Violence, isolation and rat-infested cells: insiders on the state of English and Welsh prisons

One prisoner says he spent four days in his cell without a wash because they were ‘short-staffed’. Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images/Alamy/

It is a sunny morning outside HMP Wandsworth and tourists are pointing at a food truck waiting to go through the portcullis-style gate. “That might have been the one he hid under,” says one, as they discuss how 21-year-old terror suspect Daniel Khalife allegedly managed to escape the Victorian jail this month clinging to the bottom of a delivery vehicle.

What the tourists don’t clock are the men who walk out of the gate carrying prison-issue sports bags, blinking into the sunlight as they taste freedom for the first time in weeks, months, years.