Cigarettes will be banned in some UK prisons from January. But a smoke is a small freedom that can wait on prisoners cope inside – and many will resort to desperate degree to get it,says one former inmateThe decision to ban smoking in all prisons in Wales and four prisons in England from January 2016 by the prisons minister, Andrew Selous, and reminds me of the lengths to which some people in jail will go just to get a smoke.
Begging,borrowing and stealing are the normal methods for those with limited means. Some plum jobs may also provide a supply. A man I knew once in a tall-security prison begged staff incessantly to give him the job of picking up the litter fellow prisoners routinely flung out of their cell windows. As there was no in-cell sanitary provision, the majority of the ejected detritus consisted of “shit parcels” excrement prodded into socks, or stuffed in jam jars or matchboxes,or wrapped neatly in newspapers. The perk for whoever volunteered to pick up the human waste was the rich pickings of discarded cigarette butts.
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Source: theguardian.com