This was almost groundbreaking tv when I watched it almost 45 years ago now. Today it seems more like a historical look at how penal servitude has changed. For better or worse will be subjective. Thanks to those involved, and for whoever was responsible for posting the series

It's a disgrace that bloke was put inside for non payments of his rates, he's a working man doing his best and that's how he gets treated, and things are no better now.

The police..." Walking on the moon...wishing my days away " 😅 The officer sitting at the front of the bar with glasses looks like Sean Penn in Carlitos way 😂😂😂

You'd be lucky to see a Christmas tree now lol ,it's amazing to see how much trouble warders went to ,decorate the place up so much unbelievable with all trimmings .

What a miserable existence, for the delinquent villains featured ...and that was just the staff!

The Scottish guy was right the vicar is going round wishing them the best of x X mas spirit while the cameras are there every other day hes watches the beatings and ill treatment of men who shouldn't even be there at Xmas for fines of pennies they got away with murder no wonder the place was ripped to bits

Seem quite sad to see non criminals in prison..

Fines ffs . The guy who did time for rates should have billed the union in my opinion “ unions ruined Britain’s industry “

Even the toe rags wore sports jackets - the world has changed

10:13 "We got some stamps here for the Save the Children Fund" ... Good old fashioned lags..

That 45-year-old weaver with 2p on him 😁😁😁

I was quite impressed by the two men who made the effort n their cells with the cards and giving the stamps to charity.

The black lad looked like Vinny Gallagher and the amount of alcoholic screws back in the 70/80s was unbelievable they had a bar as you seen in the prison or built onto it and the priest good old father Proctor was there for decades the fella always 1st one to come and see you with a bible god bless him :)

Prison time for non payment of fines is rare these days. The courts will issue an attachment of earnings and take it directly out of your wages or benefits. Always pay council tax and court fines, they get you in the end.

19:18 "No court case or nothing" 🤣🤣🤣 Already been to court , found guilty , fined but did not pay it 🤣🤣🤣

Notice how everyone in jail is poor? That's by design.

The British judiciary has always been laughable in It's decision making.

12 days all that sht they went through just for 50 quid fine ,crazy fkn leaders 😂

Obviously we don't put debtors in prison these days, but you can see why the UK was called the sick man of Europe back in the late 70s. The economy had tanked, so working week is cut, so the guy at 15:48 has less money to take home, so can't pay bills, therefore put away, which costs more to do than the actual fine! In another episode they showed the teachers being told to come in, and would be paid, to do nothing as they stopped the classes! We complain when things were nationalised they couldn't be run, so we should privatise everything. I think the problem is clearly that when nationalised, the decisions came from Whitehall, by people that no idea how to run a prison, or trains, energy etc. Now it's just private companies giving us a rubbish service, cut to make them as much profit as possible. Neither works, and something has to change in all these areas. I watched another YT video on HMP 5 wells, run by the classic "whoops, we've lost a prisoner" G4S. Total chaos, prisoners walking around with huge knives, prisoners getting there mates to apply for jobs there so to help with bringing in drugs, phones etc. Watching this channels strange ways, you can see staff have to do everything, haircuts, food service, sorting out intercell personalities, they could walk around without the need of alarms, body cams, etc. Its a mess now, we haven't progressed at all.

You could get 30 days inside for robbing a liquorice allsort from woolies in them days.

Liver and onions is lovely with an oxo

That old man with just his bus fair home nearly made me cry.

The poor are easily controlled while the rich can do what they want

White custard! I wonder what man made ingredients went into that...

Notice the man says rates which is now council tax he went to prison for , obviously if government provided people with decent jobs and wages ,there wouldn't be people who couldn't pay bills .

45 and 41 they look about 60

The bloke dispensing the cash & issuing the receipts reminds me of "Figgis" - James Bolam!!

Brilliant, cheers for the upload 👍

Your channel pops on my feed out of nowhere, me, ends up watching 8 hours of strangeways. I like the governor, seems a really decent man, very wise. But a bucket, no toilet, thats rough. But its nice to see the lack of F word back then. I was born in 1965 and i never swore once till i was 18, nowadays you see kids swearing at 7 or less. Its sad to see. People need God, and morals. Seems to be lost to a lot of people nowadays.

Guard - "did you bring any cash in with you ?" Prisoner "2p" I would have just said "no"

When you used to do time for outstanding fines we used to work it out when you handed yourself into the police at 11.50 pm thats counted as one day and make sure you would be due out on a Sunday which meant you would be released on the Friday,3 days in your pocket happy days lol

Nearly all these people would of passed on hard to believe I was ten in 1979

The guy singing at @33:35 looks like Sean Penn’s character Kleinfeld, in Carlitos way! Adios councillor.

It's amazing isn't it... Can't pay a fine we will give you a free room with breakfast, lunch and dinner for a week to punish you for having no money... Why give prison time for fines? Just makes these men more likely to become proper criminals and have no place in society, all over a fine...

going to prison for not paying rates ? Good God !!

And , of course , The Police on the radio in the background .

This is fucking nuts!!!! Walking on the moon……. Playing in the background…. And a card off the guards and pedo priest

5:38 Did he say he was 41?

3 new inmates like a prog rock band .

The worst thing these days is if you are unfortunate to go ,in for prison for unpaid fines they used to be wrote off ,after doing sentence but not anymore it's still on you .

Some lucky people getting out Xmas Eve ,probably out early because of bank holiday cos they couldn't ,let you out late by law if your date ended Sunday ,had to be out Friday .

It was rife in Manchester in the 80s, men who worked all their lives to arrive in a thatcher government when they retired, no fault of their own! Just your same old grinding mill of injustice.

I know the Governor was a WW2 hero. WW2 he probably thought the food was better than he ever had!

13:49 Why imprison someone who is unable to pay their bills and taxes because where they work the union forces its members to go on strike, which attributes to the employee being unable to afford to live according to what society expect someone to live like. its completely unfair, not only to that man that has ended up unnecessarily in prison, but also to the taxpayer.

One of those priests is father Noel Proctor, who was the prison Chaplin when i was in from April- November, 199O, for a crime i did not commit. Talk about rough justice. I told him i was innocent and he said he was sorry to hear it bla bla, which did not do me any good. But he listened and i felt he cared. Seemed like a decent guy. I was only in the jail a matter of a few weeks before the riot erupted and i was shipped off to another prison.

40 odd year old Jesus they look a good 20 yrs older

That prison chaplain is terrible, the way he told that guy his father had died without even asking him if he knew he was ill etc, awful.

A lot of the screws in there committed more crimes against men than the inmates Just brutal

13:36 In prison for non payment of rates (council tax). WTF! He explained his hours were cut in work due to industrial action yet a judge thought it best he was imprisoned. FFS! Thankfully this doesn't happen anymore.

I remember the 3 day week. Hard times

Only time the likes of us, will ever be in royal residential place.

Very interesting thanks for sharing

A more wholesome time to be alive. Turn 41 years of age but look 76.

Xuck just saw my dad 😂

What a waste of time sending that man to prison it cost more to keep him there that the debt was😂

Non payment of fines wow peado gets less nowadays

They still have that floor buffer to this day

The Christmas dinner didn't look very appetising.

The Christmas dinner from Hell

All those blokes chucked in for non-payment of fines. What a joke. The taxpayer and society at large are worse off in many regards thanks to these short sighted policies - including financially worse off! Charles Dickens would recognise the 1970's legal system instantly.

Dont pay rates..jailed utter garbage..cost more to keep him there.

What a sad flecked up system, Britain.

I know they are a necessary evil. But That warden and his screws are on par with traffic wardens. You have to be a certain type of person.

Nice to see godber there at 3.57

Amazing uploads.

I was 8 when this was aired I'm sure it was om bbc2 watching it late with my big brothers it scared me at time lols

Malcolm Price the street fighter for Merthyr Tydfil South Wales mite have been here,for fighting.

I was 19 I had done 2 DCs Whattonon in Nottingham and campsfield house detention centre Kidlington Oxford 1974 and 1975. I didn't do borstal but first prison 81 i was 21 horfield Bristol as you can see what a change 😎👌🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Was the menu halal then?

I got out on Christmas Eve after doing 18 month it may sound great to be out for Christmas day but it's not.

Fancy telling him that his dad has died on camera

They left with their bus fare home one guy got 0.45p what chance on the outside with nothing

Hey pop pickers! The Police riding high in the charts with 'Walking On The Moon', released just a few weeks before. A few years later Sting himself should have been in Strangeways himself for crimes against music

Strangeways, here we come!

i remember the old guy near the end catweazle from cheetham hill

Wow, prison for non payment of fines!!!

The governor looks like he got boiling water and sugar threw over him

Someone else said this but god bless the salvation army they were working hard here to give some form of xmas cheer to the prisoners!!!

Pig's liver and mash ummmm. And that irish padre is really creepy!

Mainly again our leaders with greed and nasty ways ,have mostly destroyed Xmas for most who if ,there working don't get that long off .

was up in there for 3 months in or around 1981 for buying a nicked motobike.... im 68..

Under Edward Heath, the corporations were set up to tax the nation, Corperations tax or rates or council tax or tax tax tax, with Her Majesty The Queen being head of the Corperations, this maybe over 40 years ago but the situation is the same for each subject.

I am not surprised they rioted. Those prison officers were a nasty lot in Strangeways in the 1980s. That poor man put in there because he could not pay his rates.

How bad would it of been on the 2 of January when they took the decks down…..

10.20 radio music in background The police walking on the moon

3.40 Fulton Mackay.

Imagine to be an alcoholic in prison with no access to booze.... must be horrific

12:12 what is the guy in the bed discussing? Can’t make it out.

32:28 They was only clapping because they stopped playing .

People looked older back then. Most 60 year olds these days look younger than the man who said he was 45. Life was different then. Not many visits to the doctor, plus lots of booze, cigs, red meat, and fry ups. I can smell the farts from here.

We had to dip our biscuit thing in the cup at Church. Found out it was only Ribena !

Jimmy saville impersonation at 35.00 !

those bent screws get there come uppence not long after this the riot begins rofl

5:45 😮41!!!!!!!! Really?

Reverend Proctor was a legend he walked past me on the landing when I saw the dog collar I smirked juvenile delinquent I was but when he looked at me his face his eyes everything about him was heavy duty and I knew I was a little fish in a big pond and that he was a shark hunter he never said a word.

Doubt they would allow Christmas celebrations now as there is many other religious beliefs

The drinking scene is interesting, don’t see that camaraderie in work places anymore.

Is ` O Come all Ye Faithfull ` the only carol they know?

What happened to the guy whose house had burned down and his father had passed?

What had sadly happened to the face of the spectacled senior staff member ?