The Secret Life of Prisons

Nigel Bromage was a prominent member of several far-right groups, including British Movement and Combat 18, for 20 years. During that time, he was close to events that could easily have led him to prison. He became disillusioned with the life in the late 1990s and began a long and dangerous process of moving away from the far-right. He now runs an organisation called Exit Hate, which aims to support people who want to leave the far...

Cherie Blair KC became a barrister in 1976 and went on to be a county court and crown court judge. In 2024 she was appointed to the Leadership Board of the charity Women in Prison, where she has stressed the importance of supporting women and girls before they come into contact with the criminal justice system.

Kate Morrissey is on the Women’s Justice Partnership Delivery Group which supports the Women’s Justice Board....

Andy West is the author of The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Learning to be Free, which is currently being adapted into a BBC television drama. Andy has been teaching philosophy in prisons since 2016.

You can buy Andy's book while supporting local independent bookshops here.

Ray Smith writes for Inside Time, the monthly newspaper for people in prison, and was a member of Andy's philosophy group during a six-mon...

Two days before the 2025 London Marathon, a very special half marathon took place behind the walls of HMP Brixton in aid of the Prison Reform Trust. And The Secret Life of Prisons was granted exclusive access to bring you the sounds of a momentous morning.

Nine of HMP Brixton's residents undertook a 16-week training programme, supported by members of the local running community, and on Friday 25 April they ran alongside around 4...

We love to hear your thoughts, your views and your questions. To contact the show, please email podcasts@prison.radio.

In this week's episode we answer questions from listeners inside and outside prison.

Presenters:

Phil Maguire – Chief Executive, Prison Radio Association

Paula Harriott – Chief Executive, Unlock

Producer: Andrew Wilkie

Assistant Producer: Faye Dunn

The Prison Radio Association is a char...

This week we've got two guests who, for very different reasons, have spent time in a lot of different prisons. We asked them to compare notes and tell us their best stories.

Duewaine Marshalleck-Baker was released from prison for the final time in 2016, having spent more than eighteen years in prison on and off. He now works for National Prison Radio as one of the presenters of our Takeover Days - visiting prisons across the cou...

Chris Tchaikovsky was a founder of the charity Women in Prison, the charity that campaigns on behalf of women in the criminal justice system. She died in 2002, having lived an extraordinary life. Today's episode marks the end of Women's History Month and is dedicated to her life and her legacy.

Kate Fraser spent 17 years in heroin addiction, engaged in street sex work, and spending spells on remand in prison. She went on to work...

Peter Lewis served a prison sentence for receiving a corrupt payment. Shortly after his release, during the pandemic, he applied for a voluntary role directing cars at a Covid vaccination centre and his application was rejected, apparently because of his criminal record. He is now an ambassador for the FairChecks campaign.

Penelope Gibbs is the Director of Transform Justice, a charity that aims to create a fair, open, compassion...

When Mo went to prison hundreds of miles from home, his older sister would visit him but he didn't see his mum in person until he was more than two years into his sentence, and his youngest sister didn't come to visit him at all. He went five years without seeing her. How did he and his family come to these decisions, and what was it like reconnecting after all this time?

Faye Dunn went to prison as the mum of two young children...

Alice Dawnay founded the charity Switchback in 2008, which supports young Londoners to find a way out of the justice system. She's now part of the team that's just launched the Common Ground Justice Project, which is an initiative to find the common ground in the sometimes polarised debate around crime and justice.

Kam was helped by Switchback when he was being released from prison. He had committed an offence, but he had also b...

In 2013, Khamran Uddin wrote a letter to the man he had violently assaulted in a random attack on a deserted railway platform. The victim was coming home from work as he did every day when Khamran seriously injured him with a baseball bat. What followed was an extraordinary meeting which changed both their lives.

Keeva Baxter is the Campaigns and Communications Manager for Why me? They're a charity that aim to advocate for the g...

David Gauke is the former Conservative Member of Parliament for South West Hertfordshire, the former Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, and the Chair of the Labour government's Independent Sentencing Review.

Phil and Paula ask him about the progress of the report, delve into the politics of crime and justice, and finish with challenge around the use of the terms 'offender' and 'ex-offender' which elicits a fasci...

Richie Makepeace was just trying to keep his head down and get through his prison sentence in HMP Brixton when he was offered a job in the prison's radio production training workshop. Like many people in prison, he was really worried about whether he would be able to find employment. But after release he got offered a job helping to deliver National Prison Radio's Outside In traineeship, and is now part of the Prison Radio Associat...

Spice, a name for a group of synthetic drugs that have gripped prisons over the past decade, are said by researchers at Middlesex University's Drug and Alcohol Research Centre to have played a role in almost half of all non-natural deaths in prisons over a five year period.

Michael Kennedy had already used spice on one occasion before he went to prison. For him it was a way of self-medicating for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity ...

Scout Tzofiya Bolton is a poet, activist, radio producer and the author of The Mad Art of Doing Time. She went to prison in 2023 where she received excellent care for the mental health conditions that led to her offence.

You can read Scout's recent article for The Guardian here.

You can listen to Scout's documentary for BBC Radio 4, entitled The Ballad of Scout and the Alcohol Tag.

Scout's latest book, The...

Tim Owen KC is a criminal barrister who has sat as a Deputy High Court Judge. He is a co-host of Double Jeopardy: The Law and Politics Podcast. 

You can find the sentencing guidelines for all offences heard in the Magistrates and Crown Courts on the Sentencing Council website.

Presenters: Phil Maguire – Chief Executive, Prison Radio Association Paula Harriott – Chief Executive, Unlock

Producer: Andrew Wilkie Assistant Producer: Fay...

Mickey Dehara is a screenwriter who has frequently collaborated with the director Guy Richie, including playing a starring role in the film Snatch. He served a prison sentence in the early 2010s when he got involved with National Prison Radio and won the Sandford St. Martin and Jerusalem Awards for a dramatisation of the Good Friday story which he wrote and starred in. On release from prison he set up Films4Life which aimed to chan...

Jamie Bennett is is the author of a new book which looks at the challenges of managing prisons. He is Prison Contracts Group Director at His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service. He has been Governor of Morton Hall, Long Lartin, Grendon and Spring Hill prisons.

Andrew Morris served a sentence in HMP Spring Hill while Jamie was the Governor there. After release, he founded the New Wave Trust which aims to provide mentorships for y...

In November 2024, Janey Starling from the charity Level Up, called out the presenter of LBC's breakfast show Nick Ferrari live on air for his apparent ignorance of the facts around the imprisonment of women.

In response to that interview, we invited friend of the podcast Dr. Kimmett Edgar to the studio to help us understand what the numbers can tell us about prisons and the people who live in them.

Kimmett is a former Senior Resear...