Strangeways Unlocked: Former prison officer from Yorkshire shares stories of inmates behind bars at notorious Manchester jail

But now, for some of the men behind bars during Samworth’s time at the notorious Strangeways, he does. He knows their whole life stories.

Samworth spent eleven years working at HMP Manchester, a high-security men’s prison, still commonly referred to by its former name. Nearing four years ago he published a memoir, his own account of life is like in the jail.

Now he’s written a follow up, giving voice to a number of the people who spent time inside. “I hope people can read it, take a step back and not be so judgemental of the people that you find in prison,” the 59-year-old says.

Strangeways Unlocked: The Shocking Truth About Doing Time features the stories of a number of inmates, from how they ended up in jail to how prison impacted them and their families and how they see their lives going forward now.

“A lot of these people inside, these lads, were decent lads,” says Samworth, who lives in Wakefield. “Not everyone who goes to prison is a really bad person... I know we all have choices and not one person made an excuse for their path. But the childhoods are horrendous, they really are.”

When Samworth’s own account, Strangeways: A Prison Officer’s Story, was published in 2018, he was not prepared for its impact. Messages came flooding in. Prison officers, serving and retired, wrote to him, as did criminals who had spent time behind bars.

He heard too from people with a range of mental health issues after writing about his own experience with anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder. The response prompted him to launch the Real Porridge Podcast on Youtube in February last year.

Much of its content is interviews with people from both sides of the prison system - ex-officers as well as former inmates and their family members, often with a focus on mental health. Given his own struggles, he says he wants to encourage people to get the help and support they need.

“Everyone who I meet who I’ve interviewed has had problems whether it’s mental illness or addiction,” Samworth explains. “For other people in similar positions it helps them seeing people being frank and honest and talking about their situations.”

The individuals featured in Samworth’s book had made contact with him over the past few years. Some he knew from his days at Strangeways, others he’d never “locked up” himself.

“The book is relaying these people’s experiences, giving these people a voice really,” he says. “First they became friends then I asked them to help me with the book. They trusted me with their stories and some are quite grim.”

As for Samworth’s own story, he was born in Sheffield and spent 22 years in the engineering trade before working as a bouncer in the city’s nightclubs. His prison career began in 2001, first taking him to Forest Bank in Salford. In 2005, he started as an officer at Strangeways, where he remained until he left the prison service in 2016, after his PTSD diagnosis.

In his latest book, he paints a picture of the dark underworld of the prison system he has witnessed, where riots can occur at any time, where the worlds of gangs suddenly collide and where class A drugs and contrabands roam.

“I learnt early on in my career that there are things going on in prison that you’re never going to be able to deal with,” Samworth says, “this underground movement if you like. People will be up to stuff, selling drugs, getting bullied and the like.

“When prisoners used to be out [of their cells] all day, you could see what was going on. You very soon get to know people. When I was on K wing at Strangeways there was 200 prisoners and I knew every one of them, most of them by name. You can see if someone’s down, if people are up to no good.

“It is a very dark world and you’re never going to be able to address that. The best thing you can do is be a decent person, speak to people properly and treat people the best way you can.”

He adds: “It’s important to remember that a lot of days you had a bit of a laugh, you had a laugh with the prisoners, it wasn’t all bad.”

Staffing shortages and years of cuts to Government spending on prisons has led to inmates spending more time locked up in their cells, Samworth says. He claims a greater focus is needed on rehabilitation.

It was one of the things highlighted in the latest HM Chief Inspectorate of Prisons annual report, from 2020 to 2021. The report noted that whilst it was difficult for full programmes of education, training and rehabilitation to be delivered during the Covid-19 pandemic, “too many prisoners were locked up with too little to do before” and there had been failures in rehabilitation and release planning “for many years”.

“We’re going back to people being locked up 23 hours a day and it’s just going to create a lot of anger, it’s not going to help people,” Samworth says. He believes too that “far too many people” are being sent to jail and more provision is needed to support people with mental health issues.

Reflecting on his time on the healthcare hospital wing at Strangeways, he says: “You see people at rock bottom…They can end up in a bad place trying to harm themselves, extremely violent.”

“Some of them are not the sort of people who should have ever gone to prison,” he adds. “We don’t need any more prison spaces, we need more spaces for people with mental health issues.”

As for his own struggles, Samworth says he was left “battered” physically and mentally from his time as a prison officer. As officers at Strangeways became more and more overstretched, relationships with prisoners began to break down.

One dinner time, when an inmate attacked two of his colleagues, Samworth “lost my rag... both my knees and right fist were a mess – I displaced a knuckle – but the guy’s face was in worse shape”.

“I’m not proud of what I did,” he writes in the preface to Strangeways Unlocked. “It was unprofessional behaviour, and up to then professionalism was something I’d prided myself on.”

Soon afterwards he was signed off with a shoulder injury after restraining a prisoner - and then was diagnosed with PTSD. Writing his first book “stirred up” a lot of raw emotions and traumatic memories and though Samworth says he’s in a “better place” now, prison life for him is “too intense” to step away from.

His Youtube channel and his latest book has given him a positive focus though. “People say why don’t you just let it go but this, meeting people, has given me a purpose,” he says.

Strangeways Unlocked is published by Pan Macmillan, priced £18.99, and is out now.