The Loose Screw (31 page)

Depressing is the only way to describe my day-to-day working life at that stage as I waited for news of my transfer request. I was constantly battling to swim against the tide in terms of the attitude of the majority of staff towards their treatment of all inmates. It was clear to me that the Scrubs was too set in its way to accept change or an officer with different work ethics. Perhaps they were scared what might come out. At times it became so difficult that even I thought it might be easier just to fall in line with everyone else and act as they did, but my conscience would never allow it.

However, on Valentine's Day 1998 something happened that confirmed to me that it was worth persevering with my methods of working. I had arranged to meet Natasha after work to take her to the Valentine disco at the staff club. This was a bit of a private joke between us, as many years previously I had taken her to a country and western evening at Bexley mental home with my old army mate, Kia, as his sister and mum both worked there as psychiatric nurses. Natasha has never let me forget this romantic gesture, especially the bit when John Wayne chased her down the corridor in a wheelchair fully equipped with the Stetson and pair of six-guns whilst returning from the toilet!

Anyway, back to the Scrubs. I had just walked from B-Wing to the gate to deposit my keys when one of the gate staff informed me in their usually jolly style that I was to return to the wing immediately. My protests that I had prior engagements were ignored, as whatever was going on had caused a lockdown, meaning that no one could either leave or enter the prison anyway. I therefore had no choice but to return to the wing and see what was happening. On my arrival I was told to report to the threes landing office where I found the duty governor and senior wing management, who cut their conversation dead as soon as they saw me in the doorway.

I was informed that an inmate on the threes landing had barricaded himself in his cell and was threatening to harm himself and smash up the cell, and that he was refusing to come out until he had spoken to me. I walked down the landing to the area outside the cell to find about a dozen staff fully kitted out in riot gear, goading and tormenting the inmate through the door with threats of what was going to happen to him when they got hold of him for fucking up the wing routine -nice one boys! My first request was that they retreated to the landing office to remove the intimidation factor from an already tense situation. After some hesitation and protests from many of the squad's members, the governor reluctantly ordered them to retire to the office and I began talking to the inmate.

He had only been in the prison for about three or four days, and I noticed immediately a nervous fear in his voice. After ten minutes or so of my persuading him that the riot teams, which he described as 'the pack of wolves', were out of earshot and no one was taping or listening to our conversation, he began to calm down slightly. He agreed to take down enough of the barricade to allow me to gain entry and talk to him face to face, so long as I guaranteed that the riot teams would not storm the cell. I relayed this to the duty governor, who reluctantly allowed me to carry on. I must admit that I still could not guarantee that they would not storm the cell over me as soon as I gained entry, but it was a risk I had to take -not least because I was now keeping Natasha waiting and that was something I feared more than any riot team trampling over my head.

I knew the inmate in question was no threat, and as soon as enough of the barricade was removed I gained entry. I spent approximately half an hour talking to him about why he felt this course of action was necessary rather than talking to an officer. I should have known the answer to that one. He stated that he had been told by one of the cleaners that I was the only officer he could trust and that he was in fear of his life so he could not go to anyone else. It turned out that he had received threats of serious injury and persecution from a group of staff on the wing via a message from an inmate employed on the hotplate. Basically, he was told that the staff didn't like him and would make his life hell by victimizing him. He seemed genuinely in fear of his life and felt the action he had taken was the only way to avoid reprisals.

After he had told me this, I informed him that all I could do was transfer him to the rule 43 unit for his own protection, albeit against the staff rather than other inmates. Most inmates do not like this option, as rule 43 also houses the sex offenders and there is a danger that you could be mistaken for one of them, but this lad was so convinced that if he stayed on the wing he would be seriously injured or killed that he felt he had no other option. The problem was, he would not name the inmate messenger or the staff involved, if indeed he knew who they were at that stage. I knew that this would impede any subsequent investigation that I could initiate into these allegations; in short, the intimidation factor of these bully squads would prove enough, once again, to avert justice being done.

All I could do at that stage was promise him safe passage off the wing and onto the 43 unit and a guarantee that I would submit a report of what he had told me to the governor on that unit the following morning. I knew, however, that it would be taken no further and that any follow-up on my part would fall on deaf ears, and that by the morning the whole incident would be forgotten and the staff involved would be triumphant in the fact that they had got the inmate removed from their wing and would be free to move on to their next victim. All I had to do was persuade the duty governor to allow us safe passage from B-wing to the 43 unit without the overzealous riot teams jumping us halfway down the landing.

Permission was granted and I escorted the lad to the unit without incident, albeit with the riot teams close on our heels spouting threatening remarks in an attempt to keep the intimidation going. Once he had been delivered safely to the unit, I was able to leave and attend the Valentine disco, albeit a couple of hours late. We did not stay long, however, as word had obviously spread quickly about the incident. Let's just say that my ears were burning slightly and I could feel eyes glaring at me from various groups of officers around the club.

This incident confirmed two things to me: one, that I must be doing something right in the way I carried out my duties to gain that sort of trust from a very scared young man; and two, that I was never going to be accepted by the staff at the Scrubs and would always be an outsider. Thankfully, I did not have to suffer the backstabbing and dirty looks for much longer, as not long after that particular incident I received an official letter from Belmarsh's personnel department, giving me a transfer date that was about six weeks away.

I therefore decided that I needed to act swiftly and approach a letting agency about the flat. I found a tenant quickly and within two weeks I had moved into Natasha's house in Wildfell Close, Kent. I struggled with the two-hour commute to and from the Scrubs for the next few weeks, my imminent transfer date being the only thing that kept me from ending up like Michael Douglas in that film Falling Down. However, only days before my anticipated return to Belmarsh I was notified that once again there had been a fuck-up and I didn't have a place at all.

While waiting for news of my transfer, a further incident took place that was to be the final straw that broke the camel's back for me. As previously mentioned, an ongoing investigation was under way at that time into brutality against inmates by certain members of the segregation staff. Despite various attempts to exonerate the staff members involved, the net was closing in and this time, I am thankful to say, the outcome did not look good for them.

I came into work one morning to find the gate had been 'frozen' and all staff were to report to the officers' club. When I entered the club, I found that someone had opened the bar and it was packed with one hundred or so officers, many of whom were drinking pints of ale even though it was still only about seven in the morning. I asked one of the B-Wing officers what was going on, to which he replied that the POA (Prison Officers Association) had called a strike in support of the 'Scrubs Four', as the accused officers had been labelled.

I had not become a member of the POA, as I did not feel that the subscription fees each month validated the job they were supposed to do, so really I had no right to be there. I had not actually told anyone that I was not a member, as the Scrubs at the time was a staunch union prison, but I knew I would get no support if I decided to stay and, besides, I did not agree with what they were doing. I felt sure that the accused staff members were guilty and I did not feel they should be allowed to get away with their actions any longer.

I had to leave quietly and explain to the staff on the gate that I did not wish to join the action, and so I requested that they let me through to my place of work. As you can imagine, this blacklisted me even more than I was already, but I stood by my principles and I believe that made me a better man than most of those outside the gate. The strike went on for the whole of that day, and there were in fact about half a dozen of us nonunion members who had reported for duty that day.

Despite our initial fears of reprisals from the inmates for being on lockup most of the day, apart from feeding times, the majority of them respected the fact that if it had not been for we few and the governors drafted in from other London prisons, they would not even have received any meals that day. Needless to say, I was not flavour of the month when the rest of the staff returned to work, and I thought it best to take a few days off sick while the dust settled. Incidentally, the Scrubs at that time had one of the worst staff sickness records. I recall a funny thing I noticed when reporting back for duty: once so many staff were having time off and putting it down to sickness and diarrhoea, but they could not spell the latter on their self-certificated sick note, that they had written it in big letters on the noticeboard in the orderly room for all to copy.

Rather than bore you with the details of the problems I encountered trying to solve yet another red-tape fuck-up by the Prison Service, I will just say that this time my experience helped me to resolve the matter a lot quicker than the previous Scrubs transfer. It only took about a month of persistence on my part before I received concrete confirmation of my transfer to Belmarsh, and before I knew it I found myself back in the familiar surroundings of house block three's staff room.

16

BACK IN BELMARSH -AND OUT AGAIN

I felt relieved and happy to be back initially -relieved that I would no longer have to endure the rat race of commuting through London and happy that Natasha and I were together again. For the first time in my life, I felt everything was going right and we would be happy forever. Nothing had changed at 'the Marsh' apart from the fact that most of the young officers I had served with previously were now senior officers on the wings. The routine was still the same and house block three was still the induction wing.

I was soon reunited with my old mate Bosley who, I was pleased to see, had retained his dry sense of humour and 'don't give a fuck' attitude, and he quickly had me in fits of laughter once again. It didn't take long for me to fall back into the regime of the wing and begin to build my own unique rapport with the inmates on the house block. I had hoped to meet up with my old pal Charlie, who I thought might pass through at some stage, but unfortunately I was not to see him again until after I left the Prison Service. I learned that the Service had built a new 'super-max' unit at Woodhill Prison to house the prisoners considered to be the most dangerous in the system, and this was where Charlie had been sent.

I spent the next few weeks getting back into the prison's regime, or at least trying to as I had other more important things on my mind. Natasha was pregnant with Morgan and was not having a particularly easy time of it.

I was growing increasingly tired of the politics involved within the Prison Service and was becoming worried that, in order to comply with the way some of my colleagues thought a prison officer should behave, I would have to let them change who I was. This, of course, would go against the advice I had been given years earlier by my old mate Simon's dad, Jim, and I knew I didn't want to do that. I was now in a bit of a predicament: I knew I had to get out of the Prison Service, but I still had a family to support and it was a well-paid secure job if nothing else.

The numbers of assaults were on the increase as well as the numbers of suicides, or attempted ones, by inmates. Many members of staff treated these attempts as a bit of a joke and would even ignore the routine of keeping an eye on inmates on suicide watch in the sick hope that they would actually do themselves harm. I had witnessed such attempts before and had seen inmates who had cut themselves, overdosed and hung themselves using their bed sheets -some unsuccessfully, and some who had actually achieved their aim.

One particular suicide attempt I witnessed was probably the final straw so far as my decision to leave the Service was concerned. It was not the most gruesome suicide attempt I had seen. It was more the way in which it was handled that finally pushed me to the decision that enough was enough. It involved a young inmate on the threes landing, who was obviously finding prison life difficult and who had already fallen foul of the stronger inmates and bully element of officers. As a result, he was on suicide watch.

On that particular day, I came on duty after lunch and began to unlock the threes landing. That was when I discovered the inmate lying on his bed, which was partially covered in blood. He had cut both his wrists with the razor blade I could see lying in a pool of blood on the floor, although he was still very much alive, indicating that he had only just carried out the attempt. I immediately put on a pair of surgical gloves, which I always carried with me, and began to wrap his wrists in towels. Whilst doing so, I sent another inmate to alert the staff so they could arrange for medical assistance. Some ten minutes later no one had arrived, so I decided to take the inmate to the house block's treatment room. I told him to keep his hands raised in order to stem some of the flow of blood from his wrists, and helped him along the landing.