People think an explosion means fire, riots, chaos in the hallways. But that’s not how prisons really blow. It’s quieter than that. It’s the slow collapse of basic functioning—like a building that looks solid until you touch the wall and your hand goes straight through the plaster. That’s what’s happening here. You can feel it every morning when the doors crack open: an exhaustion, a heaviness, a kind of silent agreement between prisoners and staff that the place isn’t running, not really, but everyone is pretending it is because the alternative is admitting failure.
And that’s the part the public never sees—the pretending. Everything here is make-believe. Officers pretend they’re in control. Management pretends they’re meeting targets. Politicians pretend prisons are “working as intended.” And prisoners pretend we don’t notice the rot crawling up the walls.
Take today. There’s a lad on the landing who hasn’t had his medication in two days—two days—because healthcare is “short staffed,” yet somehow there’s always enough staff to run workshops on “accountability” for us. You want accountability? Try running a prison where basic meds aren’t turning up on time. Try explaining to a man shaking with withdrawal that he just needs to “put a complaint in.” A complaint goes into a black hole. A man goes into crisis.
And then there’s the food. You can’t talk about prison without talking about the food. You get a tray that looks like someone slopped it together in the dark. Half the time it’s cold, the other half it’s still frozen in the middle. If you’re lucky, you get something edible. If you’re unlucky, well—welcome to Berwyn. People don’t realise how something that small grinds you down. Cold food, no air, no time outside, no answers, no consistency. You don’t need violence to break a man. Just starve him of dignity one day at a time.
But here’s the cruel twist: even with all this, they’ll tell you the system is “innovative.” They love that word. It’s plastered on posters and policy papers. Innovation. Rehabilitation. Opportunity. Words that look good in Parliament and fall apart in reality. The only innovation happening in here is how quickly the place finds new ways to fail.
And the staff—look, I don’t hate them. Most of them aren’t bad people. They’re just drowning. Understaffed, undertrained, overwhelmed. Some days it’s like watching rookies try to steer a ship that’s already underwater. They don’t know the rules any more than we do. They guess. They hope. They bluff. And every mistake they make, every shortcut, every delay—it all piles up on us.
This week I watched an officer stand outside a cell with a radio crackling in his hand, looking lost. Properly lost. He asked another officer what wing he was on. Imagine that. A man trusted to lock and unlock human beings didn’t know which part of the prison he was standing in. That’s how stretched they are. That’s how thin everything is stretched.
So when I say this place is going to blow, I don’t mean flames and sirens. I mean something subtler, something worse. A collapse of trust so deep that the place won’t be able to function. A system where no one believes in the rules, the routines, the structure—not prisoners, not staff, not management. When that happens, you don’t need a riot. The whole place just… stops.
And when it does, when the reports come out and journalists pretend to be shocked, when politicians act like they couldn’t have possibly known—remember this. Remember that someone inside told you long before it happened
Because history won’t say the prison exploded. It’ll say the country ignored the warning signs. It always does.
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