Name: 「何が起きてもおかしくない」過密危機にあるロンドンの刑務所を取材
Uploaded: 2024-09-06T12:17:53.000Z
Duration: 5 min 33 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

We're the only broadcast journalists given access to one of Britain's most dangerous jails since the current crisis.

And some prison officers are so frightened of being targeted on the outside that we've had to blur their faces.

Staff are overstretched and on the verge of breaking point.

You worry about, you know, opening the door in the morning and making sure that they're alive.

Alright, what have we got coming this afternoon then?

Each day more busloads arrive, making this jail one of the most crowded in the country.

Can you stand in the middle of the black and yellow box for me?

So this scanner will show whether they're hiding anything inside their body, any drugs, any weapons.

Just there, there's a gap, that'll be the entrance of his anus basically.

As of tonight there are just nine spare beds.

Most of the inmates are on remand, so they're waiting for their trial or sentencing.

Others are doing time for crimes such as murder, robbery and rape.

A code red alarm involves blood or burns.

A moment of apprehension as they assess the situation.

Yes, we've got a prisoner who's self-harmed here.

We were told he'd carved the words mum and dad onto his skin with a sharp object.

Staff say overcrowding is leading to an increase in self-harm and violence because of inmates' frustration with being locked up for longer.

Across the wing, Michael's inside for drug offences.

There are some people who simply don't care about prisoners.

But you are supposed to be rehabilitated inside.

Do you think prison is providing a rehabilitation?

It's hard to rehabilitate yourself in a place where you've got gang violence, postcode wars, drug violence, money wars.

If you've got beef there, violence there, drugs there, people collapsing here, the staff, they're outstretched.

They're trying to do this, this, this and this, but no, you want help as well.

Prison officers are running up the stairs to try and get them down.

What the staff are saying is that it can turn really quickly.

A quiet moment can become chaotic within a matter of seconds.

As one prison officer said, it's like the flick of a switch.

Staff do what they can to calm things down.

And very quickly, they're back on normal duties.

They all kind of blur into one because it's not like, oh, once in a blue moon, something happens.

You kind of are dealing with incidents from self-harm to violence to kind of people with severe mental health issues.

And then there are complaints about the cells.

I've been telling them about that for three weeks.

Gang violence is an ongoing threat at Pentonville and has had some serious consequences for staff.

This prison officer broke both her wrists while separating two gang members during a fight.

It's probably the biggest thing in London.

Like, the gang affiliation, gang issues are the biggest reasons why we have so many probably people in jail.

So it ends up us trying to stop them, just trying to stop the fight.

That's how I broke both my wrists, just trying to stop it.

That wasn't even, yeah, it just gets really messy sometimes.

Mark is waiting to be sentenced and has been here for nine months.

When they come into here, you don't know who's on this wing.

Every other wing has got allocated for every gang member.

What's the worst case scenario in your mind?

Fights, killings, all sorts could happen.

 Like, when they're such in close proximity, then it does blow up.