Linda De Sousa Abreu has been out of jail since the spring and is, she says, keeping a low profile. The former Wandsworth prison officer sentenced to 15 months after pleading guilty to having sex with an inmate in his cell, filmed by a fellow prisoner in June 2024 and released early after five months on tag, told The Sun this week that the prison she left was “very understaffed and hard to manage.”
Linton Weirich, the inmate, says it was worse than that. Staff were corrupt, he told the same paper. They smuggled in phones, drugs and food for money. Prisoners ran the landings. “Officers don’t run jails anymore,” he said. “Prisoners do.”
Neither account surprised anyone who had been paying attention.
The tabloid interviews (De Sousa Abreu’s first public statements since her release, and Weirich speaking separately to The Sun and the Daily Mirror) have brought the June 2024 viral video back into circulation. The encounter, filmed on B-wing on a contraband phone while the cameraman smoked cannabis, resulted in De Sousa Abreu pleading guilty to misconduct in a public office and receiving a 15-month sentence. The filming prisoner’s commentary, “This is how we live at Wandsworth bruv,” was read into the record at Isleworth Crown Court. The judge described De Sousa Abreu’s participation as “with evident enthusiasm.” She was arrested at Heathrow Airport attempting to board a flight to Madrid.
She served five months at HMP Bronzefield before being released under a policy that allows early release after one-third of sentence with good behaviour. That policy exists because England’s prisons are dangerously overcrowded. The prison at the centre of all this – Wandsworth Prison – holds 1,444 people in space certified as fit for 894.
Weirich, now 38, was serving four years and nine months for stealing £65,000 worth of valuables from a Kensington flat. He told The Sun that De Sousa Abreu had smuggled Nando’s and Chinese takeaways for prisoners at £150 an order, and that they had communicated via a contraband phone on Instagram and Snapchat. De Sousa Abreu denied both claims. “The police had my phone for over a year,” she said. The smuggling allegation was not part of her conviction. She was convicted of the sexual relationship, which she admits.
The prison they were describing
What they described was Wandsworth at its worst. The Independent Monitoring Board published its annual report in August 2024, the same month De Sousa Abreu pleaded guilty. Its chair, Matthew Andrews, called it “the worst year in memory.” Up to half of all officers were absent on any given day. Nearly half of those in post had been there for less than a year. There was, the report noted, “ready access to drugs, weapons, mobile phones and drink.” Weirich had a phone when they were strictly prohibited.
The staffing problem ran deeper than absence rates. New recruits arrived after nine weeks of centralised training the IMB described as inadequate. The governor had no say in who was hired and was then judged on their performance. The IMB called it “extraordinary” that staff were hired nationally, never visited the prison before starting, and the institution was then assessed on how well they performed.
But the corruption problem was more serious still, and the tabloid coverage missed it. In August, a Sunday Times investigation into Bobby Cunningham, the prison’s head of security from 2021 to 2023 revealed he had been connected to organised crime. Prison officers had filed multiple whistleblowing reports. Cunningham personally authorised the transfer of a fraudster who owed £541,000 under a confiscation order to an open prison, explicitly violating rules barring anyone owing more than £200,000 from open conditions. When he was finally suspended in July 2023, he was allowed to resign on medical grounds and left with a compensation package worth two years’ salary. That decision was later reversed. He was retrospectively dismissed for gross misconduct and forced to repay the money. He was never referred to police.
Former chaplain Liz Bridge, who served at Wandsworth through the pandemic, gave a public talk at the Putney Society in September 2025. She described cells designed in 1851 for one person now shared by two: “One person can sit and eat their meal at the counter. The other person either sits hunched on the lower bunk bed, or they have the pleasure of eating their meal sitting on the lavatory.” A man had died of heat exhaustion in December. “There was nothing the matter with his heart,” she said. “Some cells are so small both men cannot lie on the floor on a wet towel.”
This was the prison De Sousa Abreu and Weirich were in.
The governor who changed things
Governor Andy Davy inherited all of it. He took over in June 2024, the same month the video was filmed. His predecessor, Katie Price, had resigned under pressure following a sustained public campaign.
Davy’s approach was different from the start: he gave independent monitors access, walked them through the wings himself and shared his own data. He was put in special measures in 2024, and the October 2025 IMB report still found one-third of staff absent every day and fewer than 85 officers managing 1,500 men.
But by the time monitors visited in February 2026, the numbers had shifted. Prisoner-on-prisoner violence was down by 70 incidents on the same period the previous year. Assaults on staff were down by 99. Self-harm incidents were down by 78. The prison was fully staffed, slightly above complement. A dedicated reform wing, G-wing, had opened in November 2025 on a Scandinavian-inspired model, with 15 specialist officers who had chosen to work there. Independent monitors found it working.
These are real improvements. They are Davy’s. The question is whether they outlast him.
Putney.news understands that Governor Davy is due to leave his post. No replacement has been announced.
What reform has not reached
It is not all positive: the same February monitoring visit that documented improvements found rats on G-wing. The showers were in “disgusting” condition. Men were still arriving from court at 8:30 in the evening. Three men died at the prison within eight days in March 2026: Thomas James, 84; Ahmed Said, 31; Kamal Uddin, 49. All three are under PPO investigation.
The most recent investigation to report concluded a death was “absolutely foreseeable and therefore possibly preventable.” The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman has now opened 29 investigations into deaths connected to Wandsworth since 2019.
Men are leaving Wandsworth with charity sleeping bags and nowhere to go; an outcome no individual governor can prevent while the structural conditions remain unchanged. The prison holds 1,444 people in space certified as fit for 894. No other prison in England exceeds that ratio. The promised £100m government rebuild has not started.
capacity
most in England
The question the MoJ hasn’t answered
The Ministry of Justice responded to this week’s tabloid coverage with a prepared statement. It is “cracking down” on staff corruption “through tougher vetting, a strengthened Counter-Corruption Unit and over £40 million in physical security to clamp down on the contraband that fuels violence in jails.”
We have reported on HMP Wandsworth for more than two years. The prison inspectorate is due to reinspect in 2026. All our coverage is available at the HMP Wandsworth tag page.
