by Jake Arnott
‘Yeah. Well, you don’t take much interest in my work.’
‘I do.’
‘No you don’t. You just nod for a bit then try to change the subject. You always think that your work is more important than mine.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘Well, more glamorous then. It’s like these criminals are exotic specimens or something. I have to deal with ordinary people struggling to survive day in and day out. Maybe that just seems boring to you.’
‘I don’t think that,’ I protested. ‘Of course your work’s important. But mine is too. I just wanted to share it with you. It’s very exciting.’
Karen sighed. She put both her elbows on the kitchen table and slumped over them.
‘Yeah, well, maybe I don’t get a great deal of excitement in what I do.’
I reached over and put a hand on her shoulder.
‘I want to get involved in something,’ she said.
‘Of course,’ I said, stroking her back. ‘Once I’ve got this project rolling we can both get involved. Together.’
She straightened up and brushed my arm away.
‘Yeah, well, I want to get involved in something that doesn’t involve you.’
I didn’t follow.
‘What do you mean, “something that doesn’t involve me”? You mean an affair?’
‘Oh, Christ, Lenny.’
‘Babe, it’s all right,’ I said soothingly. ‘I won’t be jealous. We’re supposed to be an open relationship, after all.’
‘Is that all you ever think about? Do you think that’s all women are for?’
‘It’s just that you said “something that doesn’t involve me”. I thought . . .’
‘Yeah, you thought. I meant political involvement. You think politics is all about men. Well it’s not.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Yeah, but you thought it. Well, anyway, I’m not putting up with all that any more. I’m starting a women’s group. And that won’t involve you.’
I smiled and said I thought that it sounded like a good idea. She chided me for being ‘patronising’, But I did think that it was a good idea. I was glad for her to get involved in something. I did feel a bit disconcerted, though. I mean, what was she getting so angry at me for?
At the next class at Long Marsh E Wing I went through some of the fundamental ideas of sociology. I talked about Max Weber, the Protestant Work Ethic and the rise of capitalism. I wasn’t sure at what level to pitch the classes but I was determined not to have any kind of patronising approach to these men. I treated the sessions as if they were like any other class at a further education institute. Some of the group had dropped out but those who remained proved to be very sharp. They were all experts in one area of criminology, after all.
The Torture Gang Boss, Harry Starks, seemed particularly intelligent and lively in discussion, if a bit domineering, as I’d noticed before. He told me that he was determined to keep his mind alert amidst the stupefying effects of high-security imprisonment. He was worried that his long sentence might turn him into a zombie.
‘A lot of old lags, they get into exercise, body building, you know,’ he said. ‘They get obsessed by it. Some of them, I reckon, would prefer an extra inch on their biceps rather than a year off their sentence. Thing is, they neglect that very important muscle that lies gasping for exercise in their skull.’
The rest of the group agreed. One of the biggest fears of long-term imprisonment was mental deterioration. Education could be of some use, simply as a resistance to the mind-numbing effects of incarceration in the Submarine. I wanted it to be more than that.
I introduced Durkheim and the development of the concept of anomie that came with the growth of industrialisation. I mentioned the Chicago School and their studies of urban environments and social disorganisation. It was all leading somewhere. I wanted to guide the group into an understanding of deviancy theory. Then I could really take the part of the guilty men, or rather let them take their own part, in a discourse that would put their crimes in the context of a political struggle. That all forms of deviant behaviour were in some way a challenge to the normalised repression of the state.
But when I brought up the word deviant, there was a reaction in the group I hadn’t foreseen.
‘You mean we’re not criminals but deviants?’ someone asked.
‘That could be a way of looking at it,’ I replied.
‘What do you mean, deviants?’ Harry Starks demanded fiercely. ‘Like fucking nonces or something?’
The group bristled with barely suppressed fury. I felt that it could get ugly.
‘Are you saying we’re weirdos or perverts or something?’ someone called out. ‘Is that it?’
‘No,’ I tried to placate them. ‘That’s not what I mean.’
I waited for the room to calm down. It gave me time to think.
‘What I mean is,’ I went on, ‘all social groups make rules and find ways to enforce them. They decide what is normal for the group and what is deviant. Howard Becker talks about this in Outsiders. And when someone breaks a rule it’s not only the action that is seen as being outside the law, the person is as well. That’s what I mean by deviant. That someone is labelled as an outsider.’
The group chewed this over for a moment. Some looked towards Harry to see what he would say. He smiled.
‘Our problem isn’t that we’re outsiders, Lenny,’ he said, looking around the walls of the windowless workshop. ‘It’s that we’re insiders.’
And the room broke into much-needed laughter.
‘Right,’ I said when it had all died down. ‘Any other questions before we finish?’
‘Yeah,’ someone piped up from the back. ‘Why are you such a scruff, Lenny?’
‘What?’
‘Yeah,’ someone else chipped in. ‘You must be on a fair whack but you come in here looking like a tramp.’
I realised that appearance was everything to these men. A raw atmosphere demanded that one looked sharp. Even in drab prison-regulation gear they made an effort. To appear in control. My hippy aesthetic didn’t impress them at all. It didn’t look confrontational, it merely looked sloppy.
So I resolved to take their advice and smarten up. I felt that it might empower the group to show that I respected their value systems. And I might gain a bit more of their respect myself. I got rid of my old army-surplus jacket and bought a fingertip-length black leather coat. I dug out an old pair of chelsea boots and wore them instead of the tattered desert boots I habitually wore. I trimmed my beard into a sharp Van Dyke style and gathered my long hair into a ponytail so that it resembled the swept-back look that Harry Starks sported.
But Karen was not impressed.
‘You look like a pimp,’ was her dismissive judgement.
I managed to meet with her disapproval at almost every turn these days. It was like she was laying all of this resentment onto me.
‘The problem with all of this deviancy theory,’ she ranted on, ‘is that it’s all so male dominated. And it’s always male environments that you study. Skinheads, football hooligans, bank robbers. I think you get off on all this machismo.’
‘I think you can take this feminist critique a little bit too far,’ I countered.
‘Really? Well what about rapists?’ she demanded. ‘I suppose there’s rapists in that place you go to.’
I hadn’t thought about that. Were there rapists amongst the men that I taught? Again, ugly images of the Guilty Men and the bad things they had done flashed up in my mind.
‘So where do they fit into your theory of deviancy?’ Karen went on. ‘Eh?’
‘Well,’ I tried to reason. ‘Of course some things are, well, unacceptable. But maybe they’re better treated by something other than simple long-term imprisonment.’
‘Oh, I agree,’ she said with a gleam in her eye. ‘We think that they should be castrated.’
I didn’t ask Karen if she wanted to come to the party at Janine’s house. I
didn’t think that she’d enjoy it and I figured, the way thing’s were, we needed a bit of space.
‘You look great, Lenny,’ Janine enthused as I came into the party clutching a bottle of wine.
At least she approved. She was wearing a tight flowery T-shirt and blue velvet hipster jeans.
‘So do you,’ I told her.
And I felt good about my new image. It gave me an edge. Some of the arrogance of the E Wing inmates had rubbed off.
A rather loud second-year cornered me in the kitchen.
‘The things is, about your theoretical base,’ he droned, ‘is it’s all American. The Chicago School, Goffman, Becker. All Yanks. It’s like cultural imperialism.’
‘So,’ I shrugged casually. ‘It’s like Rock and Roll. We’re taking American ideas and doing it better. That’s all.’
That shut him up. Someone passed over a joint and I took a long toke, smiling at my own cleverness. I couldn’t help feeling pleased with myself. Sociology was by far the most fashionable, the hippest subject in academia of the time. And here I was, young, cool and at the heart of it.
Janine was trying to open a big Party Seven can of bitter.
‘Let me do that,’ I said. ‘You have some of this.’
I offered her the joint. She took it with a smile that showed a row of perfect white teeth. Someone put on ‘Street Fighting Man’ by the Stones.
‘Come on,’ I said to Janine. ‘Let’s have a dance.’
We strutted our stuff together in the tiny living room. Janine’s eyes half closed, her mouth half open, as she wiggled about in front of me. Her breasts bobbed up and down in time to Keith Richards’s power chords.
Later, we met on the stairs as I came out of the bathroom. She smiled up at me. I sat down on the top step so that our faces were level. I couldn’t think quite what to say.
‘Great party,’ I declared.
‘Yeah. Glad you came.’
‘So am I.’
I moved my face closer to hers. She blinked and pouted slightly. I kissed her on the mouth and ran a hand gently against a velvet-encased thigh. She pulled back and blinked again.
‘Not here,’ she whispered.
She continued up the stairs past me and, taking my hand, helped me to my feet.
‘Come on,’ she said, and led me through the door next to the bathroom. She clicked on a light. There was a poster of Che Guevara over the bed.
‘This is my room,’ she announced.
It all happened very quickly. Janine giggled as we took all our clothes off together. She giggled as she lay on the bed and let me put myself slowly inside her. Then she pushed at my chest.
‘Let me see,’ she demanded. ‘Let me see it going in and out.’
And when I had granted her request she giggled some more.
Afterwards we lay on the bed for a while and shared a cigarette. I tried to relax but I kept thinking that I had to get back. After a while I got up.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I said.
‘Don’t you want to do it again?’
I smiled thinly.
‘I’ve really got to go.’
Janine frowned.
‘Have you got a girlfriend, then?’
I nearly laughed. Girlfriend. Karen would love that.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘Well I mean, not a girlfriend. I’m in a relationship. An open relationship.’
‘So, they wouldn’t mind?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘They’ll be cool about it. But I really should be getting back.’
I travelled home in a taxi in a state of elated drowsiness. But as we pulled up in front of the house I found myself anxiously checking the windows to see if any lights were on. I felt something strange in the pit of my stomach as I paid the driver. The garden gate squeaked, delivering a verdict. Guilty.
There was much laughter at my next entrance to the workshop in the Submarine. Catcalls and wolf whistles greeted my sartorial transformation. But I felt a rough sort of camaraderie in it all.
‘You look like a Maltese ponce,’ commented Harry. ‘Still, it’s an improvement.’
I felt that I was beginning to gain their trust and that I was starting to get results from my work with them. Most of the class had already used some sort of reading or study or even writing in order to deal with the mental punishment of confinement. Now sociology gave them a structure within which they could understand their situation and a vocabulary with which they could resist it.
Power was at the heart of it, of course. Despite a constant assertion of authority over them, the men on E Wing always tried to display a superior attitude to the screws. They considered themselves both intellectually and culturally distinct. Being mostly from London, they endowed themselves with a metropolitan, or even cosmopolitan, smartness with which they looked down upon the dull, provincial mentality of their captors. They sometimes revelled in being pariahs since it gave them an elite status and even celebrity. Harry Starks once commented that: ‘These poor screws, spending all their waking hours on the wing, watching me, then when they get home and jump into bed with the missus, all she wants to know is: “Darling, did you speak to Harry today?”’
And as they studied their own predicament they could use a theoretical language in any verbal confrontation with prison staff or governors. A new-found articulacy could be a weapon for their embattled position in a power struggle that formed the very centre of gravity of prison life. Not as direct or as cathartic as the physical force they had used in the riot all those months ago, but a resistance of sorts none the less.
Sometimes its form would merely be humour.
‘So, this screw, you know, the stupid Geordie, he asks me at the end of last week’s class: “So Jeff, what did you learn tonight?” And I tell him, all straight-faced like, that we’d been discussing a report that gave conclusive evidence that prison officers are predominately authoritarian psychopaths. And the silly cunt just smiles at me and says: “Very good.”’
We’d spend a good deal of time in the classes discussing words. Sometimes to be clear about defining terms but sometimes just for the pleasure that some of the men had for understanding their meaning. For their own sake. They would enjoy having new definitions which they could apply to their own condition. They would use these words to spar with each other. Harry was particularly obsessed with expanding his vocabulary and applying new terms to his own experience or the environment around him. Recidivist became a particular favourite of his, I suspect partly because he found it so hard to pronounce at first. Once he had mastered it, it became something that he threw around with great regularity, often using it as a mild put-down to other cons. ‘That’s just what a recidivist would say,’ he’d retort to someone’s comment or: ‘Typical recidivist thinking.’
During one session he launched into an anecdote that he felt epitomised the definition of his new pet word.
‘When I was in Durham I came across this bloke, right, who must have held the British record for recidivism. He’s on the security wing and word gets around that he’s in under the Sexual Offences Act. He ain’t on Rule 43 with all the nonces, but if someone’s Category A, and it’s sexual, it’s bound to be something heavy. So, some of the chaps take a bit of an interest in this bloke, Frank was his name. He keeps himself to himself, but soon enough a couple of fellahs corner him on the landing. Looks nasty, like they’re going to do him with a razor or something but first they want to know what heinous crime he’s in for. They’ve got him up against the railings, he’s pleading and shit, then suddenly, they let him go and come down into association, pissing themselves laughing.
‘Turns out Frank wasn’t into little boys or little girls. He was into pigs.’
There was some laughter at this. Harry looked about the room with a mischievous gleam in his eye.
‘Yeah, old Frank had been making bacon in a big way,’ he went on. ‘Thing is, he couldn’t stop himself. His first offence dated years back to when he was a young impressionable lad, working on a farm. The
head pig man catches him at it, shops him, and he does a couple of months. But what do you think is going through his mind at night in his cell as he’s doing the old five-knuckle shuffle? Yeah, his little curly-tailed friends. So as soon as he gets out he finds himself another job on another pig farm, and he’s at it again. He keeps getting caught, keeps going back to it. Over the years he notches up over fifteen separate convictions for bestiality and a fair few for breaking and entering pig farms. The sentences pile up and he ends up Category A.
‘He got a bit of stick on the wing, but it was mostly verbal. Mind you, I did give him a slap myself once. One day, just out of curiosity, I turned to him and asked, “Frank, tell me, all those pigs you fucked, were they male or female?” And he looks at me, all affronted, and says, “They were sows, Harry. What do you think I am, queer or something?”’
There was more laughter which quickly petered out as Harry glared at the group.
‘So I decked the bastard. He said that to the wrong person, that’s for sure.
‘Anyway, the point I’m making is how fucked up this system is. I mean, it creates that sort of recidivism. Think about how much it costs society to keep Frank banged up every time he gets the urge. Then there’s the court costs, legal aid, police time. It’s a fucking fortune over the years. And it’s not as if Frank’s a menace to society. A menace to those little piggies maybe, though he always said they never complained. So wouldn’t it make more sense, in the long run, for the Home Office to buy Frank a couple of porkers and a little sty somewhere and let him get on with it?’
Harry had not only defined recidivism but had also outlined a fine example of deviancy theory. But the absurdity of the story seemed to undermine the very thesis that it proved. The sociology of deviance was already under attack from critics as a ‘misfit paradigm’ which deflected from any real attack on the power of the State. Anthony Platt accused us of ‘trivia and politically irresponsible hipsterism’. Whilst Alexander Liazos condemned an apparent preoccupation with ‘nuts, sluts, and perverts’, as he put it. In this context, Harry’s impromptu case study was vaguely disconcerting. And I couldn’t help thinking that he’d made up the whole thing to wind me up.
