A prisoner called female gaolers to his cell while he was performing sex acts on himself.

Marc Michael, 42, who was suffering from a manic episode at the time and later confessed to having no memory of the events, also made lascivious remarks to the three female guards at HMP Bullingdon.

He demanded that one of the female prison officers show him her breasts before calling her an ‘old hag’.

Prosecutor Charles Ward-Jackson said the officers had been called to Michael’s cell by a bell, given to him as he was suffering from mental health problems at the time.

The flashing incidents all happened in April 2021, starting around two months after he was jailed for almost two years at Reading Crown Court for a string of public order and theft offences.

At the end of April, he spat in the face of a male prison officer who was trying to break up a mealtime dispute.

Interviewed by Thames Valley Police detectives, Michael claimed he had no memory of the events. Psychiatrists had subsequently diagnosed him with a form of bipolar disorder.

Sentencing him at Oxford Crown Court on Wednesday, Judge Ian Pringle QC said: “When officers went to the door of your cell you were looked at and seen to be masturbating and issuing obscene words to the women prison officers, deliberately on your part.

“The fourth offence came some weeks later when a problem arose and you spat in the face of a male prison officer, a truly appalling piece of behaviour.”

But he added: “What was not known at Reading in February of this year is that you were almost certainly at the time suffering from bi-polar affective disorder and that has affected your behaviour probably increasingly over the last few years and that is what led you to behave in the way you did.”

The judge imposed a three year community order with 60 hours of unpaid work, up to 50 rehabilitation activity requirement days and ordered he complete the Horizon sex offender programme.

Tom Nicholson, mitigating, said his client was remorseful, was an ‘articulate and thoughtful man’ who had been accompanied to court by his mother, sister and probation officer.

Apart from an old conviction relating to an incident at Los Angeles Airport, he had not been in trouble before the offences that earned him the 22 month prison sentence at Reading Crown Court in February.

Michael, formerly of HMP Bullingdon, near Bicester, pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to indecent exposure and assaulting an emergency worker. He must register as a sex offender.

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