Strangeways

by Neil Samworth

  Prison populations can change and, at one stage, the prison decided B1 and B2 weren’t needed for YPs anymore, they were required for adults. B2 was emptied first, they wanted to change the bedding, give the place a lick of paint, but the lads already there weren’t happy. In the days leading up to the change they threatened to riot and got put back behind their doors, but by the time it came to shift the B1 inmates we’d got rid of a fair few on both floors and were down to about forty or fifty prisoners to be shipped out. They were still all refusing though, every single one. So the management said we were going to take the basics first, as they are the most troublesome and mouthy.

  Among them was this gang member, Yardie, a kid I got on well with, polite and no bother at all. The manager told us to get kitted up in PPE – personal protective equipment – and Yardie was first on the list. Where possible this stuff was worn in ‘restraint’ situations; it was practical in a fight and the look of it sent a message. Fifty restraints would make for a very long day, so being ‘timid’, Yardie was the ideal kid with which to lay down a marker.

  ‘He needs to scream,’ said the manager.

  He screamed all right. He screamed the fucking wing down. Four of us went in, big lads the lot of us, but would he move? He would not. He fought and he fought hard. Anyone watching might see it as brutality but, as ever during restraints, it was actually controlled on our part, well organized. Yardie fought back, though, and he fought back hard, refusing to leave the wing. The noise! Anyway, eventually we managed to get him out of there.

  Another lad on the wing was a proper gobshite. He was a bad boy, a bully who I didn’t like at all. Five or ten minutes later it was his turn. Moments before he’d been shouting, ‘Fight ’em, Yardie, fight ’em Yardie . . .’ so we expected more trouble. But when we opened him up, out he came, head down, quiet, like the kid he really was, and walked off the wing. After that, the rest of them surrendered, no more trouble.

  Eighteen months in that environment was more than enough for me. It felt like a thousand years. Burnout. I moved to the segregation unit, where the real bad boys go for extra punishment, or sometimes just their own protection.

  At Forest Bank, seg’ was basically a corridor you went through a set of double gates to enter. On the left as you went in was the office, on the right the ‘special cell’, a temporary holding bay for the most troublesome new arrivals, lads who were kicking off and risking their own health and that of the staff – a plinth to sit or lie down on, observation panels, no toilet and no sink. Nowadays, with human rights and that, they are a last resort. In total, we had twenty-two cells on there, single occupancy. There was also a servery, where food was dished out, an association room and outside exercise yard.

  Every day, by application, prisoners in for punishment could have a phone call, an hour’s exercise and a shower. That’s your lot. They weren’t even allowed on the servery to collect their grub. We’d fill up a trolley and take food to their cells, three at a time, pretty much locked up all day long. Those not on punishment – Forest Bank had no vulnerable prisoners wing at that point, we had eleven sex offenders with us once – did get out for a few hours a day, together in the association room. All in all, though, it was pretty miserable.

  The entrance to cell seventeen, bottom of the landing on the right, was the only camera blind spot and every prisoner down there knew that. There was another small area of the exercise yard outside, but that was it. You couldn’t be filmed going into that cell. If you’d a badass on, you could threaten to put them in cell seventeen and they’d fall straight into line. I’m not saying we gave them a kicking or anything, but disruptive prisoners drain resources for everyone, including their fellow inmates, so the unspoken threat was enough. It was a dangerous seg’ at Forest Bank. You had to use every weapon at your disposal.

  The old man was just out for a drive with his wife when he made the mistake of beeping his horn at the driver who’d just pulled out on him. A mild rebuke, you’d think, but the reaction to it was not mild at all. In fact, it was insane.

  Unbeknown to his victim, Michael Kennedy was a violent maniac. Although not the biggest of lads, maybe five foot six and lightweight with it, he had the strength of a wild boar. The elderly couple were run off the road, the stunned driver dragged from his seat. Having pulled the man’s arm across the bonnet, Kennedy hacked it off at the shoulder with a machete. Nor was he done yet. He got the bloke’s missus out of the car and started chopping at her. Bravely or foolishly, passers-by got stuck in. It was incredible that nobody died, though any rational individual would imagine their parents or grandparents in that situation and know that they must be traumatized forever. Kennedy got a public-spirited kicking and was arrested. By any definition, he was a horrendous little creep. One day, though, I would save his life.

  Behind bars, his reputation demanded that we watch him like hawks. He went on a three-staff plus SO (senior officer) and Oscar One unlock, the latter being the duty manager of the jail who works off the wing but is called to it if there’s an incident. Basically, that’s who had to be there whenever Kennedy was released from his cell. Even lunatics can do with a proper wash and this particular Sunday I reckoned he needed a shower.

  As well as being a danger to elderly drivers on the out, however, Kennedy had been flagged up as a serious threat to women: he should be allowed minimum female contact. Handy then that our Oscar One was a woman, and that aside from myself the rest of the team were too. He’d be butt naked, so I asked for more male officers, only for the SO to say, ‘There’s three of you, deal with it.’ As usual on a weekend, we were short-staffed and when the Oscar One came down, she agreed we had enough firepower to manage the situation.

  I had no worries about physically restraining this scrote – I’ve seen smaller who were tougher – but he was very unpredictable and sly. I’d never turn my back on anyone down there, certainly not him.

  ‘Listen, Mickey,’ I said. ‘We’re gonna let you out now, so no funny stuff, eh?’

  We shot the bolt and he strutted out, walking straight up to one of the officers and putting an arm around her.

  ‘Y’awright, love?’ he said. ‘Fancy a drink when I get out?’

  Now, he wasn’t attacking or assaulting anyone, but that’s still inappropriate and the lass was trying to push him away. The others were undecided about what to do.

  ‘Come on, Mickey,’ I said, ‘get in the shower.’

  There was a bit of what he’d consider banter – sweetheart this, darlin’ that – but eventually we got him down there.

  As inmates in the seg’ are so dangerous, the shower curtain only covers half of their body. You need to see their top to know what they are up to and talk to them. The Oscar One made a classic error.

  ‘What are you in for?’ she asked.

  It’s never a good idea to ask a prisoner that unless you’ve built some sort of rapport.

  ‘I cut an old guy’s arm off,’ he said.

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘I cut some old guy’s arm off, love.’

  ‘Oh, how obnoxious are you?’

  Kennedy looked at me. ‘Mr S.,’ he said, ‘what’s obnoxious mean?’

  ‘That you’re a horrible bastard, Mickey,’ I said, and up he blew. He tore out of the shower, bollock naked, and went straight for her. I ended up restraining him, while the two officers got hurt.

  This guy was tricky to get to earth, especially when slippery and wet with his todger whirling around. The thought of it is funny now, but wasn’t then, especially as the person who’d insulted him fucked off quickly without pressing the alarm – at the outbreak of any incident you do that to let other staff know something’s afoot, and the cavalry rides to the rescue. One of the officers who got injured did so instead. More staff arrived and he went back behind his door.

  Thing is, he’d been playing up for a fortnight. What he wanted to do was go back to Liverpool, but that wasn’t happening. No prison takes bad boys from a segregation unit if they c
an help it. ‘We’ve Michael Kennedy here, dirty protest, staff assault . . .’ – he’s going nowhere, is he? You tell them this, but it never gets through.

  This dick’s behaviour got worse. One day I went to answer a cell bell – they all have them, for emergencies (they don’t get room service). The alarm wasn’t Kennedy’s, but as I walked past his cell I could smell smoke. When I looked in, a blaze was raging.

  The flames weren’t high, but the floor was orange. As dread rose in my gut I yelled a warning and got a hosepipe. The door was red hot, steaming. After cracking the bolt, I got on the ground and blasted the cell with water for a good minute. Kennedy was on the floor too, his torso smouldering. The smoke was acrid and overpowering. People were coughing and choking. Whoever else was there helped me drag him to the landing where, despite him being badly burned, we flipped him over and I began CPR, cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

  When I started the compressions smoke came out of his mouth – that’s what I remember most. It billowed out of his gob, you couldn’t help but breathe it in. But I carried on until the nurses came and stuck a tube down his throat. Once the ambulance took him away, someone made us a brew. I was still coughing my lungs up, felt sick. One officer threw a whitey, feeling nauseous, and a governor moved him away. Fair enough.

  How did it start? Who knows? They could smoke in their cells then, but we’d light the cigarettes for them because they weren’t allowed lighters.

  Some colleagues were critical – what had I saved that piece of shit for? Well, him croaking wouldn’t have given me any sleepless nights, for sure. Kennedy was a sorry excuse for a human being. But at the same time, you are what you are. My instincts were to drag him out and start CPR, so that’s what I did. I felt sorry for the lad who was traumatized. As I would discover in the years ahead, it is a job that has a habit of getting to even the toughest prison officers.

  One month we had a spate of cell fires on the seg’, including one started by Patrick Durr, a nonce from Rochdale. It was a run-of-the-mill job where prisoners deliberately put their gear under the bed because it’s less likely to get damaged. Property is important to them – it might have taken a while to accumulate. We bagged and tagged his stuff, standard practice after a cell fire, and then disposed of it since the gear was ruined. He then put in a claim, accusing us of throwing decent clobber out. The case went to the ombudsman, a solicitor was involved, and we had to pay him out. Ridiculous, really, since he started it.

  Another star turn was Harry Hammond, a well-known crook around Manchester. Alcoholic, drug abuser, he was the sort of inmate I found fascinating, being full of stories. At the time I was his personal officer; we’d each get a handful of cells and their inhabitants could bring you their problems. Boy, did Harry have problems. He’d been abused in an infamous kids’ home. A solicitor came in to see him once, trying to get compensation for adults who’d been there, but Harry was having none of it. Didn’t want money, and it was thousands of pounds this solicitor was on about.

  ‘I’m an addict, an alkie . . . it’s ruined my life and I don’t want it coming back.’

  About forty years old, covered in scars, battered stupid, prison all his life, the lad didn’t have a lot to live for. I got told he’d tried to cut his own face off once by slicing around it with a knife. He admitted to it. That’s not self-harm, it’s desperation. If you were straight with him, though, he wouldn’t necessarily be happy with your decision but would put up with it.

  This particular morning, we had an SO on seg’ who liked to bang heads, usually for the sake of it. My first job was to go around the cells counting heads and gathering requests. When I got to Harry he said, ‘Awright, Mr S.? Can I get my exercise today?’ I told him he could, yeah. He was entitled to an hour in the yard – no big deal. I was on duty all day so would make sure of it – promised him, like.

  We’d have a clipboard, and would tick off answers to routine questions: did they want a shower, phone call, exercise . . . that’s basically all they were allowed. On punishment, they were banged up for twenty-three hours a stretch, pretty much. You’d then hang the board up in the office for all to see, same routine every day. Prison officers are creatures of habit, just like cons, and it was important to establish a system. You could never have two prisoners out at once, for example. There was no socializing. Most of them were fucking dangerous so they needed keeping apart.

  When I got back from a few other duties I noticed that this SO had crossed Harry’s name off the list and we got into a bit of a barney about it. Golden rule: never break a promise to a prisoner. Rights and privileges are important to keep the peace, if nothing else, especially in a seg’ unit where people can go cuckoo. The SO was the boss though, so I had no choice but to get on with it. It didn’t look like being Harry’s lucky day.

  In my experience, people join the prison service for all sorts of reasons. Some, like me, are just hoping for reliable employment. Others, I’m sure, honestly believe they can make a difference, to begin with anyway. Jails tend not to encourage idealists. I dare say some come in on a power trip and that would certainly describe this bloke, or perhaps the service ground him down, I don’t know. Quite definitely, though, most prison officers at least try to be decent people, which makes the bad apples all the more rotten.

  We had a young officer on seg’, an ex-squaddie, decent lad, but like a lot of officers he was a chameleon: he’d adopt the personality and attitude of those he worked with. This kid had taken to fronting-up cons, a risky thing to do when people have serious personality disorders. Seg’ is not a normal wing. Harry was on his buzzer, wanting to be out, so this hero marched off and came back, chest like Foghorn Leghorn.

  ‘The cock’s still wanting exercise. Told him he’s not having it.’

  I looked at the SO and said this was out of order. He just shrugged.

  Harry pressed his buzzer again, and when the lad returned this time he announced, ‘Prick says he’ll set his cell on fire.’

  I looked up from my paperwork. ‘And what did you tell him?’

  ‘To fucking crack on with it, like, know what I mean?’

  Great. He also said Harry had covered himself in bog roll.

  ‘Do you not think that’s a clue?’

  He just gaped at me, blank.

  I got up, pressed our bell. Didn’t matter what the SO said now, did it? I got out the hose, walked down and, sure enough, Harry was setting himself alight. I cracked the door, soaked him through, no damage done. The fire had just been getting going, and he wasn’t burning anything other than himself, although he had put a dent in the door with his boot. The SO said to put him on report, but I was having none of that. If it went to adjudication – mini-courts in which a Home Office representative tries prisoners alleged to have been disobeying orders, fighting or having drugs on their person, that sort of thing (in public jails, it’s the governors who judge) – it’d be, ‘I wanted exercise and they refused me it after saying I could have it . . .’

  It didn’t end there. Harry had also smashed his sink, so a C&R (control and restraint) team arrived. In times past, you’d get six burly lads barging into a cell, two ending up with broken jaws. It’s more organized these days. As they were getting kitted up and formulating their game plan, I spoke to Harry through his door and persuaded him to pack his stuff and move to another cell peacefully. But I warned him, ‘If I open this door and you kick off I’ll be in bother.’

  I was able to let Harry out because he wasn’t on an unlock, the prison protocol dictating the rank and number of officers needed to be there for someone like Michael Kennedy, for example. In a segregation unit, everyone’s on a two-officer as a matter of course: never open a cell door on your own. It all depends how volatile the prisoner is: someone like Charles Bronson can be on a twelve-officer and SO unlock.

  Off Harry went and laid down on a bed in the cell opposite, good as gold. I told a governor hanging about to stand the C&R team down.

  ‘I’ve moved him. That’s what yo
u wanted, isn’t it?’

  He laughed wryly and called me a cock.

  Yet another case of a cell fire in seg’ was the burglar and armed robber William Cassidy, well known throughout the system, dead now, I believe. HIV positive. Hep C. Hep B. Baghead . . . the word once reserved for glue-sniffers, but it’s come to mean any drug addict. For reasons best known to himself, he chose to appeal his five-year sentence. He’d already done six months on remand, so that was four and half left, then you maybe halve that, and in reality he was looking at two years more to serve, perhaps three, for twelve or thirteen burglaries – he was a repeat offender, this guy. The appeal process is long and he ended up at the High Court in London. I don’t know how, it should have been kicked out. Anyway, he had his day of fame and came back with an increase – twelve years.

  When he gets back to segregation, he goes straight in his cell, drops one out and smears it over the walls – dirty protest (or dirty conditions as they are now told to call it). For two or three days he threatened staff, spat and threw his blood products from the transfusion centre which, bearing in mind he was HIV positive, ain’t great. Sometimes in prison cons will pay someone to do a vile and disgusting act called ‘potting’ on their behalf. They’ll chuck urine and faeces, the works. Cassidy was happy to muck in himself, so we put a screen around his door and a blanket on the floor so he couldn’t piss under it.

  Two ladies from the Board of Visitors (now called the Independent Monitoring Board) came on to see him. To be honest, I thought the BOV were jobsworths at first, and I wasn’t on my own, though my opinion has since changed. They come in voluntarily, visit seg’, healthcare and so on, have a part in the complaint system. Prisoners ask to see them. They are usually well-to-do and are supposed to be there for inmates and staff alike, although few officers used their services. The feeling was that they looked down on us as scumbags, while talking about rapists and paedophiles as if they were Lord John.