'They shut prison wings under the guise of renovations to hide staffing crisis,' whistleblower claims as violent offenders freed early
A serving prison officer has told LBC the prison capacity crisis in England and Wales is being exacerbated by “chronically low” staffing.
A whistleblower has claimed parts of England’s prison estate are being closed “under false pretences”, with wings allegedly being shut and labelled as under “renovation” amid staffing shortages.
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Sam, a serving prison officer whose name we’ve changed to protect his identity, told LBC the prison capacity crisis in England and Wales is being exacerbated by “chronically low” staffing, which limits the number of cells that can be safely managed in facilities and therefore reduces the supply of places across the system.
Without addressing this, he contends, the combination of increasing the number of places and releasing inmates early will not fix the issues at the heart of a creaking prison system.
In an arresting account, Sam spoke candidly of the mounting pressures facing officers across the country.
He revealed colleagues are routinely being attacked with boiling water laced with sugar to stick to their skin, inflicting further pain, and that many sites now feel on the verge of riots “every single day”.
On top of this, he lays bare the impact of the drug epidemic across the prison estate, with officers being signed off sick for months after coming into contact with fumes from inmates’ use of synthetic highs - also known as spice.
Wings labelled under “renovation” to mask staff shortages
Earlier this week, the government announced plans to release up to 5,000 serious offenders - including killers and those convicted of severe assaults - halfway through their sentence. Under current guidelines, such offenders are only eligible for parole after serving two-thirds of their sentence.
Around 1,000 people convicted of rape, grooming, and serious child sex offences will be excluded from the early release scheme after the government reviewed its scope.
Yet Sam believes that crucial breathing space is being squandered due to a shortage of prison officers to man jails across the country.
He said that inmates are routinely kept in their cells for 23 hours a day to help manage these pressures, but that many jails have resorted to more extreme measures.
“They close the wing because they can't staff it, and they label it as being renovated,” Sam explained.
“Either there're prisons that just can't staff to begin with, or prisons that are staffed are now in such a chronic position of low staffing levels that they have to close wings under false pretences.
“Some jails are running 200-300 short.”
According to the latest figures from the Ministry of Justice, around 97% of available prison places are filled by inmates, with the department forecasting that it will run out of cell space by November without changes.
However, LBC understands that cells that are out of use because they are undergoing maintenance are removed from overall capacity statistics.
Sources also confirmed they are aware of sections of the prison estate needing to be scaled back owing to capacity constraints.
In 2022, Her Majesty’s Probation and Prison Service introduced a Strategic Enhanced Resourcing Support process to authorise capacity reductions due to staffing levels where other mitigations are insufficient.
Justice Secretary, Alex Norris, told LBC's Nick Ferrari the reforms are necessary for police officers to continue to make arrests and incarcerate new offenders.
Under the government’s current plans, an additional 14,000 places will be added to the prison estate by 2031, including the completion of four new prisons.
Sam questions whether the supply of additional places would alleviate the pressure he and his colleagues face on a daily basis.
“New jails are opening with capacities of over 1,000, and then they are not able to find the staff to run them at full capacity.
“They're slowly filling up, and say they've only got 50% staff, so they fill up to 50% capacity, and then the governors kind of have a decision to make.”
Sam claims this is what happened at HMP Millsike, a medium-security facility in Full Sutton, East Yorkshire.
Opened in March 2025, the Category C jail has a capacity of almost 1,500 prisoners.
A report by HMP Millsike’s Independent Monitoring Board, published in January, raised alarm about its safety and security, with high levels of prisoner violence and self-harm leaving inspectors feeling as though they could "only visit in pairs due to feeling unsafe on the wings".
The prison is run privately by the facilities management company Mitie Care and Custody, which was handed a 10-year contract for the site worth £329m in April 2024.
It was the first contract that the firm had been awarded to operate a prison.
“It’s a really sorry state of affairs there,” Sam said of Millsike. “The friends that I've had that have worked there, they all don't work there now because it's just a bad situation.”
Mark Fairhurst, chair of the Prison Officers Association, said that while he was not aware of prisons falsely claiming wings were under “renovation” to disguise staffing shortages, he acknowledged clear problems at prisons like Millsike.
“It's nowhere near capacity at the moment,” Fairhurst told LBC. “His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service are deliberately stalling the ramp-up because they have staffing difficulties.
“I would think they're probably at about 70% of their target staffing level, but because of the attrition rate weekly, that obviously has a knock-on effect.
“If you recruit 30 staff who start tomorrow because they've just finished their training, by the end of next week, you probably only have 15 left,” he added.
A spokesperson for Mitie Care and Custody said: “As with any new prison, accommodation wings and staffing levels are brought into operation in line with prisoner numbers and operational requirements, as agreed with the Ministry of Justice as part of the prison’s phased ramp-up plan.”
“I could kill you tonight and I’ll sleep well”
Assaults on prison officers have soared in recent years. According to data from the Ministry of Justice, there were 9,833 assaults on prison staff in the year to March 2026, a decrease of 7% from the previous year, but still almost double the rate of a decade ago.
In Sam’s experience, the problems of overcrowding and depleted staffing, which often result in jails limiting visits from family members and restricting time outside of cells, have amplified tensions between officers and inmates.
“I’ve had a prisoner scream at me saying, ‘I'm a lifer, I could kill one of you tonight and I'll sleep well.’ And you’re there going: ‘yeah, you are a lifer… If he was to kill somebody every single day, that wouldn't affect his life.’
“The reason why he was so upset is because we cancelled visits and we cancelled visits because we didn't have staff, and he hadn't seen his father.”
All too often, though, inmates follow through on their threats against prison workers.
“I can think of staff members who have been hot watered… [Inmates] get a boiling kettle, fill it full of sugar so that it sticks to the skin, and they throw that on officers,” Sam, who has spent more than half a decade working in prisons across Britain, added.
“They do a thing called ‘potting’ as well. That is where they fill a flask full of their own bodily fluids and they throw that over staff. Incidents like that, in my first year, I don't think happened - but now they're happening at least monthly.”
Staffing, Sam insists, is “at the crux of everything”. The Prison Officers’ Association notes that most recruits depart within two years, creating “a revolving door of new faces, which in turn leads to instability and frustrations".
The MOJ says the current resignation rate for officers is at its lowest level for five years.
However, the high turnover over a period of years has left a paucity of experienced officers. Combined with an increasingly febrile atmosphere across many of Britain’s jails, maintaining order is becoming more challenging.
On the prospect of prison riots, Sam says “every single wing feels on the verge of having one every day”, pointing to the increasing use of his jail’s general alarm, which is used to divert every officer’s attention to a particular wing because of a disturbance.
“Five years ago, we might have had one a week - maybe one every 2 weeks,” he estimated.
“[Now] it will ring every once a morning, maybe twice in the afternoon, and then that just becomes a daily thing. When I was working in one jail, the alarm bell rang 17 times [in a day].
“Prisoners have nowhere to put their frustrations and the only people they can aim at is staff.”
And for some officers, the mental burden becomes overwhelming. Burnout is frequently cited as a reason for officers leaving the service, while Sam has witnessed some of his colleagues pay the ultimate price.
“When you come to a workplace as stressful and difficult to deal with as a prison officer is, it exacerbates everything,” he added remorsefully.
“We've lost a staff member to suicide at my jail, I think, every year since I've started.”
“You have no idea whether that cloud of smoke is full of heroin”
In many prisons, these physical and mental health challenges are compounded by the growing presence of synthetic cannabinoids on wings.
Otherwise known as “spice” or “black mamba”, synthetic cannabinoids are man-made narcotics which aim to replicate the sensation of smoking cannabis.
The problems presented by spice are well documented. A 2023 study by the University of Middlesex’s Drug and Alcohol Research Centre found almost half of non-natural deaths in prisons across England were associated with spice consumption between 2015 and 2020.
Increasingly, Sam warns, inner-city prisons are facing the issue of smugglers using drones to drop contraband to those on the inside. The latest figures show there were 26,630 incidents of drugs being uncovered across the prison estate in England and Wales - a figure which has nearly doubled in just three years.
A combination of X-ray body scanners, detection dogs, and restricted fly zones are being used to help combat this increase.
In Britain’s jails, its effects are not confined to its users.
A 2019 survey of more than 1,600 members of prison staff found more than a third (39%) had reported becoming unwell from exposure to new psychoactive drugs being consumed by inmates.
“We put our health on the line to help people who have taken [spice],” Sam lamented.
”If there's somebody who's taken this drug and then they're on the floor and they're choking, you know, we do go in and we then do, you know, have these chemicals subjected to us.”
“You open one of their doors and then all of a sudden you're hit with a cloud and you don't know whether that's just them vaping heavily in their room or if it's going to be a spice cloud.
“We have officers as well who are in their 50s, and it can really take a toll on somebody, and it really does damage to your lungs… I’ve known people to be off for months and for them to come back to work and not still not be right.
“You have no idea if that cloud of smoke is full of heroin, you have no idea whether it's full of cocaine or if it's just bleach… sometimes [you] don't know you've had spice exposure until it's too late.”
Early release is a “lose-lose” situation
Although the government introduced an early release scheme in September 2024 - which reduced the amount of time many inmates served from half to 40% of their sentence - the pressure on the system has shown little sign of abating.
New data suggests that reoffending has reached record levels, with almost a third (31.9%) of the 70,000 people released since the scheme began committing another crime.
Government projections suggest the prison population could rise to about 90,000 in 2028, a figure which outstrips current supply.
For Sam, rising recidivism exposes a key flaw with both the early release programme and the system’s failure to rehabilitate convicted criminals.
“I wouldn't say that early release scheme is a solution in any way, shape, or form, because if they go out, if they go back into the wider community and aren't prepared for that, they are just going to come back in and re-offend.
“At the end of the day, that just creates more victims, and that is what the prison service is supposed to be there to prevent.”
Part of the reason for the increased reoffending, Sam suggests, is the difficulty accessing rehabilitation courses.
Many inmates are only eligible for anger management classes, for example, two years before their scheduled release. Bringing forward offenders’ release dates has created extra demand on these places, which already have long waiting lists at many jails, meaning many will be released before they access such courses.
“It's just a lose-lose situation,” Sam concluded. “You release prisoners early, they re-offend and come back, and you don't have enough staff to manage them.”
In response to Sam’s experience, an MOJ spokesperson said: “This government inherited a prison system in crisis but is taking the decisive action needed to restore order and protect the public – building 14,000 prison places and investing millions to support our hard-working staff who navigate some of the toughest environments in the country.
“While the Prison Service has a clear and transparent process for reducing capacity in the event of staffing issues, the prison officer resignation rate is at its lowest in five years and we are at 92% of our staffing target for frontline officers.”