Former Wimbledon champion Becker served eight months of his two-and-a-half-year jail term and described his stint in London’s most notorious jail as ‘torture’
Endless screaming and sleepless nights are what Russell Brand has in store for him at HMP Wandsworth Prison, according to Boris Becker.
Former Wimbledon champion Becker served eight months of his two-and-a-half-year jail term after being found guilty of hiding millions of pounds worth of assets after declaring himself bankrupt. However, Becker described his stint in London’s most notorious jail as “torture” and he feared that he wouldn’t be able to survive being ‘caged with psychopaths.’
Brand, 51, will spending a considerably longer time at Wandsworth. He was sentenced to a total of 10 years and six months in jail yesterday for raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others. He will be on the sex offenders register for life and must serve at least seven years of his sentence behind bars before being considered for release on license.
Insiders have already called the comedian a ‘marked man’ as they warned of the ‘welcoming’ awaiting famous faces from their fellow inmates.
Wandsworth is one of the largest prisons in the UK, located in south west London, and holds between 1,300 and 1,500 prisoners.
Becker, 58, spoke about his harrowing stint behind bars there in his book, Inside, following his early release.
“You can’t sleep because all of it is true,” he said of the rumours before he went in.
“In jail people do kill themselves, people do harm themselves and people do go crazy. It’s the harsh reality when you have never been to prison and that’s what your lawyers don’t tell you before – maybe not to scare you. HMP Wandsworth is probably one of the toughest prisons in the UK so to be put in there was quite a shock.”
Becker said he said goodbye to his showbiz lifestyle on a Friday and was confined to his cell until the following Tuesday as ‘bedlam’ broke out in the cells around him.
Recalling the first few nights in jail, he said: “This is torture. Surviving it all is an impossibility. I’m in a cage with a bunch of psychopaths. I’m alone and I’m lost.”
One of the most difficult parts of his jail stint was how slowly time seemed to move. “Time is your enemy inside because the clock ticks very slowly. It’s 22 hours a day inside a tiny cell and that’s hard.” He added: “In hindsight, it was probably very good for me to stand still for a long time, and 231 days is quite a long time. To truly understand what happened to me before, to put the dance together of what happened, was a relief. But it doesn’t happen overnight.
“You have to take real accountability and a cell life gives you that opportunity. I like to think I’m a pretty bright guy and eventually, you start thinking about the whys, ifs and whens of all that happened. Three years later, the reason I’m doing well is because I took full accountability for the good and bad I did.”
However, Becker insisted that prison life is not easy and that “it’s a real punishment”.
Much of life inside Wandsworth were run by the prisoners themselves, Becker claimed. However, there was some hope in the form of a warder, and he was persuaded to talk to other inmates to try and rehabilitate some of them. He told young prisoners his life story about having everything and then losing it all, but tried not to be too down about it.
“I read lots of books and I recommend the philosophy of stoicism to people who have issues in the free world,” he said. “It’s more important than ever with the trying times we live in.”
It comes as a former HMP Wandsworth inmate has said Brand ‘needed to survive’ the violent institution by ‘keeping his head down’ until he is moved to a different prison.
The old inmate was released from HMP Wandsworth last year, according to The Sun, but has said Brand is a ‘dead man walking’ as long as he stays in that prison.
The former inmated said: “If Brand stays in Wandsworth, he’s in real trouble – a dead man walking.
“He won’t be there permanently but needs to survive until he’s got his permanent move. Wandsworth is violent, corrupt, dirty and noisy. He will be so far out of his comfort zone.
“When I was there staff paid prisoners to attack other inmates and violence would break out over the smallest thing. Brand will be a marked man while he is there and – if he is to stay safe – needs to move quickly.”
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