Life Inside by a Prison Officer

By Hannah Ratcliffe
BBC Kent

Jeff Kelly with prison visitor the musician Herbie Flowers

Saving a number of prisoners' lives has been a career highlight for Jeff Kelly while dealing with the pressures on the prison service was a low point.

Jeff Kelly from Rochester worked as a prison officer for 12 years.

He shares his experiences of prison life in his book called Bang 'Em Up.

"When I used to talk to people I was always looking around me, waiting for prisoners to be doing something wrong...it's now taken me quite a while to maintain eye-contact."

Have things changed over the years you were in the prison service?

"The change I saw was the type of prisoner you got in. The majority were simply robbers, blaggers, then all of a sudden there was this real increase of people with drug related issues, those requiring de-tox. And then all of a sudden we saw an increase in the mentally ill that were coming into the prisons, clearly there wasn't funding or beds for them outside."

Are there too many people in prison?

"Far to many people. It's because we're not dealing with the problem, we're not dealing with what causes these people to be in prisons. The problems are drugs; the largest problem we've got in this country is drugs, we've got to really tackle that culture that brought that change and the susceptibility of our youngsters that go on drugs."

How much of the prison population do you believe are taking drugs?

"About 80%"

That's a huge amount, where do they get them from?

"They will come in on visits, where you have direct contact between two people obviously things can be passed. If we catch prisoners doing that we can put them on a system called closed visits but that won't be for a long time and again they will get them from someone else who brings them in."

At what age is it OK to bring a child into prison to visit their mum or dad?

"At any age, babies come in, any age and it's one of the saddest things we see in visits. Clearly some of these people are just ordinary working people and they come in with the children and you can see the distress, discomfort of the parents because they've got the children there."

Do you think the children should be there?

"It's the only time they are going to see their father and why hide the truth their father's in prison? I think the best way is at least let them face up to that see what's going on and not be afraid of that."

Do prison officers ever make friends with prisoners?

"They do, there are two level of friends. There's a sense where you will be friendly with a prisoner and you can strike up good rapport but to actually bond and make friendship is frowned upon and so it should be."

What do you think about the portrayal of prisons in the media?

"The older type programmes are the closest, you've got the older series of Within These Walls and you've also got Porridge. People say it can't be all like Porridge, in fact actually it is, you look at Porridge there's a lot of sad moments as well."