To the delight of Britain’s tabloids, female prison officers keep entering into relationships with the male prisoners in their charge. In 2025 alone, 11 female screws have been charged with or found guilty of misconduct for relationships with prisoners – one of whom was a prison governor. Eighteen women working at one prison in Wales have been sacked or resigned for the same offence over the past few years. The Mail suggested “bad boy energy” is to blame. Others argue that having female officers in male prisons is itself a recipe for disaster – overlooking the many who do a fine job.
There is a conservative tendency to view these incidents through the lens of individual moral looseness. In perhaps the most notorious case, Linda De Sousa Abreu had sex with a prisoner while allowing his cellmate to record it, despite having been working at Wandsworth Prison only a few months. The video went viral. It later emerged that De Sousa Abreu had a dormant OnlyFans account, which the judge noted in his sentencing remarks, adding that she was “certainly not naive about the media or social media”. The notion that the incident was a publicity stunt carried out on the taxpayer’s dime stoked a wave of moral panic.
This was a red herring. In De Sousa Abreu’s case, the judge euphemistically described Wandsworth as “a challenging working environment”. It is in truth a colossal wreck, from which multiple prisoners have been accidentally released in recent weeks. It is the prison Daniel Khalife escaped from in 2023 by strapping himself to the bottom of a delivery van.
Poor management in failing prisons creates fertile ground for petty corruption.
Take Megan Breen, 23, who this year received a ten-month suspended sentence after beginning a relationship with a prisoner and boasting about it to colleagues. She met up with the prisoner while on a night out in Liverpool (he was on home leave) and introduced him to two colleagues. She also pointed him out on the prison computer system to another staff member and recounted the story. The relationship appears to have been widely known among her colleagues.
How do such things happen? Breen’s induction training as a prison officer lasted just one week. It was described in court as “comprehensive”, though longer courses run to ten days. By comparison, it takes years to train as a teacher, accountant, nurse or lawyer. Yet we allow young people to be unleashed on the prison estate after a week of tea, biscuits and a debrief on “prison protocols, expectations and security requirements”. Breen was around 20 when the affair with the prisoner began.
Then there are the long years of real-wage stagnation in the public sector, and the prison estate in particular, despite rising living costs and the grim pressures of the job. Low pay leads to high staff turnover; retention rates have been falling for years. The young and inexperienced increasingly predominate.
Experienced criminals spot moments to corrupt; the corruptible see more incentives. One of the women was also accused of supplying cannabis vapes to inmates. She was unable to explain £1,000 in banknotes found by police at her home and pleaded guilty to possession of drugs. A prison officer at Five Wells in Wellingborough was recently jailed for an inappropriate relationship with a prisoner in which she tipped him off about cell searches. Meanwhile, an officer in Surrey is on trial for allegedly having relationships with “at least” two inmates and conspiring to bring drugs into the prison – she denies all charges.
The government is currently denying to grant a 6.3 per cent pay rise to prison officers, which would, in the words of their union, “begin to repair and correct years of real-term losses, rebuild morale and support staff retention”. The union has also proposed raising prison officer salaries to £41,700, as this would meet the skilled-worker visa threshold and enable international recruitment. Either option is estimated to cost around £280m a year.
The “optics” of funnelling more public money into a failing arm of the state will probably prevent it from happening. And so conditions are likely to keep deteriorating – even as Labour pushes ahead with plans to build more prison places.
Is the prison estate uniquely cursed? It has suffered years of neglect because of that same obsession with optics. Nobody cares about the “dregs of society” until they are breaking out of collapsing prisons or being released early from overcrowded ones. The breakdown of prisons is merely the sharp end of the wedge – the part of the public sector we began neglecting earliest. Consider the future of a poorer, less competent British state, unable to insulate itself from the blight of petty corruption. Future flashpoints are easy to predict: policing and local government, where funding crises interact with institutional decay (this week, a housing officer in Newham resigned after being accused of “serious internal housing fraud”).
This country suffers from shady, big-ticket corruption – dodgy foreign money sloshing around the capital and the like. But it has, thankfully, been largely free from the mire of widespread petty corruption in public offices, at least since the high-minded reforms of the Victorians. Transparency International regularly rates the UK generously in its Corruption Perceptions Index. While the prison sex stories provided titillation for the media, they may be a harbinger of miseries to come.
[Further reading: The real reason prisoners keep walking free]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 13 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What Keir won't hear