Two prison officers at HMP Wandsworth have been dismissed for joking about an inmate’s suicide on a WhatsApp group.
After the 21-year-old prisoner killed himself, messages celebrating his death were posted on a group containing 27 members of staff employed at the south-west London jail.
According to the Times, which was passed the messages by a whistleblower, hours after the inmate’s death, prison officer Kevin O’Farrell asked if he was the man he referred to as “the fuckwit”. A colleague said: “Former fuckwit.”
O’Farrell wrote “Splendid if so. Total prick.” He also wrote “utter cunt, no loss” and “Good, I hope he suffered.”
Another officer, Armin Naroozi, shared a gif of a man dancing, alongside the words: “Another one bites the dust”. He also wrote: “If he wasn’t such a cunt, I might have felt sorry for him.”
An officer reported the messages to the governor and O’Farrell and Naroozi were sacked last year for unprofessional conduct. The other staff in the group were given warnings and guidance.
The mother of the inmate, who asked for him not to be named, told the Times she was “totally broken” after finding out about the messages.
She said: “My boy was challenging in some ways, I know he was, but he didn’t deserve this. He was funny, he was always laughing. He lived for his basketball and won so many medals for athletics. He got in with the wrong crowd. Everyone says that but he really did.
“These are meant to be prison officers. They haven’t apologised to us. Do they know how it hurts when you lose a child? I can’t stop thinking, were any of the officers making his life hell before?”
She expressed gratitude for the officer who spoke out “but there were so many who didn’t do anything”.
In the WhatsApp group, officers openly joked about assaulting prisoners, including the tennis champion Boris Becker, who spent a few weeks there after being jailed for hiding assets during bankruptcy, and talked about getting revenge against an inmate who assaulted a staff member, the Times reported.
Officers are also said to have shared misogynistic messages, mocked a gay prison officer’s appearance, joked that a gay prisoner particularly enjoyed jail shower time and about colleagues taking drugs.
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Naroozi, now unemployed, told the Times he was “full of remorse and regret” for sending the messages and was “shocked” that a written apology he said he penned to the dead prisoner’s family had not been passed on. “It was something that I fully regret and I live with for the rest of my days,” said Naroozi. He said conditions at the prison were awful and claimed governors “threw us under the bus”.
O’Farrell did not respond to the Times’s requests for comment.
HMP Wandsworth has been called the worst prison in England and Wales and described as having “inhumane conditions”. Earlier this year, a prison officer Linda De Sousa Abreu admitted misconduct in a public office after being filmed having sex with an inmate.
A Prison Service spokesperson said: “This was truly despicable behaviour that tarnishes the hard work of the overwhelming majority of our prison staff. The two officers involved were dismissed last year when these messages came to light and their actions were reported to police. Where officers do fall below our high standards, robust action will be taken as was the case here.”
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