How would spending your days locked in a 6ft by 12ft cell affect you?

That’s how the governor of HMP Swaleside responds to people when they suggest that prison is a holiday camp because his view is that being locked up is the punishment.

Jim Bourke has been the top man at the category B training prison (category A is the highest security) for almost a year and in that time he says he has become very proud of the way his prison is run.

Although staff are massively outnumbered, he says the prisoners recognise they are better off with them in charge than the inmates.

He says that the way prisoners are treated is an indication of how civilised a society is and that in our society, deprivation of liberty is the ultimate punishment.

“You are completely at the mercy of somebody coming through and opening your cell door,” he said.

“People wonder if prison works but deprivation of liberty is the ultimate punishment of our society and if most of us think about it, that punishment would be severe.

“If you brutalise the prisoners you are putting brutalised people back into society.”

Mr Bourke does recognise that there are some people for whom prison is not a deterrent, but he says that is often because of problems in the outside world and admits the struggle is reducing their risk of re-offending.

He said: “If someone has been in and out [of prison] since the age of 14 and they are 24 when they land with me – that’s an awful lot of undoing, a lot of damage on the way. We are not in the business of turning chaotic criminals into good prisoners – we are trying to turn them into good citizens, via prison.”

Like most prisons, Swaleside also has a problem with items being smuggled in and it is usually mobile phones, drugs and even digi-boxes – all things to make the prisoners’ lives easier.

One of the sad things, he says, is that for many youngsters who have grown up in abusive households, having their own space, a bed, three meals a day and prison officers who will manage them without brutalising them may actually be preferable to life on the outside.

Mr Bourke says one of the worst things about the job is that terrible things can happen – prisoners kill themselves, they assault each other and they assault staff, which he said can be disturbing.

He said: “We tend to be measured by our failures – we are remembered for the riots, disasters and escapes and for the amount of people that come back to prison.

“It’s hard to measure success.”

However, he said it can be a rewarding job as there is a lot of laughter in prisons and the best thing about it is the people.

“When I first started I felt like there was work that needed to be done and I felt like I could do it.

“Every day is exhilarating, exciting, disappointing, frustrating, rewarding, maddening, saddening and gratifying.

“My approach has always been that you can learn something from everyone and I have learnt a great deal from prisoners and my colleagues.”

Mr Bourke said an advantage of being a training prison is that staff got to know their population and worked with them, in turn reducing their risk of re-offending, but he said the longer sentences can mean that violence tends to be worse.

He added: “A lot of the people that end up here made one or two bad decisions.

“There are people that have done horrific things, but the monsters are very rare.

“All of us are capable of doing good things and bad things – but there’s no excuse.

“There may be facts for why people do the wrong thing but they have to be punished for doing the wrong thing. We lock them up and that’s my job.”

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Father-of-three Jim Bourke, 40, started working for the prison service when he was 24 after seeing an advert for an officer at HMP Reading.

He worked there with young offenders, before going to HMP Huntercombe to carry on his work with juveniles as a manager.

In 2001, he worked at the prison service’s headquarters in the high security directorate.

After that he went to HMP Belmarsh where he had a number of different roles including head of operations and security.

Mr Bourke stayed there until 2005 when he returned to headquarters to work on a number of policy change projects.

In 2007, he came to Sheppey as head of interventions across all three sites.

In January 2009, he took up the post of deputy governor at HMP Swaleside and in October that year became governor at HMP Standford Hill.

Finally in March 2010, he returned to Swaleside as governor.

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• There are more than 2,800 prisoners across the whole Sheppey Cluster (HMP Swaleside, HMP Elmley and HMP Standford Hill) which is the highest population on one site in the UK.
• HMP Swaleside was opened by Princess Anne in 1988.
• At full capacity it holds 1,012 prisoners.
• There are eight wings which each have between 120 to 178 single cells.
• Around 630 staff work in the prison with another 150 coming in and out to work – such as contractors.
• The majority of prisoners have been sentenced to four years or more and about 600 prisoners are serving life sentences, most for murder.
• The average length of sentences at the prison is six years.
• Swaleside has the highest population of those in prison for public protection – about 200.
• There are no prisoners in Swaleside whose only crime is a sexual offence.