HMP Retreat: Inside the British jail housing only foreign prisoners where inmates enjoy ice baths, breathwork and yoga: ‘Life is so comfortable it barely feels like punishment’

Cold plunges, breathwork classes and yoga: they sound like the sort of activities on offer at a luxury wellness retreat – the sort of wholesome getaway popular with hen parties and celebrity influencers – and often costing many hundreds of pounds.

Yet, staggeringly, these are the sort of therapeutic treatments currently offered to foreign criminals – including rapists, drug dealers and burglars – and in one of the UK’s increasingly overcrowded prisons.

A report into HMP Maidstone, one of the UK’s three prisons dedicated to housing foreign nationals, revealed earlier this month how these are just a few of the pastimes offered to inmates, alongside other initiatives such as soup and bread-making sessions and guitar lessons.

The programmes, often run by charities, are well-intentioned: they are supposed to build ‘self-esteem and confidence’, as well as help addiction recovery, to rehabilitate prisoners for when they are eventually released back into society – or, better still, deported.

Yet it comes at a time when Britain’s prisons are in crisis. Many are at full capacity, with the Government grappling to reduce the numbers of inmates within the next year.

As a result, hundreds of dangerous criminals have been released early, with thousands more set to be freed by June next year.

Prisons, like many public sectors, are also under severe financial strain, with a £1.8billion maintenance backlog. 

It is undoubtedly a precarious time for the country’s jails, which has led to many workers within the prison services questioning how appropriate – or indeed moral – it is to offer wellness and spa activities to prisoners, creating an environment which hardly feels like a punishment, when they really should be paying for their crimes.

As one prison source told the Daily Mail: ‘Most prison officers accept that the prison environment should be austere but not cruel.

‘Nobody is suggesting prisoners should be mistreated or denied opportunities to rehabilitate themselves.

‘But there’s a difference between rehabilitation and making prison life so comfortable that inmates barely feel they’re being punished.

‘I know the official line is that the punishment is the deprivation of liberty, but try explaining to victims of crime that offenders are being offered cold-water therapy and breathing exercises when many hardworking people outside prison are struggling to make ends meet.’

Another former prison officer at one of the UK’s most notorious prisons added: ‘Prisons are no longer being run by prison officers, they are managed by psychologists.

‘Everything these days is geared towards prisoners’ mental health. I don’t think it is the way forward and it can be easily abused.

‘Prisons need to make up their minds on whether it’s rehabilitative or punitive. It does not work trying to do both at the same time.’

The Government recently pledged it will deport all foreign offenders – a promise that has been trotted out by successive governments over the past two decades but has never been fully delivered.

The statistics speak for themselves: in the first quarter of this year, nearly 20,000 foreign offenders, subject to deportation, were still living freely within the community after serving their sentence, according to findings from The Migration Observatory.

In stark comparison, the number of offenders returned to their home nation was just 5,858, in the year to March.

The rollout of cold-water therapy in prisons began in September last year, being trialled at seven prisons across the country, mostly in Category B and Category C prisons such as Maidstone, which often works with prisoners at the end of their sentences.

Until recently, cold-water plunges were most associated with elite athletes, speeding up the recovery of sore muscles after intense activity, yet following a surge in research into its mental health benefits, more and more of the health conscious have been buying into the trend.

Popularised by Dutch motivational guru Wim Hof, an advocate of cold water therapy, who praised the physical and mental benefits of the practice in his BBC1 show Freeze The Fear, sudden immersion into cold water has been found to trigger an acute stress response which in turn causes a surge in ‘feel good’ dopamine and endorphins.

The brains behind bringing the practice into prisons is breathwork and performance coach Ben Davie, who delivers the programme alongside drug and alcohol addiction charity Change Grow Live.

Speaking on a podcast about the initiative in May, Mr Davie said: ‘In prisons, I teach prisoners how to meditate. On a wing, in an intense environment, I teach them to come back into the body.

‘We went in and have done the first ever UK trial of cold therapy as a tool to support recovery [within prisons]. It started out as breathwork, but they were quite quickly interested in the ice bath work. I shared passionately about how I believe it can help the guys.

‘The governors showed courage to sign it off and trust in it because it’s new, different and we did it in a Category B high-security prison, six-week trial.

‘We had some wonderful moments there with regard to connection, the feeling the men got, the resilience, the camaraderie, peer-to-peer support, week on week they were supporting each other.’

A report from the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) earlier this month praised HMP Maidstone’s initiative and its other wellbeing activities for helping to improve prisoners’ ‘self-expression and emotional wellbeing’.

Ice baths and wellbeing notwithstanding, the prison is far from perfect, calling for some to question whether this is the most appropriate use of the prison’s budget.

The report also highlighted ongoing issues with drugs, language barriers and cultural clashes between inmates.

‘Some cells are cramped and prisoners have to share accommodation originally intended for one person,’ one insider said.

‘There are still problems with drugs, illegal mobile phones and prisoners suffering from mental health problems.’

They added: ‘The really frustrating thing is that while we’re offering all these wellbeing activities, there are still prisoners who can’t access the proper offending behaviour programmes they need.

‘Prison should be about discipline, responsibility and rehabilitation. Teaching prisoners useful skills and helping them address their offending behaviour makes sense. But I struggle to see how sitting in cold water or practising breathing exercises is going to stop someone committing another crime.

‘The worry among some officers is that we’re creating an environment where keeping prisoners happy has become more important than holding them accountable for what they’ve done.’

Not that criticism of prisoner-led initiatives is confined to HMP Maidstone alone, however.

Last year HMP Five Wells, in Northamptonshire – another Category C prison for inmates serving short sentences or nearing the end of their time inside – was dubbed Britain’s ‘cushiest jail’ after the partner of one inmate commented his ‘lake view, phone, tablets to text and email on’, before making the wry observation how they ‘wouldn’t mind swapping for a weekend.’

There, prisoners are referred to by guards by their first names and kept entertained with a gym, soccer pitches and yoga classes. As for the work placements and courses on offer, they range from hairdressing and bike repairs to sewing tote bags from recycled denim.

Much of this was to be achieved with ‘prisoner-led initiatives’, whereby inmates are empowered to help with the running of the prison and rewarded with perks for good behaviour.

Further perks range from the right to order a takeaway from the prison cafe to a congratulatory letter from one of the governors. Visits from loved-ones are encouraged. They’re allowed to kiss and cuddle partners and, for £2.50, inmates can buy a photograph of their reunion.

A couple of Christmases ago, the Daily Mail revealed how two miniature donkeys were even transported to the jail to further enliven family visits. ‘Helping to make good memories,’ read the headline on the social media post recording the event.

‘Five Wells isn’t really a prison – I would say it’s like a boarding school for adults,’ one prison officer told this newspaper.

While, unlike Maidstone, HMP Five Wells is not specifically for foreign nationals, they currently account for 12 per cent of the general prison population in the UK – the highest level since 2013, and said to cost UK taxpayers £580million a year.

Meanwhile, at London’s biggest prisons, foreign offenders also make up a large proportion of inmates, with 30 per cent of inmates at Belmarsh being foreign nationals and almost half at HMP Wandsworth.

The 600 capacity men’s prison once held Reggie Kray and Soviet spy John Vassall 

According to the most recent figures, Albanians made up the largest proportion of foreign offenders, at nine per cent, followed by Irish and Polish offenders, who both make up seven per cent of the population.

Statistics from 2021 showed that of those Albanian inmates, 61 per cent are serving time for drug offences.

In HMP Maidstone, which has inmates from 89 countries, Albanians currently account for 15 per cent of the population, with Muslims forming the largest religious group in the prison at 46 per cent.

Overall increases in immigration, as well as a reluctance on the part of criminal court judges to grant foreigners bail for fear they will abscond, were given as explanations for the steady rise in foreign nationals flooding our jails.

The surge has led to the creation of foreigner-only prisons which, it was hoped, would help streamline and speed up the deportation process, as well as address issues created by language and cultural barriers.

HMP Maidstone, which once held the likes of Reggie Kray and Soviet spy John Vassall, was converted from a sex-offender prison for 500 foreign nationals in 2013.

This year it deported 65 per cent of its inmates, with a fifth being moved to immigration centres and 13 per cent being released into the community.

There are two other foreigner-only prisons: HMP Huntercombe in Oxfordshire and HMP Morton Hall in Lincolnshire, which was developed into the country’s third foreign national prison in 2021.

Yet these prisons are not without controversy. As one former prison officer told the Daily Mail: ‘I don’t understand why we have foreign national prisons in general.

‘If you commit a crime in this country, you should no longer be in the UK. It’s a right, it’s not a privilege.

‘They are spending around £60,000 a year to house these prisoners – how much of the prison budget is being spent on that?’

Yet, the recent ‘wellness’ report revelation wasn’t the first time HMP Maidstone has been called out for its perceived luxuries.

Last year video emerged on social media from inside the prison, showing off one gleaming cell that seemed more akin to a university halls of residence than a traditional prison cell.

Filmed on a mobile phone smuggled into the prison, the footage showed a cell with huge speakers on the wall, a telephone hanging down next to the bed and designer trainers stacked up on a shelf.

As a result, the Prison Service launched an urgent investigation, warning the inmates at the Category C prison that they could have their sentence increased if they were to be caught with mobile phones. It was never confirmed who had filmed inside the cell.

The Ministry of Justice will never comment on where prisoners are held, so it’s unclear who is among the inmates at HMP Maidstone right now.

One notorious Albanian gangster, however, who was jailed following a Daily Mail investigation, referred to himself on TikTok as the ‘real King of HMP Maidstone’.

Selamet Mehmetaj, who called himself ‘the Devil’, was locked up for four and a half years in 2023 after running a cannabis factory staffed by illegal immigrants who distributed drugs worth millions of pounds a year across the UK.

During his time in prison, he posted shameless selfies and even made videos mocking the police.

The drug dealer, who chillingly described how he previously kidnapped and cut off the fingers of a rival, has since been released and is now back living in north London, where he’s often found boxing at an amateur gym near Finsbury Park.

Will he be deported? Again, the MoJ cannot comment. What is clear, is that whatever path Mehmetaj takes next, his time spent at His Majesty’s Pleasure – with its icebaths, yoga and all – will have provided him with some wholesome memories while he waits to find out his fate.