Strangeways

by Neil Samworth

  Workwise, after leaving school at seventeen I’d done a youth training scheme in engineering. Despite failing the exam – I was more interested in rugby and going on the piss – it led to my first job at a knife manufacturer in Sheffield, where there’s a lot of that about. Ninety-nine hours for ninety-nine quid. It was an eye opener – only thirty lads to four hundred women. If you bent over a machine you got back-scuttled. Your arse would be purple. One lass took her teeth out and kissed me – I was there four years at a time when sexual harassment wasn’t seen as the serious issue it is today. Even that place had its tragic side though. I got my first proper taste of how I’d react in a crisis.

  It came about when a kitchen knife got stuck between a pair of rollers that dropped horizontally to polish the blades. The machine stopped moving and the kid who tried to unjam it forgot to switch it off. He tried to pull the knife free, and the thing sprang back to life, dragging his arm in up to the top. It took the lot, muscle, sinew, fat, you name it; there was a big bulge at his shoulder. Rollers get hot, so it burned him too. Not surprisingly he passed out, so we had to take it in turns to hold him up. It took a fitter twenty minutes with spanners to unwind the machine and get him clear. People complain about health and safety – I’ve done it myself – but sometimes, you know, it does make sense.

  It was at the knife factory that I met the lass I married. Even as we were going to the registry office, I was saying to Mark, my best man, ‘Let’s sack this and go on the ale.’ By the time he’d argued me around we were in the car park with people stood around waiting.

  The next place I worked at had a bloke on an invalid scooter who’d been there years. One day, a bit of metal broke off a spinning-machine, size of a house brick, and hit him full on in the face, killing him instantly. He was splattered as if by a shotgun, poor sod.

  By Christmas 1984, what with everything going on, I’d ballooned up to twenty-one stone, was divorced, and in a very short space of time ended up in a squat. Fortunately I’d another engineering job by then, but otherwise, bare floorboards, no heating, no water or bath, fuck all. I’d do my twelve-hour shift at the factory, get showered there either side of it, then pub, chippy and home at eleven, head down in sleeping bag. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. That was my life for eighteen months, so I know what it’s like to be homeless, although I did have food in my belly and I was working.

  Then I was made redundant, so I was out of work too. Come Christmas 1985, I was starving and by that time had another mouth to feed, a dog I kept for company. We’d follow the old Express Dairies milkman around and swipe potatoes and other produce off people’s doorstep. Well, I would. The dog had no hands. Once a week I’d walk around to my nan’s for a hot meal, but I was too proud to go every day, cap in hand. This was when the Tories put a clamp on benefits and wanted people to move around the country – Tebbit’s famous ‘on your bike’ speech. I’d had no money for two months when one of the neighbours began bringing me a bag of groceries once a week, which was very good of them, and I made it last. On Christmas Day, the dog and me had potatoes four ways: chips, jacket, mash and roasties, with gravy. I’ve been homeless and I’ve been starving, but not at the same time. How people who are both of those manage, I really don’t know.

  Things did look up. My dog went to live with my uncle and I could afford to rent again after I got a job manufacturing drill chucks. I was there seven years; secure employment saved my skin. I was shit at it to begin with, but when they got a new line in from France I moved over to that and never looked back. Well, not until the company was sold off to China. When we arrived for work one day, the gates were chained.

  My second marriage was a happier affair. She was a nurse and we were together fifteen years until we began to drift apart. By 1998 we’d split up. I then lodged with Julie, a friend of a friend, for three-and-a-half years. That helped me out, settled me down and got me back into a routine that now involved a college massage course run by Alison, the wife of our rugby club president. I got into aromatherapy, Indian head massage, reiki healing – your alternative Japanese stuff, all a bit spiritual and out there. I even began to teach it. I got £40 a night, two nights a week, for that.

  I was also a bouncer. Friday nights at Gatecrasher in Sheffield – earplugs recommended – or at Hanrahans, a trendy wine bar that attracted thugs and celebrities. Jarvis Cocker, Phil Oakey . . . we had them all in there. One famous, er, face was Dane Bowers, who made that sex tape with Jordan. He had a meal with his mate and gave the waitresses and chefs a hundred quid tip. He did the same with the bar staff, who never got tipped usually. On the way out he shook my hand, forty quid in it. Never judge a book by its cover – a useful life lesson.

  Hanrahans was also where I first had a gun put in my face. Two local gangsters rocked up, hard as fuck, and people were fearful. They had a beef with the manager and pointed the shooter at me.

  ‘Can we come in for a drink?’

  ‘I’m on £9 an hour, of course you can.’

  That emptied the bar. There were no last orders that night.

  Then a mate of mine’s cousin gave me the number of a company set up by former prison officers. He was an officer himself and told me I should call them. They dealt in female-only secure mental health units – for some reason called ‘forensic units’ – that come in varying degrees, like prisons. High-security units include places like Rampton and Broadmoor. In medium-security units people can’t get out unless supervised.

  The two places this company had were medium security. They were after hired muscle essentially, although the job was far subtler than that. I told them I’d been a doorman for a while, got the job and worked there two years. I’d done nothing like it before. It was a great experience, though quite stressful and certainly challenging.

  The units I worked at looked like renovated hotels over two floors. One was just outside Chesterfield, the other in Mansfield. They housed anyone from schizophrenics to girls who’d been hospitalized back in the day because they got pregnant out of wedlock. When I started I was asked to have a read of a few case files, not too many as that would get in my head. It pulled me up short.

  The vast majority of patients – aged twenty to around sixty – had been harmed or raped as children by supposed friends and family. One, abused by her parents, was put in the custody of her grandparents, who continued the abuse. At seventeen, she’d cut her grandad’s throat and stuck a stiletto heel in Grandma’s head. When I met her she was a pensioner, her entire life since spent in mental institutions. A standard life sentence would have seen her released after fifteen years. Put someone healthy in a place like that and they can become unwell just through learned behaviour: stay around mentally ill people and you can take on their traits.

  The company wanted us to be as natural as possible, because the unit was these women’s living space. But I was a male in a female environment, so had to be careful how I behaved. No walking around arms folded like a bouncer on a door. If somebody went off on one, you’d sit with her while she had dinner, take her into the garden, perhaps, or go shopping. One patient I’d been watching was lying quietly on her bed when a pool of blood began billowing around her. She asked me to get a nurse, who found a piece of metal she’d used to cut herself.

  That woman had some heft about her – a lot of psychiatric patients do. One side effect of antipsychotic drugs is weight gain, especially for women. Imagine being mentally unwell, size ten and going in hospital. Two years later you’re a size twenty-two and have put on eight stone. Not good. She’d gone through the top layer of skin and a layer of fat: her intestines were protruding. The nurses made no fuss. There was no rushing about.

  ‘All right, love, we’ll get you off to hospital,’ one said calmly.

  Her stomach was stapled, and the next day she was back with us.

  But it was endless. The Chesterfield unit had about thirteen lasses upstairs and seven or eight down, who were more of a handful. Mansfield had twenty in total, again over two floors. Some days
there might be forty staff, because if one kicked off, they all did. In the morning, someone self-harming would get upset. Then another would, and another, until by the end of the day the place was bouncing. They could be violent as well. You’d get punched, spat at, bitten and we had to use as little force as possible to restrain them.

  One self-harmer was pinned to the floor for thirty-six hours, on and off. She had cut herself and began pulling the stitches out. At one point, when we’d got her calmed down, she was allowed back to her room. She slammed the door and immediately smashed her head against a mirror. It went on like that. She’d relax, you’d think it was over, and then bam! We rotated staff, put pillows under her head, turned her over, got her up for a cup of tea, and she’d harm herself again . . . I spent a thirteen-hour shift with her. We were talking to her all the time . . . ‘would you like a drink’ . . . ‘are you going for a cigarette’ . . . and when we’d let her up she’d run straight into a wall, smash a cup on her head or something. She was sedated for a while, but then off she went again.

  All in all, it was a very intense job yet also fulfilling. I enjoyed chatting to the women; their stories were fascinating. It felt worthwhile, like I was really helping people. I connected really well with some patients, many very wary of men, given their backgrounds. I was quite proud of that. The few blokes employed, former prison officers among them, could be a bit unapproachable, but I really tried. I put my heart and soul into it.

  While there, I got offered a chance to work in the private prison sector.

  Forest Bank, Salford, was as good as new. A Category B men’s nick – originally designed as a maximum-security Cat A, but immediately downgraded one level below for reasons I don’t know. It had opened in January 2000, the year before I arrived. There are four categories of prison security: Cat A, whose prisoners are judged highly dangerous to the public or national security; Cat B, whose prisoners are marginally less dangerous – allegedly – but for whom escape still needs to be extremely difficult; and Cat C for lads and lasses who still need to be in a closed prison but are unlikely to try to get out. Open prisons are Cat D, where the cons can be reasonably trusted.

  Private jails get a bad press compared to public ones. That’s partly because when they open it tends to be with fresh-faced staff. Cons sniff weakness a mile away, so anyone raw soon gets terrorized or becomes a target. The other thing is that when you open a new prison, the rest don’t send their quietest and most peaceful inmates. Obvious when you think about it: if you’re at Durham prison, say, and hear you can send twenty lads to this new joint, you don’t go to the wing where you keep your white-collar crooks, do you? You get rid of all the dregs – the disruptive bastards who won’t toe the line. That was how it was at Forest Bank. I met several dodgy customers there that I’d later run into again and put behind their doors in Strangeways.

  As I say, I enjoyed working at the female mental health units, although the full-on nature of the place along with all the other stuff I was doing (working as a bouncer and masseur) was taking its toll. I was knackered. So much so that I sold my possessions and went to India with my landlady Julie and her boyfriend on a much-needed break. I’d been mulling over the prison service for a while, some of the lads in the units talked about it, so I applied direct to Forest Bank and got offered the job. The very day I had to let them know was the day we flew home from India. It would have been dead easy to keep going as I was, floating about aimlessly, not in a relationship or anything, but my nan’s voice kept coming back: ‘You never regret what you do, only what you don’t,’ so I gave it a whirl. What did I have to lose?

  Actually, part of me wanted to stay in India, and I sometimes wish I had. But then I wouldn’t have met our firestarter, Thomas Riley, would I, and hundreds of twats like him.

  2. Lippy Kids

  Forest Bank in Salford was a modern building, fronted by what is known as a sterile area – essentially a place that inmates never enter. In this case, it was an office block where you hung up your coat, collected your keys, handed in your phone or whatever on arrival. Then, beyond a gated vehicle space and fenced walkway, also sterile, came the prison proper.

  The entry point was ‘Main Street’, around 150 metres long and maybe 12 metres wide. Running horizontally off that were various buildings – gym, prisoner reception, kitchens, chapel, medical centre, workshops, etc. – along either side. At the end of the street was the four-storey housing block that held the prison wings – six in total, A, B, C, D, E and F Wing, but two floors each, so A1, A2, B1, B2 and so on. All the cells on the ‘ones’, first floor, were doubles, around eighteen of them, accommodating two people. The ‘twos’ on the second floor were single occupation.

  The wings were flooded with natural light because the wall at the end of each was almost totally toughened glass. The cells contained fixed furniture of the type you might find at Ikea – open wardrobes, a little table to eat at, that sort of thing, very compact and well designed. Everything was made easy. Each wing had its own exercise yard next to its gate, so there was less need to escort inmates around.

  At Forest Bank, if someone had to go to work, you’d just let them off the wing and they’d walk there, perhaps thirty metres, on their own: no prison officer required. Movement was far easier than at Strangeways. Nowadays it holds more prisoners than Strangeways too, up to 1,600, yet covers only about a quarter the amount of land. Comparisons, though, would come later. However superior Salford’s layout was, starting work there was still a real shock to the system.

  I drove over from Sheffield to begin with and that first morning I remember sitting in my car, an hour early, just staring at the walls and crapping myself. Am I gonna be tough enough? Am I gonna have to fight people every day? What exactly am I gonna have to face? I’d done my nine weeks’ training at a centre away from the prison, but this shit just got real.

  Clocking on would again stand comparison with Strangeways, only not in such a positive light. Because the place was so compact and well designed, they needed fewer staff, so there weren’t as many fellow officers to blend in with. And the first thing the prison did was put you on Main Street, where there might be 300 prisoners walking past you to work. They’d all be eyeballing you and making comments as they went by – ‘Shitting yourself, boss?’, that sort of thing. One con, passing another new officer, said, ‘Boo!’ The kid jumped and they all laughed. You were on your own.

  Within that first week, I worked an all-dayer with young offenders on a YP (Young Persons’) Wing which housed eighteen to twenty-one year olds – a nightmare population. They’re not kids at that age, are they? When I was twenty-one I was tackling hairy-arsed prop forwards. That shift, which kicked off at half six in the morning, felt endless; stressful doesn’t come close. They were taking the piss. At night, the prisoners were supposed to be locked up by eight o’clock. It got to half past and I had to phone for help. A manager came on with one other officer and – bam! – straight behind their doors. Driving back to Sheffield I wondered what the fuck I had done. There was no way I was giving up though; my nan’s voice in my head again.

  There were two YP wings at Forest Bank at that time, built like every other wing to hold eighty-six prisoners, though we were never quite full. A1 was for sentenced YPs, A2 for enhanced sentenced YPs. ‘Enhanced’ meant the lads who’d behaved well enough to earn privileges like extra visits, etc., so they were less hassle. B1 was for remand YPs, who were the worst, and B2 for enhanced remand YPs. Watching them on each floor were three members of staff, including me on B Wing. There were a lot of big lads and a lot of violent lads, it really mashed your head in. They were fighting every day, not with us necessarily but with each other. All on the juvenile estate know that these so-called children are among the most violent characters in prison. Some may not have maturity or size, but they need managing with a firm hand. Anyone who chooses to work with young offenders I applaud.

  Incidents piled up and not always in Forest Bank itself. I got asked to accompany a t
eenager called Mark on a four-officer escort to a hospital in Liverpool. His notes described him as a violent offender and very unpredictable. There was quite definitely something odd about him, standoffish. Usually in hospitals they put prisoners in a side room, out of the way of general public. Not this time. We went in a massive waiting room, size of a church hall, never seen anything like it. It was packed, full of people and, guess what, they’re not all looking at him. They are staring at us.

  It was uncomfortable. Comments were being made out loud, ‘Fucking screws.’ I was all for drawing a line under it and taking Mark back to prison.

  Then one member of the audience made a comment about battering us and the officer in charge, big bloke, bit of bottle, suddenly said, ‘It’s all right looking at us like this, you don’t know what this twat’s in for.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ this Scouser replied.

  ‘Well, think.’

  ‘Is he a fucking nonce?’

  Now I didn’t know what he was in for, even though he was on my wing, but the atmosphere changed. It got even more hostile, only now Mark was the target. Fortunately, one of the nurses saw what was happening and moved us to a side ward pronto.

  Back at the prison I decided to have a nosey at his background on the computer and what I discovered didn’t make for pleasant reading. He’d broken into the home of an elderly pensioner, robbed and killed him, and then gone back for a fortnight buggering his corpse. Not your average teenage misbehaviour that, is it?