by Jake Arnott
These years of incarceration have certainly taken their toll, mentally as well as physically. In particular, the effects of sensory deprivation, the lack of stimulus, the sheer weight of mental confinement can be too much for many men to bear. Scandinavian studies on institutional environments have concluded that after seven years in such conditions a subject will suffer severe psychological deterioration.
I have managed to stave off mental atrophy through study. In the course of my sentence I have taken up education, culminating in an Open University degree. Through this process, I believe, I have rehabilitated myself, though at times it seemed the only way in which I could keep mind and spirit alive. The prospect of another ten years inside have driven me to despair and ultimately to take the desperate course of escape.
I do assert, however, that my attempts at rehabilitation have been genuine. In studying psychology, sociology and political philosophy I have learnt new perspectives and concepts that have challenged my hitherto negative and parochial mores. I am a changed man. I now accept that no man can be a law unto himself no matter what social category of deviance he is subject to. I was convicted for offences that arose through disputes within my entrepreneurial enterprises. As I have had time to reflect and adopt more positive attitudes and values I know now that my methods in resolving such disputes were entirely wrong and the process of self awareness that I have been subjected to means that the possibility of being involved in such situations again is negligible.
I realise that any freedom granted to me in the future will have necessary limitations. Given the attention paid by the popular press to me in the past, my own supposed notoriety in itself would secure a good deal of scrutiny and surveillance. I accept that my pariah status has formed part of my punishment, albeit somewhat excessive in its severity. I wish to put all of that behind me now. My only desire is to fulfil a useful role in society that could be afforded by a conditional release on licence.
In the final analysis, it’s my assessment that this worthwhile opportunity to humanely rehabilitate effectively enough, now is nigh. Enough over-zealous legal deterrence. Continuation of my punishment thus only negates society’s tentative reforms, exceeding equitable treatment.
Yours faithfully
Harry Starks
Of course I’d heard about Harry’s escape. It was all over the papers. TORTURE GANG BOSS IN DRAMATIC BREAK-OUT. STARKS ESCAPE: BRIXTON SECURITY PROBE ORDERED. Police-file photographs in dot matrix reproduction. Blurred front and profile shots, hardly much use for identification as they were a decade old, but sending a little shiver of recognition up my spine none the less. The tabloids ran other pictures. Sixties highlife and lowlife grinning for the cameras. Nightclub line-ups, Harry phalanxed by ‘personalities’. Stories ran all week. Grave-robbed scandal and nostalgic gossip made good copy for page six or seven. Ruby Ryder Speaks Out On Escaped Gangster: Exclusive interview with busty blonde star of ITV’s Beggar My Neighbour. A graffiti campaign started up all over the East End: STARKS – 10 YEARS LONG ENOUGH.
All this coverage helped to quell my unease at the thought of Harry being out there somewhere. All the details of his criminal career, his public-enemy status, reassured me that I was a very small part in the story. Then came the letter to The Times. Suddenly I was involved again. I couldn’t avoid it. It was a message.
I hadn’t thought about Harry for a long time. We’d lost touch after his last parole knock-back. To be honest, I thought he’d had a serious breakdown. Something that he’d always dreaded. The fear of it had at least been partly the reason for taking up education. He had a desperate will to keep that phenomenal brain of his together through the long years of incarceration. And it was this that had brought us together in the first place. Though, to say ‘brought us together’, well, we were never exactly together at any time over those years. Letters, prison visits, even the sociology classes I did at Long Marsh where we’d first met, in every instance we’d occupied a very different reality.
And my interest had always tended to the academic. ‘Your little experiment,’ was how Karen described it. But then I’m a criminologist. It would hardly seem natural for someone like me not to be fascinated by someone like Harry. It was something that Karen and I argued about. ‘Ethnographic work based on participant observation,’ is how I justified my methodology. She called it ‘zookeeping’.
I’d actually believed that the relationship that Harry and I formed had a sort of dialectic energy to it, that something essential could be learned from a discourse between a criminal and a criminologist. I was wrong of course.
I remember someone using a quote by Chekhov to explain our duty as radical sociologists: ‘We must take the part of the guilty men.’ That’s what I’d tried to do with Harry. But it was I who had the problem with guilt. The Catholic upbringing, I suppose. I think it was this that attracted me to criminology in the first place. It offered me a way out from guilt.
Harry, as the letter confirmed, always seemed less troubled by his conscience. Consequently the general response to it was cynical. Harry was using sophisticated terminology to excuse his crimes. He wasn’t showing adequate remorse for his wrongdoings. The press was mocking. One columnist joked about Harry’s new vocabulary, contrasting it with the vernacular more commonly used to describe his activities. ‘Sociology is a cruel and unnecessary punishment in Britain’s prisons,’ he concluded. ‘It should be abolished forthwith.’
But they didn’t see the real joke. The letter had its purposes, as a stunt to bring attention to his case, as a way that Harry could prove he was educated and ‘reformed’ and not just some mindless thug. But it was a wind up as well. He was taking the piss. The terms he used mocked my own lost faith in a theoretical system. A faith that he himself had shattered.
And there was a real meaning to what he wrote. In the final analysis. A message hidden in the text. Something that addressed itself to me. A semiology of sorts. Signs, signifiers, the lot. In the final analysis, that was the key phrase that unlocked it. In the final analysis.
Long Marsh Prison’s maximum-security-section wing was known as the Submarine. After going through three sets of gates to get into the main prison, I was led down to a metal door. A small shutter in the door slid open to reveal a peephole. It scrutinised me and the two officers who formed my escort. The double-locked door was opened from the inside and we entered an antechamber. I waited as more routine signals were exchanged by officers on both sides of another double-locking door beyond. There was a row of closed-circuit television screens in the antechamber. A couple of bored-looking screws sat watching them. The blue light from the tubes flickered as the screens gave the occasional horizontal-hold blink. Then the next door was opened and we went down into the maximum-security section itself.
E Wing. The Submarine. A tunnel-like building about fifty yards long and twenty yards wide. An underground bunker that entombed twelve Category Double-A prisoners. Hiding some of the State’s most dangerous criminals from the light of day. There was no natural light let in to any part of the wing. Instead, harsh artificial fluorescence flooded the grey mausoleum. The lighting had to be kept at a high level of brightness in order for the closed-circuit surveillance to work. All these famous villains were well lit for the cameras.
There was no natural air either. No windows that opened to the outside. A ventilation system throbbed incessantly throughout the concrete and steel vault. An unfathomable stench pervaded the whole wing. A sickly sweet smell.
I was led to the end of the wing. The workshop. In the corner were bags of kapok, of fake fur and shredded foam rubber. Making soft toys was one of the few activities the inmates of the wing were offered.
There had been a riot earlier that year. An inquiry had recommended some changes in security and also a ‘liberalisation programme’. As well as stuffing furry animals, sociology classes were suggested as part of that programme and I had been employed by my University’s Extra-Mural Department for this purpose. On my appointment, the Go
vernor was nervously insistent that I should follow the rules and guidelines laid down for prison teachers. Prisoners were not allowed to keep notebooks, for instance. I wasn’t to discuss anything connected to their personal lives.
I’d nodded solemnly in his office and tried to conceal my enthusiasm as a criminologist to have privileged access to such an elite group of criminals. It had come just at the right time. It was an exciting period for criminology. Radical ideas were everywhere. The National Deviancy Conference in 1968 had really shaken things up. We didn’t talk any more of criminology per se but of the sociology of deviance. We had made a clean break from positivism and with siding with the agents of state control. We spoke of attempting to create a society where the facts of human diversity would not be subject to the power to criminalise. We must take the part of the guilty men. Going into a maximum-security prison to teach sociology seemed to epitomise this approach. I thought, in a quietly determined way, that I could be at the sharp end of a whole movement.
I turned from the bags of fur and stuffing in the corner of the workshop and met the combined gaze of seven heavy-looking and strangely familiar guys, all with expressions of bored malevolence. The Guilty Men. I swallowed and gave a little cough. I nodded to the prison officer who had come in with me and who was about to sit down in a chair by the door.
‘Thank you,’ I croaked.
He frowned up at me from a half-crouching position over the seat. I smiled and shrugged at him. He stood up straight again.
‘I should really sit in, sir,’ he said.
‘I really don’t think that’s necessary.’
‘Hm.’
‘Please,’ I implored.
‘Very well,’ he replied wearily.
He picked up the chair and scanned the room. Stares of hardened boredom came back at him. He slowly made his way out of the workshop.
‘I’ll be outside the door,’ he insisted.
As he left I raised my eyebrows mischievously. A few smirks appeared briefly on the faces in front of me. I’d hoped I’d broken the ice a little but the cold expressions returned as they turned their gaze from the departing screw back onto me. Who the fuck’s this hippy? I could almost hear them thinking.
I coughed again and sat down in front of this class. I tried to make my body language as relaxed as possible. I thought I recognised some of the assembled. Faces that matched blurred newspaper photographs. Tabloid headlines involuntarily flashed up in my mind. I tried to ignore these strange images and got on with the matter in hand.
I introduced myself and, in a tentative and casual way, outlined what we would be looking at in the course. I tried to get them to ask questions but very few were forthcoming. Well, I reasoned, incarceration in maximum security was hardly a conducive atmosphere for open discussion. They eyed me suspiciously and made guarded comments, cautious of giving anything away, wary of ridicule from fellow inmates.
The most vocal member of the group was a thick-set man with streaks of grey in his slicked-back hair. Heavy-lidded eyes that stared intently beneath thick eyebrows joined in the middle. He seemed to be the dominant member of the group. Others deferred to him, glancing carefully at his reactions if they spoke. But there was an engaging quality to him as well. He smiled a lot even though his grinning often seemed a reminder that teeth had other uses.
I finished the lesson by saying that although I had my own ideas about what we would study, I’d welcome any suggestions from the group as to areas of interest.
‘Well, Lenny,’ this man announced with his trademark smile. ‘If you can prove that it’s society what’s to blame for me being in here, then it would be worth my while, wouldn’t it?’
There was laughter at this. I joined in, trying not to force it too much. I didn’t mind a joke at my expense. Indeed, I naively thought then that this comment wasn’t too far removed from what I intended myself. I felt relieved that the first session was over and it had gone, yeah, it had gone OK. Now we could get started.
‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ I announced, standing up. ‘See you all next week I hope.’
On my way home my mind was racing. All sorts of ideas and theories swarmed around me. About symbolic interactionism and the labelling perspective. About the nature of imprisonment and the potential for real-live exponents of social deviancy to define themselves. But all these buzzing thoughts were swatted by something else. I couldn’t help but dwell on the uniqueness of the men I had encountered. Rather than putting them in the context of social norms, I found it impossible not to be fascinated by their very criminality and its individual characteristics. Many of them were famous, after all. Their faces had become matrix dot icons, their identities bound up in thick block headlines. The Train Robber, The Panther, The Shepherd’s Bush Cop Killer, and the man who smiled so much, The Torture Gang Boss. I tried to avoid thinking like this. It ran so contrary to my theoretical standpoint. Rather than being objective about labelling theory, I was doing the labelling myself. I was regressing into crime as pathology. As mythology even. I tried to ignore these thoughts and concentrated on my methodology. Then the faces of the Guilty Men came back to me. Their terrible and audacious crimes. Did they feel guilty? I knew that this was the wrong way to think about them but it was all part of the experience, after all. There was something exciting about it.
I stopped off at a pub near the University. I needed a drink. I needed to wind down. Cool out a bit. The pub was full of students. I stood at the bar with a pint, staring out into the middle distance. I found my face hardening into a gaze of the type that the men in the Submarine wore. A sort of numbed alertness. The bleak expression that spoke of the empty years of confinement. The what-the-fuck-do-you-want? look.
‘Lenny?’
A girl’s voice behind me. I turned around.
‘What?’ I said, somewhat sharply.
‘Are you all right?’
It was one of the first-year sociology students. Janine. She had long blonde hair, wide green eyes and a big pouty mouth. I smiled.
‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Sorry.’
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Lenny.’
I laughed flatly.
‘Yeah, well, I’ve just been in a room full of them.’
I told her about my evening in E Wing.
‘Wow,’ she remarked.
She was impressed. I was the youngest lecturer in the faculty. The students liked me, trusted me. I could relate to them and they appreciated my radical credentials.
‘Do you want to come over and join us?’ she asked.
I was tempted but I declined.
‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘But I’ve really got to get back.’
‘We’re having a party at my house. Saturday week. You will come, won’t you?’
There was a flirtatious lilt in her voice. I grinned and nodded.
‘Sure.’
‘See you then, Lenny.’
‘Yeah, see you.’
I finished my pint. I really did have to get back home. Back to Karen.
Karen and I had met at the London School of Economics in 1966. We were both Sociology undergraduates. Heady days. Full of fervour and activity. Even the Chess Society defined itself as Marxist Leninist back then. We occupied the LSE in 1967. We went to Paris in May ’68. We actually participated. SOYEZ RAISSONABLE, DEMANDEZ L’IMPOSSIBLE! And when we got back to London, Hornsey College was occupied, a ‘state of anarchy’ declared. We joined the International Socialists. There was something in the air. Revolution. And we were going to make it happen. Herbert Marcuse had said that the workers had become stupefied by the products of their own labour and so revolution must come from those outside the system. It was up to us: students, hippies, freaks.
The second demo at Grosvenor Square, in October, was to be the climax of the year. Officially an anti-Vietnam War protest outside the American Embassy, it was intended as a catalyst. We would take revolution to the streets of London. As it happened, after a brief battle, the police kept control. A
nd at the end of the day we trudged home to lick our wounds.
Then the National Deviancy Conference happened. That was when we saw the potential for putting radical ideas into academic work. When the next LSE occupation, in January 1969, ended in failure, we resolved to concentrate on our studies.
I got a first and applied for a post-graduate post in Criminology at Leeds. Karen got a 2:1 and started a Diploma in Social Work. And so we headed North. That in itself seemed a political decision. We moved into a big communal house in Chapeltown with some members of the Agit Prop Theatre Group who had come up from London at about the same time.
The sixties came to an end. It was a bit of an anti-climax. A time of reaction. The Tories got into power again. It was necessary to regroup. Karen concentrated on radical social work and began to define herself as a feminist. I focused on the sociology of deviance and theories of resistance to oppressive social norms. But it didn’t seem so exciting any more. Until the Long Marsh project came up. Now this was something that I could really get my teeth into.
Karen was in the kitchen when I came in.
‘You’re late,’ she commented.
‘I stopped off at the pub on my way home. It was quite a heavy evening. I needed a drink.’
‘Uh huh. Well there’s some food left. It’s in the oven.’
I got myself a plate and retrieved what was left of the evening meal. I started to tell Karen about the high-security wing, about the famous villains I’d met. She nodded blankly for a while and then rubbed at her face.
‘Look, Lenny,’ she said wearily. ‘I’m tired. I’ve had a hard day myself, you know.’
I shrugged.
‘I’m sorry. I thought that you’d be, like, interested.’
