Bouncers and Bodyguards

by Robin Barratt

  As I said, it took around 11 months to finally get to sentencing, even though I had essentially pleaded guilty at the very beginning. If I had known how the courts worked and how the seasoned criminals did it, I would never have said anything at the very beginning when I had been first pulled over. But of course I hadn’t known.

  My barrister asked me time and time again, ‘Why did you say it was your gun?’

  ‘Because I did have an antique gun,’ I would reply.

  ‘Yes, but you don’t tell the police you had one,’ he would say.

  ‘But why?’ I would ask.

  ‘Because you don’t do that. Criminals don’t do that!’

  But I wasn’t a criminal. I was just telling the truth. I didn’t have a history of violence. I had been doing the doors for almost 26 years and had a successful agency, but I had never been to court or been arrested for any violent crime. Even though the minimum sentence was five years, my barrister also thought I had a very good chance of getting away with a heavy fine and community service. He couldn’t really see me getting the statutory five years.

  But the judge slagged me off completely. He told me that I was a professional ‘enforcer’ who ran a door agency of ‘bouncers’ – he said there was no other way of putting it – and the only reason I had the gun was for intimidation. I felt fucked.

  My mum, brothers, sister, her son and some of my friends were there to hear the judge deliver my sentence. He said, ‘I am giving you five years.’ The only way I can describe my reaction is to compare it to when you sometimes lose your balance and catch your breath. It was like being on a funfair ride and suddenly dropping.

  ‘Five years for making a mistake?’ I shouted. A security guard tried to grab my arm. ‘No,’ I shouted, shrugging him off. ‘Five years?’

  The judge said, ‘Mr Etchells, you have nothing to say that your barrister hasn’t already said. Now go downstairs.’ I didn’t even get to say goodbye to my mum or my family.

  I was in shock. I just couldn’t believe it. I had lost everything: my house, job, money, everything. It was all double Dutch to me, and I didn’t really understand what was happening. It was such a numbing pain. As I sat downstairs in the cell, my barrister said that we would try to appeal. This sounded great to me, as I thought I would be released on bail until the case was reheard (just as I had been while I waited for my trial), but no. I mumbled that surely because I had pleaded guilty I should really have got a bit off, but my barrister said that I had been given the minimum sentence anyway. There wouldn’t even be anything much to appeal against.

  I didn’t go to prison straight away. I had to wait until there were six or seven of us to fill the van. I had been sentenced at about 3.30 p.m., but I didn’t end up getting to Norwich Prison until about 7.30 p.m.

  My girlfriend Lisa rang my brother Andrew at about 5.30 p.m., and he told her that he was sorry but I had been given five years. She was devastated and broke down. Luckily, my family all rallied round and went round to see her as often as they could. In a way, I think I was really lucky that I wasn’t there, because seeing her upset would have made things even harder.

  On the way to prison, I tried to reach up to look out of the van window. I am from Norwich and know every road and turn. I saw people I knew, but they couldn’t see in. I was trying to cling onto something I knew. We drove up Knox Road, through the main gates, and I heard the gates slam shut behind us.

  It was a horrible, horrible feeling. I felt like a wound-up piece of string, not knowing what was ahead. I was then taken to the reception area, where the guards removed my handcuffs. ‘What the fuck are you doing here, Bob?’ a guard I knew asked.

  ‘I dunno,’ I said.

  ‘What have you done?’ he asked again.

  ‘I got five years,’ I replied.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I dunno,’ I said again, confused and stunned.

  The screws who I knew started talking to me, but it was all just a blur. One minute I had been surrounded by my family and friends, and the next minute I was handcuffed and in prison. It was weird, but because I knew quite a lot of the prison officers I felt I wasn’t alone. I was interviewed, and I knew the screw who was interviewing me, but I was in prison. I couldn’t understand it.

  After being in reception, I was then strip-searched and given my prison clothes. But I wasn’t given new clothes; I was given someone else’s clothes, including their boxer shorts. The clothes were all grey or mauve.

  The prison was cold, damp, dirty and musky. I was put into another cell until all the other new prisoners had been processed, and then we were all taken up into the main prison – fresh meat. It was exactly like a scene from Escape from New York, with everyone hanging around the prison landings. I felt like a rabbit caught in headlights. I looked up at everyone staring down at me and thought, ‘Who the fuck have I thrown out? Who have I beaten up? Who have I given a good hiding to?’ There are a lot of drug dealers in prison, and over the years I had thrown a good few out of the pubs and clubs I had worked in or had stopped them from getting in. I wondered if any of them were staring down at me.

  I was lucky at the beginning, as I went straight onto the fours, which was one of the better landings, and I got my own room . . . sorry, I mean cell. I didn’t come out of it for about three days. I didn’t eat. I didn’t do anything. The thing about prison meals is there are only three choices: crap, shit and more shit. It is disgusting, and if you don’t put in your food slip, you get the vegetarian choice, which is even worse.

  Because I didn’t come out of my cell for three days, I didn’t know about the food, about letters, about visits, about applying for work to stop the boredom or about the gym. I didn’t know when I could go for a shower or about how the phone worked – that I needed to get credit and register my phone numbers – so when I did actually ask about these things I was three days behind. They had explained everything to me when I had first arrived, but because I had been in so much shock, nothing had sunk in or registered.

  It is hard to explain what happens to you, but your defence mechanisms kick in, barriers go up and you go into a very basic survival mode. After three days, I came out of my cell and started to talk to people. I got chatting to a young lad whose dad had been a good mate of mine when I had a flat in Costessey. In fact, I had known the lad when he was a boy. He was in for stabbing someone and had already done four years. He obviously knew the prison routine and told me what I needed to know.

  To use the phone, you had to register who you wanted to call and supply their telephone number, their full name and address, and their date of birth. However, I just didn’t know that sort of information for everybody I wanted to call. So, a small problem like that suddenly became a mountain. I was given an initial £2.50 phone credit. After that had gone, I wasn’t given any more. And all I wanted to do was to talk to Lisa.

  Norwich Prison was exactly like the one in Porridge, with the same cold bleakness and brick walls and screws who don’t really want to talk to you much. Everything was done by your last name: Etchells this and Etchells that. There was nothing personal.

  At the very beginning of a person’s stay in prison, they have to decide whether they are going to be one of the majority or one of the minority. The majority are those who know prison and the system very well and feed off the minority. If you want to be fed off, you stay in the minority; if you want to be a feeder, you stay in the majority. Most people definitely don’t want to be in the minority, so they feed off others, and abuse the new arrivals. For instance, a new person is given £2.50 phone credit. Someone in the majority will offer to help him out but first ask if they can quickly phone their mum. They then use up most of the new person’s credit – that’s how things start. Newcomers are an easy target.

  I also learned very quickly that everyone in prison is in on a scam. If there were, say, 700 people in Norwich Prison, I met maybe just a handful of genuine, decent people in all the time I was there. Prison is an association of crimina
ls.

  You can’t have any morals in prison. If you have morals, you are nothing. For example, people will ask me if I have a stamp, but if I need a stamp, they will just say, ‘Sorry, mate. Don’t have any.’ Even if I gave him one last week. And then I think to myself, ‘Hang on. I am asking for and getting wound up over a stamp!’ I earned £1,200 a week running my door agency in Norwich, but now I can’t even buy a stamp!

  When I finally settled into prison life, I really saw what was going on. I saw the bullying and the intimidation, and the threats and the fear. However, Norwich Prison doesn’t have one particular hard bloke who runs the place. People generally know that no matter how hard they are they could accidentally knock into someone on the landing who has just come in, who is high on drugs and who would stab them with the pointed end of a toothbrush. He might weigh only nine stone and have never fought in his life, but he would be scared and high on drugs. Or the new prisoner might take offence at being bumped into and wait a while until the so-called hard man went into the shower and then hit him hard with a coffee cup in a sock. So, being someone who can fight doesn’t count for much in prison. There are no rules, and there is nowhere to hide. For instance, if you have a fight in the middle of the street in town, you might never see that person again, but in prison you live with him 24/7. If you have a ruck with someone, you will see him again in the dinner queue and again in the queue for medication and again on the landings or in the gym. And he can stab you or throw hot water and sugar in your face at any time. So, there is not really a hard man of the prison, not like in the days of the Krays, for instance. There is no trust, and just because you might be the hardest bloke on the landing doesn’t guarantee that you won’t be stabbed in the shower.

  Despite all of this hatred and dishonesty and intimidation, there were certain times when I was in Norwich Prison that everyone stuck together. If a member of an inmate’s family died, we were sad for them; if we heard that someone who had left prison had overdosed and died, the whole landing was solemn. It didn’t make sense. Two days previously, someone might have been trying to fucking stab the bloke over an argument about some speed or sleeping tablets, and yet the whole landing would go to church when he died, and we would then spend a few hours or sometimes even days talking about him. One minute it was all filth, and the next minute it was all soft. And the next day it was back to mayhem again.

  Luckily for me, my cell overlooked the road, so when I got my first visit I said to Lisa that I would tie a sock to the bars so that she could see where I was. I think it made a lot of difference to her, and it made a lot of difference to me too. I wasn’t frightened of getting into a fight, but there are different fears in prison. Prison can be scary, what with the noise and being next to people with hepatitis, Aids and all sorts of other diseases – you just don’t know what to expect. So, the fact that I could look out of my window and see Lisa coming with the dogs and my brothers kept me human.

  I never became a parasite, and I never became a bully while I was in prison. I was never in the majority. I stayed in the minority, but I wasn’t bullied either. I think if I had been put in another prison to begin with, I would have got into a lot of fights and have been in danger, but not in Norwich. Because I was known and well respected, because it was known that I ran a door agency, because I didn’t have anything to do with drugs and because I stayed in my cell a lot of the time, I wasn’t a threat to anyone.

  It is all drugs now. People smuggle in drugs up their arse. If other prisoners think that someone has smuggled in drugs, five or six guys will storm into his cell to ‘spoon’ his arse and get the drugs out. Pretty fucking crazy.

  There was a lot of group violence as well: three or four on one. Gangs frequently went into someone’s cell and made a mess of them, but you couldn’t get involved, as the victim might have owed somebody something and not paid it back, despite several warnings. A lot of the time, you had to ignore what you saw – it wasn’t your business. It wasn’t like on the streets where you could help if someone was getting a kicking. Inside, there was always a reason. If you got involved, you were in trouble and those prisoners would turn on you.

  It was all about material possessions. For instance, if you had one and a half ounces of tobacco, a half ounce of that was worth another ounce, because if you borrowed a half ounce from me, you had to give me back one ounce plus the half ounce you borrowed. This was when the majority preyed on newcomers, because the person who had just come into prison didn’t have anything. This was when you got the intense intimidation and bullying. For example, some people were intimidated into pretending to have a back ache to get the doctor to give them medication. Other prisoners did little things to frighten and intimidate people, like walking into your cell and picking up your things. I told one person to fuck off when he tried to do this. He did, but many people were too frightened to tell another prisoner to fuck off, so the intimidation continued.

  Prison teaches people how to improvise. Prisoners made their own 90 per cent proof alcohol. I met people who were doing their sentence brain-dead because they had drunk too much ‘hooch’, or ‘moonshine’ as it is known in the US. They just slept their prison sentence away. Prison is all about drugs and medication, and prisoners will do almost anything to get sleeping tablets, painkillers or any form of medication. They’d walk around the landings shouting down, asking who had what available. You’d then see people passing stuff up over the landings, which eventually went for four or five times its original value.

  Someone can go into prison for just three months and come out a complete bastard, a liar and totally untrustworthy. You see, it is easy to lose your morals if you are intimidated, as you have to intimidate back in order to survive. For instance, you can sit and be friendly and chat to someone in his cell, before leaving a few seconds later after having stolen something that you have already sold for a few ounces of tobacco. There are no rules. The long-termers feed off the short-termers, and people who are bullied or whose stuff is stolen can’t go to the staff and say they are being bullied, because then they will really get beaten up. And being a grass in prison is taboo – it’s almost as bad as being a sex offender. You will be beaten, no matter what, and people will just step over you.

  The regime in prison was degrading. You had to ask for everything: for shampoo, soap, toothpaste, everything. You even had to ask for an envelope. You were allowed one envelope a day. One fucking envelope! If I’d used that envelope and wanted another, I’d have to borrow one, and then I’d have to pay it back.

  There are different classes of people in prison: you have the right scumbag, the lesser scumbag, the scumbag and eventually the nearly human. I struck lucky with my first cellmate, a bloke from Wymondham. He got nine months and a £55,000 fine for health-and-safety violations. He came into prison about two weeks after me and was on the same sort of moral level as I was. At first, he was on another landing, and I could see he was just a normal person in a very abnormal world. He was in complete shock. His wife was pregnant, and he was getting got at in prison. I liked him, and I took him under my wing and helped him cope a little bit. He was a nice bloke, and we became good friends.

  It is amazing how people make a life for themselves in prison. Just sitting watching everything that went on was amazing. As well as physical violence, intimidation was rife. The fours intimidated the threes, the threes intimidated the twos and the twos intimidated the ones. Each landing had their little crew running all the scams, but I managed to make friends with other prisoners without joining their ranks.

  Nobody wanted a job as a landing cleaner, because you’d be used to move drugs around. So you’d refuse the job, which then gave the pushers and dealers an opportunity to get someone they wanted. It was important to pick and choose your jobs because of the wider implications of what each entailed. I was lucky, as I worked in the printing shop, where I was treated a little bit better and more like a human being than in many of the other jobs. But even in the printing shop, I saw people
take the pots of glue used to join the pages together and sell them as solvents.

  The prison authorities tried to move me twice: once to Wayland and once to Highpoint. However, I refused to go, because I knew that if I could stay in Norwich I would eventually be sent to Britannia House, an open prison that was a lot more comfortable. It was just a matter of time, and I was eventually transferred. However, I was sent to Peterborough Prison for a week while I was at Britannia House, as I broke my bail conditions. By then, I was working at the YMCA on day release. I left work, went to ASDA and drove down Drayton Road, which I wasn’t meant to do – I still wasn’t allowed to go past my ex-girlfriend’s house. I was seen, arrested later that evening and sent off to Peterborough Prison for a week. Peterborough was very different – it was private and run like an American prison with gangs. I wasn’t there long enough to judge, but people did say that the facilities there were much better than at Norwich and that the food was much better.

  Norwich was such a cold prison. Visits lasted only an hour, whereas in most prisons visiting times are two hours minimum and sometimes up to four hours. Norwich was not a nice prison to be in. For instance, if you had to make an appointment to see the dentist, it might take three weeks or more to see him. You could have an abscess and a horrendous toothache and be in pain for weeks.

  Eventually, I went on a course and became a ‘listener’ – somebody people could call at any time for a talk. I made friends with John, a lifer who’d killed someone and been given 15 years. He’d then stabbed his cellmate and been given life. He’d served 27 years. His skin was sallow and grey, he had prison tattoos on his neck and arms, he was covered in scars, and his eyes were dead – there was no sparkle or life left in them. He was never getting out. He looked a bit like Robert De Niro in Cape Fear.