Five Wells prisoner jailed for severing man's ear with machete launched 'weighted sock' attack on inmate
A man who was doing time in HMP Five Wells has been in court again after he attacked a fellow prisoner.
Samuel Estifanos used a ‘weighted sock’ to launch the brutal assault on a sex offender in HMP Five Wells.
He has now appeared at Northampton Magistrates’ Court to be sentenced after pleading guilty to two offences.
The court heard that the 21-year-old, who was coming to the end of his jail term at the Wellingborough prison in September last year when, unprovoked, he attacked the man with a popular prison weapon – a sock with a weight in it.
Estifanos admitted assault by beating and possession of an offensive weapon when he appeared before magistrates on April 9.
He was given a further 12 months in prison to be served consecutively to his existing term. He was also ordered to pay costs of £85 and a £154 surcharge.
Estifanos was originally incarcerated for a horrific attack in his home town of Peterborough in 2022, during which he stabbed a man several times with a machete in a drug deal gone-wrong. The victim was left with a severed ear, a machete sticking out of his neck, and in need of emergency surgery.
Estifanos, formerly of Welland Road, Dogsthorpe, was given six years in prison for GBH, knife possession and drug possession.
He has now been moved from HMP Five Wells and is being held in prison in Norwich.
In October last year inspectors raised serious concerns about staff safety, drugs and food shortages at the £253m super-prison in Wellingborough, which only opened in early 2022.
The prison was originally supposed to be a solution to help long-term prisoners who were shortly to be released re-integrate into society. But now other prisoners are also housed there and it has become home to many serious violent criminals.
Two prisoners died there within the space of 15 days at the end of last year and a string of incidents at the jail have been before the courts including prison officers who have started relationships with prisoners.
In 2021 protestors tried to block the building of the prison in protest at the privatisation of the penal system.