‘It’s not about religion,’ he said. ‘When I landed, I’d heard the stories. It was friendly banter at first. I can fight, me, but I can’t fight thirty people.’
It had taken them three months to get through to him, ended by a scrap he’d gone on basic regime for. ‘I can’t do it any more, banged up all day,’ he said. ‘I’m too old. I go to prayers and am seen to be learning the Koran. I just need to finish my time and I’m out. It’s about survival, boss. There’s a lot of it going on.’
He predicted that the next people I’d see in the news, blowing people up and driving into pedestrians, would be white kids like him – John Smith from Salford or Leeds or Rochdale or wherever: people with no family – druggies, maybe – who were just trying to get by.
‘They’re vulnerable, them,’ he said. ‘They get sucked up and taken in.’
There is a definite threat bubbling in prisons that won’t be stopped by tiptoeing around for fear of Islamophobia. It’s a similar story with sex crimes, as we saw with those poor girls in Rotherham the other year. It used to be that when you went on a wing, the vast majority of sex offenders were white. The idea of the dirty old man in a raincoat, always a cliché, is gone. When I left Manchester, it was maybe fifty-fifty, white and Asian.
I don’t know the exact figures or how many of those have been radicalized, but that’s how it is at the sharp end. If the security forces want to counter it, they should have someone undercover in every high-security jail, where most prisoners are currently free to associate with whoever they like, unmonitored. Maybe we need a terrorist-only prison where such activities can be isolated and contained. It would be a dangerous place to work.
Radicalization operates like gang culture, and is about power and control, not religion. We had imams working in the prison and they were good men. But one of them – in a roundabout way – was responsible for a sight that still makes me shudder.
Max Haslam was just a young lad who’d found himself in the wrong place, only twenty-one and a victim of gang crime. He’d had a normal life up to then: girlfriend, small child and a mother who loved him. In a case of mistaken identity gang-bangers had set about him, and the attack left him brain-damaged. People like that should not be in prison. He should have stayed with his mum until they found a place in a brain unit for him.
Brain-damaged people can become disinhibited and act inappropriately. Their injuries sometimes lead to them finding it difficult to distinguish between right and wrong. Max was like a child, which left him better around women at Strangeways than men, because they dealt with him that way. ‘Max, you need to be in your cell,’ they’d say. ‘You need to get a shower.’ And he’d do it. He was in for rape, having got into bed with his mate’s girlfriend. In the end the allegation never went to trial, due to his condition I assume.
But he was a lump physically and could also act like a stroppy teenager. Showing off one day, as he saw it, he told some other prisoners what he was in for. In healthcare we let the VPs mix with the normal location prisoners because it was well monitored, even though in the prison rulebook that shouldn’t have happened. It worked fine usually, but if someone starts boasting about being a rapist it’s a different situation. We had to put him on a three-officer unlock for his own safety.
I then went away on my annual leave. I’m not knocking those who were on while I was away but, because he was so awkward, they didn’t get him out. He spent more and more time behind his door, in a cell the size of a bathroom. He smashed his TV. That meant he was locked up, brain-damaged with no telly, for twenty-three hours a day. By the time I came back, he’d deteriorated.
Many screws, perhaps, would have tried to stay professionally aloof and detached but my emotional guard was slipping by now and I couldn’t help feeling it personally. During his stay on healthcare I met his mother three times. Due to his circumstances, she’d see him in normal visits in the out-patients unit downstairs. She was lovely, worried about her lad. She’d watched him gradually go downhill.
When eventually a place on a brain unit was found, it didn’t seem like a day too soon. He’d pissed all over the floor and blocked the toilet, flooding his cell. There was shit everywhere. He’d thrown his canteen – crisps, noodles and biscuits – around; it was floating in an inch of mucky water. The smell was ghastly.
I looked in and there he stood, like some sickening Statue of Liberty, holding up a Koran and ramming big handfuls of mulched-up paper into his mouth. It was doubly bizarre because he wasn’t a Muslim – an imam must have given him it, they would if you asked. He then washed it all down with bog water scooped up in his blue prison plastic cup.
I went into the office. ‘Haven’t you seen this guy? Have you seen what he’s doing?’ People were quite laid-back about it. He was going to hospital the next day and that would be the best place for him. I’m not sure they took in what I’d said. Eating a Koran. I’ve seen some horrible things in prison but, boy, did that stay with me.
19. Out of Control
I recently read a report that said on average prison officers are expected to live two years after retirement. Two years! What the prison service is really doing therefore is ensuring its staff will not be alive to collect the pension they’ve earned. And, don’t forget, it has since been decided that they should stay in the job until they’re sixty-eight. Scandalous. Here’s an example of the sort of thing we in healthcare faced all the time.
I was on with the Stretcher Bearer and Nikki, the other officer who passed the interview with me when the changes came in.
‘Samikins,’ our nurse manager said, ‘we’ve got a lad in the gated cell. He’s been sent on an ACCT form from reception. Can you check his background, please?’
I didn’t always do that in the rest of the prison, as we’ve seen. Very often it didn’t matter. On healthcare, though, there were nurses and vulnerable people around, so if prisoners were rapists, racists or terrorists it paid to be aware. We often did it. I had a look on the computer and the first thing I noticed was that he’d been in Liverpool prison, in segregation, for six years solid. That was enough. Whatever he’d been sentenced for, he was either fucked in the head or dangerous. Shortly after arrival, he rang his bell, asking to use the phone. Nobody else was unlocked at the time, so I agreed to his request. Mistake number one.
Out he came, squaring up to me straight away. He wasn’t big but he was fit, young too, in his mid-twenties. He looked me right in the eye. Cockfight. No messing. ‘Get me down to seg’, now.’ He didn’t care for his new accommodation.
‘You’re not going to seg’, lad,’ I said. ‘You’re on healthcare. When the nursing staff say you can leave, then off you go.’
‘Get me down to seg’,’ he said again, in a very threatening manner, fists clenched.
Adrenaline kicked in, the knees began shaking. Nikki took off her glasses and put them to one side. I pushed the lad behind his door and suddenly we were in a restraint. By now I’d had my fiftieth birthday, Nikki was the wrong side of forty-five, and the Stretcher Bearer was sixty and built like it, little pot belly: not exactly Conor McGregor.
Nikki, as ever, followed us into battle. It took my full weight to drag this kid to the floor, where all four of us ended up. I got him in a neck lock, not textbook but it was doing the job until he shook it off, wriggling like a conger eel. One very long minute and a half later, the cavalry arrived and we were only struggling to pin him down then, nothing else. A minute later, with the extra muscle and weight, we had this limpet in restraint. He carried on struggling though.
‘You fat Yorkshire prick!’ he said, giving it the mouth. ‘You’ve eaten too many fucking pies.’
He was going back to seg’ now, this dick. He’d got his wish. Getting him back was a struggle – he was fighting all the way.
‘You need more cardio, you fat fuck.’
‘Listen, lad,’ I said, ‘I’m not the one puffing and blowing.’
As soon as we handed him over to the segregation unit he changed
. Compliant. He was where he wanted to be. And that wasn’t healthcare.
Back in the office, the Stretcher Bearer had a whitey on. A pensioner almost, he’d just been grappling with a lad nearly three times younger and deserved a sit-down. Nikki was crying, hurt as well, knocked around. But she was upset because the three of us – combined age nearing a top score in darts – hadn’t got a lock on: we’d only just restrained him.
‘I’m no good to you, am I?’ she said.
For prison staff, such physical demands aren’t unusual. I’m sure the fun will only increase the closer you get to sixty-eight years old!
Over the coming weeks, I did a couple of shifts in seg’ and supervising the exercise yard I saw the Limpet and he saw me. Did he call me a fat Yorkshire prick again? No, he did not.
‘All right, Mr S.?’ He now knew my name.
‘Yeah, I am, how are you?’
‘Good.’
‘Good.’
‘No hard feelings?’
‘No hard feelings. What you doing?’
‘I’m on my regime. Doing an hour, I kill it.’ And he did. Press-ups, burpees . . . he went at it non-stop.
‘You need more of this, Mr S.,’ he laughed.
‘You’ll not be so keen when you get to my age,’ I told him.
He was quite a long time at HMP Manchester, the Limpet, and I saw him again at least a dozen times. He went out of his way to speak to me and me to him. That’s what prisoners tend to be like. They are not all badasses and don’t hold grudges. We’d had a bit of a grapple and then moved on: dynamic security and all that.
Nikki ended up getting hurt another time we had a prisoner who didn’t want to be on healthcare, and it was all down to the smoking ban.
Healthcare was funded by an NHS Trust and ran to their rules, hospitals of course having been non-smoking for years. Hospital patients are allowed a fag, but only if they exit the main building, and you aren’t going to do that in prison. Other parts of the jail would have that familiar tobacco aroma, but not ours, after 2011 anyway. That was when the NHS began to insist we followed suit. Staff in healthcare could then be disciplined for smoking on site. I’ve never smoked, so I didn’t mind. Healthcare was only a small area and the smell was nasty enough as it was. Another plus was that offenders who fancied blagging a break with us, seeing it as easier time, suddenly decided otherwise when they couldn’t have their tabs.
It wasn’t great when smokers with mental illnesses came on, though. Taking their burn off them was cruel. They were addicted to it. That’s all they’d got to live for. We would check their property, strip search them and put their lighter and tobacco in storage. They were offered patches or counselling but basically went cold turkey. It caused real problems. We had loads of restraints, plenty of issues. At least, though, it was only in healthcare.
Then, on 1 September 2017, the service introduced a trial smoking ban right across all high-security and long-term prisons in England and Wales and every other wing followed suit. Soon afterwards, riots erupted in HMP Birmingham, where prisoners could be heard chanting, ‘We – want – burn!’ before Tornado teams were sent in. This was after massive riots there the previous December.
But let’s suppose that in the end this blanket smoking ban goes peacefully. It won’t stop people doing it. Around 80 per cent of the prison population smokes. All it will do is create a new prison economy. Burn is cheap compared to heroin. Lighters and matches will be sought after too, smuggled in the back way as usual. A new black market will be born. The bullied will get battered for something else, and a breed of tobacco barons will emerge. The structure for that is already in place. If you borrow burn it’s double bubble: I lend you half an ounce and want an ounce back. They already make money; it will just get worse. Yet more hassle and grief for the staff.
In fact, it’s already happening. The other day, while out walking my dog, I bumped into Manny. Having just come out again, he told me it was indeed all going to pot, literally. According to him, the burn barons are on the rise, lots of bullying, everyone still smoking. What’s more, prisoners are now allowed to use ‘vapes’, to wean them off cigs. Only what the cons are doing is taking the battery out and using the things like bongs, puffing weed through them instead.
Meanwhile, back on healthcare, a prisoner came to us late one night having tried to punch a member of staff and been bent up. Six foot one, thin as a rake, curly black hair and scruffy as fuck: the entire prison was waiting for us to get him behind his door so they could clock off their shifts. He started giving me lip. ‘I’m not stopping on this unit.’
What had upset him all over again was having his burn removed. I gave him the spiel: ‘You’re here for the night, there’s nowhere else in jail. Tomorrow you can go to a wing and smoke your tits off.’
He wasn’t having it. As Nikki and I went to unlock the cell to put him in, I took my eye off the ball. Before I knew it, he’d taken a huge swing. If I’d had hair it would have rustled like hay in a breeze. He missed but caught Nikki, behind me, with a forearm. Thankfully, not full in the face, but he did knock her glasses off. I got him in a headlock while Nikki, although shocked, carried on struggling with him gamely. Eventually we got him to the floor and backup arrived to take him back to seg’, where he’d be allowed his tobacco.
My fellow officer was shaken up and again sported bruises I’d have been proud to wear. She had a bit of whiplash too. But the thing that really pissed her off was that in such situations I’d try to push her to one side. ‘I’m a prison officer too,’ she’d say.
‘Yeah, you are love, but I’m from Yorkshire, and if anyone’s getting brayed around here it’s me, not you.’
I couldn’t help but admire her, though. She was far braver than a lot of blokes in there. The administrators and politicians take advantage of officers like Nikki and the Stretcher Bearer. They put them in more danger than they ought to be facing. Older staff and the majority of women shouldn’t be placed in such brutal situations and very often wouldn’t be if officer numbers were high enough. I dare say some will call that ageist and sexist; for me it’s just common sense. What are they arguing for? The right to be battered senseless? Handy for the bean counters and politicians that, isn’t it?
Spare a thought too for the young officers just starting out on what they hope will be a fulfilling career in the prison service. Some of the things they are forced to see and deal with will haunt them for most of their lives.
Jimmy Makin was only in HMP Manchester four days, that’s all, when he arrived on healthcare. Ten staff brought him up from reception. He’d not been restrained but wasn’t right – you could see it. He looked through you. He was a lost soul really, not eating, drinking or communicating: he’d got nothing. He wouldn’t talk to Bradders, and neither would he engage with a psychiatrist we brought in. Emergency section if ever I saw one. He’d be off as soon as a bed became available, which might be days or weeks given all the papers that needed signing by doctors, judges, psychiatrists or whoever. An immediate decision was made to put him on constant watch, behind the Perspex shield. I wasn’t on that weekend, but Warren was – the young officer, you’ll remember, who’d already had to watch Holden gouging his own eyes until he’d blinded himself.
On the Saturday, Jimmy had begun to punch the iron bars, each one an inch in diameter. It’s not like punching plaster. By close of play Sunday his forearms were just dangling from the elbows down, jelly. Nurses were crying. He’d broken both hands and his wrists were smashed to fuck. Surely he was a worthy candidate for the liquid cosh? Once he’s smashed himself to bits you can’t put cuffs on him. A body belt would have been no good, it’s a belt around your waist with cuffs. The physical damage was done. Lack of intervention comes back to docs having to make decisions and all the potential legal ramifications. By Monday, when I came back, he’d finally gone to hospital on an emergency section.
Warren spent all weekend watching Makin destroy himself, it’s got to be traumatic that. Like me, he m
ight well have been parking what he saw in a box in his mind that one day he would have to gaze into.
On healthcare, a quiet week is as dull as anywhere else in Strangeways. And the ratio of boring days to eventful ones? Boredom was unusual, especially when we were short of staff. On a peaceful weekend, with them all in their cells, you might be eight hours on your feet, leaning on railings. Backache was an occupational hazard. In some areas of the jail, where prisoners spend more time in their cells, you might be sat in the sterile area, but on healthcare you spent the bulk of your time on the landings. There was always a potential ding-dong. You had to stay alert.
It was a really dull Sunday in 2015. There’d been an alarm bell on outer E Wing but it appeared to have been attended to, done and dusted.
Then another voice came over the radio: ‘All out stations, E Wing Outer.’ It was a chilling message, rare then, not so much now. What it meant was: anyone available needed to get there fast.
Healthcare could spare four of us: two jockey-weight female officers, one of them an SO, Chris, a male officer with little physical presence, and me. Being younger than me and not carrying eighteen stone, Chris set off like a gazelle.
‘Whoa! Slow down!’ I shouted. ‘You don’t know what you’re going into. You might need some fight.’
E Wing held over one hundred prisoners on two landings – the threes and fours – and the rumpus covered half of it. On the top deck was a lad who’d taken spice, begun choking and was now unconscious. Paramedics were already there, as were a few nurses, so our SO ran up to join them. Meanwhile, the call had gone out for inmates to get behind their doors and, on such a sunny Sunday, they hadn’t liked that one bit. They wanted to be on the yard. The mood turned ugly and now there was more trouble brewing on the threes, so I stayed put.
One guy terrorized the place, a well-known member of the Mancunian gangster clan that used to do the doors on the Haçienda. He was up on a pool table giving it the old, ‘We’re not going to take it anymore,’ as an audience of around seventy warmed to the theme. Ring-pieces were twitching, full-on adrenaline dump. I was on a landing ten metres wide and thought it best not to hang around, so I drew my baton and others followed suit.
Strangeways Page 21
