult things that the public may not go along with you for, and that's not easy one to do. Get me wrong, I've watched prison sentences get longer and longer. People still think they're doing less time now than they did 30 years ago, and it's not true.

Determinate sentences are longer, lifers are spending longer in jail, and yet there's no evidence to prove that it's actually made a significant difference in the crime rate. Yes, there will always be what I call the seasonal fluctuations. Different crimes rise and fall. That's about society more than it's about prison policy. So the evidence is not there, and yet the evidence is there for your Nordic prisons about how many people come to jail, why they're coming to jail.

Is there other preventative things going on before they get to jail? We still talk about, you know, bang them up for longer, give him longer. He should be doing light for that. He should be doing light for that. He should be getting that. He should be in jail for the next 20 years. You know, they're all easy, emotional things to say. And the danger is there. There's a bit of a danger that over the years, politicians have fallen into that trap. They work for eight years. Well, that's a double.

Yeah, it's truly got to be. It's got to be. All parties have got to get together and then whatever they create, they go. We have to stick with this. Don't change your mind. We have to stick with this for the next 10 to 15 years. And that means the next prison we built will be nothing like the current ones we're building now. Nothing like them at all. I can see Starbucks, Farage sitting in a room together, agree on prison system and how it should work. Yeah, yeah. And staff.

And staff need huge amount. I think in Nordic prisons, they've got to be someone like two years trained in. And I think they have to do a third year at the degree level. That's more about just pulling open and closing. Prison officers still roughly, with three months, 12 weeks. Yes. They got 12 months probation where they do these little modules, but they're not really at that level.

I actually think the prison service like to keep it like that because they can then hold prisoners down from the UN professional level, where they might say, we're now at a professional level where we have a right and demand much better terms and conditions because we're now in a profession, a proper, skilled profession. I'm not saying prison officers aren't skilled. They are. They're hugely skilled at what they do and a lot of it's learned right there on the job and that's a great thing.

But they're doing it because they're dedicated. They're dedicated to get it right. And that's the reality. It's just that they've been, I know, I don't want to say nailed down at every opportunity, but, you know, cost cutting, it's always about money. And prison services are out of sight, out of mind. So they. I bet you on this next round of public money, we will talk about nurses and police officers. We're going to put another 30,000 people on the street.

We're going to get another 20,000 nurses. And that's all brilliant, that's all brilliant. But at the end of the day, you're going to go, we are a part of society. Prisons are part of. The criminal justice system is probably the most expensive organization that runs. If you take it from police to probation to the courts to the after to the tagging people, to the prisons to the after. Getting out of jail probably cost us more than all the other things put together.

It's probably cheaper to put a hundred thousand police officers on the street and go, prevention. Yeah. Every time somebody runs around a corner, do something naughty, they bump into a cop and then they run away from the copper, they run down the next corner, they bump into another copper and they go. And they go, oh, yeah. So it made by. It's not behavioral. Ah, what you people do things because they think they're not being watched. True. Okay, Right, last question.

What has being a prison officer taught you about life and humanity? Poor man didn't tell me it's going to be this difficult. Didn't you see the question? No. Life generally. Remember I was 25 and I was still quite naive about the world around me. And it was very easy to be very black and white about things when you're younger. And that's generally quite common with younger people. It's either is or it isn't. And so generally as you get older.

But the prison service has taught me to look at things a lot deeper. I've done a lot of reading about the side from the psychology side of things and criminology to find out why these things exist. It's one thing to come and do a job and to go home and it's another reason to understand why you're doing it in the first place. So it taught me to look at that. But that's a skill you can take outside. That's the reality.

It's a two way process that you learn to think about things differently and you look at things. And one thing I did learn with prisoners, take what you see that stands in front of you. Never make assumptions about people. Ever make assumptions about people. You get the biggest surprise you like. I have seen prisoners defend staff that have been assaulted by other prisoners and it's the least prisoner you expected to do it. The one that's a bit loud on the landing, a bit larger than.

Yeah, and all that. And before you know what you've gone poor. I saw it happening in this prison. Literally. The prisoner grabbed him and chucked him away. He said he's a decent and screw. He is. Excuse my language, but he's a decent screw. He is, you know, because prisoners will recognize, you know, that it's not good officers get assaulted as much as bad ones do. It's never about, well, he's a bad one, so he deserves it. However, you know what I mean?

So you get surprised when you least expect to be surprised. And that's the thing it taught me. When I see people out in society, I never judge people on a first look. And we still tend to have a habit of judging what we see, not what we know. Yeah, great answer. And Joel, what has spending so much time with Graham as a prison officer taught you about prison? Oh my gosh, I wouldn't even know where to begin. Before I did this, I knew a little bit about prison.

My wife works in a prison as A psychologist, a behavioral treatment program. So I had an understanding I'd be in a prison that was open or like a cat sea prison where life was. So I'd seen inside of one, which is very different. I think every bit of knowledge I have, I've gained from the teams within the jails and probably 90% of that, give or take, has probably come from Graham. I think it's just I house a huge amount of encyclopedic knowledge, I would say, of prisons.

I was saying this to somebody the other day that I can tell you all about the prisons, all about the prison histories, the routine, the systems. I could run a guided tour right now with no bombs at all. What I can't do is replicate the feeling and that. That actual of living and walking through it and knowing, hold on, I need to keep an eye on that guy. Because this might happen or this might happen or that might go. And that's what you get different from prison officers. As if they walked us.

They've lived it in that sense. So, yeah, huge, huge amount of knowledge. But I think what we've done is we've tapped into Graham and other prison officer's knowledge and we've extracted it very, very well. And what we've then done is be able to turn that into factual tours to then repeat that history through to people and repeat those stories. So majority of our tour guides and staff are not experts.

No, no, no. And the stories that they tell, the information they do is all being garnished from people like Graham and people that have lived and breathed and worked in it for years. And I think that's what makes us such a successful heritage attraction is the fact that the stories we have are real, the history is real, the information's real. The people telling it wouldn't have been the people walking the walk effectively, but they certainly, you know, they know, they know everything about it.

And yeah, you learn more and more and more as you go then. Yeah, every tool is another. It's education with fun made. Well, thank you both so much. It's been such a pleasure to chat with you both. Thank you very much.