Of late, drones look like being a menace and need regulation. Anyone caught flying one within half a mile of a prison should get a twelve-month sentence or a ten grand fine. We need a registration scheme for owners, as with dogs and firearms, to trace them back. Flying stuff over prison walls and fencing, onto exercise yards or wherever, is only a tiny problem at the moment, but it is on the rise.
Manchester, for all its problems, is basically a well-run and disciplined jail, where no one takes drugs openly. Like anywhere, though, they are available to anyone who wants them and that includes recreational drugs – coke, ecstasy – as well as steroids. There are a lot of steroids in jail now, which is problematic given how huge lads on them get. Mood swings just make that problem worse.
What has taken off big-style in prison in the last few years is zombie drugs, or synthetic cannabinoids to give them their proper name: spice, black mamba, Bombay blue – there are loads. It’s because the stuff is easy to get hold of on the out. There are some restrictions now but they used to be a legal high, very cheap to buy. The other handy thing inside is that they don’t show up in piss tests, which cannabis, heroin and more traditional drugs do. People come into prison with a backside of spice and can make themselves fifteen or twenty grand in two or three months. I’ve seen it happen.
There are people in prison who can’t afford tobacco or drugs of any sort. As a practical joke cons would roll a joint, stick a bit of spice in it and throw it on the floor. Some vagrant type, in prison for three weeks, would leap on it, spark it up and – bang! Knocked out cold, before coming around and throwing up everywhere. Jails are harsh.
Cannabinoids are also infamous for unpredictability. There are those who can smoke it all day with little effect other than getting a high or feeling chilled. The wrong blend, though, can be a disaster.
Joseph Holden was a quiet lad, a minor offender. He wasn’t violent and his sentences were small, but as soon as spice started to become popular he was drawn under its spell. He was found smoking it and got sent to healthcare on a short overnight stay, then within the day discharged back to K Wing. The following night here he was again, same story, using up staff resources. It had taken a good hour to move him from K Wing, fighting all the way. A real battle, it was not like him at all, so he went straight on an unlock.
I tried talking to him, and he was rambling on about the Devil peeping out of his eyes. Over the coming days his behaviour got even more bizarre, to the point where he’d started banging his head on the wall. He said it had Satan in it and he needed to get him out. If anyone normal tried to do that, their body system wouldn’t let them; not with any force anyway. It’s a natural in-built mechanism. He was full-on though, and it escalated quickly.
I was on an early shift and this lad’s head was covered in lumps and bumps, it was awful. A healthcare manager was called: he’d started sticking his fingers in his eyes. I don’t mean poking, I mean having a good delve, gouging them. He ended up throwing himself out of bed at the wall, arms tucked in, absolutely twatted himself. The thud as he nutted it was sickening. From somewhere he’d developed the strength of ten men: another one who needed the liquid cosh.
I didn’t like leaving Warren, the young officer who came on, alone with what was now constant supervision: he’d be watching a lad his own age destroying himself. But my shift was up. Later he told me what had happened. In the end a team in full PPE gear had gone in and tried to restrain Holden, but couldn’t. So they put him in a cuffed body belt, which took a while, and moved him off to hospital where the kid was confirmed to have lost his eyesight. His eyeballs were still there, but he’d damaged the muscles so badly his vision was ruined. He was a criminal, but not a particularly troublesome one. Somewhere there were people whose son, brother, nephew or grandson had gone into jail and come out blind.
That’s spice for you. It is indeed the Devil’s work.
Another prisoner on healthcare alleged he’d been made to mule a mobile phone and drugs through gang rape. What they’d done, he said, was ram a toilet brush handle up his arse to make his ring bigger so everything would fit. He’d had the items inside him for days, started bleeding and passed out as medics arrived to save him.
All of this reminds me of a time at Forest Bank, when four or five inmates were running drugs. I watched them all day, handing stuff back and forth on the wing. It became very obvious when you took the time to stop and watch. That night, with everybody dashing around as usual before lock up, I migrated to one particular cell. It belonged to a lad with a fearsome reputation. I was face to face with him while a handful of other lads stood around me, a fact I was very conscious of. He had a bag of powder in his hand that I suspected was heroin. I asked to see it.
‘Mr S.,’ he’d said, ‘I like you and get on with you. I’m not going to show you what’s in my hand, but aren’t gonna touch you either. What are you gonna do?’
I knew a couple of these lads and wasn’t afraid of them, but one or two were sneaky. Although he’d said he’d not do anything, I couldn’t be sure of them. I was outnumbered: had I reached for that bag I’d likely have got a beating. I had no radio, the alarm wasn’t within reach. I was weighing up the odds, though, when he gave me a get-out-of-jail card I thanked him for later.
‘How about I get behind my door, Mr S., and you can lock me in?’
So whatever he’d got, the rest of them weren’t getting tonight. First thing tomorrow, security would be knocking on his door and spinning his cell because by then I’d have put a report in, as he also quite definitely realized.
‘You are locked behind your door,’ I said, and the others went.
By the time security knocked on his door, strip-searched him and turned his cell upside down, they found nothing. He’d either hid that bag very well or moved it on. He was let out for a brew, good as gold. I’d done my bit reporting it, and he’d done his. It was all in the game.
Which brings us to lines. Staff at both Forest Bank and Strangeways used to go on about them all the time. What are they on about? I wondered when I first heard them. Well, what they were on about was thin – very thin – strips of bedding, tied together and made into tiny fishing lines, then ‘hooked’ with something to give it weight. The first time I saw them in action I was amazed.
Imagine you are in the cell next door to me, and there’s a half-inch gap under the doors – they’re never flush. This particular night you’ve run out of cigarette papers.
‘Got any skins?’
‘Yeah, chuck us a line.’
So you’d have a plastic knife or pen tied to the end of this line, throw it under your door with a jerk and whip it around under my door. I’d fasten one to it, you’d pull it back again, and Bob’s yer uncle: you’ve thrown out a line.
At Forest Bank on the YP there were two landings. On a night, you’d see a line come under a door on the twos, drop to the ground floor, bit of tweaking and it was in a cell. Little stuff – it might be a lighter, matches or bit of burn. It used to fascinate me: they’d sling them across landings while you were walking up and down. I’d turn the lights off and stand in the middle – no one would know you were there – and watch. Out they’d come, a strange little delivery service that might be five cells this way or ten cells that. It was incredible, really, and very skilfully done.
I was on B1 one night when this lad asked his mate across the landing for a light – didn’t know I was there. ‘Sling us a line,’ he called out, and threw one out which I caught. Feeling mischievous, I tied it to the leg of a pool table, and he started tugging at it. ‘It’s snagged,’ he called. These are only very thin strips – you couldn’t call them a rope – yet he dragged that fucking pool table several metres. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I popped up at the lad’s door, looked in and we started laughing.
Prisoners can be ingenious bastards. There’s not much else to do, I suppose, but practise their skills. Another time, an officer and I were doing a sweep of the exercise yard and heard something come over th
e wall. We shone a torch into the shadows and there was this little parcel that jerked and began to move. It had a line attached, and up it slowly climbed, towards a window on the twos. At Forest Bank the windows were made of plastic, so to get a bit of air in the cons used to burn holes in them with fag ends. When the place was new we’d replace them, but over time that tailed off, and the whole wing ended up like that. Now, if you thought chucking a line under a door on twos and dropping it down to the ones was unbelievable, how about this? Someone had clocked the parcel coming in, seen where it landed and somehow thrown a line through one of these holes, snagged it with a fishhook and started dragging it back. It fell off and we took it to security, where we found it contained cannabis resin and a mobile. Suddenly the phone rang.
‘You fucking prick, Samworth,’ someone said, and the line went dead.
At Strangeways, none of the wings butt up to the wall. The nearest point is about ten metres away. Yet lads have chucked lines out of windows, over razor wire and onto the street. Dog handlers outside, patrolling the jail, have seen them pulling stuff for hours at a time, although obviously once it gets near the walls they put their foot on it. We had people coming up at night to talk to prisoners, but not directly: a couple of them would stand by the wall and converse between themselves, as boyfriend and girlfriend maybe. ‘Do you fancy going for a drink?’ they would call out as though to each other – code the prisoner would understand. Bletchley Park would have struggled to suss it.
Once I was searching a lad’s cell in healthcare and he had three tubes of toothpaste. They use it as adhesive to stick photos to the wall, but he was making a mess so I confiscated a couple. I’m inquisitive, so before I threw them in the bin I had a squeeze. Sure enough, some sort of liquid benzodiazepine. He was on it but hadn’t been taking his full dose. Somehow, he’d got the stuff in there and begun selling it. We’d been having a quiet weekend in association with a few lads falling asleep, which suddenly made sense.
The lengths some in jail will go to for their fix . . . A lad I’d known since Forest Bank came to us in healthcare at Strangeways with a dislocated shoulder. It was ugly. He’d done it ‘playing pool’, he said, straight-faced. His arm was dangling at a hideous angle. Even though he’d dislocated it himself, he was still in agony.
I and two other lads were nominated to escort him to North Manchester casualty. The hospital already knew him and he wasn’t their favourite. The ward sister warned us she’d seen it before – a day out to get doped. ‘He’ll be getting a local in the back of his hand and that’s it.’
‘I’m in pain, I’m in pain,’ he howled. The sister tipped me the wink that I ought to go in and see this.
One officer had him on a closet chain – which allowed for the greater movement he needed given his injury, so named because they also allowed prisoners to go to the toilet on their own – and I sat watching. I’d have had popcorn but they didn’t sell it. This nurse and a colleague pinned him back and told him what followed would be incredibly painful. He was still yelling for drugs, but not getting them, when the doctor put his shoulder back in. Oh, it fucking popped. I couldn’t help but laugh. The officer cuffed to him almost shat himself and the patient actually did, screaming all the while. Very professionally, the nurse retained her composure, and back to jail he went.
Weed is easy to find inside. That’s at the lesser end of the scale, with booze and tobacco. The booze, as we know from the hooch saga, is often brewed on site, and burn actually helps the jail to tick over. Weed is a step up from those in that it can – and does – lead to harder shit. As a young ’un, like most people I think, I’d dabbled with grass, but skunk, this new strong cannabis, is not like back in the day when, chilling by a barbecue, all you wanted was a shedload of fried chicken. Kids need to understand the dangers. They put all sorts in it. Too many folk suffer psychotic episodes. If hardened users who have been on heroin for twenty years start smoking a lot more weed it can finish them: their mental health is shot to pieces. It’s Class A stuff, and so it should be.
A percentage of prisoners will always use heroin because prison is boring and they will do anything to escape it. If they can’t get out physically, they do it in their head. Lads on antipsychotics will be bullied for them, so nurses and officers inspect their mouth to make sure they’ve actually swallowed the meds and aren’t ‘cheeking’ them. And actually, most prisoners rely on that so they’ve then got an excuse to take them and not pass them on. If the medics aren’t on the ball, already unwell inmates are the ones to suffer.
One drug for stomach upsets is very popular because crushing and smoking it gets you high. Subutex, an alternative to methadone, is also in demand. It’s supposed to work on receptors in the brain. Painkillers, tramadol, anything opiate-based, benzodiazepines . . . prisoners are mad for them. I saw one who’d took twenty-five diazepines in one go. They destroy people – out of their head, spewing. But while they’re in that state, they are somewhere else. It helps them forget.
Addicts is the politically correct term for drug users with a dependency, but for me that implies someone who may be working or holding their life together to some extent, but who has an addiction. Everybody is addicted to something. I’m partial to motorbikes, Stones Bitter and trifle. A smackhead or baghead, call them what you will, is something else. I wouldn’t call it a lifestyle choice exactly but for some it can end up that way – lots of prison sentences for burglaries and muggings.
At Forest Bank we had a smackhead who went in for an eye operation. At the hospital the doctor briefed me, ‘I’ll take his eye out, have a look inside and bob it back.’ There was a waiting room with a TV screen to watch it on, if we liked. I’m having some of that, I thought, our own episode of Casualty. ‘Thing is, though,’ he went on. ‘I’ll need your help, twice. Have you seen a heavy user go under with general anaesthetic?’
We hadn’t.
‘He’ll fight. I’ll give him a local, then gas and air. Countdown of ten, he’ll be lucky to reach six.’ As he breathed it in, the doctor told us, we’d have to restrain him. He’d tense up, kick out for a few seconds and then be zonked.
Sure enough, that’s what happened. I’d seen nothing like it. He must have risen two foot off the bed. I’d got my eighteen-plus stone on his arms, the doctors and nurses also struggling when – bam! Out he went. The doc asked us to come in at the end of the op, when he gave the signal, to put the cuffs back on.
I watched the operation and it was fascinating. For some reason my colleague had gone outside to take the air. The doc clamped our bloke’s head back and had a nice gory rummage around, producing an eye from its socket like a pickled onion on a string. Then, when he’d finished and pushed it back in, he indicated via the screen for us to return. The cuffs went on and he made another prediction.
‘We would be knocked out for an hour,’ the doc told us. ‘Not this guy. He will—’ when suddenly One-Eyed Jack jerked back to life, bolt upright. It was like something out of The Walking Dead. Shit a brick, it made us jump. They build a tolerance, do these lads.
At Forest Bank, we’d had a detox wing. When an addict arrived at the prison, they had a five- to seven-day course of DF118 tablets and would then rattle for a few days, a couple of weeks for a heavy user. But what you found with lads who were on a six-month sentence, say, was that afterwards they would start using the gym, put a bit of weight on and begin to look quite healthy. They left jail, a lot of them, drug-free, or as near as possible, with a chance of getting on with their lives and going straight.
Then, in 2003, came methadone – and almost overnight hundreds of prisoners were presented with a new pathway to hell. Are you an addict? Yeah. On you go. In the medical world it was the fashionable thing, but for us it was a nightmare.
In Strangeways and elsewhere, it was a similar story, although the public sector didn’t start using it until maybe five years later. Instead of prisoners being released relatively fit and healthy – the best time for drugs counsellors to get hold of
them, incidentally – they would come in as skinny little fuckers and go out as skinny little fuckers. There are fat addicts – maybe they smoke weed and eat fried chicken – but most of them do have the appearance and charisma of scuffed pipe cleaners. They maintain that look and lifestyle on methadone.
One or two might come in on it, get a reduced dose, come off it and then start using smack. The cycle begins. They detox again, use smack again. The prison has to keep offering its detox programme – human rights – so on it continues for ten years or more if that’s the length of their sentence . . . methadone, smack, methadone, smack, methadone, smack. You ended up with an army of prisoners queuing every day for the stuff. You couldn’t fit all the addicts on Detox, so the meth heads were spread out over the prison and they’d queue one wing at a time in the top jail, five or six people a go. They’d have a drink of water, stand in front of a retina scanner, hand their ID card to a nurse who’d pass it to another, be given a plastic cup of water to drink from, before and after taking their fifty mil or whatever, so they couldn’t regurgitate this ‘cure’ and sell it on later.
It was very controlled in the top jail, in the bottom jail not so much. There was no working retina scan there at the time and fewer staff. The ID-card process was less strict: sometimes there’d be water, sometimes not – two different methods in the same prison. One lad, talking to a mate, handed his ID card over and the nurses did the usual. The mate also gave them his card, but when his dose was put on the hatch the first lad necked that as well, double-dosed. They’ll try anything. This kid was just an opportunist who got carted off to healthcare. He slept for eight hours and that was that.
So being on methadone means prisoners stop using other drugs, right? Wrong. They still take heroin. They’ll take tramadol. They’ll take antipsychotics. They’ll snort ‘subbies’ and anything else they can get hold of. So all you’ve really done is add an extra course to the menu. Methadone saturates the body, so every time you have a tug, a bit is left behind. You end up permanently sedated by this nasty green stinky liquid that isn’t doing you any good.
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