HAVING already “done” death row, newsreader and presenter Trevor McDonald ventures inside two of Indiana’s most dangerous female prisons in Women Behind Bars.

There, he sees the manipulating ways of the inmates as they prey on each other and the guards.

He heads to Rockville Correctional Facility, the largest female prison in Indiana, which admits hundreds of women a week – both murderers and re-offenders.

He also visits Indiana Women’s Prison, which houses cases that are not for the faint-hearted. There, McDonald meets women who will spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

In this first part, he meets Sarah Pender, who went on the run while serving 110 years for double murder and became America’s most wanted female criminal.

She was captured four years later. She admits that, after striking up a sexual relationship with a prison officer, she persuaded him to drive her to freedom in his van.

It is Pender’s story that really stuck with the presenter. “She managed to get up the noses of the authorities. She did the unthinkable,” he says.

“You are not supposed to suborn a male officer. You are not supposed to be able to do that. The entire system is rigged so that you do not do that, and she manages to do it. Because she managed to do it, the story is built up around her that she is extraordinarily manipulative.”

Meanwhile, Addie Harts, who is serving time for strong-armed robbery, talks of how she has not seen her mother for seven years, and Paula Macintosh, 28, one of Rockville’s newest residents tells Mc- Donald that she is a drug addict and has been since she was 17. She has four children and has been in prison before, but now she is back for breaching her probation terms.

McDonald admits that at the time of filming, it was difficult not to feel sympathy for them. “I am a bit of a softy, bleeding heart and there was a woman called Cindy White who was probably, certainly according to her, a victim of abuse, and she set fire to a place to get out, according to her. But other people got hurt and were killed,” he says.

“And you looked at this lady who is in her 70s and she looks terribly harmless, and she is, in a way, extremely charming and very talkative and has fabricated a concept of a life in there.

“Some people are genuinely bad, but some people have slipped into a thing...

and life takes a turn where you have been unlucky and I feel terribly sorry for people in situations like that.”