Neil Samworth

Britain's prison system is in crisis. Prisoners catatonic on Spice, prison officers under extreme stress, overcrowding, riots, fatal stabbings - barely a week goes by without disturbing reports reaching the outside world of life inside our jails. For eleven years, Neil Samworth worked as a prison officer in perhaps the most notorious of all prisons, Strangeways, now HM Prison Manchester. He left in 2016 and, having kept a diary for many years, is ready to tell his story. Strangeways: My Life As A Prison Officer is a no-holds-barred account of one man's struggle to keep his professional composure and sanity in one of Britain's toughest jails. From the chaotic, intimidating atmosphere of K wing, which houses more than 200 prisoners spread over three landings, to the healthcare unit where the prison's most mentally disturbed prisoners are held, Neil has seen it all - cell fires, suicides, terrifying violence. He has had to beat back his own emotions as he deals with psychopathic killers and witnessed the worst of human nature but also the best, and some of the most moving passages in the book recall the embattled camaraderie among his colleagues.

My Life As a Prison Officer

Strangeways

Neil ‘Sam’ Samworth worked as a prison officer for twelve years, many of them in HMP Manchester, more commonly known as Strangeways. It’s bad enough for the staff – but what is it really like to be banged up in a category A prison with some of the country’s most dangerous offenders? Six ‘ex-customers’ of Strangeways have shared their stories with Sam. We’ll see what it’s like to be stuck in the cells for twenty-three hours a day, to cope with the power struggles and prison hierarchy, to fall foul of Manchester’s most notorious gangster, Danny Gee, and lose an eye in the process, to become addicted to spice, to be traumatized by your experiences on the hospital ward (where they lock up the suicidal, the insane and the downright evil), to be messed around by the probation service and to cope with an IPP sentence, which means you are incarcerated indefinitely for a trivial crime. And much more . . . Inside Strangeways is full of shocking, darkly funny, insightful stories. Sam has a sympathetic but clear-eyed take on events. He knows the prisoners are not angels, but he also knows that the prison service fails them.

Neil Samworth

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