Sky News reports:
I'm a prison officer - inmates are taking significant control'
The description by a prison officer of his job is sobering and makes one wonder if the Gulags were not a better solution.
Ivan Denisovich would probably disagree but prisons in the UK are well-known to be full of drugs not droogs and radicalization not re-education.
The gulag system - out of sight, out of mind, out of this world - would never work in the UK but that doesn't mean that it was all bad as an idea.
Except that they'd all end up being located in Scotland.
By way of contrast, for most people of a certain age in the UK, prisons are framed as the kind of cheerful places portrayed in the TV show Porridge - full of old lags, cheeky inmates and dopy staff not drone drug-drops or places to plan chopping someone's head off.
Either that or prisons full of Australian lesbians.
A bit like the way WW2 PoW camps are framed as places where plucky Brits practised gymnastics while digging tunnels to escape from German Stalags as opposed to the Eastern front reality where thousands of PoWs were surrounded by barbed wire and machine-gunned or left to starve to death on the frozen steppe.
Nevertheless, prison officers deserve some kudos for doing the jobs they do.