How a wealthy London borough is home to ‘most troubling’ HMP Wandsworth

Daring escapes, the buzz of drug-smuggling drones and guards being filmed having sex – welcome to HMP Wandsworth.

HMP Wandsworth is trending once again after two prisoners were accidentally released from the category B jail within a week of each other.

Police in London and Surrey are looking for any trace of the accidentally freed flasher Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, 24, and fraudster William ‘Billy’ Smith, 35.

But how did an affluent neighborhood in Wandsworth become the home for high-profile criminals, and what blunders is the prison best known for?

Inside Wandsworth prison

The prison was built in 1849 as the Surrey House of Correction, designed for 1,000 inmates serving short sentences.

Comprising eight wings, the prison became the main site for executions in south London in 1878, which is also when the nearby cemetery opened. One of the last prisoners to face the gallows was an 18-year-old murder convict, Francis Forsyth, who was hanged in November 1960.

The sprawling prison is in stark contrast to its surroundings, with well-kept homes on tree-lined residential roads, a tennis club and a cricket ground around the corner. Wandsworth has been named the most popular London area this year.

The average house price in the borough fetched £771,260 overall last year – well above the UK average of around £265,000. The area has several highly-rated schools, while average salaries are consistently within the top ten highest for London boroughs.

Inside the prison, the inmate population has ballooned to around 1,500. More recently, it has been used for people awaiting sentencing and as a center for sending prisoners to other sites outside London.

Famous and notorious prisoners at Wandsworth include German tennis star Boris Becker, Charles Bronson, Gary Glitter, Julian Assange, Oscar Wilde, Pete Doherty, Ronnie Biggs and Ronnie Kray.

Biggs, the Great Train Robber, managed to escape from Wandsworth in 1965 by scaling the 35-foot wall. He fled to Brazil, where he lived under the radar for over three decades before his return and subsequent capture in the UK in 2001.

With the forbidding-looking main building and history of executions, it is unsurprising that there have been rumoured ghost sightings. The best-known tale is the spirit of the Grey Lady haunting the corridors and cells.

Last year, Wandsworth was embroiled in a scandal after the chief prison inspector raised the alarm over ‘shocking conditions’ following his visit.

A scathing report by HM Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) last year claimed that Wandsworth had become ‘symbolic of the problems that characterise what is worst about the English prison system.’

It found that the prison was severely overcrowded, with 80% of the men sharing cells designed for one person, and high rates of self-harm, violence and drug taking.

In response, the Ministry of Justice pledged to boost staffing and give £100 million of extra funding.

Daniel Khalife’s escape

One of the most notorious escapes from Wandsworth was by former soldier Khalife,who was awaiting trial over terrorism charges.

He managed to give guards the slip by fastening a makeshift sling made from kitchen trousers and bedsheets, attaching himself to the underside of a food delivery truck, and simply riding out of the prison gates.

Khalife used his short burst of freedom to buy clothes from Marks & Spencer, a coffee from McDonald’s in Richmond as well as reading newspaper articles about himself.

After an intense manhunt, he was finally caught 75 hours later along a west London canal path.

At his trial, Khalife told jurors that ‘95%’ of prisoners in his unit were ‘serious sex offenders, rapists, paedophiles, that sort of thing’.

He said: ‘It was not a nice place to be … people on that wing said strange things to me.’

Earlier this year, Khalife, now 23, was jailed for 14 years and three months for spying for Iran.

Prison guard who had sex with an inmate

As the prison was recovering from the stain to its reputation from the Khalife-saga, footage of a prison guard having sex with an inmate spread on social media.

The video showed the guard, Linda De Sousa Abreu, engaging in an intimate liaison with prisoner Linton Weirich in the summer last year.

A cellmate, who filmed it, is heard saying ‘this is how we roll in Wandsworth.’

The video quickly went viral with people on the outside joking with police officers in the street about committing crimes so they could be sent to HMP Wandsworth.

De Sousa was sentenced to 15 months in prison for conduct the judge described as ‘forbidden for good reason.’

Drugs flown in with drones

UK prisons have also been plagued by drug deliveries with drones.

Suspicious drone sightings by prison staff increased to more than 1,700 in the year to March, marking a record high.

One of the intercepted drones caught at Wandsworth was loaded with drugs worth around £6,000, it could fly for 40 minutes and hold four packages at a time.

The MoJ has announced £900,000 to battle drones carrying drugs and weapons, on top of an extra £40 million aimed at boosting security at prisons.

The smell of cannabis was described as ‘ubiquitous’ in a recent HMP Inspectorate report. It also found that more than half of inmates (around 51%) at Wandsworth said it was ‘easy’ to get illegal drugs inside.

It didn’t reveal how many drone flights took place but found drugs were also being smuggled in by corrupt staff or ‘throwovers’, posted in fake legal letters.

It warned that drugs, most devastatingly Spice, and alcohol are ‘easily available’ initiating a cycle of debt, bullying and violent behavior.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@usnewsrank.com.

For more stories like this, check our news page.