Eric Allison is the Guardian’s prisons correspondent
HMP Woodhill, Milton Keynes, where Mark Culverhouse was recalled before killing himself in 2019. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian
HMP Woodhill, Milton Keynes, where Mark Culverhouse was recalled before killing himself in 2019. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian
Mon 31 May 2021 08.06 EDT
Last modified on Mon 31 May 2021 08.34 EDT
Without doubt, the conditions in jails in England and Wales are currently – and by some distance – the worst I’ve ever known them: both in four decades as a career criminal after first entering custody in 1957; and latterly, for 17 years, writing about the prison system that held me for about 16 years, on and off.
THE family of a prisoner who died following multiple failures at Wormwood Scrubs in London voiced concern today about how the prison service is run.
Winston Augustine, 43, who had a mixed black Caribbean and white British ethnic background, was found hanging in his cell in August 2018.
A post-mortem examination showed that he had been suffering from severe pain from kidney stones and starvation.
He had been transferred to the prison’s segregation unit on August 28 and was found hanging 48 hours later.
The inquest heard evidence that during his time on the segregation unit his cell door was not unlocked, he did not receive food or exercise, was not able to shower or make a phone call and received only one low dose of his pain-relief medication.