Becker’s f irst night19 in UK’s worst prison
Crumbling, squalid jail world away from Boris’ lavish life
CRUMBLING, overcrowded and rat-infested, Wandsworth Prison is a world away from the luxurious lifestyle Boris Becker enjoyed.
This squalid 170-year-old Victorian edifice, which is crammed with more than 1,300 inmates, is regularly described as one of the UK’s worst jails.
A report this year by Charlie Taylor, UK chief inspector of prisons, revealed a jail blighted by drug abuse and mental health problems, where ‘desperately bored’ inmates spend more than 22 hours a day in dilapidated cells.
One group of inmates was described as walking ‘blinking into the sunlight’ after more than a week indoors.
Violence is an acute problem, with almost one attack every day among inmates in 2020/21.
Prison staff used force 1,295 times during the same period, or nearly four times a day.
This is the bleak and dehumanising environment that greeted a stunned Becker, 54, on Friday afternoon.
Prison sources say the tennis star is likely to spend up to a fortnight at the Category B jail before he is moved to a lower-security Category C jail. After being sentenced at Southwark Crown Court shortly before 4pm, Becker, his belongings in a Puma holdall, was led to a prison van for the 45minute drive through South London to the prison, less than two miles from Wimbledon’s Centre Court – where he won his first of three Wimbledon titles in 1985, aged just 17.
After waiting in a reception area, the six-time Grand Slam champ is likely to have been told to strip and then searched for weapons or contraband. Becker will then have been interviewed to assess the risk of suicide or self-harm, before being led to a cell on E-Wing, where new prisoners stay during a threeday induction.
If he got there by 7.30pm, he may have had time for a shower. If not, he faced waiting for another 24 hours. His first night at ‘Wanno’ – as HMP Wandsworth is known by its inmates – is likely to have been terrifying.
The brutal realities of life inside the jail were exposed two years ago by former prisoner Chris Atkins in a book serialised by The Mail on Sunday.
Mr Atkins, a Bafta-winning filmmaker sentenced to five years in 2016 for a tax scam, called Wandsworth ‘one of the most notorious jails in the country’.
‘The first thing that hits me is the noise,’ he wrote about his arrival there in July 2016. ‘Yelling, banging, screaming, grunting, barking, threatening, ranting, laughing, whining, arguing, fighting, howling, crying. It’s as if someone has downloaded every single sound effect and is blaring them all out at once. The reception wing looks like it last had a makeover in 1895 when Oscar Wilde was here... jailed for homosexuality.
‘It’s basically Porridge meets One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and is full of the most terrifying individuals I have ever seen.’
Becker has been given his own cell, but he is likely to be moved to a shared one this week, a prison source said. It will be 6ft by 12ft with a concrete floor and a toilet with no seat or privacy curtain.
The mattresses on the bunks are made from blue plastic so bodily fluids can be cleaned up easily.
Mr Atkins said inmates ‘mostly appear to be either severely mentally ill, off their heads on drugs, or both’. He added: ‘What do they do all day? Smoke spice and watch Cash In The Attic on TV.’ For most, the day begins at 7.45am. Those who are employed will work, often as kitchen workers and cleaners. For the rest, most of the day is spent ‘banged up’ in their cells.
Mr Taylor found that the prison’s education block had sat unused since March 2020 and ‘gym sessions were regularly cancelled’.
The food is believed to be better than in other jails, with more than half of inmates saying their meals were good in a recent survey.
However, overcrowding means that evening meals are simply left outside cell doors and the trolleys used to transport the food are ‘filthy’, according to Mr Taylor.
If Becker is lucky he will be moved to H-Wing, dubbed ‘The Ritz’ by the white-collar inmates locked up there. Despite this, it only has six showers for 86 cells, most of which have two inmates.
The tennis star may get extra perks if he becomes a listener – those trained by the Samaritans to support other inmates to reduce self-harm and suicide rates. Listeners are eligible for larger cells.
However, when Mr Atkins was a listener, an inmate told him to sing a song, ‘or I’ll slit your throat’.
He said last night that although Becker will be ‘terrified’ there were ways to avoid trouble.
He added: ‘Wandsworth is a very violent prison, but if you keep your head down and don’t get involved in drugs and debt and all the politics of the wings it is not actually that dangerous. Just stay out of the way. I’d just say chin up and it’s not going to be as bad as you think it’s going to be.
‘In prison, sport is massive for the prisoners and the officers alike. They are all going to see him as a bit of a hero. He is probably going to be inundated with people wanting his autograph.’
‘It is full of the most terrifying individuals’