present stuff and mental health experts respond to our exclusive interview with an inmate inside what he alleges to be the revolving doors of the tory government's prison system a few months ago going underground was contacted by an inmate who is currently serving a recall for a life sentence in a prison in britain he has been in and out of prison for a number of crimes including violent ones he claims that despite voicing concerns to the authorities of rising levels of violence drug use and self harm he has been ignored he has since decided to risk speaking to the media the inmate has hidden his face so we cannot be identified and he speaks to us from a contraband mobile smuggled into prison here with this exclusive report is going on the ground deputy editor sebastian packer you're currently before cell inside one of britain's prisons why are you experiencing right now.

one of the reasons that michael the chief executive and prison probation service resigned was allegedly cheated the reports of the high levels of drug use what are you actually seeing inside your prison. so what is actually causing the rise in violence. and. to warm. armor. does prove your littlest.

nutrition will more to pollute such nutritional food still that our prison officer resigning is doubled in the past two years what they are actually getting manipulated into doing. some children. and your option. for national nationalist false. as for those. cheaper. smart little mention of. rational. charm just one huge. mohajer. know how to deal with sure i'm sure. the cop shop is mental. follow

what you are mulder. and not. flush. the luge unbelievable mars experience look. on. merging home portion with. suction through all mentionable are just struggling. for a corner. blockbuster and a lot more double hopelessly porn to stomach trying to watch only one option. to match our recall former short special their proposals on george. russell lou. normally possible. although.

one of our region officials or shooting was involved. forging told me to do the job in a small versatile and last june we should bash me and you've lost all the jewel. trot. them on among. all. the professional. wonderful. moment.

not. to touch upon a moment. not. such . well that was when major cuts are affecting prison officers now let's hear from a member of the national executive committee of the u.k. prison officers association joining me is dave cookie's one of nearly ten thousand prison staff the reason they held a day of action over the u.k.'s allegedly dangerous prison conditions dave thanks for coming on the shows are that president we spoke to resell claiming he's seeing more drugs and self of what your members telling you but we're saying exactly the same thing drugs and self violence in prisons have spiraled out of over

potions over the last five to seven years since historically cuts of come in but that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody if you if you slash the prison prison offices of mine take control and discipline in our prisons then it stands to reason that. crime in prison will royce the gun. and didn't say that a certain resignation that happened in the first week or so was related to your concerns but we surprised the tourism is government said michael spur the c.e.o. of emergencies prison service was resigned. i think that from a from a union point of view that heads should have rolled way before now we would have expected some actions being taken well before now marco has presided over a crumbling and dangerous prison service for many years there's been no lot in that you know at the end of the tunnel in fairness to marco i have to also recognize

that treasury input or impact in the prison service has reduced resources available to him but as the head of the organization it's his role responsibility and duty to stand up and fight to to maintain safety in prisons you see the increase in violence is a direct result of say taking one thousand prisoners that the absolutely if you reduce the people actually keep control and discipline then if you're reduced to and get rid of them and we lost nine thousand experienced off these was stuff that had many years service that when they left so they took a lot of experience with them and then if you then try if you take away the place from the street and if you take the place away from society then anneke will prevail and unfortunately that is what happened within our prisons and again i mean would you mean that the younger less experienced prison officers the replacing the ones that are leaving are more susceptible to being used by prisoners the trouble is now is that we are they all replacing prison officers they are recruiting prison

officers i have to give them that that jews they're not replacing enough they took seven thousand prison officers out there replacing it with two thousand five hundred maybe three thousand prison staff do the job of yours the still four thousand prison staff machine but to work in a prison is a unique place because. if you're dealing with people you dealing with damaged people you're dealing with criminals who have nothing but criminal intent in the moments you you're dating with people who have severe mental health issues where i have an aging prison a population now so we get into mencia and all that sort of stuff where are we putting young men and women into these prisons without the resources and the skills and knowledge to do the job that we're actually asking and it takes on average four to five years before prisoners can be classed as an experienced reasonable prison officer what your local branch members and officers say that when the new recruit comes in because if it's twenty five reported incidents of violence today prison

officers have been assaulted twenty five it is the current rate would you say to them the three hard to recruit i think it is hard to recruit. our wages were actually compared to the wages of morrison's. land the the you know prisons been for the tarn stood in parliament and announced that i thought it was disgraceful disgusting statement to have made. and to be actually honest why would somebody come and work in a prison where you face violence or the physical verbal psychological volume's every day that you're at work compared to work in a place of a supermarket or something of that nature. where the wages are comparable they're not going to come into prisons ok but how are they getting the drugs into prison the better it is in a huge rise in drugs getting in is a your members bringing them in i would get all contest the fact is that it's members ever he says it's prison officers making prisons our stuff but we have

prison staff civilians we have contractors come in we have thirty agencies that work within our prisons so yet every all of them are susceptible prisoners are no different to any other public sector organization you have police who have done criminal things we have judges who had carried out criminal acts. we're no different to anybody oh yes within within prisons we do have some staff who are susceptible this huge amounts of money organized crime with in prisons if you're going to be if you're a young man or young woman and a prisoner of issue i thousand pounds to take a mobile phone into a prison you know you could see the impact that that would have on the individual that the turmoil that that they would face at all and i should say we haven't paid anyone to take any mobile further didn't we don't like an advertisement for being in custody but can inmates make more money being inside than absolutely

we have we have cases where prisoners are being released and deliberately coming back into prison carrying drugs and other items inside them through because of the money they'll get paid to actually bring them into the prison drugs inside a prison or a mobile phone and so on a prison is worth far more inside the prison than is out drugs right mental issues . violence is in here your members are being schooled in how to rehabilitate offenders i think the fact is is that unfortunately the prison service is trying to be everything to everyone and do everything at once with a very small with you know with with a budget that doesn't actually fit with it. they took hundreds of millions of pounds out of prison of the last five years. and when you took that money away you took her ability to work with their offenders prison officers want the ability to sit with prisoners and do the work and work with the person and help him or her

turn their life around if they don't have the time to do that and that will not happen we've had senior officials on the show before over the purse few years warning of a fatality future fatality luckily we haven't had one chance going up that you might see. violence or that we believe unfortunately we do believe that the death of a prison officer is an inevitability because we can't with our employees are failing to protect us to put measures in place to protect us we came very close last year where one of mark colleagues in the prison service had to face life saving surgery following an attack in in his prison he was knocked out and his head was stamped on he had to face life saving surgery to relieve the pressure in his brain so he could survive that was that was more luck than judgement that he actually survived we do not believe we actually believe that death is inevitable

whitty sometime in the future if our employers do not put the safety measures in place that we're demanding thank you thank you after the break. with self harm levels reaching an average of one hundred twenty eight incidents a day in prisons across england and wales we speak to a mental health expert about what austerity cuts have done to the tens of thousands who are suffering all this symbol coming up about to have going underground. maximizers financial survival guide stacey let's learn sal fill out let's say i'm

not so i can hear. the fight. thank you for helping. destroy that's right. that's slavery. secret indeed priests accused of sexually abusing children can get away with it literally i like to call this the geographic solution so what the bishop needs to do then he finds out that the priest is is a perpetrator is simply moves him to a different spot where the previous scandal is not. highest ranks of the catholic church conceal the accused priests from the police and justice system to that end

of that's known as the i intend. to use this out in. this. case felt. welcome back to our going underground prison special in the first half of the show we heard about the rising levels of drug. and violence that cause stuff at ninety five percent of the prisons in the england and wales to take industrial action but out of austerity cuts to mental health services affected u.k. prisons arguably already at breaking point his deputy editor is about to back a talking exclusively to an inmate in a british prison levels of self-knowledge being described by the spectre's as the worst they have ever seen how doing the cuts have affected prisons being able to help these people in. the bush sure.

sure. and bluish arms. actually. from. rosemary bush a little. lost children. to be looked up. from a list. of russian. leaders our. missions. were all commercial. from. commercial work. you experience any mental health issues since even aside. from your. arms full force

and. all the washing. that you do is not a form. of. what should. or must. if you're in britain and have been affected by the issues just discussed in that interview please contact the samaritans of the number below internationally contact your local health services but that was perhaps just one of the tens of thousands of people affected by mental health issues in britain's prisons i'm joined now by andy bell deputy chief executive of britain's center for mental health and thanks for coming on the show so why do you think this year's who are the largest levels of self home own record is it will be a number of factors one of which is that i think self harm has always been common among the prison population because of the nature of imprisonment i think possibly

people are now better recognising not. but i think we also know that as the prison population gets larger and prison officer numbers did reduce in recent years that does increase the risk of that some people will will be unwell and not getting the one someone support they might need and we are looking at people with mental health issues before sentencing. it does sometimes happen i mean inevitably a large proportion of people that come into the criminal justice system will have preexisting difficulties with their mental health they may not be evidence of the police or to the courts a little time because it's not always easy to identify but someone's got the difficulty lots of people have if you like mental health difficulties that are not immediately apparent that don't affect the way they behave and so it's not always possible to know who is suffering and who is having difficulties and some people's

poor mental health may relate to things that happened earlier in life don't necessarily evident in their behavior at the time. but which by being locked up opened up again and that's when you get people who become vulnerable even if it wasn't evident when they began their journey that that would be the case you see two hundred twenty eight incidents of self oh maybe going in prisons today according to the average figure is how do you characterize mental health. appear the appearance of degradation of mental health in prisons i think it is i think we have to acknowledge first of all the imprisoning somebody who has any kind of phone or ability to pull mental health is likely to make up words always been the case i think it probably has always been there and i think partly we all see a greater awareness now of mental health issues and of course we have to see that

as being progress and we do now have mental health services in every prison in england which again is really important because there is help there. it's often very overstretched and i think for many prison officers when you quite rightly raise the they're also vulnerable that again being a prison officer means you're witnessing and sometimes part of quite traumatic events. and that can certainly put them at risk as well and it's why one of the things we need to do as well as supporting prisoners mental health is to make sure the prison staff also get help for that is that right now when obviously the prison officers are you know and walk out which never happened before because of what they see as a crisis can prisons create mental dots very difficult to say i think i think so many people have have poor mental health when they go it in a sense what it does is it brings back things or it or it brings things to the

surface i mean there's no doubt that the experience of being in prison can be damaging to your mental health and it's always you go to prison officers well i didn't have them before they went into the world not necessarily we do you know no sleeping a lot of poor mental health in adult life had some kind of difficulties during childhood but there's no doubt that some occupations of more stressful and risky than others. and that will be the case for prison officers as much as it was before police officers or people in the armed forces. to get all this data because the national audit office says they don't have any data on this really they're relying on metrics they said thirty one thousand three hundred twenty eight were doing prisoners reporting mental health problems as a twenty seventeen as a charity how do you get your data which is to the support we just said so i think it's it's based on where we've got date so that is from national surveys and there was a national survey twenty years ago. which showed to ninety nine zero percent of prisoners

have some kind of mental health difficulty. and i drew what year was that that was one thousand nine hundred seven. and it's unlikely that proportion has changed because the prison population is much the same as it went a year. it's a long time ago but i think if that data tells us that the majority of prison is vast majority of prisoners have some kind of mental health problem or ability. that we have to assume that more or less the whole population does and we have to have a prison system which is based around an assumption that the vast majority of people will be at risk of poor mental health but you claimed that the vast majority have at least one male mental health issue of the entire prison population rapes there's a whole number of reasons for that which which may be to do with what happened before may be to do with what happens inside but that will be fairly standard i suspect across any country and i think we just have to acknowledge that imprisoning

people. particularly you have preexisting vulnerabilities will increase the risk to them. and we have to look at creating prison regimes and systems we respond to them and you will thank you thank you well with so few of those leaving prison getting access to the mental health services they need and then to get probation system gotten privatized by the government the tory government however reoffending rate being affected nearly whore for adults reconvicted within a year of leaving prison do you think the government of those ation of power their probation service has helped. more.

fluxion. drop. food. she offered to leave for just for a short. moon problem for sure. natural just felt wrong. before. marsh. imo marsh showed bob mitchell marsh. halsall. book for. robert park which is. called.

sleuth. hope. builders for. you can do the work. of moving. to. the shops allusions little horses or all the usual. well no. young troops. to pull young troops. of the watch lost actually.

farm shortage. you need to do the work you didn't. to. boot from world. war two. for. certain not just. because. of the. constitution. or not because the

search. engine little engine. and. long life. long expression. was a wash that was lost while. going on the grounds that the adage is about in back of that speaking exclusively to an inmate in one of the cells of britain's austerity at present system that's if the show is you again the money would be investigating a failure of intelligence oversight that is that the on the intelligence thing of us assets all around the world itself that even as president you will see only they wanted to they have a castle million referendum that led to a defacto wave of the false oppression by the european.

and that this guy like he acted like i. had to get that out will. go and visit me so i needed to get the money at the one of my levy to. get it if it. didn't get them and they do and that is at the will it is how much of the island i think after. the lot about how the now rolling starting somebody pulled out and get.

them out of downtown so out of town a lot of the model people got. out of my depth and i could see that as i asked by the way to really. get that they did things about the truth so yeah i'm not it's. about the people that are sound all of you filming the little. and with the.

theo he thought through. be. the u.n. general assembly russia's foreign minister rails against the political blackmail economic pressure and brute force he says western governments use to maintain global dominance. thanks. protests take over police use force against pro independence demonstrators in catalonia just two days before the first anniversary of the region's independence referendum.