Part of my Crime Fiction Experts series
Andy Marsland on Category A reality, real corruption, and why your prison scenes might be too dark
A prisoner walked past a Pentonville officer one afternoon and clocked something familiar on the man’s wrist. His own gold watch. The one that had been taken from his property bag and locked in the prison safe.
That single moment finished off a long-running corruption investigation. The officer, it turned out, had been planted inside Pentonville by a local organised crime group to deal drugs, and once he was inside he’d got greedy, branching out into lifting jewellery from prisoners’ property bags held in the prison safe. The watch tied it all together.
Welcome to Andy Marsland’s territory, where prison corruption looks nothing like it does in the films.
Andy spent over 30 years in HM Prison Service, from his first day at HMP Belmarsh in 1991 right through to his retirement in 2023. He worked with some of Britain’s most dangerous Category A prisoners, then spent the back half of his career inside young offender institutions. He’s also managed corruption cases, run prison incidents, and held strategic responsibility for the oversight of young people held in segregation across the country. He’s one of my Crime Fiction Experts, and if you’re writing prison scenes, he’s the person you need.
Let me show you why.
Belmarsh: bigger than you think, more human than you write
Andy trained at HMP Leeds, an old Victorian prison crammed onto a tiny footprint with over a thousand prisoners inside it. Then he transferred to Belmarsh.
“I was amazed to find that Belmarsh was at least four times larger and it was literally about half a mile from the Gatehouse to the Houseblock at the far end of the prison.”
That’s a useful detail for any writer because, as Andy says: “When there was an incident, we used to have to run some distance to respond and support colleagues!”
He was twenty-three, and most of his colleagues were ex-forces or old-timers who’d transferred in to see out their final years.
“I had to prove myself with the old timers, as they would not speak to you until they deemed you worthy.”
Now here’s the bit writers usually miss. Yes, Category A meant high-profile prisoners on the 10 o’clock news. Yes, violence was rife. But Andy’s clear that prison life had layers most fiction doesn’t bother with.
“The realities are that life was also fun, mischief and laughs between staff and prisoners!”
When politics walks into your prison
One of the things you almost never see in fiction is how political a high-profile prisoner can become. Andy was heavily involved in the care and management of two famous names. The first was Jeffrey Archer, who later wrote a book about his time in Belmarsh (and in which Andy features!).
“Jeffrey Archer should have actually been transferred to a Category D open prison based on his risk and nature of his offence. However, the Government clearly wanted to teach him a lesson, and made it clear to us that he would not receive any special treatment and he never moved to an open prison due to Ministerial meddling.”
The second was Ronnie Biggs.
“Ronnie Biggs was not even a Category A prisoner, but Ministers paid very close attention to him and, as staff, we had to manage him under a high level of scrutiny from those above. Clear instructions would come from Ministers’ offices about what we should and shouldn’t do, such was the public interest at the time.”
That’s a layer fiction tends to flatten. If your fictional prisoner is high-profile, there may well be unwelcome oversight from those caring more about perception than security and rehabilitation
There’s also a black market that crime writers rarely include. At Belmarsh, autographs of famous prisoners changed hands inside, with a signed cell location card fetching around £300!
How corruption actually takes root
The gold watch was the moment it broke open, but the mechanics that got there are more interesting. The officer in question had been put inside Pentonville by an organised crime group, his original brief being to deal drugs. Stealing the jewellery wasn’t part of the plan; it was greed, and it was reckless. As Andy puts it:
“Obviously, he had got greedy and had ventured into carrying out theft, which would not have gone down well with the gang.”
That’s another thing fiction might miss. Andy’s officer wasn’t undone by a clever detective on the outside; he was undone from inside, doing things the gang who planted him would never have sanctioned. Worth knowing if your story leans on the brilliant outsider cracking it open.
Andy ran a second case, this one involving another officer suspected of gang membership. The intelligence came from prisoners themselves, picked up by staff and reported. Andy and his team built a timeline and an evidence chart and presented it to the police, who weren’t convinced. Frustrating. So Andy challenged the officer directly about some of the evidence, and the man resigned the following morning. Sometimes that’s all the confirmation you get.
Young offenders are not “kids who got into trouble”
Andy moved into the youth estate in 2005 and stayed there until he retired. The first surprise was the girls.
“The girls would fight each other and not give in! I was amazed to see teenage girls working themselves into a frenzy and frothing at the mouth!”
But the bigger correction for crime writers is about how seriously to take young men in custody.
“Crime writers might not be fully aware that despite their age, most young people in male YOIs are quite sophisticated gang members, who are committing offences linked to organised crime. Stabbings that take place are not just postcode gang related issues but tend to be linked to more serious organised crime. Age means very little in such matters and this should be remembered in crime related writings.”
Worth taking seriously. The kid in your scene might be operating in deeper water than you’ve written him into.
The moments writers always leave out
Andy gave me two moments that have stayed with him. They’re worth your attention because they’re the kind of detail crime fiction almost never reaches for.
The first is the lettuce story. He set a small group of seventeen-year-old girls to plant lettuce seedlings, each one in its own little plastic pot, and came back to a tidy row of new plants, all still sitting in their pots, buried straight into the soil!
The second is more poignant. The girls organised a charity auction inside, made the food and decorations, ran the whole thing. One of the girls in the group was particularly vulnerable, operating at the developmental level of a five-year-old. As the event went on she came out of her shell, eventually picking up the microphone.
“She told the audience about how well cared for she felt and that the prison felt like home. Very sad, but it showed the level of need the girls had.”
If you’re writing about youth custody and you focus only on conflict or violence, you’re leaving the most powerful stories on the table.
Inside an incident, properly run
When a serious incident happens, Andy says, the prison goes into command mode and effectively all operations cease. Resources get redirected, the incident often becomes a crime scene, and the full range of emergency services might turn up.
It’s slower than fiction usually plays it, and quieter.
Like with the police, a command room opens, the senior manager takes charge as silver, and junior managers get allocated bronze roles beneath them. The ‘regime bronze’ advises silver on practical issues like getting prisoners fed; the ‘interventions bronze’ plans any use of force needed to bring the incident to an end. Every plan and decision flows up to silver in the command room, and every action gets logged for audit and evidence.
“There is no right or wrong decision, it’s just some decisions can be better than others. A calm head is required but you do feel the pressure as all eyes are on you as incident commander.”
If your fictional commander is barking orders and getting it all right first time, you’re missing the most interesting part of the job.
What TV gets wrong, what TV gets right
Andy’s surprised by how prison escapes get dramatised on screen.
“It really isn’t James Bond like in my experience.”
Same goes for the smuggled gun.
“A gun being brought in and passed like something from a spy novel, from Officer to Officer is far reaching!”
For what gets it right, he points to two notable shows:
The first is the BBC sitcom Porridge. (For anyone under forty: Ronnie Barker, 1974, career criminal Norman Stanley Fletcher is trying to keep his head down at HMP Slade. It’s still very funny.) Andy’s view is that it captured something important.
“The sitcom Porridge captures well some of the comic moments and mischief which goes on in a prison. This element is very often missed in other prison dramas and books.”
The second is the BBC series Time.
“This is very real and I feel displays the real personal impact being put into prison can have on family and friends who are left in the community. It also displays the impact on victims which is important. Add to this the way the programme shows the viewer the stresses that prisoners are affected by, really demonstrates life in prison.”
Andy’s one rule for crime writers
When I asked Andy for the single rule he’d impose on every crime writer attempting a prison scene, this is what he said.
“Prison is a small community therefore writers must include the good, fun and interesting interactions between staff and prisoners, not just the bad and the ugly!”
That’s it. Not a procedural correction, not a technical note, just a reminder that the place you’re writing about is full of human beings, and human beings are never one note.
If your prison is all darkness, your prison is wrong.
Andy Marsland is one of my Crime Fiction Experts. He served over thirty years in HM Prison Service across HMP Belmarsh, HMP Pentonville and HMP Cookham Wood, with later strategic roles in the Youth Justice Board, Medway Secure Training Centre, and the national oversight of separated young people. His specialisms include prisons and youth custody, corruption management, youth justice policy and process, and incident management. For prison and youth custody advice on your crime fiction, get in touch here on my website.
