Inside Strangeways The shocking truth about life behind bars

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.