Prison is no deterrent if our jailhouses rock with high-end vodkas, drugs and sex on tap

DRY January is up and wobbling, adding misery to an already torrid month.

As we sit, shivering and bathless, in our miserable little houses, fuelled only by dust and orange squash, life is grim.

If a nursing strike hasn’t finished us off, a train strike probably will (metaphorically at least).

But wait! Hidden away, there’s a magical mystery kingdom where life is good, and the term “cost of living crisis” is as far-removed as a Narnian centaur.

Joy is abundant, sex is rampant, parties are a-happening and vodka is being sunk quicker than you can say “Grey Goose made me do it”.

Welcome to the British prison service, 2023.

READ MORE ON PRISONS

As The Sun revealed yesterday, lags have been filmed necking shots, doing drugs and snacking on trendy air fryer canapes.

One prisoner, probably not a future participant of Mastermind, uploaded the incriminating footage on to Snapchat.

The gang were enjoying high-end Ciroc and Grey Goose vodkas, Wray & Nephew Rum and smoking cannabis.

As with any good house party (the house, in this instance, being HMP Five Wells in Wellingborough, Northants) the music was blaring and revellers were dancing.

Most read in The Sun

A jolly time was had by all. No Dry Jan here, thank you very much.

Alarmingly, Five Wells — which only opened last year — is the future.

A Category C, all-male lock-up, it is the UK’s first privately run “smart prison”, and is very much seen by the Government as the national blueprint for rehabilitation.

Bright and airy rooms — they’re not called “cells”, as that’s mean — offer picturesque lakeside views, while windows do not have bars. Obviously it’s an “eco-jail”.

Residents — no “prisoners” in this holiday camp £253million jail — also enjoy use of sprawling football pitches, landscaped gardens and a state-of-the-art gym.

My university halls, admittedly the most disgusting on campus, were far, far more prisony than this. And my crime? Reading Thomas Hardy.

Of course, one of the biggest deterrents of jail was traditionally the lack of sex on tap for offenders.

That’s not an issue nowadays.

iPhones and Androids run rampant from cell to cell. Prisoners can watch porn until their little hearts are content. Bless.

Failing that, they can have sex IRL — because, it turns out, prison is the new Tinder.

In November, a female prison officer was jailed following a year-long affair with an inmate.

Corinne Redhead, a supervisor at the unfortunately named HMP The Mount, even gave birth to robber Robert O’Connor’s son before being imprisoned for 25 months for misconduct.

Elsewhere, three more female prison officers have been locked up following in-cell affairs at Wrexham’s HMP Berwyn in North Wales.

This is another “flagship” jail, opened with much fanfare, in 2017.

It has since been described as the UK’s cushiest, with more mobiles, booze, parties and sex than you can shake a baton at.

The Ministry of Justice last week confirmed that more than 500 members of staff at Berwyn have undergone “corruption prevention”. (That horse, I may suggest, has well and truly bolted, lads.)

Either way, these snazzy new prisons might look the part...but they’re not working.

Prisoner numbers have almost doubled since the Nineties as tough sentencing outstripped the number of jail places, leaving the Government to cram the 85,000-strong prison population into buildings originally designed to hold about 65,000.

And last year a quarter of offenders leaving custody in England and Wales reoffended after their release.

It’s time, surely, to get tough.

Boring Kate is great

HAPPY birthday, Kate Middleton!

And Prince Harry certainly ensured her special day yesterday got off to a flier.

Poor Kate has been portrayed as a surly faced, white-knuckled, old-before-her-time sourpuss by her brother-in-law.

She and William come across as those ruddy-cheeked gimps at school who told tales and shot their hand up before the teacher had even finished the question.

Kate has deputy head girl energy radiating from her every pore.
Wills, meanwhile, sounds like he never got a detention in his life.

He also almost single-handedly caused a constitutional crisis by trying to ban Harry’s wedding day beard.

That being said, what do we want from our future King and Queen?

There’s a reason they attend the Royal Variety Performance and aren’t up on stage themselves, cracking gags, whipping out a crowd-pleasing ditty or dancing with Diversity.

In a world of frantic distraction, heightened emotion and increasing, self-indulgent madness, isn’t a bit of stoic stability precisely what we need?

Yes, Kate and Wills might not now be my first choice guests at a dinner party (although kudos to the pair for apparently trying to switch the table seating plan at Meg and Harry’s wedding – we’ve all been there).

But in the face of attack after attack they’ve remained quietly detached, plodded on from community centre to community centre shaking hands and rictus-grinning for the cameras.

Quite simply, they have got on with the job at hand.

If anything, Harry has just given them the best bit of free PR imaginable.

Fat cat

MY dog really needs to up her game.

Turns out Taylor Swift’s cat is worth £81million.

In stark contrast, Dora the miniature Dachshund is worth zero million and contributes precisely nothing to general household maintenance. (Bar the occasional indoor wee when it’s raining outside.)

Nor does she cook, clean, help with energy bills or make me a cup of coffee in the morning. Nada. Taylor’s moggie, however, starred in the video for the singer’s smash hit Blank Space.

Olivia Benson, a Scottish Fold, now has Instagram fan pages and can command hundreds of thousands for a sponsored post.

In other animal news, the Belgian malinois has been found to be the planet’s most intelligent dog, following a study of 13 different breeds.

Scientists assessed 1,000 dogs by setting them seven cognitive and three behavioural tasks. It’s safe to assume Dora wouldn’t have had a single one of the 1,000 canines quaking in their coats.

My useless creature, for instance, was given an IQ test for Christmas.

Cover herself in glory, she did not.

READ MORE SUN STORIES

After trying to eat the box, one test – in which a towel is placed over the dog’s head in order to see how quickly it can navigate its way out (one to three seconds is “genius”, eight to ten seconds “remedial”) – Dora sat, unmoving, for 43 seconds.

Her future, I fear, is not bright.

Leaf it out, Vic

WITH one two-syllable adjective, David and Victoria Beckham have confirmed what we all knew – tensions remain high with their daughter-in-law.

The couple, whose fractious relationship with Nicola Peltz has been widely documented, took to Instagram to wish her a happy birthday... both using the word “lovely” in their respective messages.

And EVERYONE knows (alongside “sweet” and “nice”) “lovely” is a code word for mild contempt.

“Hope you have a lovely day!”, chirruped VB, underneath a photo of Nicola, poor girl, with half her face covered up and chowing down on food.

Echoing his wife’s mildly passive aggressive sentiments, David posted the same message – this time above a photo of Nicola with some sort of giant leaf covering her entire face, minus an ear.

Over to you, Nic...

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTErKynZpOke7a3jqecsKtfZ316hY9ybWlnoKe2tLvNZqWoZZSawaa%2B0Z6lrWWSpLy7sYydqa6fo2LApsSO