Strangeways

by Neil Samworth

Another night, I’d done tea, cleaned the house and had everything prepared for a relaxing evening. You were in a horrible mood, though, and I got no welcome. You just got changed and laid on the sofa refusing to speak. That hurt and made me feel alone, which is how I felt most of the time. Upsets at work always came back to the family.

  Prison changed and brought out the worst in you. I never knew which version of you would arrive home, even when you rang to prepare me with how your day had gone.

  I was mad at the people you worked with. They took you for granted and asked favours. Then when you were ill no one would cover for you.

  I felt like a single parent. There was no balance between your job and personal life. We missed you a lot and would often cry and get upset when you set off.

  I remember the sense of relief at your first sick note from the doctor, knowing you wouldn’t have to go back to Strangeways for a while. And even bigger relief when you got another. I knew that would be that, not only due to the injury, but also blood pressure and stress. I could relax, knowing I’d take care of you; return you to your old self.

  Your time in counselling was difficult. We had bad days after every session as it brought feelings of anger to the surface. Billie and me drew the short straw again.

  At times I questioned our relationship. Were we strong enough to get through this?

  All in all, I feel the experience made us stronger. And you certainly know who your real friends are. It was hard work, but we made it out the other side and can laugh, joke and smile about our life and the people in it again.

  As a family, we are rock solid. The Sam I fell in love with is back, a loving fiancé and wonderful father.

  I’d been away from Strangeways for eleven months when the decision was taken to call it a draw. Amy didn’t want me to go back and my doctor was very supportive, agreeing that for the sake of my health and mental well-being I needed to get out of there. People go on about mortgages, but when something makes you miserable, stop doing it. Live in a caravan in Filey if you must. There are people in HMP Manchester now who were in the job before I began, and I’m sure that conditions are even worse. Yet they will stay in that place until they die or are killed by it, whichever comes first. I finally decided that was not going to be me.

  On 2 August 2016, I left Amy and Billie waiting in the car park and arrived for my interview with the new governor ten minutes early – old habits die hard. My case manager was also present, and there were reports from the psychologist and my doctors. The governor was sympathetic, confirmed it would be best if I left rather than take another job in the prison service and we shook hands. Even more than me, Amy and Billie couldn’t wait to get out of the place. It had been their first and last visit.

  23. Don’t Look Back in Anger

  Am I proud to have been a prison officer?

  I’d say it’s no longer so simple. You hear that word, pride, bandied about a lot nowadays, often on social media: ‘Really proud of everyone today, teamwork, support #Strangeways-Family . . .’ or some such bollocks. There was pride in doing a good job. Whether you’re in Strangeways for twenty years or twenty minutes, its atmosphere seeps into your soul, and it becomes a real battle to stay yourself. I’d like to think I did that. I am proud of how I conducted myself and behaved.

  The Bertie Bassett era was fantastic: leadership and teamwork were outstanding; you felt part of something worthwhile. You’d turn up every day ready to go and knowing you had his backing. I am proud to have met some wonderful people. KK, Bradders and others will be lifelong friends.

  But going on about pride isn’t helpful. I know how it is at HMP Manchester today and that’s bad, really bad: when frontline officers have nowhere to go the word has no meaning. People are turning up for work on wings that are on the verge of a riot, terrified, fizzing with adrenaline and making themselves poorly. They don’t want to be there but feel they’ve no option. It saddens me.

  I’m no angel, me. No Yorkshire martyr, and quite definitely no Confucius. I’ve spent a lot of time at the bottom of the ladder and can see the problems. Our prison service has plenty.

  Rehabilitation is what I had after my shoulder injury: seeing a physio, doing exercise, resting, getting better. When it comes to criminal behaviour, though, most often it’s time and money wasted. David Caplan at the funeral had done four or five sentences for bank robberies and he’s probably heading towards thirty-five years of age now. He’d not learnt his lesson. In America, he’d have been given ten years first up, then twenty and then thirty. Three bites at the cherry and he’s an old man. That’s how it should be. Our system isn’t working; the sentence should fit the crime. Innocent lives are being ruined.

  Prisoners worked out long ago that shooting someone means twenty years. Knife them and look at fifteen. The victim is still dead, so what was the difference? We had one lad in for killing a drug rival. Ran into him in his car, reversed over the kid, dragged him down the road and made mincemeat out of him. The killer went home, got drunk and when the police came he told them he’d been pissed. He got a five-year sentence, out in three. Increasingly nowadays, it’s acid attacks. If someone pays somebody else to scar a person physically and mentally for life, they need to be hit with massive jail time. It’s absolutely shocking. Face it: criminal is what they are.

  My grandad, though, always used to say, ‘Don’t bring me problems, Sam – bring me solutions.’ So let’s have a go, eh?

  Most important is education, and I’m not talking prisoners now, but our kids. When I was at school, we knew the Green Cross Code by heart. ‘First find a safe place to cross . . .’ I can still recite it. Catch them young. When kids embark on a life of crime they are as good as lost. Some become hardened offenders and the cycle repeats.

  Education in jail, once guys end up there, should be practical or else it’s useless. A lot of courses in prisons come from colleges who have idealist liberal agendas. They’re aimed too high for most inmates, who don’t give a shit about identity politics. There is an enhanced thinking course inside, for example, that a healthcare orderly had to do as part of his ‘sentence plan’. Before long, we got a call asking us to fetch him back from the classroom. He’d told them he’d done the course before and they said, fine, it was available on every sentence. The tutor asked what, if anything, he felt he’d got out of it. First and foremost, he said, it had made him a better criminal.

  In my experience there are very few reading and writing lessons in jail, though I hear the new Thameside prison in London is different. That’s the type of guidance needed. Presumably we want them to get jobs and become useful to society. Well, if they can’t write there’ll be no CV, and employment will be harder to get, won’t it?

  When people leave jail they need purposeful activity, so that needs addressing. When I left Manchester, they had a sewing shop where prison clothes were made. Some people did that, enjoyed time out of the cell and made a bit of brass. But it’s not really purposeful activity, is it? No one leaving prison is going into the sewing trade. Back in the day, we had bricklaying and plastering shops with qualified brickies and plasterers showing them how. That was useful, and they were very well attended. One officer I worked with had an extension built and was away on holiday when the builders started it. When he got back, to his amazement, two of the lads laying the bricks were ex-cons from Strangeways. Plasterers earn good money, so lads left jail with a practical qualification. That’s what the majority of prisoners need.

  I look back on the YTS that got me into engineering when I left school. They were all the rage back then. Similar broad-based modern apprenticeships are exactly what we need now. Every lad I was with on that course got a job at the end of the two years. For someone inside to be released six months’ early they should have to sign up.

  The private sector seems to do this better. At Forest Bank, we had an automotive shop where lads would rebuild alternators, a double-glazing shop too. That makes sense. Businesses would approach the prison and start a manufactur
ing partnership. They had assembly lines, made furniture and at one point even sunbeds and blinds. The prisoners got a decent wage, learned a skill and it helped to keep the jail running. Prisoners need focus and a feeling of feeding into society while getting appreciation back for their efforts. It gives them hope. A fair few will blow the income on something antisocial – this isn’t a fairy story – but at least you are giving them an opportunity to make something of themselves, rather than just throwing them back out into the jungle until they are in the slammer again.

  Probation – let’s say a prisoner has a two-year sentence. Actual time served will be less, and once freed they are monitored. If you are a bank robber, you turn up at an allotted time every week to tell your probation worker what you’ve been up to. You could be on the run from the Bank of Scotland. It’s not really monitoring someone, is it?

  When prisoners come out they’re often sent to probation hostels for a while. But this system can sometimes work in crazy ways. There’s a lad who lives on a street near us who was sent to a hostel in Bury, and reported that his room had a broken socket. He was accused of having done it, got sent back to jail and had to complete his time. But even if he had done it, is a broken plug socket worth two years? A teacher might get that for grooming a pupil. In any case, people sent to these hostels often have family willing to take them in – spouses, grandparents, aunties – which in my opinion is the best chance a lot of them have of going straight. Tag them if necessary.

  Electronic tagging is used nowhere near widely enough. There were objections when the system went private; it became a standing joke, wrong sorts of headlines – they tagged one bloke’s false leg: with a job to do, he left it at home. But it’s time to use tagging properly: if a dog gets lost in Cornwall, chip technology can find the owner’s name and address and they’ll get their pooch back. If tagging places you at the scene of the crime, that’s a reason not to commit the crime in the first place, isn’t it? Satellite tracking can make sure curfews are kept.

  Part of a drug addict’s terms and conditions for release from prison are that if you use while you are out you come straight back. Addicts get disability living allowance, DLA, and it can equate to between £1,500 and £2,000 a month – as much as a prison officer earns! All you’re doing is setting them up to fail. What addicts need more is life management. I Wing at Strangeways, the detox wing, had new doors put on at great expense. They had big hatches in the middle of the door, which it turned out were for nurses to push sandwiches and hot chocolate through on a night without having to open them up. It’s easy to take the piss out of things like that, and I did myself when I first saw them. But when you weigh up what they are meant for – making sure people on the rattle get enough nutrition and are fattened up – it actually makes sense. By the time I left, and I believe even now, they had never been used. They’d rather give them methadone with all the problems that brings instead.

  So when drug addicts come out of prison, give them enough money for rent, necessary bills and food perhaps, no more, but tied up with obligations like learning to read and write. Again, it might give them self-worth and purpose, a fresh start. They’d be monitored, given help to budget their resources. Not prepared to sign up to that? Finish your sentence.

  Community service gets a bad rap – a lot of it thanks to so-called reality telly showing gangs of lads smoking spliffs while some poor supervisor works his balls off doing the work of twenty. Moss Side gang-bangers or whatever, to get out they should do community projects. I’m no gardener, but give me twenty ex-cons and a piece of fly-tipped land and I’d happily have them clearing it tomorrow. Thirty-nine hours a week? I’d be up for that. Again, it’s purposeful activity. The choices you give them have to be tough choices.

  These are all ways to address the growth of the prison population, which is way too large and getting bigger all the time. How else, though? Well, a good start would be to deport all foreign-national prisoners. I don’t have the figures, but personal experience tells me that far too many have no right to be in the UK in the first place. I don’t have the numbers for how many Brits are banged up abroad either, but take our own bad boys back as a bargaining chip if that’s going to help and those figures stack up.

  And at the same time, to increase prison officer numbers we should be attracting foreign nationals in. To enter Australia at the moment it seems you’ve to be a hairdresser under forty. They must need people who can fashion a trendy mullet. Yet there are Brits currently buggering off to be prison officers in New Zealand. The government wants 2,500 new prison officers, which sounds a lot but isn’t, not least because 50 per cent will leave within the first twelve months. I reckon the bottom line figure needed is 8,000. That will make up the shortfall and replace people like me, lost through sickness and stress, and the thousands that were let go through voluntary redundancy in 2013. That cost-cutting exercise lost a lot of experienced staff, and according to reports cost the tax payer £56.5 million in payouts (compared to £5.7 million in 2012). We need fewer prisoners, more staff – what the papers call a twin-pronged approach. Common sense, really.

  Here’s hoping someone in authority recognizes that change must come, and that it needs to start now. Not in ten years’ time, because by then it will be far too late.

  As we drove away from Strangeways that day and it receded and shrank in the rear-view mirror, I was unemployed for the first time since my twenties.

  There was trepidation, sure. How would we manage? Mainly, though, there was relief, although I wasn’t out of the woods yet.

  In September, I signed up for a level five course, equal to a foundation degree, in reflexology. Although it was something I wanted to do and I was helped loads by Alison, who ran the course, and the other girls who’d signed up, it added to my mental burden. Through October and November I was in bits: it was the March and April horror show all over again. I was still struggling to handle feelings of rage, neglect and even betrayal. I started to develop a bit of OCD, a condition I’d once taken the piss out of people for having. The course was getting on top of me too until, after another fling with medication, I realized I had to move on.

  The moment came at half six one morning, while I was out walking Steve. I threw the mother of all wobblers. I stamped my feet – nobody was there but us two, luckily – and if there’d been anything inanimate to punch I’d have done it. The dog wasn’t howling, I was.

  We’ve all had times in our lives when we are down. When that happened in mine I’d go on a three-day binge and destroy myself with food and alcohol. Then at the end of it I’d think, Well, I can’t feel any worse, and begin to work my way back up. But this time that wasn’t an option: Billie and Amy were struggling to deal with my shittiness as it was. So I decided right there and then: I am not going to be ill any more.

  This is not in any way knocking people who can’t do that. I am a strong character and I decided, at last, to remember it. I was so fed up with all the suffering. Having made up my mind, I went home, took all my tablets out of their foil and threw them down the bog. I got rid of everything – blood pressure statins, the works. I felt like I needed a grand gesture to start putting this shit behind me, so I made it.

  For a month, I didn’t tell the doctor or Amy. Drug-free, I toned down the weights at the gym and turned up the exercise. I started eating right – went on a health kick and binned the junk food. I hadn’t been drinking for months, so staying off booze wasn’t as hard as it once would have been. Generally, I got myself in better shape. People saying the wrong thing was always a threat – ‘Too ill to come into work, but well enough to go to the gym . . .’ – that sort of crap. I switched off that noise as it only led to tears of frustration.

  By the time we got to Christmas the clouds began to lift. The reflexology, a bastard at first, now gave me focus. I was also starting to enjoy that feeling of control, of being a person with self-will. I don’t say this is the best route to normality for everyone; it just worked for me.

  T
he year turned, and where the last few years seemed to have been one long and painful crawl, 2017 flew by, weeks and months passing more quickly all the time. My mood improved. People began to say I was more like my old self. However, I wasn’t completely in the clear, and I’m still not. It wouldn’t take much to swing it around again – churning up all my memories for this book was always going to be a risk. Obstacles wait to trip you up. There will likely be setbacks, but the future does look bright. A lot brighter than it did in September 2015, quite definitely.

  At Christmas 2016, sorting through my things, I came across my prison diaries, which every officer lives by. You carry them with you: they contain details of your shifts. It was those that gave me the idea of collecting all these thoughts and incidents together. Cathartic, I think they call it. And on the whole that’s how it turned out.

  With Strangeways written, I want to get back to the reflexology course and start my own business in that line soon. Amy is about to begin a course herself: she wants to go into the caring profession.

  Writing this book has helped me to realize how easy it is to overlook the value of family, friends and colleagues, and made me aware of just how lucky most of us are. None of us is going to be around forever. Your family shapes you in good ways and bad; I’m grateful for the honest values of my grandparents and Mam. They didn’t have much, but they always had hope.

  Unlikely as it may sound, I’m grateful to the prison service too. It has an important role to play, and it also shaped my character down the years. By being so honest and open about what went on, I hope to help it do better, that’s all. But ask me, ‘Do I miss it?’ and the answer must be no. Those days behind bars are over; the sentence is done.

  I’m free at last.

  Acknowledgements

  These pages would be nothing without the individuals in them that I worked alongside, so a big thumbs up to all the decent, honest and genuine people I met during my years in the prison service.