Prisoners are passing up opportunities to escape because they are more comfortable inside jails where there is a plentiful supply of cheap drugs, according to a prison officers’ union leader.

Staff morale is at rock bottom and many jails are close to anarchy because of underfunding, said Glyn Travis, assistant general secretary of the Prison Officers Association.

He gave warning yesterday that the drug problem was now “out of control” and said that even prostitutes were sometimes smuggled in.

Mr Travis told of one institution in Yorkshire where members of the public were climbing over the prison walls to take drugs inside. “They put up ladders to climb over the walls, but prisoners were so comfortable in the environment they were living in that none tried to climb up the ladders and escape,” he said, in a reference to Everthorpe Prison in East Yorkshire.

“When the ladders came down at night, the members of the public hid inside the prison until their colleagues come over the following morning at 6am, put the ladders back up and they were able to get out. None of the prisoners inside tried to escape.

“It tells me there’s something wrong in society when people are breaking into prisons to bring in drugs and prostitutes, but the prisoners are quite happy to stay inside.”

Figures published in March showed that the abuse of heroin and other opiates was now more widespread than cannabis in jails in England and Wales. One in six inmates tested positive for opiates such as heroin in random tests, according to research by the Independent Monitoring Board.

The same findings ranked Everthorpe Prison as the ninth worst in terms of drug use, with 9.4 per cent of inmates testing positive for the use of opiates. The highest level of opiate abuse was at Featherstone Prison near Wolverhampton, with 16.7 per cent of inmates testing positive.

Yesterday’s comments by Mr Travis come in the wake of reports that the jailed singer Pete Doherty has been able to continue satisfying his heroin habit in Wormwood Scrubs.

Mr Travis told Talk Sport radio that drugs were coming into prisons at a rate which meant that they were cheaper on the inside than on the outside.“The quantity of drugs in our prisons today is absolutely vast.

“Every prison in Britain is understaffed and overcrowded. The Government believes the only way forward is to reduce the cost of public prisons, making them less safe and less secure. Staff feel very vulnerable.”

He also complained that prisoners were receiving a “wage”: “They receive a bed, a TV in all cells, breakfast in bed on many occasions, cash bonuses for good behaviour, and prison staff are forced to deal with them in such a subservient way it’s ridiculous.”

A Prison Service spokeswoman insisted last night that inmates were not receiving “breakfast in bed”, but were given a “breakfast pack” to eat in their cells. She added that television in cells was an earned privilege.

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