Cherrie-Ann Austin-Saddington was working in a men’s prison when she began a relationship with an inmate that would turn her, too, into a criminal. How do some of the most dangerous men in Britain get what they want – even behind bars?
T
here was a moment in the summer of 2022 when 26-year-old Cherrie-Ann Austin-Saddington, a female prison officer in a men’s jail, had to make a choice. She was on her wing at HMP The Verne in Dorset, in the day room where inmates go to read books and newspapers, when a prisoner called Bradley Trengrove handed her a magazine. Concealed within its pages was a slip of paper with a number written on it – the number of his secret, illicit mobile phone. Under the watchful eye of the prison’s security cameras, Austin-Saddington had to decide what to do next.
“I was thinking, do I report it? Do I not report it?” she says. “I wasn’t thinking, I’ll text him – that wasn’t in my head.” But she did not throw the piece of paper away. She kept it, and in the end decided not to report anything.
It was the first in a series of catastrophic choices that would lead Austin-Saddington to a sexual relationship with Trengrove, and transform her from a prison officer into a convicted criminal, in line for a custodial sentence of her own. It’s a decision she says she will regret for the rest of her life. The story of how she came to make it reveals much about Austin-Saddington. But it tells us even more about the state of our prison system, the worrying flaws in how staff are recruited and managed, and how failures in its duty of care to prisoners and staff are undermining the course of justice.
