FOOTAGE in a television documentary captured a heated disturbance involving inmates at HMP Winchester throwing bottles and a bin at guards.

The images, which are part of Channel Four’s Crime and Punishment series produced by 72 Films, show prisoners in an altercation with guards who attempted to escort nurses with medication through the wing in May last year.

Speaking at the launch of the series, James Bourke, the governor of HMP Winchester, said the main function of custodial sentences ends up being punishment over rehabilitation.

He reportedly told an audience in central London: “People quite understandably want to see people punished if they have caused harm in their lives. Unfortunately, everything else we have tried so far has not worked. Imprisonment works in the sense it does punish people.

“They arrive with me after years of (problems) with their family, their education, their social services system, their healthcare for a sentence of four or five weeks and I’m going to rehabilitate them? It’s a fantasy.”

As previously reported, last month 150 inmates were moved out of a wing of the Category B prison after riots saw people break through cell walls.

This was done, in part, to allow prison staff and surveyors to assess the damage and what alterations need to be made to make the Victorian jail, built in the 1840s, more secure.

The scenes in the documentary were captured in May 2018 when the prison was going through a difficult period.

"I think the reality of prison is that it is designed by nice, white middle-class people and it works for nice, middle-class people," said Mr Bourke.

"For any one of us in this room to go to prison would be a disaster, but what we have created is a group of people, a section of our community, who go to prisons and it is not a personal disaster - in fact it becomes a place of refuge for them."

The Crime and Punishment episode featuring the film crew’s two-year period of access to the site in Romsey Road airs at 9pm on Monday September 23 on Channel 4.