Stuart

by Alexander Masters

  In the block Stuart also met the only terrorist to have come out of the Iranian Embassy siege alive, and the two of them chatted in the exercise yard during their daily hour of ‘association’ time. ‘He said to us, he had the most luckiest escape of any man he’d known, because it was the actual hostages who dragged him out. The SAS were trying to drag him back in. All the others were shot by the SAS. It was the hostages who dragged him out with them.’

  A Turkish drug importer, a mafia ‘Baba’ or godfather, nicknamed Stuart ‘the Peterborough Gangster’ because he was always in trouble, and ‘I laughed back with him’.

  ‘No,’ said Stuart, ‘I’m just a petty thief who ended up getting nicked and getting five years for jumping over an open-counter post office. I’m just a petty thief who’s come unstuck.’

  After the Whitemoor riot (or was it before? I lose track) comes the barricading in HMP Bullingdon, the hunger strike in HMP Winchester, the HMP Grendon fire-extinguisher incident, and soon your tolerance has disappeared. The perennial problem of the chaotic has crept in: this is a life with too much intensity. The wildness is fascinating in hints, but the days are over-concentrated and piled too high with outrage for extended listening. Such people might be rich for novelists; they are a downright liability for a biographer.

  Even during visits Stuart took care not to give his prison persona any sense of real life. ‘When we left because time was up,’ recalls his half-sister Karen, ‘Stuart used to walk to the door and he would never turn round. As soon as he’d said goodbye at the table he’d turn his back on you.’ Nor did he send letters, except to his solicitor (‘Never been a big one for the 17p stamp’); he never made phone calls. He did not keep a diary, either in a book or on tape. He never wrote notes. For some people, prison is the time of memory and record: Ruth Wyner, Jeffrey Archer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, but for people like Stuart, it is the place where time doesn’t quite count. The days are relentlessly dull, difficult to separate, just to be sat through, like a football player on the substitute bench.

  ‘What’s the best type of prison to be in?’ I ask.

  Stuart raises his eyebrows and purses his lips. ‘On balance? Dispersals–high-security prisons–is better than locals. Because in locals, if you tell a screw to fuck off or there’s a skirmish, you get bent up.’

  ‘Why doesn’t that happen in the high-security prisons?’

  ‘Because in proper jails, people aren’t going nowhere. You don’t want to start arguing over a match or a roll-up. You don’t tell the screws to fuck off unless you’ve had a really bad day. Whereas in the locals, you’ve got people who might only have a month. They go round giving it the Big I Am, and as soon as they get bent up and dragged down the block, they can’t handle it. Just scream and scream and scream. When I was at Winchester, because it was a local jail, every day you’d hear screaming. But the good thing about that jail was the way the doors was designed so you couldn’t see out to see what was happening. Even if I’d looked out through the crack in the doors, I couldn’t see nothing in the rest of the block, cos the other rooms was in the wrong place. At least twice, and sometimes three, four times a day, screaming. Because it don’t work, does it?’ Stuart says suddenly in minatory mood, getting up. He pushes my tape recorder aside. He has had enough of trying to educate me today. ‘Prison can’t work. You can’t make people change by bullying them and beating them with batons and locking them up in isolation for days and days, weeks, what would drive some people mad, living like an animal in a fucking cage. Do you know how many people get killed by screws in prison every year? Nobody would tell you something like that–but it’s true, every year, murders. “Oh, sorry, gov, he choked on his vomit while ten of us was holding him down.” “Oh, do excuse us, he broke his back–how was we to know bending him in half the wrong fucking way was bad for his health?” ’

  ‘The good thing about that jail was the way the doors was designed.’

  ‘John Brock says prison’s not too bad,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, but there’s two levels, in’t there? People like John is not what they class as a criminal. Any of the screws could have been in John’s position. All John was doing was his job at Wintercomfort, so he was probably more like one of the boys. And even him–his first job on the wing–what was it? To wash the blood down in the seg [segregation] unit after the screws had fucking finished with someone in there. It’s true what John says, you can do bird and not lose days if you don’t buck the system, but unless you’re willing to give information normally, they won’t let you have a quiet time.’

  ‘Information about what?’

  ‘Who’s smuggling drugs, who’s doing what. If someone’s been done over, who done it.’

  ‘And if you said “I don’t know”?’

  ‘You’d just get stitched up, get nicked, get a governor’s report. You can have an argument with a screw, and tell him to fuck off, and the riot bell will come. Half the jail screws will come, you’ll get jumped on, bent up like a chicken, dragged into a cell, get your clothes literally ripped off you, and then get charged with assaulting a screw as well. If a load of men jump on you and start inflicting pain on you, you’re going to start struggling, and that’s classed as assaulting a screw. You get those screws who will help you out if it’s genuine, but them screws are normally the first ones in if it kicks off. There is no such thing as a good screw, and normally those that are the nice ones are also the first ones to come in with their shields and their fucking silly sticks when they want to bend you up.’

  It makes sense. Put two macho groups together and give the first desperation and numbers, and the second truncheons and protective clothing, and the result is like a laboratory civil war. ‘But there are times when someone deserves it,’ I insist, thinking, you Stuart, my friend, you little nightmare.

  ‘Well, no. If it’s not alright on the street if someone does something wrong to just go up to them and beat them, why should it be alright in prison for one screw to decide that something’s wrong, and then get a load of his mates to go and beat somebody up? As well as wearing all the protective clothes and shields. Who are they to say that that’s the punishment that person should have? All it needs is for an obnoxious screw to have a bad day and you too have a bad day. It’s easy for him to get all stroppy, for you to say, “Oh, just fuck off then,” or “Shove it,” and some of them literally just turn round and hit the bell, all the screws come running. You can take a fifteen-, twenty-minute kicking in the block. And the doctor will come down, “Yep, he’s alright.” Ask my mate Smudger to show you his arm. The screws broke his arm. Doctor had a look at it, said there was nothing wrong, and he still has trouble with it now. They broke his arm and then just left it to repair itself. Other countries just whip fucking prisoners, where in this country we call it Control and Restraint.’

  ‘Wait,’ I interrupt on another occasion, during another of Stuart’s descriptions of slammers past and future (he wouldn’t, he says, be surprised to die in one). ‘Take me through the process of arriving.’

  ‘Right, you go through reception, have a shower, go to your cell–’

  ‘What’s reception?’

  ‘Right, reception is where you get all the, awww, it’s not…I mean, it’s just…nah, horrible…not horrible, horrible, but horrible, know what I mean? Not being funny…awww, you don’t want to go there.’

  It’s no good. Stuart can’t describe it. There are prison books and diaries that detail the process, which is quite a mild rite of passage, a dull-witted but clearly necessary stripping of civility–name taken, civilian clothes removed, prison garb handed out, number given, a shower and delousing–but nothing I’ve read captures Stuart’s shudder.

  ‘Then what? What’s next after reception?’

  ‘Go to my cell…’

  ‘How do you get to your cell?’

  ‘How do you think? Clank, clank, on the wing, up the steps.’

  ‘What’s the wing like?’

  ‘Phhhaawww! Smell of piss. Just
smells of piss everywhere.’

  This was because of the practice of slop out, still common in the mid-1990s but forbidden now. Not allowed out to use the toilet during the fourteen and a half hours they were locked in their cells each day, inmates had to store their excrement in buckets until the buckets could be ‘slopped out’ in the communal latrine. The rancid odour seeped into every part of the wing.

  0800 unlock, slop out, breakfast.

  1115 dinner.

  1330 unlock, slop out.

  1600 tea.

  1730–2030 slop out, serve supper.

  ‘So there you are, the first night in your cell,’ I pursue, strangely invigorated by this vision of urine sloshing through the building. ‘What’s it like? No freedom. Cooped up. Can you sleep? Who were you sharing with?’

  ‘Alexander, that’s what I keep trying to tell you. I didn’t spend the first night in my cell. Didn’t like me cellmate. He was doing twenty-eight days. I’d just got five years and three months! “I’m not banging up with that cunt,” I says. “He’s packing his bags to go home while I’m still thinking where to put the toothbrush. It’ll do me head in. I’m not hearing him moaning about oh, he’s missing his wife and family or he’s going home tomorrow.” I wouldn’t have it. Refused to go in. About turn. Straight to solitary, the block. I spent me first night of five years three months straight in the block–I lost seven days’ remission straight off on me first night, and it was me birthday.’

  What about bullies?

  ‘First time someone tries to tax you in jail, attack them.’

  ‘To tax’ in prison is just as it is outside of prison: when a person nastier than you are takes away a portion of everything you own: a handful of tobacco, your phonecard, your Bob Marley cassettes.

  ‘Attack them? What if he’s an eighteen-stone yeti-man with pointy teeth?’

  ‘If there ain’t a weapon there to hurt them, and they’re a right big cunt, just attack them,’ Stuart says. ‘Because if you’re a bit weak-minded and give in, you’ll have others–all the time. You’ll never get away from it. And as soon as they let you out the hospital wing after that, you’ll often find the bully will come and try and take everything again but just attack them again. And you’ll find that if you fucking have a go at a bully twice, even if he beats you up, they don’t come back a third time. Another way is to create a situation where they see you just lose the plot totally, even if it’s against the screws, chasing the screws up the ladder with a lump of wood. Alright, you get a kicking off the screws, but it’s a way of keeping the bullies back. It’s a safer way of doing it. Because if you get involved with cons, it might come to the stage where you got to throw boiling hot water and sugar over them, and fucking stab them as well if they’re a right big cunt, because I’ve seen people have sugar and hot water and fucking still batter people.’

  Hence, as Stuart points out, the clear advantage of convincing other inmates from the start that ‘you’re fucking mad’. Then ‘they’ll leave you alone, in general. Also, since the Strangeways riot, there’s so much pressure on cons to give evidence in an outside court that if you do someone up, you’ll probably get a five-stretch or an eight-stretch on top of your original sentence. Where, as long as you don’t go up and punch a screw, seriously hurt one, just chase them, the chance of you getting an outside court are really rare. You’ll get a really good fucking kicking. But what’s a kicking when you’ve had so many?’

  And what about education? Why don’t more people in prison think to themselves, ‘Well, OK, it’s not where I want to be, but there’s nothing else to do, so I’ll take all the training courses so I can get a good job when I get out’?

  Says Stuart: ‘People say there’s all these courses, but what are they? In the jails with the best courses, you have to put up with between 60 and 80 per cent nonces. You have to listen to fucking kiddy-fiddlers talking about kiddy-fiddling, fucking granny-rapists ganging up and taking straight cons out, just to do a class on how to cement two bricks together. A few have motor mechanics and woodwork and welding. The courses are only very basic, and sometimes you can get halfway through doing a course and then because of a problem on the wing, you’ll get shipped out.’ Most jails do an industrial cleaning course, but ‘how many ex-cons are going to want to be industrial cleaners? And, seriously, what company director’s going to want a load of ex-cons with fuck-off-sized Hoovers running round his office at 5 a.m.?

  ‘Education facilities is always good in prisons with a large proportion of sex offenders,’ complains Stuart bitterly. This is because sex offenders are generally older, better educated, less trouble, and more intelligent. ‘Ironic, in’it? They’re in there with all the ones they’ve abused, because all their victims have been so fucked up by what’s been done to them that they’ve become criminals, too, and the abusers are still the ones with privileges!’

  This fatalistic meeting between paedophiles and victims is like Greek theatre. I press for more: moments of realisation, subtle incidents of revenge, poignant displays of despair, anything human. ‘Frank Beck what did snuff movies died, the cunt, in Whitemoor, just before I got there, playing badminton in the gym,’ recollects Stuart with bland satisfaction.

  ‘What about murderers? Did you ever share a cell with a murderer?’ I try instead.

  ‘Murderers? The mad thing is, as soon as you mention the word “murder” everyone gets hysterical, really fearful. MURDERERS! Oh, dangerous, dirty, evil people. But the majority of people who I’ve met in jail who’ve been done for murder, you could release fifty per cent of them the day after they’ve committed their murder. Alright, yes, they have killed somebody, but they’re so damaged, a lot of them, by what they’ve done and shell-shocked, they’d never ever dare commit another offence again. Fifty per cent of people in for murder are your ordinary people who just for one moment lost it.

  ‘D’you know,’ says Stuart after reflecting a moment, ‘I thought screws was called screws cos, with their silly caps and that, that’s what they look like.’

  Occasionally, Stuart’s family would find out about his outbursts. Several weeks after the event a letter from HM Prisons would arrive, explaining that the authorities had found it necessary to ‘ghost’ this scion of the family tree away to another establishment, two hundred miles south, or forty miles east, to Winchester or Lincoln. No details about why. At HMP She-Can-No-Longer-Remember-Which, Stuart’s mother once showed up for a visit to find that her strange son was ‘not available’. He’d been taken off, cell stripped out, washed down, ‘ghosted’ yet again, and another con in his place. The warders didn’t tell her what had gone on even when she was standing outside the gates worrying herself sick. He was just ‘not available’. Was he refusing to acknowledge her? Was he in hospital with an infectious disease? Were the guards unhooking his corpse from a bed sheet wrapped through his window bars? Sorry, Mrs Shorter, no comment.

  Stuart’s sister laughs. ‘The reason I’ve seen most of this country is going from prison to prison to see Stuart. It seemed like every Sunday. I remember at school we’d have to write in our weekend books what we’d done at the weekend. The others would have gone to the circus or the seaside and I’d have been to prison to visit my brother.

  ‘We weren’t never allowed to see him after he’d done things,’ she adds, ‘because I think they’d beat him so bad.’

  Another woman, the girlfriend of a friend of Stuart’s, helped out with the occasional bit of smuggling. ‘I had to takes some puff in and Stuart had to get his friend down because Stuart couldn’t put it up his bum himself. Couldn’t face it. So Graham come down to the waiting room and I put it under a Coke can and slid it to him. He picked the can in one hand and with the other put the packet down the back of his trousers, up his arse.

  Drawing by Stuart Shorter

  ‘Another time, my boyfriend had these two really dodgy characters in the car who got out when we stopped at this town on the way and come back with black bags full of stuff–they were professional s
hoplifters. They just sat in the prison car park, waiting, while we went in for the visit.

  ‘Money and puff, we used to take in. Ten- or a five-pound note, fold it up until it’s as small as you get, then wrap it really tight in cling film and burn the cling film round it, because Stuart’s got to swallow it, hasn’t he? That’s how he gets it past the screws who rub him down after the visit. You’d take it into the prison however you could. If you’ve got an onyx ring, that’s obviously raised, put it under your ring to get it in, or in your bra. Next, go up to get your Stu a drink from the machine at the other end of the room, then hand over the packet when you come back and give it him. Simple.’

  Most smuggling does not go on in the visitors’ room. It is done over the perimeter fence, at least in the lower category prisons. Girlfriends, parents, friendly businessmen, strong children–they stand in the fields outside and lob whatever’s been requested (usually stuffed inside tennis balls) into the compound. Then the prisoners on gardening duty (known as ‘Wombles’) clean up the mess and get it back to the cells.

  One Saturday afternoon, a few months before Stuart was due to be released, his name was shouted over the tannoy because his visitor had showed up. Stuart was surprised. It’s only with a visiting order that a visitor can come in and Stuart hadn’t sent out any visiting orders. No one was allowed to visit him. He had to borrow a pair of decent jeans off a mate because he wasn’t prepared. He hadn’t an ironed shirt ready nor had he shaved in a week.

  He never got to the visiting room. Just before he reached it, an officer guided him through an alternative door into a private area he didn’t know existed. To his astonishment his mother and stepfather were sitting there, together with the principal officer of the whole wing.

  ‘The hard bit to me is that Dad was crying. Dad broke down in tears. First thing I said, is, “Is Marcus and Karen alright?” Me little half-brother and sister. Me dad’s really upset.’