Prisoners are being denied their expected pay rise. But it would seem that life behind bars has its compensations. That, at any rate, is the verdict of Glyn Travis, of the Prison Officers Association, who alleges that ladders placed against walls are to let the drug dealers and sex workers in, rather than to get the prisoners out.

While porridge has long been thick with thieves, the supposed shock has been the suggestion by some inmates that their prison resembles “a holiday camp”. If so, holiday camps are not what they used to be. But those who claim the same is true of prisons may be overly influenced by the stark example of the Victorian house of correction. Any modern prison that is truly a hotspot of licentious living has more in common with its 18th- century forerunner.

In the 1700s, long-term incarceration was not necessarily the inevitable punishment for crime. There was the pillory, the noose or transportation. Consequently, those iron-restrained cutpurses and assorted lowlifes languishing in putrid squalor only made up a section of the prison population.

The period was rife with what might now be termed white-collar crime. With bankrupt businessmen also detained behind bars while their relations stumped up the cash to pay creditors, a large proportion of the prison population thus came not from the underclass but rather the “distressed” middle class. And they had not lost the habit of tipping for good service.

Such was the money that could change hands for favours that the job of a jailer was highly prized. Even in Newgate in London, a byword for hell on Earth, there were many enjoying preferential treatment. They got the best rooms in the Press Yard wing where, in exchange for payments ranging from £20 to £500, they could reside if they wished with their wives and families.

Those among them with better things to do with their time than scrub the floor could hire a cleaner for a shilling a week. The jailer was happy to procure an overnight prostitute for the same sum.

In 1717, the author of The History of the Press Yard told how he had visited the jail's upmarket quarters and found the inmates cheerfully engaged in smoking, drinking and playing skittles. What was more, they were joined each evening by friends visiting from the outside, popping round for a chat and a laugh.

What modern prisoners now buy illicitly used to be all part of the service. This ended when the Victorian reformers curtailed the jailhouse's upstairs-downstairs social division. The lowly were exulted, slightly, and the mighty brought down a peg.

If the latest reports are to be believed, the bar of equality has been raised. Now every inmate can live like a disgraced lord.

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