Bolton Crown Court: HMP Hindley prisoner damaged cell

Joe Outlaw, 36, has been serving in various prisons since 2007 with his time having been added to in the years since after committing several offences while inside.

He was brought again before Bolton Crown Court this week after smashing a toilet and sink in his cell at HMP Hindley on January 28 last year, causing flooding and exposing the pipework.

James Preece, prosecuting, said: “He was saying things like he had written off cells in other prisons and that he was more than capable of causing similar damage.”

He added: “Mr Outlaw said to one officer that the nightshift had refused to take him to hospital and told another officer that it was because they had taken £30 off him, a reference to a financial dispute the previous afternoon.”

The case was heard at Bolton Crown Court (Image: Newsquest)

Mr Preece told the court how prison staff had tried to talk Outlaw down but that he went on to cause a huge amount of damage in the early hours of that morning.

Outlaw also injured himself using a razor blade on his stomach. 

He said: “He stated that he had been asking for help for days and weeks but had received nothing and said that in prison system you have to get attention, speaking gets you nowhere.”

Mr Preece explained that Outlaw, who has 33 previous convictions for 70 offences, had been imprisoned in 2007 for a robbery with imitation firearm offence, but that he had remained inside since then after several other cases of causing criminal damage to the prisons he had been staying in.

Some of the previous convictions had been committed by Outlaw under various different aliases which he now no longer goes by.

Other offences committed in the past had seen Outlaw, now of HMP Manchester better known as Strangeways Prison, scale the roof of a prison in 2013, causing around £44,000 worth of damage, while he had also damaged prison facilities on several other occasions.

Outlaw pleaded guilty to his latest case of causing criminal damage when brought before Wigan and Leigh Magistrates Court.

David Bentley, defending, accepted Outlaw’s “unenviable antecedent history” but said he deserved credit for having pleaded guilty and claimed his crime had been an “act of desperation".

He told the court that Outlaw had long had difficulties with the prison system but being unable to access his medication had been “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

ALSO READ: Inspectors find HMP Hindley have coped well with the coronavirus pandemic

ALSO READ: A 'crumbling system' and the crimes that shook Bolton

ALSO READ: 'Vast cuts' see nearly half of Bolton trials delayed

But Mr Bentley said that the defendant now accepted that “he has only himself to blame” and that he had “behaved like a child".

Mr Bentley said: “There has to be a time when Mr Outlaw realises that his sentence will continue until he can be trusted on the outside world.”

Judge Nicholas Clarke KC accepted that Outlaw’s actions where driven in part at least by “desperation” but said that damage he caused to the cell was “deliberate and premeditated".

He said: “This was a wholesale assault on the very fabric of that cell.”

Judge Clarke sentenced Outlaw to a further 16 months in prison.