UK's most dangerous prisoner locked in underground glass box for 51st Christmas in jail

The UK's most dangerous prisoner will be locked underground in a glass box for his 51st Christmas behind bars. Robert Maudsley was locked in a glass cell at Wakefield Prison in West Yorkshire in 1983, after he killed child abuser John Farrell when he was just 21.

Maudsley is officially classified as Britain's most dangerous prisoner, a man said to represent such a high risk to those around him that he has spent the past quarter of a century in virtual isolation. With no prospect of ever being released, he will remain in prison in isolation until he dies.

Maudsley is housed in a 'glass cage', a two-cell unit at Wakefield prison that bears an uncanny resemblance to the one featured in The Silence of the Lambs. It was built for Maudsley in 1983, seven years before the film was released.

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At around 5.5m by 4.5m, the two cells are slightly larger than average and have large bulletproof windows through which inmates can be observed. Maudsley became the UK's longest-serving prisoner after the death of Moors murderer Ian Brady, who served 51 years in prison and died in 2017. During his time behind bars, he killed three men and has remained incarcerated.

After the murders, Maudsley was deemed too dangerous to be housed with other inmates, leading to the construction of his current cell. He once likened his cell to "like being buried alive in a coffin," and has previously campaigned for improved treatment.

"'The prison authorities see me as a problem, and their solution has been to put me into solitary confinement and throw away the key, to bury me alive in a concrete coffin," Maudsley wrote back in 2003. "It does not matter to them whether I am mad or bad. They do not know the answer and they do not care just so long as I am kept out of sight and out of mind.

"I am left to stagnate, vegetate and to regress; left to confront my solitary head-on with people who have eyes but don't see and who have ears but don't hear, who have mouths but don't speak. My life in solitary is one long period of unbroken depression."