An extraordinary new Channel 4 documentary has gone inside category B jail HMP Durham to capture prisoners doing drug deals, brazenly smoking Spice and texting each other on the wing
BRAZENLY smoking Spice, texting on tiny mobiles and dropping off drugs from cell to cell like an Amazon package delivery service. This is the state of British prisons.
In an extraordinary new Channel 4 documentary, airing this week, cameras have gone inside the walls of category B jail HMP Durham to expose how gangs are managing to operate on the inside, rack up a fortune and hardly move a muscle.
Situated on the outskirts of the city, the prison houses 900 prisoners and as a remand facility welcomes 250 new inmates a week—a revolving door perfect for a booming drugs trade.
Prisoners arriving to the jail conceal mobile phones and drugs in a method known as “packing” to settle debts on the inside and make a pretty penny.
And while metal detectors can seek out mobile phones, drugs are much harder to locate causing endless headaches for the prison officers known to inmates as “the screws”.
At the top of the pecking order on B-wing at Durham are prolific Newcastle gang criminals Scott Storey and Lewis McMahon controlling the prison’s drug supply from their tiny cells.
During the two hours of social time prisoners get each day the illicit economy truly comes alive.
The three-parter, filmed last year over seven months, shows inmates haggling with each other over the price of drugs like a scene from a suburban morning market.
Ringleader Lewis brags: “When I come to jail, I smash jail, me. I beat the screws.
“Spice, spice is the kid I like. Make £3,000 off an ounce of Spice in here. When there’s a nice team of lads [his gang] on the wing, there’s nought people can do with you. Cause they’ll just get done straight in.”
Just like on the outside a drugs turf war operates within the prison walls meaning Lewis and pal Scott must stay on their toes to keep on top of competition.
He explains: “There’s loads of people coming into jail, new faces with drugs, so everyone gets taken straight to the laundry, punched and have their drugs taken straight off them. It’s just a dog eat dog world.”
And it’s a well-crafted network of fellow prisoners willing to take the rap for Lewis and Scott when their cells are turned over, which allows the pair to carry on their reign.
Lewis’s cell mate Michael Surtees has been in and out prison since he was 15 and regularly takes the blame when drugs belonging to Lewis are found in the cell and inmates are called in by the governor for an internal adjudication known as a “nicking”.
Michael arrives back at HMP Durham at the start of the doc and is whisked off to segregation, or “the block”, after a metal detecting seat called the BOSS—or Body Orifice Security Scanner—discovers he’s concealing something inside his body.
Despite the clear indication that he’s hiding something metal, probably a mobile—Michael denies any knowledge.
When the camera visits him in the exercise yard, his eyes are open wide: “I'm right as rain, fresh as a daisy. We're here in the exercise yard of HMP Durham, the Costa Del Durham hotel. Awful? You're f***ing living the dream here man."
Eight days and two mobiles later, he is finally released back into B-wing when the metal detector stops bleeping.
Goading the officers, he taunts: “See, not going off at the belly now is it mate? Gone mate. I know they’re gone, one’s been flushed. I’ve lost one. You’ve won or you think you’ve won.”
Michael is paired up with Lewis on B-wing and wastes no time in getting down to business.
Brandishing a lump of Cannabis to the camera he brags “£50 for that” and then holds up a tiny mobile to the lens with the words “it’s done” showing that the money for the drugs has already been transferred to his account on the outside before he has even dropped it off to the inmate.
With a sinister smile cell mate Lewis grins: “It’s good for him being in here cause I can just give him my stuff and then if I get spun he can take the stuff on his toes for me.
“He’d take the charge for me, he’d take the punishment and I’d sit here laughing in my pad. He’s just like the runt of the litter, when he’s in my pad he’s under my rules.”
Fifteen years in and out of jail has taught burglar Michael his place in the hierarchy at HMP Durham.
But he’s also picked up some nifty jail craft which wouldn’t look out of place on the set of Hollywood prison blockbuster The Shawshank Redemption.
Michael explains how he used a well-known trick involving a pulley system to transfer one of the phones to the inmate next door while on segregation, netting himself £150 along the way.
Pointing to his bed sheet, he gestures: “You get strips of bed sheet until you’ve got four or five lengths of the pad.
"Then what you do is you get some toilet roll, a big ball of wet toilet roll so it’s about the size of half a tennis ball tied onto the end of your line, you put it in your toilet and flush your toilet.
“Your next door flushes his toilet at the same time with another line and obviously, 'cause it’s going into the same system, it tangles.
“So now you get his line and he gets your line and you tie both of those lines together. So then you’ve got a pulley.”
By using this method inmates are able to pass mobile phones - which are wrapped in gaffa tape - between each other and easily organise drug deals with the outside world.
While prisoners like Michael and Lewis joke about beating “the screws” at HMP Durham—there’s a far darker side to the boom in Spice.
A horrific trend called “going over” has emerged where prisoners “spike” other vulnerable inmates and force them to overdose on the drug purely for entertainment.
In shocking scenes to be aired on Thursday, inmate Stephen Lindsay is seen stumbling around the yard in a semi-comatosed state while Scott, Lewis and their gang jeer and heckle him.
Despite the clear threat to his health, when Stephen comes round in his cell he astonishingly admits he actually enjoys the “free buzz” even though he’s putting his life into the hands of Scott and Lewis.
He smiles: “Aye, it’s a free buzz.
“It’s like being in a coma, it blacks you out and when you come round you can’t remember anything.
“Those 15 minutes when I was in jail, it was like I was a free man. I was innocent and when you come around you realise you’re back to reality. Hell on earth.”
Understaffed, overworked and constantly being beaten by evolving technology such as drones, the boom in Spice shows no signs of slowing.
Durham now has to share a sniffer dog team with four other prisons and over the past five years has lost a third of its staff due to cuts making it harder to act on intelligence.
And while the prison system carries on bringing criminals in for short spells, officers will struggle to stop the supply.
Residential governor Chris Hounslow concedes: “We do just see the same faces revolve through the door. A lot of it is theft burglary that kind of stuff.
“So we bring drug addicts into prison on really short sentences which makes it difficult, if not impossible to intervene with any kind of treatment.
"We then wonder why we can’t reduce re-offending. It’s a constant battle and I hate to say it, a battle that we’re losing.”
