Strangeways

by Neil Samworth

  These fuckers were out of control and needed telling who was in charge; our officers had needed someone to step up. A couple of dogs were on hand too, snarling and slavering. A dozen screws now had batons drawn. If I needed to use this thing, I would be willing to do so. We were heavily outnumbered but ready to wade in. The prisoners saw we meant business and stepped back.

  There was a governor there now to negotiate, and the Manc gangster came forward. ‘We are not going behind us doors unless we get us exercise.’ Personally, I’d have just twatted him. Against a background of shouts and barking the two of them started talking, but to begin with the tension increased.

  A thousand different governors would’ve dealt with this a thousand different ways; you do the best you can. This one tried to be reasonable and said that if we could get them out, we would. The chaos and noise continued for a while but the prisoners did eventually agree to back down. Rather than move to the end of the landing, however, where we could put them away in a controlled manner, they were allowed to make their own way to their cells.

  That seemed unnecessary to me and dangerous too. We had officers with batons out – the cons would have done as they were told – but all the same here they were, walking among the staff, many of whom were terrified. Fortunately, the plan passed without further incident and the chief troublemakers were later dispatched to the segregation unit.

  Afterwards, I asked another officer why he hadn’t drawn his baton.

  ‘You can get in trouble for that,’ he said.

  That landing, seventy prisoners, a potential riot on our hands – when is there a better time to get your baton out? Interpersonal skills aren’t going to stand you in good stead with five thugs stamping on you. Apart from those dogs, batons were the only protection we had. We’d been in a riot situation, and an officer was worried about self-defence and enforcing discipline in the jail!

  Now, as I write this in 2017, there seems to be incidents like it every week. It’s the norm. In October, ten Tornado teams went to Long Lartin in Worcestershire, where the likes of Abu Hamza and murderer Christopher Halliwell have been held. Riots have also been reported in Swaleside, Bedford and Lewes.

  But don’t expect to read many factual accounts of prison riots. When I was on K Wing, Strangeways had some lads arrive from another jail where they’d wrecked a wing, injured staff. They were all looking at ten years. On segregation units, governors do rounds every day, though, and one of them opened the door of one of these kids and told him, ‘I know who you are’ – this governor had just completed an investigation into the mutiny these lads had come from.

  The prison service being what it is, the investigation had been so secret even this prisoner hadn’t been aware of it. But now he told his solicitor, who got a copy from the Ministry of Justice. This report apparently confirmed concerted indiscipline and damage to prison property, but said that nobody was injured. When their case got to court, his solicitor produced the report as evidence and the expected ten years was reduced to nil.

  Long Lartin, by the way, which needed the ten Tornado teams, has lost a fifth of its staff in recent years, and isn’t alone in that. When I first joined, the prison population was 72,000, and when I left, around two years ago, it was 83,000. It’s currently approaching 90,000. At the same time, staffing levels have dropped by about 6,000. So the system is crumbling. Under a government recruitment drive, they hope to employ another 2,500 staff by 2018. There’s just under 500 prisons in the UK, so if that seems like a useful amount, do the maths. They are talking about putting four or five new staff in each prison – Manchester alone could do with another forty or fifty. It’s a drop in the ocean. I am fearful that the entire estate is about to erupt. And when that happens people will get hurt, prisoners and staff, my friends among them. I hope that someone somewhere sees sense.

  20. Step On

  On 1 March 2015 everything came to a head at Strangeways.

  Government cost-cutting had been going on for a while and this was the latest and most revolutionary round. Budgets were sliced, which as ever meant fewer staff. There were horror stories elsewhere in the prison estate so we’d known what was coming to HMP Manchester. The buzzword was modernization. We would have new ways of working, different shift patterns leading to a more economical and strategic use of human resources.

  As usual it was all based on theory; there was no appreciation of the practical realities for those on the frontline. I hear now that postgraduates are to be employed to re-think how the prison service might be improved. Supposedly they’ll be treating prisoners as customers? Be as polite as you like, you quite definitely will not change a criminal’s essential nature. What if a customer tells one of these bright young things to get the fuck out of their cell? You’re not selling package holidays.

  Prison is not like other jobs. As we’ve seen, in jail too many staff is the right amount, because you never know what kind of extreme event you might have to deal with. Teams of staff develop, get used to working together over many years. D Wing – like K Wing, in that it held disruptive prisoners nobody else wanted – had an eight-person team formed over a decade. Their understanding was instinctive. It ran like clockwork. The new idea was that staff should be kept moving or they would become demotivated. Dynamic security hadn’t crossed the bureaucrats’ radar.

  But one of our governors was touting this reorganization as the best thing since porridge. He ‘profiled’ healthcare, which is to say looked at maximum hours and staff needed to cover that unit and came up with four officers on thirty-nine hour weeks, far too low in our view. He actually asked, ‘Why do we need prison officers on healthcare?’ Well, where do you start? Nurses aren’t trained in restraint, for one thing.

  Imagine this is Wednesday afternoon at the supermarket. It’s quiet, and eight people are running the store really well. Someone comes around with a clipboard and asks, ‘So why do we have more than eight on the payroll? Get rid of the rest!’ Come Saturday morning, the store is rammed: these eight staff can barely cope, someone knocks over a jar of pickles and, before you know it, the queues for the tills are around the block. In a supermarket, people would shop elsewhere. In prison you can’t do that, and it’s not just eggs being broken.

  The number of shifts was cut to the bone, especially on weekends. But they hadn’t allowed for officers being called away to escort prisoners to hospital, for example, or to rush off to a restraint. Through the week you’d be locking down entire wings so staff could be used elsewhere.

  The first day of the new system, I got sent to D Wing to get labour out. That done, I’m off to get exercisers out for B Wing. Staff looking after the visits area were moved, meaning visits ran late, which in turn impacted back on the jail. The whole prison was like that – officers were just moving about, task orientated, and the place never settled down.

  A couple of other ideas turned this into a car crash. They set about moving the prison population geographically. Cat A prisoners stayed put but the rest – VP prisoners, rapists, paedophiles, remand – all these groups would be shunted to different parts of the jail. The reception wing would be moved too, as would 150 officers – and all of this simultaneously. If you are moving, say, twenty VPs you’ve got to lock them up somewhere while you bring other prisoners out of the cells they will now be taking – and then put them somewhere else. A logistical nightmare, right across Strangeways: chaos guaranteed.

  On top of that, staff were worried there’d no longer be as much, if any, overtime, which was relied upon to top up salaries. But did overtime go? Did it hell. On 28 February, HMP Manchester was short of eighty officers. On 1 March, according to official figures, we had fifteen more than we needed. Same number of people actually working, mind, just a different calculation. No redundancies either. Jobs had been ‘re-profiled’.

  As new staff came out of training they’d leave virtually straight away. It was, and still is, a revolving door. The depth of the mess would be difficult to exaggerate. Just employ the amount
of people in every prison needed to do the job properly. It was an absolute farce.

  Twenty-five years earlier the Manchester riot had made people realize that keeping prisoners locked up for twenty-three hours a day was counterproductive. Now the service had gone back to doing just that. Staff–prisoner relationships broke down; dynamic security was consigned to history. When I turned up in the morning to do a job on B Wing, for example, I didn’t have time to talk to anyone: I had to get to A Wing, then K Wing, and go back to healthcare for dinner. It got so stressful it was unbelievable, not just for me, but for everyone. It started getting dangerous. The fallout is still being felt, I’m told.

  Although working on healthcare was getting to me by now, the odd nice moment did still come along. Towards the end of my time there I was walking through the visits area when someone shouted, ‘Boss!’

  I recognized him straight away. It was the young Asian lad whose father’s funeral we’d gone to in Salford. He was sitting with two women in burkas. He beckoned me over, and I asked how he was.

  ‘I’ve been great, but I’ve slipped up and I’m in here for two weeks’ – a tax thing, he said, and introduced me to his mum and sister. ‘I’ve told them how you took me to see Dad off.’

  The two of them stood up and hugged me. The entire room was watching. ‘Ay ay,’ the prisoners would have been thinking, ‘what’s Mr S. doing now?’ Officers were staring too. But what can you do? It’s your dynamic security again. I was polite and wished him and them well.

  This being prison, though, a report went to security. Hugging visitors!

  Healthcare was always tough, but with enough staff on to support one another in a well-organized team it could also be interesting. On the whole, the first years I’d been there were fine. But when the smoke of all the reorganization cleared, the prison management took back control of healthcare from nurse managers, and we went back to having too many chiefs. I found that I was the only original officer left; Nikki was moved to K Wing.

  I’m best working on my own initiative, yet the new managers had other ideas, rarely based on healthcare principles. I had a barney with an SO on the servery because I was letting out six or seven prisoners at a time. That wasn’t how we did it anymore, this SO said – two at a time, max.

  ‘Well, they’re out now anyway,’ I said, and he spat his dummy. If he was going to introduce changes he ought to have let people know first.

  Since I – the only experienced officer in the unit – was most often elsewhere, there was no one around to help new staff settle in. Remarkably, they didn’t even have to be interviewed as we’d been: they were just employed on the unit ad hoc. Crazy. We had one naive officer from the OSG ranks who very early on had to deal with a prisoner smashing his TV. Glass everywhere. She sailed straight in. The SO and me had to tell her to come out and shut the door – she could have been assaulted, flying solo. It wasn’t long before I had to suffer the consequences of untrained, inexperienced new staff at first hand.

  I’d first met Charlie Horner on the seg’ at Forest Bank. He was white but had a spectacular Afro. We were warned he was violent. I remember looking at his record to see what we’d got. Although he was just seventeen and only had a couple of chin whiskers, in the juvenile estate, which is how lads between fifteen and eighteen are classed, he’d been assaulting staff and other children. He’d therefore been reclassified as a young offender, a term usually for eighteen to twenty-one year olds.

  He had no size or presence – other than that perm – but his record spoke for itself, and though he’d been on a three-officer unlock for two and a half months without incident, you treat these people with caution. He was also a scruffy toad who refused to clean his cell. Unless you intended to spin him upside down and use his head as a mop, it was a lost cause. Ten weeks in and he had neither cracked a smile nor spoken to anyone. He refused exercise and didn’t want to use the phone. So eventually he came off his unlock.

  He’d been out and about for a couple of weeks by the time we came to this boring Sunday. As usual it was quiet, and I was on with an officer, Geordie, a big lad, heavier than me with a very dry sense of humour. We’d opened Horner up to take him to the showers, Geordie walking in front, when the Afro looked over his shoulder at me, and the expression on his face was satanic. ‘Watch this,’ it said. I’d no time to react or warn anyone when – bam! – Geordie was cracked on the chin from behind. He fell like a great oak, knocked clean out.

  I shouted a warning and the big SO and me rugby tackled this kid, or tried. Our combined thirty-odd stone couldn’t put him down. This lad was butting me with the back of his head, and it took nine or ten staff, big lads among them, to get him behind his door. He’d bust my lip and Geordie had a headache for days.

  In 2015, Horner landed in Strangeways one night, on healthcare. New sentence, I didn’t bother to see what for, but he’d still got a bit of a perm. I knew his form, though, and next morning in the briefing explained how he was violent and unpredictable: a three-officer unlock minimum. One of the new staff was a know-all, ‘I think he needs to come off unlock.’

  I disagreed. For me, he was as dangerous as he’d been ten years ago.

  For a while I got my way. I told Horner about the unlock myself and as he sat on his bed and looked up, there was a sigh of recognition. As usual, though, he didn’t really engage, with me or anyone else. Then I had a rare weekend off and when I came in on the Monday that was no longer the case. ‘Why is he off the unlock?’ I asked.

  I was told he hadn’t done anything in two weeks.

  Here we go, I thought.

  That morning, he wouldn’t come out of his cell when I unlocked it and he wouldn’t talk to me. It got to dinnertime, and Officer Know-All pointed out that only Horner hadn’t eaten, so he went to his door to find out why, and did persuade him, still silent, to go to the servery.

  The orderly there was piling his plate with spaghetti when over his shoulder I saw that demonic smile again. Suddenly Horner blew. Let out a roar. His plate hit the ceiling, his body stiffened, and both Officer Know-All and the SO shat themselves. Hand on his back, I ushered Horner behind his door – down the years he’d obviously chilled a bit – and walked away with a spring in my step.

  Afternoon briefing: ‘Does anybody have anything to say?’

  Senior officer: ‘Horner needs to be on an unlock.’

  In my seven years on healthcare I had seen it all: deaths in custody, people cutting, hanging, the lot. Most of my fellow officers and nurses were great but, boy, did it get stressful. You had to be strong between the ears, quite definitely. I’d be out of the house at six o’clock and come home at half nine at night sometimes, with overtime. If I was at work for sixty hours including travel, Amy spent the same amount of time on her own at home and then, when I came through the door, I was like a bear with a sore arse. She was a prison widow.

  For years I hardly saw my daughter Billie at all, and when I did we’d argue. When I did get a day off, I was just interrupting their routine. My unhappiness had been brewing for a while, but the changes that came in on 1 March put the tin hat on it. Strangeways had changed beyond recognition. I wanted out. I asked a PO I got on with for a move.

  The exit strategy was supposed to be my gradual removal from an area that was tense and demanding to one that was maybe less so. A Wing seemed like the perfect place. But a bit like soldiers who dodge bombs and bullets one minute and then dodge depression the next, leaving a war zone and settling back into civilian ranks can be tough . . .

  21. Hollow Inside

  The transition did not go well.

  From day one on A Wing – 13 August 2015 – it felt like a lifetime, like being in limbo. The officers weren’t the issue. One was a miserable bastard, so we hit it off straight away. My other favourite, a cleaning warder like me, was rough as toast and grafted hard, salt of the earth. Let’s call them Jack and Vera.

  There were other decent officers, but by that time staff right across Strangeways were dem
otivated, sick of being dicked about. I won’t knock them. By and large, screws are ordinary people. Think of the nicest wedding reception you’ve been to and look around: everyone over eighteen and under sixty-eight is a potential prison officer – your favourite auntie, funny uncle, scrawny cousin and bolshie niece. But now there was a growing unwillingness to get involved. You got no thanks for putting yourself in the line of fire. People were dawdling on incidents, and I could see them praying that storms would blow out with no repercussions. It was in their eyes: Please, please, please.

  Under this new regime the admin was all over the place too. On A Wing we had a big turnover of prisoners – a hundred a week – because it’s the induction wing. When they came on you’d have to give them a bedding pack: two cotton sheets and a couple of woollen yellow blankets in winter – the sort your grandma might crochet. (Nowadays every inmate can have bedding brought in from home, which is cheaper for the jail and another way to keep them settled and in line.) They were also due two clean towels a week – though they’re not much bigger than flannels, for big lads about enough to dry one leg.

  Whether through disorganization or lack of funding, from the start it was obvious we were going to struggle. I begged and borrowed – didn’t steal – from other wings and it still wasn’t enough. Understandably, the prisoners got pissed off. And this was the induction wing, which is supposed to have everything. I despaired.

  I had one lad on remand, so by rights he could have as many visitors as he wanted. The computer, though, said he’d been sentenced, which stuffed him up completely. I phoned admin every day for two weeks and spoke to the same lass to try and get something done. It would have taken the click of a mouse. After I’d badgered her for a fortnight, an office manager accused me of harassment. I had to take it all the way to the governor before it got altered. But for me all this was the least of my troubles.