{"id":391496,"date":"2026-01-26T16:13:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T16:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/391496\/"},"modified":"2026-01-26T16:13:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T16:13:08","slug":"prison-officer-who-had-sexual-relationship-with-inmate-is-jailed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/391496\/","title":{"rendered":"Prison officer who had sexual relationship with inmate is jailed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">On 23 December 2024, Novas was arrested after a phone was seized from Winkless&#8217;s cell.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">She was released on bail and resigned three days later, but she immediately resumed contact with him, making about 400 further phone calls.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Crane added: &#8220;Given your age and inexperience, you were vulnerable to being manipulated.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;However, you could easily have reported matters to the prison authorities and sought assistance.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;You persisted in having contact over a significant period even after your arrest.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Novas was told she would serve half her sentence in jail before being released on licence.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Addressing Winkless, who has 16 previous convictions and is serving a separate sentence until April 2029, the judge said: &#8220;You were older and had more life experience and used that to manipulate Novas.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He admitted two counts of encouraging misconduct in public office, unauthorised communication within the prison, using cannabis in prison and unauthorised possession of communication devices within a prison.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Winkless was told his sentence would be added to his existing prison term &#8211; to run consecutively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On 23 December 2024, Novas was arrested after a phone was seized from Winkless&#8217;s cell. She was released&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":391497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-391496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/391497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}