Strangeways

by Neil Samworth

  There are lots of methadone-related deaths in prison, certainly in Manchester. Over the time I was there we must have had at least a dozen in around a decade, although I dare say you’d get no one in officialdom to admit that. It can lower your blood pressure incredibly, the heart rate too, which is why its effects are monitored by nursing staff. We’ve had brothers die on it, two or three in the same jail. One lad came into healthcare with an arseful of drugs and on a methadone programme as well. He got moved to a normal wing and died, effectively of an overdose. He’d been on an ACCT form and they still hadn’t noticed his extra drug taking. It caused a real shitstorm.

  I hated the detox wing. It stank, and was full of people trying to scrounge stuff – people that had been in and out of there twenty times. There were fifty-year-old addicts who’d had thirty sentences, so they weren’t learning, were they? A single big stretch was needed, not being let out every six months to rob a few more tellies worth £500 to sell for £30 and get a fix. It’s crazy. You’ve a captive audience inside too, if you are really serious about treating drug addiction. All the programmes on the out are voluntary.

  In prison there are doctors and nurses working specifically on detox, in a drug rehabilitation programme called CARAT – counselling, assessment, referral, advice and throughcare. It’s a worthwhile project. But I was once talking about drugs with a nurse on healthcare who’d worked in Manchester prisons over ten years.

  ‘If one of your patients is an addict,’ I asked her, ‘what’s the best-case scenario?’

  ‘Needle exchange,’ she replied.

  What she meant was that anyone who comes out of jail as an addict tends to stay that way.

  Methadone is dodgy stuff, and for what? It serves no purpose. It costs a supposedly skint prison service a fortune that could be spent elsewhere, and all because some do-gooder namby-pamby twat didn’t like prisoners on the rattle. Help them get clean, and help them again when they come out of prison so they stay that way.

  The subject of drugs hits close to home. Just after my first marriage broke down I used to socialize with a couple through rugby in Sheffield: a middle-class pair with a detached house, two good jobs. One day they casually dropped it into conversation that they were on heroin – ‘We like a dabble, but only use it Saturdays.’

  I told them they were fucking bonkers, and over the course of a couple of years saw them become smackheads. They lost everything, eventually split up – fortunately they’d no kids – and died within six months of each other.

  Then there was a mate’s brother, a married university lecturer in his late twenties, with two six-year-old twin boys. A top lad, but he went down the same route. On crack as a youth, a decade later he began scoring again. He was found with a needle in his arm having overdosed in his bathroom.

  A fourth friend was hooked, and we all told him it would kill him. He locked himself in his flat for two weeks eating chicken soup and came out clean, so far never going back. That’s rare.

  Getting into the psyche of addicts is notoriously tough. The drugs take them over and the strategies in this country aren’t good enough: when customs seize £40 million-worth of heroin it’s headline news, but I’ll bet for every £40 million found there’s over £400 million out there.

  We need to educate our children. A huge proportion of the prison population is in for drug-related offences, and our kids are the next generation. If my daughter and her pals were educated to know what harm drugs cause, there’d be no one to buy them. Start talking to them at school.

  We should tell them about ‘stinky legs’, a not very nice name for a horrendous condition. A lot of prisoners inject there, and the result is gangrene. Gangrene smells to high heaven. If you could bottle it and give schoolchildren a whiff, it would do more long-term good than a hundred methadone courses combined. Show them pictures of the ulcers. They would be revolted, but learn. I knew one pin-eyed lad who lost one leg to gangrene, then came into Strangeways healthcare and lost the other.

  ‘At what point are you going to stop?’ I asked him.

  ‘Well, I’m not, am I, Mr S.?’

  If he’d lost his arms he’d have carried on, getting someone to inject for him, dirty needles into the groin. These prisoners are often diseased too, carrying strains of hepatitis or AIDS, another hazard for nurses, prison officers and anyone they come into contact with.

  Let’s not be worried about scary stories or unpleasant films: that’s exactly what schoolkids should be seeing – shock them into realization. Some parents wouldn’t like it, I’m sure, but ask the parents of kids who are addicted or went on to die. Ask those who haven’t seen their children in years.

  It’s got to the stage where drugs in prison are the norm, and that can’t be right, can it? If one thing comes from this book, I hope it’s that someone in authority takes this message on board. They can ignore everything else if they want: just recognize how the solution to drugs starts young. We need a new approach.

  14. Could It Be Magic

  My first date with Amy was officially on 15 February 2010 – around two years after I began on Strangeways’ healthcare. Three days later, I bought the best ring I could afford and asked her to marry me.

  I’d actually met Amy over a decade before, in a hairdressing salon in Sheffield. That’s hardly my natural environment, is it? Why would it be, with a head like a billiard ball? No, a lass on the aromatherapy course owned the joint, and offered me a spare room upstairs to do my massages in – it was part of how I was scratching a living back then. Amy seemed like a nice kid, but no more than that, given our twenty-year age difference. Fast forward twelve years, though, and when by chance we met again it was love at second sight. My old aromatherapy mate’s other half, a friend on Facebook, had suggested we meet up when I was next back in town, and who should be there but Amy? She was now twenty-seven; I was forty-seven. We just clicked.

  At the time I was in another relationship, so went straight home and told my then girlfriend that this was all totally my fault, but I needed out. Within days I’d seen a solicitor, signed the house over, taken the worst of the two cars and left everything else behind. Smitten.

  Getting engaged so fast might strike some as a bit rash, in which case we’ve made up for it since. Here we are over eight years later and she’s still my fiancée, not yet my wife. When that happens, it quite definitely won’t be bridal gowns, wedding favours and fancy hats, though. It’ll more likely be a knees-up in Gretna, in rugby shirts and Doc Martens, with a few mates. Spontaneity is more our style.

  Amy was and is stunning to look at. Her fashion sense is unique: she’s someone who’ll wear dresses and Docs, go skinhead or grow her hair long – a loveable individual who does her own thing. Only once did I make the mistake of taking the mickey out of an outfit – never again!

  In some ways we are completely different. If we went on one of those dating sites where you get asked thousands of questions, they’d say we were mismatched. She likes her stuff and I like mine. Yet psychologically we are on the same wavelength. I’m good at talking; she’s good at listening. If we have rows, no sooner have they blown up than they are forgotten. All our friends confide their problems in her – she’d make a cracking counsellor. We’re soulmates, I suppose.

  But what has really bound us together is laughter. We share the same warped sense of humour. And that, let me tell you, has come in handy. For our first six months of courting, I drove back and forth from Manchester to Sheffield, a monumental ball-ache of nothing but early shifts, travel and not enough kip. I put 25,000 miles on my car and was knackered all the time, until finally a Salford housing association found me a pad that I invited her to share. Leaving Yorkshire was a big decision for her to make – it would be for anyone – but on the spur of the moment she took the plunge and moved in. To begin with, she must have wondered what the hell she had done. I know I did.

  The thing is, the house I’d been offered wasn’t just in Salford but in Blackleach, on one of the roughest estat
es in the city. Not being locals, neither of us knew its reputation – it was near a country park, for goodness sake – but we soon got educated. Fuck me, what a dump.

  On paper it looked like home sweet home: nothing could have been further from the truth. When we pulled up in our rented Transit, heads popped up like meerkats. I had to back right up to the door. Eventually, we got everything in, by which time, this being the height of summer, the neighbours either side were in their backyards throwing down the high-strength cider and firing up their barbecues. As the day rolled on they got more and more pissed – or worse – and that night, as we lay goggle-eyed in bed, there was a racket like you’ve never heard. Next morning, the bloke next door had a face like a butcher’s apron. He’d been leathered by three lads five doors down.

  The fighting and noise were endless, day and night. Folk had doors cleaved in with sledgehammers, windows were always being smashed. One house was set alight with petrol because the dog barked. And with me being a screw there was always a risk of recognition. We’d rush in and lock the door: you wouldn’t want to hang about outside.

  One day, a bloke wandered up, staring right into my face.

  ‘I know you, don’t I?’ he said, and my heart hit my boots.

  Here we go, I thought. ‘I don’t know, kid. Do you?’

  ‘Yeah. Strangeways, isn’t it?’

  I wasn’t going to lie to him, was I? ‘Yeah,’ I nodded, fists clenched in my pockets.

  ‘What landing were you on?’ he said, and then I twigged. He thought I was a fucking con.

  ‘Twos,’ I said. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Threes, me,’ he said, and actually mentioned Trailer Pete. ‘I were on there for three or four months. You?’

  ‘Oh, a long time,’ I said. ‘Fucking hell, small world, eh?’

  Not long afterwards, I had my tyres slashed. Nothing personal. It happened to everybody, that.

  Amy and me stuck Blackleach for six months, and the only reason we lasted that long was by laughing at how horrendous it was.

  When we moved out in February 2011, it was only a mile down the road to Walkden. No sooner had we come back from dropping off the first load than we discovered somebody had crowbarred the back door and nicked a load of electrical stuff like the telly and what have you. They were welcome to it.

  The new house was so peaceful. I could even wear my uniform. We couldn’t really afford it, though, and that was something else Amy had to get used to from the start. Life was always a financial struggle.

  I suppose a fussy person might conclude that I didn’t have a lot to offer, and wonder what the hell Amy saw in a big ugly Yorkshire bastard like yours truly, who didn’t have two ha’pennies to rub together. Well, according to my good friend KK, I’ve got something more valuable than money or good looks, and that’s charm.

  Charm is a rare quality among prison officers, not so much among prisoners. Sometimes it’s harmless, often not. Even in jail, male–female romances blossom; it’s not all man-on-man action. At Forest Bank, there was a nurse we’d best call the Coffee Shop Queen, who I got on with really well. Cracking lass, trustworthy as they come. One day, in the staff car park, I saw her being dropped off by an ex-con who’d been released from prison the day before. I could not believe my eyes. He was a decent lad, not a hard-core thug, so I said nothing.

  Somebody else must have seen her though, because at the end of the day I got a call from security. ‘Did she get out of a car in front of you this morning, and was so-and-so driving?’ I’d no option but to say yes. ‘Why haven’t you reported it?’

  I told them I was in shock. Relationships between prisoners and staff are not tolerated – and there are good reasons for that, remember Bonnie and Clyde? You could take a harsher view – many do: another lass fell for a smackhead. They found all sorts of messages to him on her phone. She tried to block his prison transfer and only got discovered when she went to visit him in Risley and someone recognized her. But it’s best to know the personal situation before condemning somebody to hell.

  The Coffee Shop Queen got walked to the gate and I didn’t see her for two years after that, the usual embarrassment-avoidance technique. The next time I met the lass, and the reason I call her the Coffee Shop Queen, was over a coffee in a supermarket in Bury. I’d seen her and she’d seen me, and at first I thought she was going to blank me. She didn’t, though. Two cappuccinos and the story came out.

  This lad had come down to her clinic for some dressing or other and the spark ignited. ‘Me and you are going to be together,’ he told her. She was married but said she could feel it same as him. There’d been no hanky-panky, she hadn’t even kissed the guy, but they decided there and then that they were meant for each other. A week later, she’d told her husband she wanted a divorce.

  When this lad got out of jail, they went out for a meal, and had been together ever since. ‘The only thing I did wrong,’ she said, ‘was not leaving the job. I don’t know why I turned up that morning.’ The lad had told her it was a bad idea but she hadn’t wanted to let anyone down – usual prison story.

  In 2017, I saw her again, a good decade later, also in Bury, and we had another coffee. Now she was back in nursing somewhere else, a good job, and the two of them were still together with a pair of kids, aged five and six. But the Coffee Shop Queen and her boyfriend were above board and never looked back. I totally relate to the Coffee Shop Queen.

  You were in little danger of being charmed by some of the staff in Strangeways, and healthcare had its own share of numpties, ranging from the useless to the lazy to the downright immoral; a few had the ethics of an alley cat.

  We had a lad, Jamie Hargreaves, who’d come to healthcare in need of a safe unit: he’d been assaulted on A Wing with a tin of tuna in a sock after being accused of taking another con’s mobile. He’d been beaten so badly he’d spent ages in a coma. Jamie became one of the orderlies in the servery: being a small unit, we’d get all sorts in close proximity – mentally ill, detoxers, paedophiles, rapists, the lot – so it was important that the prisoners doing that job could be trusted not to do them harm. I was juggling oranges there one day, as you do, and, messing about, I pretended to throw one at Hargreaves. He winced – and I mean winced, the way a mistreated dog might do.

  ‘What’s that about?’ I asked the other orderly, but he just put his head down.

  ‘What’s going on, Jamie?’

  But he wasn’t for saying anything either.

  Eventually the other orderly told me to look at Jamie’s arms. I’ve had dead legs, when your muscle bleeds out, but I’d never seen anything like this. Jamie’s arm was not just bruised, it was black – all the way down below his elbow – and going yellow.

  ‘What the fucking hell is that?’ I said.

  The story unfolded. It turned out that Biffo Bacon – an officer who hadn’t spoken a word to me for months when I started on healthcare – had been going into Jamie’s cell and giving him a dead arm. He’d been doing this pretty much every day since Hargreaves came in.

  I asked the other orderly why he hadn’t told me.

  ‘He asked me not to, I don’t want no trouble, Mr Samworth.’

  I was furious. It got worse. The other day this Biffo Bacon twat had taken off a shoe and chucked it at Jamie’s head – and this is a lad who’d been in a coma . . . No one had reported it. In fact, said the other orderly, the staff that saw it had laughed.

  So I went to see KK and put something at her door she didn’t want. She came to have a look and was as horrified as me. Had I seen Biffo doing it? No, I hadn’t. KK went and had a word with her manager, so it got investigated, if not seriously. It was kept in-house and people began calling me a grass again.

  I was on a landing with an officer who’d done thirty-five years and was about to retire, someone I liked, when out of the blue he said, ‘We don’t do that.’ This was a month after the incident and I knew what he meant. So I took him to Hargreave’s cell. It wasn’t easy, but I got Jamie to take
his shirt off and his arm was still purple and yellow. I asked this bloke if he was happy for a colleague to do that, and he couldn’t answer. Imagine that was one of your kids. Things were frosty for a bit, and the culprit got moved on.

  15. The Air That I Breathe

  Funerals are never pleasant, but going to one with a prisoner is worse than on your own. You’re not wanted. You are the enemy. I’ve been to four. Lucky officers don’t do any. Only the death of an immediate family member will get a prisoner to a farewell do – child, parent, spouse or sibling: taking prisoners to a funeral is a security risk that the Home Office would rather avoid. We had one lad who’d been brought up by his grandparents from the age of two, and still wasn’t allowed to see his grandad off, even with the chaplain in his corner. That seemed harsh and I felt sorry for him, but I suppose you do have to draw the line somewhere. Some of these kids have a lot of grandads!

  My first such escort was at Forest Bank, just after I’d joined the prison service. We’d an Asian lad with us, very upset because his dad had died. I didn’t know what he was in for or what to expect and, to be honest, the idea was a buzz – I was eager for adventure. Three of us set off with him: one driving, another, Tall Lad, on cuffs, leaving me in charge despite having next to no experience, either in prison or on an escort. We were in a minibus with ‘UKDS’ – UK Detention Services – plastered all over it. Why you’d advertise yourself like that I don’t know.

  We arrived on this street, cars double-parked, up on the kerb, loads of Mercs about. Victorian semi-detached houses loomed over us with their bay windows, pointy roofs, typical of that part of Salford. The driver counted house numbers, found the place and, fuck me! The deceased must have been popular. There was a crowd and a half, most of them in robes, Muslim. Most of them were pointing and shouting at us, and not in English so far as I could tell. The atmosphere was hostile, and there was lots of emotion. I wasn’t enthusiastic any more; this wasn’t a place I wanted to be. One guy began shouting in my face.