We need to talk about the scandal of sex in prisons

I am by no means opposed to dating in the workplace. I’m also a sucker for a story about forbidden love. But even freaks like me have to draw the line somewhere, and for reasons I didn’t think needed spelling out, prison guards having relations with inmates is where that line should be.

Every few weeks, like clockwork, there’s another headline about a prison officer, usually female, and an inmate. A Netflix documentary explaining this ghastly trend – Love Behind Bars: Britain, perhaps – will surely drop any week now, complete with a haunted narrator and a distressed HR consultant. But until then, we’re left asking: how did this suddenly become so common?

Yes, before anyone clutches their pearls, this isn’t entirely new. Prison romances have existed since the first guard realised that proximity plus power is a cocktail best served never – although, judging by recent behaviour, it seems to be one that is now going down alarmingly easily. Over the past few months, the stories of screws living up to their nickname have felt relentless. Perhaps the training module, titled ‘Absolutely Do Not Do This (No, Seriously, Please Don’t Do This)’, is being delivered at 4pm on a Friday. Or perhaps the bar has sunk so low for women’s dating options that the men behind them are now the most appealing option.

Or maybe the truth is simpler: women no longer want the man in uniform. Authority is out, accountability is tedious, and the new fantasy appears to be a bloke in tracksuit bottoms with nothing to lose, nowhere to be and an extremely flexible schedule. Hey, it’s the norm in the real world. Why not add a frisson of danger to the equation by involving a convicted criminal?

If that sounds abstract, consider how this particular mood curdled into headline reality at HMP Wandsworth last year. Footage emerged of a female prison officer having sex with an inmate – filmed, helpfully, by another prisoner who stood doing nothing more than providing camerawork and… vibes. The clip circulated, summed up by the cameraman with breezy fatalism: ‘This is how we live at Wandsworth, bruv.’ It was a line that sounded suspiciously like a catchphrase.

After that, a pattern emerged. Wandsworth itself turned out not to be the full story, but instead the ‘cold open’, cueing up a phenomenon that now seems to unfold with sitcom-like regularity.

So, what’s going on? Is it the explosion of forbidden-romance erotica? Hormones? Or is it simply that in the age of smartphones, nobody gets to be discreetly stupid anymore?

The HMP Wandsworth video wasn’t a one-off lapse or a tragic mistake; it was the logical endpoint of a system that keeps pretending impulse, attention and stupidity won’t eventually collide. The prison officer didn’t just cross a line – she did it on camera, in uniform and (very) enthusiastically. Which does make you wonder who thought this woman was suitable for the job in the first place.

If you thought that was an outlier, well… the conveyor belt of calamity hasn’t stopped. One prison guard messaged an inmate, ‘I’m literally praying to have your babies’ amid a three-year affair with a convicted violent offender. The story involved smuggled phones, explicit texts about date nights, and dreams of a family. Meanwhile, another officer allegedly juggled two prisoners at once and was accused of plotting to smuggle drugs into jail with their help.

The trend isn’t confined to prisons either. Female police constables have also made headlines for similar reasons. One was sacked in Wales for groping colleagues and trying to kiss a senior officer at a party, while another recently appeared in court accused of intimate relationships with four criminals while accessing their records.

Taken together, these stories form a pattern so predictable it’s almost comforting. You can practically hear the newsroom intern typing: ‘Woman… Prison… Horny.’ Rinse, repeat.

But in all seriousness, these women should know better. Prison officers are trained – repeatedly, bluntly, sometimes patronisingly – about boundaries, manipulation, and the very specific fact that inmates will say whatever they think they need to. This isn’t a grey area – it is practically laminated into them.

So when yet another officer gets caught sneaking phones, exchanging messages or turning a custodial sentence into a budget romp, it’s hard to summon sympathy. This isn’t a lapse of judgment in a normal workplace – it’s a catastrophic failure in a job where judgment is the whole point. You don’t get to plead surprise when the prisoner you’re supervising turns out to be charming, attentive or emotionally needy. That’s page one of the manual, and ignoring it is an abuse of the system these officers are paid to uphold.

Every one of these scandals makes the job harder for everyone else. It weakens already fragile trust in institutions and puts colleagues at risk, all for the ego boost of being wanted by someone with literally no other options except the man in the next bunk.

Simone Hanna is a writer.