Strangeways

by Neil Samworth

  ‘I’ve got a missus, two young kids, told them I wanted out,’ he said. He’d decided to put his family first and they’d tried to kill him for it.

  All the gang-bangers from Moss Side in Strangeways were black – in fact there was only one white lad among them, and it so happened that this single white lad on K Wing in 2006 belonged neither to Gooch or Doddington. Understandably, coming out of his cell he’d always have his back to the wall. We had twenty Gooch lads who outnumbered fifteen or so from Doddington, but there was an unwritten truce. No one wanted to start anything. On the twos, again there were more Gooch than Doddington.

  Then Bertie got us in the office, ‘Right, security’s been on. They said our thirty-five gang-bangers are to be spread around the jail.’ Over the next week, we dispersed them and got rid of maybe fifteen. A fortnight later, we had thirty-five again. They’d migrated back: the other wings wouldn’t tolerate them. Rarely were there any fights, just the sort of heavy nervy atmosphere that made you twitchy.

  One Doddington lad, Mac, was built like a steamroller and must have weighed around twenty-four stone. He could have taken out four or five people on his own. At one stage he’d been number two in the Doddington gang. But a lot of the real hard cases, lads like Mac who’d been in prison before, were respectful of staff to some extent. He knew K Wing was strict. He knew which staff to talk to and understood the routine. He was influential with hotter-headed lads and, in his way, helped keep the peace.

  The last time we met inside was 2012. I was in reception doing overtime and he was coming in for another spell, must have been missing the place.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Looking at a big one?’

  ‘Might be,’ he said. ‘You all right, boss?’

  ‘I am. Thought you’d be keeping your nose clean . . .’

  That’s how we’d always been, chatty and cordial.

  On that occasion, a pair of Doddington lads had been in a club, someone had spilled champagne on one of them, there’d been an altercation and a young lad got kicked to death outside. Eleven of the gang were arrested, whether they’d been involved or not, and were up for murder, pending investigation, Mac included. They will do that, the police. If they suspect two of them have done it and there’s eleven of them there, they’ll get arrested and put on remand. It gets them off the streets, doesn’t it? Makes it a bit quieter.

  He must have got off, though, because I then bumped into him again on the out in Manchester, Shambles Square. I didn’t see him, but he saw me and came over for a chat. He could have cracked me, ignored me, anything while I was distracted, but just wanted to catch up. ‘Y’all right, boss?’ he said, and off we went again.

  Anyway, back during this earlier term, this one officer on the threes was getting under his skin. It got to a point where Mac and this lad were arguing, so they tried to restrain him. He had some muscle, Mac, under the fat. It took maybe thirty of our forty staff, swapping over, to get him to segregation, an operation that ended someone’s career. A colleague of ours got trapped underneath and was forced to retire with a crush injury. An ex-para, he’d been in the prison service a long time, but twenty-four stone on top of you – dead weight – it’s not going to do you any good, is it? It was a real shame. The lad was a good landing screw.

  A lot of officers, incidentally, are offended by the word ‘screw’. There’s no need to be – I looked it up. The old slang word for key was screw; it’s as simple as that. When you locked anyone up, you turned the screw.

  Why didn’t we knock Mac out, as you would a rhinoceros? That’s a decent question; I’m glad you’re paying attention. There is a ‘liquid cosh’, Largactil, Acuphase or whatever you want to call it. It tranquilizes people and also stops them harming themselves. Back in the day, if someone was really violent – bam! They’d get a jab. Charles Bronson had it used on him. It did save a lot of bother.

  I’ve seen it used three times, but there’s an unwillingness to entertain it nowadays. It has to be a last resort, authorized by a doctor. That’s because it is quite dangerous, putting antipsychotics in someone out of control. You don’t know completely how it’s going to affect them. Do they have a heart problem? Will they suffer a stroke? What will be the impact on their mental health? There are times, though, when common sense says it’s worth the risk.

  Gradually, some gang-bangers went to court, some moved on and it thinned out to around a dozen. One group convicted of an infamous drive-by shooting got around thirty-eight years each. A lad who’d been in the drive-by vehicle got thirty-three years and we had to restrain him more than once, he was so full of testosterone. Two of them, Lee Amos and Colin Joyce, became the unwilling stars of a poster campaign plastered all over what the tabloids were calling ‘Gunchester’. Their two families objected but had to lump it. These posters depicted them both at the age they were when they went in, and as what they’d look like when they came out. It was an attempt to deter kids. A couple of others who had been dealing drugs for the gangs and got seven years behaved like the stroppy teenagers they were.

  The thing about gang-bangers and crime families, as we’ve seen, is that they are two sides of the same coin. They like to make threats, intimidate you if they can. It happened a lot inside – some twat threatened us every day and not only gangsters. On the whole I shrugged that off. It was just part of the macho culture. Only two ever unnerved me and the first one had nothing to do with gang-bangers or organized crime.

  It happened when I was working at the kids’ home. I had three young ’uns with me in Bury town centre when I saw a smackhead I remembered from YP at Forest Bank. He saw me an’ all, from just across the street.

  ‘Listen,’ I told my lot, ‘you know how I once worked in a youth prison? Well, there’s a lad there and we might end up fighting. If anything happens, all I want you to do is walk up to the police station and wait for me.’

  One little shit said he wanted to watch, but I sent them packing. As they went I got a massive dump of adrenaline, legs shaking: this guy looked like he was going to start. He hadn’t really got to me inside, but now here he was in the open air – his big chance.

  As I got closer though he just said, ‘All right, Mr Samworth?’ nice as pie. This is the thing, you see: out of prison he can call me what he likes, just as Mac could have done – dickhead, cock, prick – and what am I going to do about it? Inside, during one particularly rough restraint, he’d threatened to cut my throat.

  ‘I am,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘You think I’m going to start, don’t you?’ he said.

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘You always told me you would.’

  ‘I know I gave you a bit of a hard time,’ he said, ‘but no hard feelings, eh? Can we shake?’ So we did that and off he toddled.

  That lad is the only prisoner on the out that I have ever been fearful of. I was ready but it never happened. All the others, and I’ve seen loads – gangsters, the lot – they either avoided you completely or dragged you over to meet their family.

  The only mobster who really got to me was also at Forest Bank – Tommy Beveridge, who we’d had on seg’. He was an associate of Curtis Warren, Britain’s most notorious drugs trafficker, though not part of his empire. Beveridge was in his forties by then but in his day had been a proper bastard. Famously, around twenty years earlier, he’d fought the heavyweight boxer Paul Sykes in Armley jail and won. He was once recounting his youth and it was a mess – he’d been shot, stabbed and hacked. I asked the question I always did, ‘If you could have avoided this life, would you?’ Quite definitely, he replied. They always do.

  While he was in seg’, three members of staff went on the sick due to his threats. Every morning when I came on shift, his bell would go and he’d yell, ‘Samworth – get your arse down to my cell!’ He’d only ever do it when I was on my own, and how he knew that I couldn’t tell you. It was instinct, maybe, or the sound of my feet; he just enjoyed the feeling of frightening people.

  He was well connected, th
is guy. One day he was on the phone when an SO, two staff and myself were there, telling someone on the other end that he had a lad here called Samworth. There aren’t a lot of us in Manchester.

  ‘I want you to find his address and kill him,’ he said.

  I asked the SO, ‘Are you going to let him say that on the phone?’

  ‘He’s entitled to a phone call.’

  Characters like that will get in your head, which is why seg’ staff are now monitored psychologically and rotated. It’s different to the rest of the jail. After a while, you need moving on.

  8. Blue Christmas

  Most prison officers worked one in two weekends – Div One and Div Two, as the shifts were traditionally known. Div One was alpha male, Div Two, my shift throughout my time on K Wing, less so. They had a derogatory name for us, but I never cared. We had easy-going staff, as reflected in how the weekends tended to go. Div One had far more incidents than us. We had intelligent people who were able to talk prisoners down.

  Tractor and Trailer were in Div Two as well, and Helen used to do the officers’ breakfast every Sunday. Without fail, Pete would cart in a load of bacon, sausage and the rest, pre-cooked by his missus at home. The prisoners knew we had it, and nobody complained. Tea, toast, two eggs, rasher, banger and black pudding – quid a pop. Can’t go wrong.

  If weekends in jail were quiet, Christmas and New Year were even more so. Landings were subdued. You could rely on that. They were missing their friends and family.

  Listen to the critics and you’d think prisoners get fed better than old folk and schoolkids. Well, it’s cooked from fresh, so the standard is good, but the amounts are small. Me, I’d be starving. When I started at Manchester, prison food was two hot meals – dinner and tea – and a breakfast variety cereal pack with a small carton of milk. I’d need three packets of that to fill me up, but there you go. It’s not Brighouse Holiday Inn. In 2013 a dinnertime hot meal got stopped and they went to sandwiches, noodles, hot dogs now and then. At night they’d have various choices, minced beef and potatoes, lasagne, curries and such, a lot of filling carbs.

  For Christmas dinner they got sliced turkey you could see through – it looked like polythene – stuffing, roasties, sprouts and gravy. It wasn’t bad. At teatime, they had the cold buffet as that was easy to serve and there was plenty of it for them to take back to their cell to eat while watching the Christmas night film, maybe.

  As for decorations, there weren’t any, apart from a sad-looking tree near the entrance to the sterile area with a bit of tinsel strung around it. All in all, it was a glum time. Some prisoners made a little tree or stuck Christmas cards up if they had any. There might be some special activity – inter-wing five-a-side football, say – and there’d be church services available for all religions. No one sat in front of a blazing log fire unwrapping presents.

  In prison, you are always going to be working one of the big three. Me, I always did the Christmas morning shift by choice. That way I’d have Christmas night with my family and Boxing Day to sleep off the eggnog. I once did seven nights over Christmas, encompassing New Year’s Eve. On the first night the in-cell power went off for a while, meaning no one on K Wing could watch TV. There was hell on. Bedlam. So I went from cell to cell promising everyone that for the rest of the week, if they behaved, I’d bring in DVDs and play them all night, every night. You weren’t supposed to bring DVDs in, as it happens, but a blind eye was turned. The prison had a film channel, so everyone would get to see them. The entire wing was watching movies from nine at night until 6 or 7 a.m. and most of them didn’t get up the next day – quietest Strangeways Christmas ever. Jackass was a big favourite.

  Christmas Day with Tractor and Trailer was like Sunday, only with turkey and all the trimmings, not just a fry-up. Helen was helped by an officer called Kate – Pete was just their whipping boy – and the first dinner I had there was a fine sight. We’d cover their jobs while they prepared it. We staff had a trestle table in the brew room, tablecloths, mince pies, three-course meal, soup, bird, veg – the full monty. Three years on that wing Helen did our Christmas, and it was fantastic. After her cooked dinner I didn’t want to work; none of us did. It was better than you’d get in a pub.

  The first Christmas, though, was significant for one incident. Prisoners got money inside by their families sending them a postal order, if you can remember those. The relatives would address it to the governor, and a correspondence department opened the mail. What should have happened is this: mail comes in, opened, postal order removed, sent off to finance department who would deposit it in the prisoner’s account. It would show up, ready to spend. There was a kid who hadn’t been in long and wanted this cash so he could phone his kids on Christmas Day. Every single morning he’d been on at me: ‘Mr S., it’s not in my account. Will you check, will you check, will you check?’ I did ask for him now and then, as you would, but come Christmas Eve, the damn thing still hadn’t turned up.

  Now unfortunately, some aspects of prison aren’t run so well. Letters arrive in the mailroom and get lost among the rest, especially at Christmas when it’s obviously busy. There ought to have been a rotation system but there wasn’t: the staff just kept working from the top. I’d warned the lad: his letter came in early, so was probably bottom of the pile and might not get dealt with in time. So he said, ‘Is it possible to sort me a call out, Mr Samworth?’ We had that facility.

  The phones all worked by PIN. Prisoners would get a secret number connected to their account with which to get a line out. If they had money, there was no problem. But SOs had their own PIN and could facilitate a call; give them a bit on credit. We did that in genuine cases. So I told Bertie this lad had been good as gold and deserved a call.

  ‘Yeah, but you’ll have to tell him it will only be a couple of minutes,’ he said. Just about everyone wanted to phone out.

  About half past ten that Christmas morning, I’m on twos and this same kid comes walking down the landing with a postal order in his hand. Mail had been delivered that morning, but he shouldn’t have had that: it should have gone to finance.

  Next minute, there’s another lad with another postal order, asking me to take it from him. Then another. And another. Fuck me: they’d all opened their mail, not only on my landing but the other landings too, and we ended up with 220 postal orders. Major stuff-up. Some of them had three, posted weeks ago, and very few had money on their accounts. The others hadn’t said anything, just hoped theirs would arrive. Well, here they were, God help us.

  I went to Bertie Bassett who, as you can imagine, wasn’t too chuffed. I suggested asking security to turn on the phones with our PIN. He told me to crack on, so I did and an OSG officer answered my call in a very curt tone.

  I told him we’d a situation and that K Wing needed plenty of credit. Could they add it, please? As things stood, we’d enough for twenty-five calls when we needed a couple of hundred.

  ‘We won’t be putting the fucking phones on for K Wing,’ the OSG said.

  This being the season of goodwill, I asked who he was effin’ and jeffin’ at, and the bellend put the phone down. I phoned back and another officer answered.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘It’s Officer Samworth on K Wing. We want the PIN putting on.’

  ‘Yeah, that won’t be happening, kid,’ and he slammed the phone down too.

  When I told Bertie he blew his stack – cartoon style. Wig went up, steam came out his ears. ‘Who the fucking hell’s there?’ He stormed off and I tagged along.

  He let this officer have it, did Bertie. Finger-pointing like a piston engine – ‘Put me 200 quids’ worth of credit on NOW. It’s Christmas Fucking Day.’

  I went around the cons and told them they had two minutes on the phone each. Prisoners might be bullies or smackheads and all round vicious bastards, but mainly they respect staff, and gestures like that help a wing to work smoothly. They queued peacefully. At teatime, we gave them a bit of a buffet and, as they went behind their
doors, they thanked us for it.

  That was a good Christmas Day in the prison service, when we did our good deed. It’s a good job Bertie Bassett was on, mind, or there would have been a Yuletide riot.

  An officer called Two Pens almost gave us our noisiest Christmas.

  Two Pens let things annoy him, and when they did he’d pursue it. Every day in that job prisoners fuck you off, you need a thick skin. His was like wafer-thin ham. He’d treat the file we made our comments about the inmates in as his own personal diary. Two Pens would chip away, a relentless bureaucrat, hence his nickname.

  One lad was on the phone, eating an apple. Prisoners weren’t supposed to eat or drink on the landings, though personally I’d have let him finish the call before telling him – he was no bother. Two Pens told him to get rid of it but got no response. The lad wasn’t ignoring him, he just didn’t hear him as far as I could see. Two Pens told him twice. After a third time, he grabbed the phone, which got a reaction. The kid’s eyes came out on stalks. It could have ended in a restraint. I knew the lad really well – dynamic security, good relationship – and calmed him down by putting him behind his door for twenty minutes.

  Another prisoner was a wanker and a prolific one at that. He’d been on healthcare and yanked his todger in front of governors and staff – male or female, he wasn’t fussed. He did it under the covers, not in the open, but was restrained God knows how many times, the sort of prisoner everyone avoids. Not violent, just odd: he wasn’t wanted on any wing. You don’t want people tossing themselves off all the time, do you? It’s antisocial and the sheets have to be cleaned.