Prisoner caught taxi to escape 'rough' jail (From Swindon Advertiser)

Prisoner caught taxi to escape 'rough' jail

11:00am Tuesday 7th February 2012 in News

A PROFILIC burglar got a cab to escape from prison because he said it was full of hard drugs and sex offenders.

Lee Fitchett said he went on the run as he was sick of sex offenders boasting to each other about their crimes and other prisoners offering him drugs The 29-year-old even left his own key behind so the authorities wouldn’t have to go to the cost of changing the locks at the jail.

Fitchett walked out of Leyhill open prison on January 14 and got a cab to Swindon to see friends and family. He handed himself in to police the following Monday.

Now the repeat offender, who has 127 previous convictions, is back behind bars after his solicitor told a judge he wanted to do ‘proper time in a proper prison’.

Fitchett was sentenced to three and a half years in August 2010.

He had been found guilty of stealing jewellery worth more than £1,000 from a friend’s house, the fifth time he had been convicted of dwelling house burglary.

In November he was transferred to low security Leyhill prison, in Gloucestershire, as he was approaching his early release date.

Martin Wiggins, defending, said he had six months left to serve when he was transferred and was days away from being allowed out into town when he absconded.

“He said he had great difficulties at Leyhill, mainly with class A drugs. He was a heroin user but for 20 months he hasn’t touched class A drugs,” he said.

“At the same time he felt very isolated. A number of the prisoners, if not the majority, he could see were sex offenders.

“He found it very uncomfortable listening to them. On a number of occasions he had to listen to story telling and boasts about what they were in prison for.”

He said Fitchett asked to be moved but prison officers told him it would take three months and the only way he could speed it up was to do something wrong.

After handing himself in, Fitchett, formerly of Brunel Crescent, Pinehurst, who admitted escape, was returned to a secure prison.

Jailing him, Judge Douglas Field said: “This was foolish in the extreme, you approaching this critical stage in your sentence.

“I take into account hat there was no physical breaking out of custody and no damage or violence. You walked out of prison.”

He imposed an eight month jail term which will be consecutive to the current sentence meaning his release date is pushed back from May to September.