One man, who had been in there for over 30 years and had been given no date of release, told me that the best way to pass time is not to ask or talk to the guards unless you really must. “Trying to deal with small problems in prison leads to greater stress than just putting up with the problem in the first place,” he said. I got to know that this poor prisoner killed himself in December 2019, obviously too afraid to ask for help.
As soon as you wake up in prison you fall into a routine. Everything happens at the same time, every day. Sleeping, waking, going to the toilet, brushing your teeth, eating and making phone calls. As free will is taken away, you become lazy and complacent and merely go through the motions of the day on automatic. You become numb to your surroundings. You just live to tick off days, and that is when you realise that if you don’t find some form of escapism, however small, you’re finished.
The only things that break the monotony are visits and phone calls, which although longed for, can also be a cause of great pain. With memories of outside life and your distance from it echoing in your solitary, faces of love start haunting dreams. You see and hear the daily problems that the family must cope with and you cannot do anything to ease their suffering. That is true torment.
Days blur into weeks, and calendars fill and fall off the wall, with no meaning – just a painful number. Everyone gets older while you stay locked in a room like a petulant child, away from responsibility, and reality. Birthdays and Christmases become nothing, just numbers. At first you count days, a hundred, a thousand, two thousand days in.
Moreover, you don’t even have a proper date of release. With every appeal court and every case lost, costs given in judgment are then duly converted into days to serve. Days which are added to your sentence, pushing the release date further and further away.
Officers in charge of the records laugh at you if you ask for your release date. “Oh, come back in a few years, you have plenty of time left,” they tell you.
When you finally get an EDR – Estimated Date of Release – you’re scared to count down. What are you counting down to? A world and people you used to know in another life? Children you’ve never really met beyond these walls? Will that final date bring relief and freedom, or fear and dread?
Panic sets in. Now jail is your home, where you belong, and outside seems foreign and alien to you. Your head swims in “what ifs” and “hows”. It gets to the point when you long for the door to close and lock. You feel protected, even from yourself. Solitude can be comforting and the space around you feels yours. You are in control, at least for a little while … until the door clangs open again and in floods the absurdity of reality. You focus on anything – a picture, a thought, trying to have hope, trying to see a future, any future that doesn’t involve whistles, confinement and powerlessness – but it’s hard.
You’ve got no control of life anymore. You empty your mind and think of nothing. A saying from a friend a long time ago comes back to me, “Too much thinking will kill a man.” I think that could be true. Panic, deep inside the chest. Tightness of breath. No control. No control.
For me, reading and writing are my way of escaping, the only way I can take control of the moment and the next, then the next. It’s almost like taking the first baby steps. I don’t think about the long road ahead, I just concentrate on that first step.
Life in prison is not thrilling or glamorous. After you’re released, everyone always asks you the same questions. “Did you share a cell with anyone?”; “What about fights, deaths and violence?”; “What about rapes or other dramas?”
Yes, there are some stories about these things, but mainly prison is just full of empty lost souls, wandering around trying to avoid contact – even eye contact – as they wish away their lives. It is mainly days full of tedious boredom and pathetic, soul-crushing petty rules and routine, routine, routine.
Even food gives no sense of enjoyment. It is merely something to pass the time, wishing for the days, months, years to end. You can bet on what’s for lunch or dinner next week, next month, or next year, and have a 75 percent chance of winning the bet.
You’re surrounded by murderers, paedophiles and rapists. Mostly though, you’re surrounded by drugs, drugs and drugs. They’re given out gladly by the prison doctors and willingly supplied illegally. The modern governance of humanity, a docile population is a willing population.
Can you imagine living in a world with no trust at all? You can’t let your guard down, or truly be yourself, you can’t be nice or kind for more than a moment or someone will see it as a weakness. Jail has place for two kinds of people: predators and prey. And who wants to be prey?
Surrounded by so much anger, pain and fear you must turn off the empathy switch or it will swallow you whole. I don’t know how it’s all affected me.
Seeing the world differently you feel alone, misunderstood and misjudged. Alone. They say before death, your life flashes before you. It has already happened many times but you’re not dead, you just feel it. You’ve forgotten more than you ever knew. You don’t know who you are anymore, what you like or what you want. All you want is for the pain and sorrow to stop, but it doesn’t. So, you do all you can to survive and wait, and wait, to see where life will take you next. Slightly immune and indifferent to it.
Not all inmates are bad or screws either, but in such an archaic prison system, which only helps those who tread on each other, it’s a selfish lifestyle. Inmates are simply eager to grass on each other, to gain visits, jobs or just have more than others.
Guards turn a blind eye either because they are powerless or heartless, but mostly because they too are part of the system. In this prison, good deeds are never rewarded, but infraction of rules come at the price of the high penalties – depending on who you are. Some people who test positive for drug use get no punishment, while others are moved to maximum security Divisions and have extra time added on to their sentence.
There is no way to understand prison life. However, it does reflect the society that nurtures it. In Malta corruption is widespread and it’s who you know, not what you know. Malta has two main political parties, the Nationalist Party and the Labour Party, and a prisoner’s political allegiance effects the way he’s treated in jail. Officers side with their own party members, whether an inmate or screw. There is little solidarity between officers as they are split in two, according to their political beliefs.
This leads to chaos and is of very little help to the foreign inmates who make up almost 50 percent of the prison population. A foreign inmate is told he cannot have any speakers brought in, while a Maltese inmate booms out his 1000 watt 6-speaker with subwoofer surround sound. An officer sits in a cell drinking coffee and playing the Xbox with some inmates, but then won’t lift a finger to help others.
It is a place of huge contradictions.
The arrest
June 19, 2006. Morning. Barry’s car was parked outside my flat. On this rare occasion it was there without him. I’d borrowed the car for a run-around day. The minute I sat behind the wheel I was quickly surrounded by scary men screaming in Maltese. In the chaos and din, all I could see were an array of rather old and dilapidated firearms that were being pointed at me.
I can still see it clearly to this day, one of them lunging at me from the car window, his hand holding a revolver held together with Sellotape.
I had flashes of my life ending abruptly. I was not a stranger to street crime, the cities of Cardiff, Newport and Bristol, where I was raised, are unforgiving like every other large modern city.
When no one fired a shot and I was still sitting there with a joint in my mouth and keys in the ignition, I heard something deadlier than a bullet: “Pulizija! Pulizija!”
What happened next is almost a blur to me. It was, after all, over 13 years ago and as I sit here a semi-free man, it seems like someone else’s life.
I recall being manhandled out of the car by plainclothes policemen blurting out broken English. I was searched and so was the
car. Apart from the lit joint in my mouth, I also had a sheet of Yellow Pages containing an Embassy Number 1 cigarette and a small amount of cannabis bud – about one gram – enough for one joint.
The keys were taken from my possession by one of the many policemen, whose faces blurred into one and in a mix of Maltese and broken English they half pushed, half led me, through my front door along a corridor and upstairs to my apartment. Then they invaded my life. I was not shown any search warrant, although they claimed they gave me a copy. I still haven’t seen one to date.
In one of the bedrooms growing under four, 600 watt high-pressure sodium (HPS) bulbs, they found five, one-metre high cannabis plants. A cross strain of Purple Haze and Northern Lights cannabis plants.
Inside a cupboard, in the hallway, they found two parcels of bud wrapped in newspaper: one just less than 100 grams and one just under 30 grams, of snipped and prepared bud from five plants that had been harvested a few days before and were drying.
The prosecution stated that was proof of preparation for sale and wouldn’t even hear the truth, that the two weights written on the newspaper were just a personal note to show the yield from the plant’s performance and my own interest.
On the kitchen table they found 26 not-yet-rooted clones of a different strain growing under a 24-hour Metal Halide (MHD) tube bulb.
A lot has been made about the equipment and plants in my possession, stating how professional it was. The prosecution adamantly saw my flat as a drug factory, and they saw me as a cultivator and trafficker for profit.
That could not have been farther from the truth. The two grow books in my possession showed everything one had to do to set up and maintain the plants. It is after all only growing a weed, my input was that of love, caring only for the plants as best I could. The number of cuttings or not-yet-rooted clones were 26. That number a few days before was higher, I did take over 100 cuttings, all but the remaining had died. There was a small pest infestation in the Rockwool, and in my opinion, in my care none of those 26 plants would have grown, and in truth I didn’t want to grow them, the crop felt jinked. I was slowly convincing Barry to cut our losses, but I was a little too slow.
Like every gardener, I was taking more cuttings than necessary, it enabled me to choose the strongest plants from a stock of choice. Common sense.
In the back bedroom, which I had been using as a drying area, they found a cardboard box with a few desiccated stems and discarded outer leaves, larger than a hand, called fan leaves, and some other scraps all only containing trace levels of THC at best. I have never been able to receive a proper complete transcript of my case or seen any of the photos that were taken at my flat as “evidence”.
Over the years, and through the seven lawyers I amassed, I tried to obtain copies of this “evidence” but they always failed me. “Leave it alone, don’t make a fuss,” they all told me. “You can get the file when you leave prison,” they used to tell me. But now sitting in Wales banned from Malta for five years, the chances of that happening look incredibly slim.
Even though I fought the feelings, in truth it felt like madness. I felt that, throughout my case, nobody was really working on my side and more than that, appearing to conspire against me. Was I a scapegoat or paranoid? It did push me to the very limit of my sanity. I tried to get a lawyer to open a case for wrongful representation against one of my former lawyers, because of his sheer incompetence. And was told, “In Malta. Forget it.”
When the dozen or so police, by now milling all over my small flat, entered the main grow room, they instantly started pulling wires from lighting and ventilation and the black-out covering I had placed over the window. All the while, they were coughing and gasping for breath as if the mere contact with the air around the plants would infect them. It would have been comic, were it not tragic.
In this manic farcical confusion, I did one last act of defiance. I lurched forward and bit the top of the main collection of flower buds/Kola of one of the plants.
As soon as I bit the plant, one of the policemen started screaming at me, “Stop that! You can’t do that! Spit it out now!” He swayed towards me, like a rugby player. But I ducked and kept on chewing and swallowing. “Well it’s done now, and you’ve told me 20 times today with great glee I won’t be seeing the sunshine ever again, so to hell with it.”
The way they destroyed the room, the lighting and the water system was so frenzied, that I concluded that they had never seen an indoor growing system before. Clearly, they thought of it as a dangerous drug/pharmaceutical factory, with hazardous substances and gases.
The first newspaper article I ever saw about my case had a screaming headline: “Drug factory found in Gozo”. Which is strange, as a car factory with five cars in it would be called a garage.
It took the policemen most of the day to pack up all my flat into their vans and cars. All the while, I sat on the settee watching. Everything was confiscated, leaving only two small bags of possessions that I would be allowed to take to prison.
In the afternoon, this circus was disrupted by the doorbell ringing, bing bong. I wondered who had popped round to see me, and whoever it was, was about to get a big shock to be greeted by police. But it was I who got the surprise. When the door opened, I was amazed to see that it was a delivery boy: the police had actually ordered pizza!
They all proceeded to sit down at my kitchen table, to eat this celebratory feast using glasses from my cupboard to drink their Coca-Cola, celebrating their huge bust-up. I remained handcuffed, sitting on the side of my settee.
I was, as expected, not offered to join the party; it seemed a rather private affair. When I asked if I could make a cup of coffee they laughed, “No way, where do you think you are?” they said. In my own home, I replied. “Not anymore,” they jeered, with their mouths full of pizza.
When the feeding time was over, and the house and my life were packed in vans, I made the foolish mistake of naively asking the inspector if I could take the only money I had – a month’s rent, LM135 (c. €300) – with me to prison.
I knew I was going to prison for a very long time – they hadn’t stopped telling me since they’d arrived. “Sure, no problem,” he told me. But just as I was taking the notes from inside the book where I kept the money, a hand snatched the notes away violently, telling me they were now confiscated as proceeds of crime. They tossed me the loose change there was, telling me that I could keep that. I forgot how much that was, not enough for a pizza I’m sure. Those LM135 were just the first financial loss in this epic tale.
Incidentally, in court, the prosecution stated that they didn’t believe I was a cannabis smoker. I was only a trafficker, they said, as they had not found any drug paraphernalia. The truth is they had found a tin with various different coloured rolling papers; bits of cardboard for roaches; two zippo lighters; half a pack of tobacco; and some odd bits of wood like toothpicks, used to pack down joints. They also found a plastic tube tapered at one end to keep cannabis cigarettes when transiting, the lid of which had a prominent cannabis leaf design. All this was confiscated, along with a mobile phone, two diving knives, personal and financial documentation that I never saw again. So, they had all the proof they wanted that I was a smoker. But clearly that day, they wanted to arrest “a big, foreign drug trafficker”, irrelevant of what they found.
Every time I tried to query this with lawyers, I was told, “What can you do? This is Malta!” That is something I’ve heard from so many official people, it could be the island’s official justice mantra.
Finally, the convoy was ready to leave Gozo and head for the short crossing to the mainland. It was a journey full of overwhelming emotions; the policemen constantly tormenting me with fearful images of a violent and drug-filled prison, which was no place for a nice, foreign boy like me. I was terrified. It was working. They even asked me if I’d seen the film Midnight Express which was filmed in Malta. They enjoyed telling me about that.
I felt like I was drowning under their
words.
Finally, we got to the Floriana police headquarters. I don’t remember how long I stayed in the dank, mosquito-infested cell. They kept taking me upstairs, to different interview rooms, to grill me. I lost count how often this happened and by then I was disoriented and confused.
There were no recording devices and none of the interviews were transcribed. When I asked for a lawyer, they laughed, and told me, “You’ve seen too much TV!”
I do remember the inspector’s office which had some pictures on the wall, of sickly looking, spindly cannabis plants and the inspector telling me, he now had some better pictures to put on the wall.
Their tactic of terror was working.
By the end, I was deprived of sleep, nicotine, caffeine and proper food. They concocted a statement from the many interviews, which basically stated that I grew the plants alone. Even though most questions seemed to indicate that Barry was the mastermind, I denied this, and only admitted to having given Barry some for free. I was unaware that he too was sitting in one of their cells. They had raided his family home, about the same time as they raided mine.
Out of innocence and from wanting the torment to cease, I signed their paperwork, without even talking to a lawyer. I was played. I was naive. But then again, I wasn’t a criminal, I was a young boy, scared out of my wits.
I was driven back to Gozo, and dragged to court, and there I found myself standing beside Barry, in front of a magistrate and we were both officially charged. Myself on the following five counts:
1. Cultivation of cannabis
2. Trafficking of cannabis
3. Importation of cannabis seeds
4. Possession of cannabis block/Ħaxixa 0.24g
5. Possession of cannabis herb 1063.01g
The total charges carried a maximum of five life sentences and fines of almost €500,000. Now, I was officially a criminal to the highest degree.
Daniel Holmes: A Memoir From Malta's Prison: From a cage, on a rock, in a puddle... Page 5
