The Loose Screw (27 page)

After a month or two, I had forgotten all my fears of working on a house block and had become happy carrying out my duties there. We had our fair share of fun and games as well as our fair share of nutters who passed through our doors. One group of inmates we received shortly after Christmas was a gang of about eight Chinese triads on remand for kidnap and arson. These boys were scary and wasted no time in establishing their authority amongst the other inmates. They spoke very little English, or so they made out, and the first incident we had involving these budding Bruce Lees occurred moments after their arrival on the house block. They had been brought up from reception and placed in the holding room with about half a dozen other inmates to await allocation to a vacant cell.

Minutes after they had arrived we heard an almighty commotion coming from the holding room. When we arrived we saw the Chinese beating the shit out of one of the other inmates in the room. We opened the door and intervened and all the Chinese bowed politely to us and retreated to the back wall of the room. It turned out that one of their number had wanted to go to the toilet and so had just pissed in the corner of the room. This had disgusted the other inmates and the one who had just got the kicking had been nominated to vent the feelings of the rest of the group.

We removed the injured man and made the Chinese inmate mop up his pool of urine. Satisfied that the incident had been dealt with, we locked them back up again. Not five minutes later we heard someone frantically banging on the window of the holding room. When we investigated, the inmate who was banging shouted through the glass that the Chinese were tooled up and ready to kick off. This was obviously a far more serious threat to us and the other inmates in the room than the previous incident. The fact that a knife had been mentioned meant that we would have to tackle the incident wearing riot gear and using shields. The use of such equipment was standard procedure when dealing with armed inmates should a peaceful settlement be unsuccessful.

As we donned our overalls, helmets and protective leg gear, Governor Outram began to use his powers of persuasion, which he had successfully executed when Charlie had been given the news of his setback on the unit. This was a difficult task even for him, as the language barrier severely slowed down the negotiations and we could not afford to wait for a suitable interpreter to be called in.

Eventually Outram took the unusual decision to be the first to enter the room without any protective clothing but closely followed by those of us that now formed the four three-man riot teams. You may think this was a foolish decision, but had we rushed in with guns blazing the Chinese inmates who were armed may have had a chance to injure some of the other inmates or some of us before we could disarm and restrain them all. With Outram leading the way in a non-aggressive approach he hoped to minimize casualties on all sides.

The plan worked and, whether it was down to his approach or the sight of the riot teams, luckily we did not have to remove any inmates aggressively as they surrendered their home-made knives and walked out peacefully. This particular gang caused a few problems during their stay with us, as I have already mentioned. The main thing they would practise was intimidation of other inmates by preying on them in the recess or in the phone queue. They met their match though when a large gang of Jamaican yardies arrived on the house block and made it quite clear that they would not stand for any nonsense from the Chinese.

That is the way prison life goes. It is a constant battle to survive and it really is survival of the fittest or hardest. As an officer you have to learn to judge each and every incident individually and try to act accordingly depending on that particular situation. This may mean that you turn a blind eye to certain things or you may have to steam in to help an inmate who is in trouble.

Whatever the Prison Service claims, I stand by the belief that the inmates run the landings and wings of our prisons. The most successful way to run a prison is to find a happy medium where the inmates and staff can work together. There are very few prisoners in the system that go out of their way every day to cause disruption, and the majority of the ones I have witnessed doing so have all had very good reasons. How many of you would smash up your living room and destroy your television just for the fun of it?

When a prisoner gets frustrated over not getting a valid explanation to a certain problem, the main way that he can get heard is by smashing up his cell. I have witnessed many, many officers refuse to speak to an inmate and forcibly lock him up to get rid of the problem. They then ignore the cell call bell that inmates use to get a member of staff, and sit and wait until the prisoner gets so frustrated and angry that he starts to smash things up. This then gives those officers who love to wind up inmates the 'valid' excuse to get on their riot gear and go into the cell to remove the inmate by force.

To many members of staff it is part of their daily routine to play such mind games and ultimately get 'hands on' a prisoner before taking him down to the segregation unit and nicking him for assault on staff and damaging prison property. Both these charges are considered very serious and can result in the inmate receiving many days added to his sentence as well as weeks spent in isolation. This sort of behaviour only helps to breed hatred towards the staff by the inmates and can send a man who just wants to do his bird and get out into a deep black hole that can be very difficult to get out of.

By about January 1996 I had begun to find it increasingly difficult to work with many of my fellow officers and felt under pressure more and more each day to help them cover up some of their acts of brutality or false accusations against some inmates. I was being talked about in the staff room more and more and was beginning to find it almost impossible to carry out my duties in my own unique way. I felt that I might not have any option but to resign, although financially I knew I could not afford to do so.

When a position in the segregation unit came up my name was put forward by the senior management on the house block as they wanted me out because they had grown worried that I might report certain officers' behaviour to a higher level. The fact of the matter was, I knew that if I had done so no one would have taken any notice and I would have been transferred or sacked and totally alienated from other members of staff.

I took up the position in the seg as I thought it might give me a break from the pressure I was under, not that I was given a choice really. At about that time I had moved out of Heartbreak Hotel and had moved in with my old army pal Harry in his flat in Uxbridge. The main reason for this was the fact that I felt I could not have Lauren to stay in a flat with twenty or so pissed-up screws bringing all sorts of birds home at all hours. The other reason was that I was beginning to get tired of other officers' company at work, let alone twenty-four hours a day. Also, the travelling was becoming difficult and the shift pattern in the seg unit was slightly more flexible than the one on the house block and allowed me an extra forty-five minutes in the morning to travel across London.

Taking all those points into consideration, I felt I had nothing to lose by transferring to the seg, and so at the end of January I reported to the acting senior officer for my first day's duty.

14

BELMARSH SEGREGATION UNIT

Belmarsh prison boasts one of the largest segregation units of all British prisons. The unit was laid out over two floors and was equipped with approximately twenty single cells, two strong boxes, its own exercise yard and its own kitchen area. Its appearance was certainly less grim than the seg unit I remembered from Wandsworth.

I walked to the office, which was situated on the first floor of the unit, and entered it to find about six officers slouched around on various chairs. As I entered, the young officer who was sat behind the main desk looked at me and stuttered, "Y-y-your la-la-late". Fighting back the urge to laugh at this strange-looking kid with his college boy baby-faced features and silly Tintin haircut, I just told him to fuck off and made my way to the kettle to make a cup of tea.

As it turned out, this Tintin lookalike was actually the acting senior officer of the segregation unit, which will give you some idea of the state of things at Belmarsh at that time. To make matters worse, he was quite a big bloke and really fancied himself as a bit of a hard man. During my time there I learnt to tolerate him because I had to work with him, but his arrogant nature and opinion that he knew everything about everything was typical of the type of person I despise.

After I had finished my cup of tea, Tintin paired me up with his mate Simon, an ex-navy officer, who was also a pain in the arse who thought he was the dog's bollocks, for a tour and brief induction into the seg unit's regime. In his opening speech to me he more or less said that we were a law unto ourselves in the unit and it was a cushy little number as we got to give some of the arseholes a dig when they stepped out of line. He told me that when a prisoner was first brought down to the seg we would always take over from the escorting staff and place the prisoner into one of the two strip cells on the ground floor. We would then carry out a full strip search on the inmate and, once done, we would vacate the cell, leaving the prisoner a special suit to put on and a heavy-duty grey blanket on the floor. The prisoner would remain in these conditions until he had been seen by a prison medical officer, usually a nurse not a doctor.

Many of these nurses, both male and female, at that time were fully fledged prison officers and not agency nurses like some are now. The problem with this was that if the inmate complained of injury the nurse who examined him would not report the full extent of these injuries on their form or they would state that they were self-inflicted during a struggle with the staff. Don't get me wrong, I have witnessed many prisoners harming themselves by splitting their own heads open on cell doors in order to claim they have been assaulted. Such incidents are, however, rare whereas cases of nurses covering up genuine injuries are more common than you may wish to think.

The seg unit, as I was made aware of on that first day, was the end of the line for an inmate involved in problems on the wings. It was also the place where most of the reports were written with the help of other more experienced members of staff to cover up any over-the-top behaviour carried out by staff whilst restraining an inmate. This procedure would involve all the staff involved in the initial incident, the governor who was present during the removal and even some of the seg staff, who liked to give their previous experience on dealing with such delicate reports.

Once an inmate was in the seg he would remain in a cell on the ground floor until the following morning, when he would go in front of the governor to be adjudicated on for his crime against the prison rules. In the vast majority of cases he would be found guilty and some would receive an award, i.e. they would stay in the seg, while others would be sent back to the house blocks. If an inmate were sentenced to remain in the block, he would be relocated to a cell on the first floor for the duration of his stay.

It became apparent to me at a very early stage that even though the seg staff usually had very few inmates under their charge at any one time, they were even less eager to give them their daily rights than those staff I had left on the house blocks. To ensure that their daily workload was kept to a minimum, they had devised an unwritten rule between themselves and one that I had to swear never to reveal to any senior management. This rule was called the 'first day rule' and as its name suggests was carried out on all inmates during their first day of incarceration in the block.

The daily routine always began with the taking of applications during the serving of breakfast. Each inmate had this one and only chance to make an application for all his basic rights for that day. He would have to request a shower, a telephone call, a medical appointment with a nurse, and even his one statutory entitlement of one hour's exercise. If the inmate was asleep when we went to his door, no attempt would be made to wake him and he would be marked in the book as having refused breakfast and applications.

Similarly, if the inmate wanted to report sick he would be told that he would be placed on a three-day rest-in-cell routine, during which time he would not be able to make applications. This particular 'rule' was done without the knowledge of any medical staff. The theory behind this, according to the brainchild who introduced it, was that if the inmate were genuinely sick he would still be sick in three days' time, at which point he would be allowed to book an appointment with the nurse.

During an inmate's first day on the block he was advised that due to the 'first day rule' he was not entitled to any applications or privileges and would spend the first twenty-four hours locked up in his cell. Most prisoners feared reprisals too much to question this rule, as they knew that down the block there was only ever one prisoner unlocked at any one time and he was always faced with no less than four officers.

With all these schemes in place for denying the inmates their routine and rights, it meant that we had nothing to do all day except feed them and sit in the office watching television. If an inmate insisted on taking his exercise, the staff would usually cancel it at the last minute for a number of excuses ranging from "We had an incident" to "It looks like rain". Although I did not agree with this method of working, the fact that all the other members of staff did very little but sit in the top office telling war stories, I could escape and enjoy my own company in the bottom office, which was vacant.

One of the first prisoners I came across in the seg was a young but big and loud man by the name of Strachan. He had run into problems on the wing basically because his face did not fit, but he was not going to allow anyone to push him about. Many officers regarded his large physique and loud personality as a threat to their authority and so orchestrated an incident, which would ensure he was restrained and removed to the block. His first period with us was for fourteen days and he settled in well and seemed to be enjoying the time on his own away from the hectic routine and certain officers on the house block.