Strangeways

by Neil Samworth

  William Cassidy had put in a complaint. We briefed these old dears, safety pins in their skirts, about the state he was in, and recommended they speak to him from behind the screen, at a safe distance from the door. It was for their own wellbeing. Even in a new prison, cell doors are rarely a perfect seal. The lock side? Yeah, tight. Precision fit. The hinges at the other side, though, created a gap you could get a slice of bread through. Prisoners used to throw playing cards covered in shite out. Hence the screen. That wasn’t good enough for one of them, though, who toddled off like Miss Marple to have a word. She couldn’t hear him, she said, and moved to the side of the screen. ‘Don’t do that, please,’ I warned, but up went the hand – I could talk to that. And sure enough, before long out came the golden spray. I watched the jet of piss cascading off her plaid woollen skirt.

  ‘Ethel!’ her mate shouted, and off they went, not so prim, proper and matronly any more.

  The SO said to place Cassidy on report, which I did. All fell quiet for a while. I kept having a look in at him, though, and sure enough at one point saw him setting his cell on fire. People like that get to a point in their life where they’ve nowhere to go.

  He’s not usually getting out of his cell covered in shit, piss and blood, as he was. There are rules to deal with prisoners in that state. To open the door we’d have to get kitted up: PPE, white suits over that, white boots on top of your boots, easily disposed of afterwards. The big SO, good and sensible, agreed we hadn’t time. I got the hose, ran to the cell and kicked the screen aside, jetting water down the sides of the door as best I could before cracking the bolt. The flames were getting higher.

  The walls were red hot, smoke swirling low as a dawn mist. He’d stuck wet tissue around the cracks in the door to hide what he was doing. It had only been going a few minutes, but Cassidy was face down on the deck, unconscious and covered in bubbling shite. We dragged him out and began compressions. He wasn’t alight so when the nurses arrived they got stuck in, knelt in all sorts. Most are young and female; there are very few male nurses in prison – maybe half a dozen in my time.

  They made sure he was breathing and got him an ambulance. Off to hospital he went with smoke inhalation damage, master of his own downfall. That new twelve-year sentence still makes me chuckle.

  3. Bitter Sweet Symphony

  You may think there is no alcohol in prison, in which case you’d be wrong. All you need is sugar, water and fruit. Once it ferments, fill your boots. Cons are smart. They’ll use Ovaltine powder because it’s got yeast in. A prisoner has twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week to play games with you. If there is hooch on a wing and they know cell searches are coming, they might hide it in a bin on the landing. There is never enough staff to detect everything.

  I was locking up once at Forest Bank on F Wing and got a whiff of that distinctive sweet stink. It was the usual tale at banging-up time, lads fannying about getting tobacco – known inside as ‘burn’ – milk or coffee, and one kid tipped me off, ‘Best go up there, Mr S. Some lads in a tangle.’

  The closer I got the worse the sickly whiff grew – rancid oranges, mainly. Not only that, there was a smell of vomit. I looked in: there were four of them – a dad, his son, an uncle and their mate, every last one unconscious, and the stench was nasty. The prisoners were going behind their doors then anyway, and a call went out for medical staff and an ambulance. The son, dad and uncle went off in that while the friend was shipped to healthcare. Although sparko, they had to be cuffed to officers. One of the older pair died of alcoholic poisoning.

  At the inquest it was revealed that between them they’d drunk about twenty-three litres of hooch. And when tested, it was between 21 and 23 per cent proof. I got questioned: ‘How did you not see it?’ The new lad I’d been on shift with sat in the office all day terrified. He was about nineteen, and prison officer is not a job for a nineteen-year-old. The private sector is all about bums on seats.

  One lad in seg’, John Dand, an ex-young offender, was on remand for murder. He’d gone on a revenge mission with a gun and shot someone dead at a party, case of mistaken identity as it turned out. At this point in his prison career he was about twenty-two years old and had already carved quite a reputation. Now he’d been found in the prison yard, out of his head on hooch.

  We’d carted him to the seg’, he’d fought back, and hadn’t been in long when he blacked out and began spewing. Segregation and healthcare had adjoining doors, so we took him to an observation cell in there. Around teatime, a nurse manager phoned to ask if we could take him back as he was coming around.

  So off we went and there he was, hung over and booting fuck out of the door. There were four of us plus the duty Oscar One, who said, ‘Right lads, you can either get kitted up or we can treat this as spontaneous.’ Getting kitted up can be a ball-ache: overalls, gloves, helmets, boots, pads . . . so we decided to go in and, being a big daft Yorkshire twat, I went first, rugby tackling him to the floor. Normally prisoners comply once restrained. Not this fucker. He’d have none of it, spitting, swearing . . . taking huge swings that thankfully missed. We got him to his feet, cuffed him, but still had to take him to the floor a few times as we hauled him out of healthcare.

  ‘Fucking hell, Dandy,’ I said. ‘Give it a rest. Behave.’

  He kicked his legs out, trying to trip us up, butting his head. This one time he went down the Oscar tapped his head with the side of his boot, barely a touch. He was still squirming, though, so we had to manhandle him. With a non-compliant prisoner, that’s a dangerous thing to do, as you are either lugging a dead weight or can be ragged all over. They teach you to be careful. And you carry them on their back. I took one arm, another guy cradled his head, my SO had the other arm and two lads wrapped his legs. Still creating, he spat right in my face, so I wiped it off with one hand and put the other over his mouth so he wouldn’t be trying that again. It was a revolting thing to do.

  This relocation, through a couple of gates and over fifty metres, took a good twenty-five minutes. You get out of breath. As he was non-compliant, once we got him back to seg’ we put him in the special cell – bare, nothing in it. There’s a couple of observation points in the ceiling, where you can go up some steps and keep an eye on them every five minutes or so, to make sure they’re all right.

  So we’ve carried this joker into the cell on his back, me on his left arm. At this point no other staff should enter. We were going to strip search him, as decently as we could, to be sure he’d no weapons to harm himself or anyone else with. The plan was to leave him with a blanket, boxers, socks, maybe a T-shirt. One lad went out, leaving four of us in there, not counting the prisoner who was now on his front, arms cuffed behind him.

  At which point, the SO turned this lad’s head to the side and banged him one, right on the nose. Why he did that, I don’t know. Dand had calmed down a bit, but his hooter was split now, claret all over the shop. The rest of us looked at each other in disbelief – What the fuck has he done that for? – while our hooch-supping friend rallied in strength, calling us dirty bastards.

  Somehow we managed to follow the strip search routine and eventually left the cell. As usual, there was a nurse on hand to check the prisoner was uninjured or record any cuts and bruises, and on this occasion also a healthcare manager. Neither could fail to notice fresh blood that wasn’t on his face when we wrestled him in. This manager gave us a knowing look and returned from where she came.

  Within half an hour, the Oscar One was walked off the premises pending investigation, accused of kicking a prisoner in the head. And what’s more, the prisoner wanted to phone his solicitor citing assault. The duty manager came and got the lad out on the landing, where the three of us, including the SO who’d twatted him, stood waiting.

  ‘You fucking bastard, Samworth,’ said Dand, pointing right at me. ‘You punched me in the face.’

  I looked him in the eye. ‘Are you sure it were me?’

  He looked at the other officer there and said, ‘W
ell, you fucking did it then,’ as the duty manager glared, fit to explode.

  It didn’t look good, although for a while all went quiet. The SO who had cracked him likely thought it would be all right. For five days, not a word was spoken. Only the Oscar One was suspended.

  Here was a quandary every officer faces, but shouldn’t. I knew I’d have to put a statement in saying what happened and that it had to be honest. But if I tell them my SO punched a con, I’m a grass. Colleagues won’t speak to me; I’ll lose my job. Ethics and integrity can go by the wayside. My mind was in a whirl. Common sense said, Shut the fuck up, Sam. It’s a team game this and you’re in the front row. Head down, arse up. Pack tight. But my gut instinct just wasn’t having it. I kept coming back to the fact that there was no need for what happened – being a prison officer is not a licence to punch the fuck out of people. It’s wrong and behaviour like that disrespects and endangers your colleagues, so where’s the team spirit there? Maybe if this SO had just apologized for losing his rag it would have blown over. Prisoners being what they are, if he’d said, ‘Look, lad, you’ve fucked us about,’ Dand might well have taken that. But he’d kept schtum and it was now a dodgy situation.

  Eventually, a more experienced member of staff told me that he knew what had happened. ‘All I’ll say,’ he said, ‘is tell the truth.’ Then he added that if I mentioned our conversation to anyone he’d deny it. I like to think I’d have done the right thing anyway but the fact is I didn’t want stitching up, so felt I had nowhere left to go.

  The minute I put my version in, I was suspended as per protocol. In fact, all five of us in the restraint were ordered to stay off work.

  In private prisons, whenever there is what management called an adverse event – a mobile phone is found, say – the pot of government funding shrinks. Every time there’s an assault, they lose brass. So the best-case scenario for Forest Bank’s substantial profit margins was that incidents were rare or nonexistent. Given that system, cases were rigorously assessed by the Home Office to ensure impartiality. The guy investigating us was asked to complete ours quickly as five staff members missing was a problem. Investigations can take months; this was sorted in four weeks. I did about five hours of taped interviews and got a letter clearing me. I phoned personnel and asked for a return to work date. ‘We’ll get back to you.’

  For two or three weeks, radio silence. Then I received a letter saying the company was doing an investigation of its own based on the Home Office’s. I was interviewed again, and now was accused of assault and falsifying paperwork, among other things. How? They were using the same info.

  My disciplinary was ten months later and I was suspended throughout. Stressful doesn’t describe it. I went to a wedding where mates turned their back. It’s a bad place to be, soul-destroying. I’ve seen folk ruined by it. Yet it wasn’t me who’d done anything wrong.

  I had said that my SO threw a punch at the prisoner. When I finally saw the paperwork the same officer had put that I ‘might have caught him with his elbow’. The three others denied seeing anything at all, which is what a prison officer would normally do. Imagine that, in a space two metres or so square. If I’d have said, like I was going to, that I too hadn’t seen anything, I’d have been charged with assault, probably faced police charges and quite definitely been booted out.

  That’s how it is. If you go down that route and the real culprit then makes something up, you can be seen as the guilty one. Tell the truth and you are the bad guy. Thankfully, I was cleared again in the end and represented the company against my SO at his hearing. The governor and I were on one side of the table, he was on the other with his union rep.

  Six years later, by which time I was at Strangeways, another letter arrived from London. That SO was still appealing the decision, trying to get his job back.

  When I returned from suspension after twiddling my thumbs for nearly a year the segregation unit was a different place. The earlier camaraderie was extinguished. Even though the manager there was looking out for me, I still had to put up with wisecracks, the cold shoulder – it got tiresome. I was there two or three weeks, getting into arguments with other officers all the time.

  Someone asked if I’d like a move to F Wing, and I couldn’t get out of seg’ fast enough, but nothing changed there. I stuck it out for a while, then handed in my month’s notice. I couldn’t face that either, so handed over my keys and fucked off early. By the time I left what few illusions I had when starting at Forest Bank were long gone.

  Fortunately, I landed on my feet. By then, thoroughly pissed off and looking for an escape, I’d applied to the HM Prison and Probation Service and actually had an offer from Strangeways. A job as a carer at a children’s home came up at the same time though, so I took that instead. At that point I’d quite definitely had enough of prisons, ta very much.

  There were six kids in all, not exactly locked in but well supervised. Two staff per shift, so three kids each, which wasn’t really adequate when they were troublesome. It was a private house, nice gaff, with six bedrooms, so the kids could have one each. Like anywhere in this line of work, though, it had its frustrating side. They’d all come from broken homes, troubled pasts, and this was where the system failed them.

  One eleven-year-old lad, who looked seven, had been abused by his dad and uncle, and as a result began showing highly sexualized behaviour. He was smoking, drinking and generally heading the wrong way. A fifteen-year-old was a flasher, with a mental age of ten. He was another who had been abused and needed therapy, but all we were really doing was supervising. Kids like that need hope and stability.

  Once, I’d got them out in the park when the fifteen-year-old started ragging the other, who threw a stone the size of a cricket ball at him. It caught me on the head instead and almost knocked me out; it was my bad side as well, above my left ear. Back to the house we trudged, where the manager told me to call the police.

  ‘He’s assaulted you,’ she said. ‘I want him charging.’

  I didn’t do it, of course. An assault charge on his record as an eleven-year-old? He’d just lost his rag, is all. Kids need to be mentored and cared for. The six I helped look after will have ended up in jail anyway: they didn’t know how to fit into society. You can be a role model, fine, but I might only see them for two shifts a week. Not much of one, am I?

  And so the conveyor belt keeps turning.

  4. Strangeways, Here We Come

  The children’s home gave me a sense of responsibility that I enjoyed, despite the usual frustrations that exist everywhere today in the care industry. It felt good to be helping kids with their whole lives ahead of them – or trying to. To begin with, there was hope.

  It was also good to be out of Forest Bank after all the hassle there. When the reality of the kids’ futures dawned on me though, that breath of fresh air turned stale as an old lag’s tab. And on a personal practical level, by then I also began to regret what I’d lost and reckoned I needed another job with more hours and longer-term security.

  Let’s be clear: although I was choosing to work with offenders, that wasn’t because I was on some sort of social crusade. I’d just sort of fallen into it. I’d been divorced twice, forced to sell as many houses, been homeless and experienced redundancy. I had an urge to put down roots and wanted a job I could settle down in and get my teeth into, preferably with a pension attached. Having been at Forest Bank, I was confident in my abilities as a prison officer and so thought I’d try and give it a go again somewhere else. Maybe a change of scene was all I needed.

  In the private sector you apply direct to the prison, as I did at Forest Bank. In the public sector you apply to HM Prisons and put down your preferences. Strangeways was only my third choice. My first was Hindley, in Bickershaw, then Risley, near Warrington, two Cat C prisons whose inmates would be a bit less troublesome than Forest Bank. As luck had it though, HMP Manchester had greater need, so under that scary tower and within those walls I went.

  It might surp
rise you to learn that when you apply to become a prison officer in the public sector there is no formal interview. First, they give you a basic medical. Then there’s a physical that most folk piss, a bit of role play and English and maths tests, all scored. That’s the lot. Pass and you are in.

  The training centre was away from the main prison and the first couple of days went quickly, all seemed well. Then, halfway through the first week, the men in charge went AWOL one morning: not an instructor to be seen in the classroom. Managers walked past but didn’t look in. We were like, What the fuck? At about eleven o’clock, one boss stuck his head around the door and read out one bloke’s name: he was wanted upstairs. Then he came back and, after a while, the boss said someone else’s name, and off they went too.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

  ‘Can’t say ’owt.’

  Eventually everyone had been up but me, which was quite definitely a concern. Had I done something wrong? How could I have? I hadn’t been there a week. Nobody was speaking, and by now there was a really shitty atmosphere. Then the manager came back. ‘You,’ he grunted, pointing a finger, ‘upstairs.’ Fucking hell.

  There were four of them waiting: two SOs, one principal officer, or PO, and the officer who took the training. ‘Sit down,’ he said, and then it began. ‘You’re a cunt. You’re a bully – you’re going to fail this course.’

  Every time I opened my mouth they shut me down with this barrage. ‘If you pass this course, you’re still going to fail. You’re a cunt.’ Bam. Bam. Bam.

  After about ten minutes of this I was feeling pretty small, until finally I just about managed to ask what I’d done. ‘You’re a cunt and a bully and we don’t like fucking bullies in this job’ – and off they went again, until even they’d had enough. ‘Right, fuck off.’ Wow. Back downstairs I went.