Thank you for listening to Tales From The Jails!! We've reached the end of Season One, my first year of incarceration, and are pressing pause on the podcast, but we will be returning in the New Year with Season Two, which turns out to be far wo...

It's the 25th of December, 2016. Imagine waking up on Christmas morning with a person you only met a few months ago, not your partner or soulmate, but your pad mate, in HMP. I'm on top bunk and he's down below, two lives colliding. 

It's the 16th of December, 2016. It's Friday. Today HMP Birmingham has turned into a riot, resulting in a complete meltdown. The official statement as of 5:00 PM is control has been lost. The G4S private prison has between four and 600 prisoner...

It's official. Toenails has left the building. There was no real camaraderie. Number 1, a fellow Despicable, walked with him to the meat wagon. From the rest of us however, it was more good riddance than au revoir. The place felt instantly brig...

Breaking news. It's just been unofficially confirmed. Toenails departs in two days. Cat D. He's hanging on in reception by his grubby fingernails and his days are numbered. And if he's caught doing anything untoward his Cat D is over and he'll ...

I have said many times, nothing and no one is sacred when it comes to Scousers, even more so in prison. Inside HMP, in many ways it is like falling down Lewis Carroll's rabbit hole on acid and coming through the other side only to be in a Steph...

Scouse Rambo is the first to admit that his drink and drug use is way beyond that of recreational. He tells the lads that he once collapsed in a field at Glastonbury, doesn't remember how he got there but when he came to, security was there and...

We're full to capacity in Walton. We never went to work on Saturday because we were full. History in the making, again. The news before we left for work this morning was that a prisoner commits suicide every three days in prison. It was quoted ...

The local BBC news is outside the prison, and officers are striking outside. It's chaos beyond the door and we're subjected to Christmas ads playing every 12 minutes on TV, on almost every channel.

Only 48 hours ago, mobile phone footage was uploaded to the net and social media of 230 inmates in HMP Bedford running riot and out of control. Day by day the broken prison system is making the headlines.

How do you respond or react to someone when they are seemingly happy and you feel lousy? It takes on a whole new meaning in here, manifesting in anger, violence or malicious acts to derail your happiness.

As I settled and focused, there was a young inmate slumped on the floor with a bed sheet noose tied around his neck. He was alive, but he was desperate.

By seven o'clock this morning the BBC was reporting a man knifed and dead in Pentonville, two seriously injured and two arrested. By the time I'd put the phone down on T, a guy had been slashed in the showers on the fives. A normal day in HMP. ...

The constant level of juvenile behaviour is beyond what you can imagine, but at the same time it has to be taken seriously because of the ever present violent undertones that lurk. You may be surprised to hear that vanity plays a significant ro...

Any one of us can be attacked or caught up in a violent episode, and potentially or probably be knifed, slashed, coshed, swilled, strangled or battered brutally and viciously. Who do you become as a result of any of this, when on the receiving ...

Self-harming is as common as the cockroaches that appear each evening. The place is infested with self-harming severe mental health issues and men attempting suicide daily, to the entertainment of far too many lads on the wing.

Four lads went in on another inmate. Brutal attack apparently. They tried to cut his ears off because he's supposedly a nonce, aka a paedophile. Worse than the attack itself was the screaming from the lad.

Crime is bigger than both the Beatles and Liverpool Football Club in this city, and I am nestled in the epicentre of one of the most criminally minded group of men in Europe, and it's chaos of a different kind.

What was it like being GW? It was all crazy as fuck. I used to drink a lot, champagne back in those days. Vodka too...

Can you imagine being cooped up in a prison cell without any power? No lights, no TV, no hot water and no radio.

Nothing prepared me for this day. I'm not angry, bitter or resentful, but it hurts. It seems so unfair...

It's surreal how the X-rated antics in the outside world still manage to seep into prison.

It's the Wild West of mayhem, crammed in cells are lunatics and psychos, paedophiles and rapists, murderers, drug addicts and violent men.

My closest friend thus far is in for manslaughter. He killed his wife in what he describes as two minutes of madness when he just flipped.

How to make friends and influence people? Cut hair.