The last room on the second floor is the telephone room where there are two telephones for inmates to make outward calls and another just for incoming calls from overseas. Inmates are allowed one 10-minute overseas call per day, but the guards will often allow it to continue for longer if nobody else wants to use the phone, or for less time if the connection is not good or they just fancy practising their sadism. It’s funny that the outward line is always perfect, but the connection for the incoming phone is often terrible, with family sometimes having to phone back many times as the connection gets broken, deliberately or accidentally, I don’t know.
A notice stuck to the phone states, in English and Maltese, “All telephone conversations may be monitored and/or recorded” / “Il-konverżazzjonijiet telefoniċi kollha jistgħu jiġu immonitorjati u irreġistrati”.
In one corner of this phone room there is a boiler for hot drinking water, as kettles are not allowed. Thermos flasks, which are available at €13 from the prison shop, can be filled and taken to the cells. The boiler is always leaking, so a huge plastic box is placed underneath to catch the drips, but it ends up full of used tea bags, cigarette butts, noodles, rice and oil from plastic pots which are washed under the hot water. It’s emptied most days, but the box is never cleaned, so there is a ring of a thick black smudge of grease, and any water splashing into it when you’re filling your thermos disturbs the rancid water at the bottom and brings up a stench like the rot of infection.
The boiler is very prone to breaking down and inside the boiler there’s a thick deposit of limescale. It’s best not to think of it when you make your morning tea, and just spoon off the frothy scum from your plastic cup and daydream of a time when you can again use a clean ceramic cup with clean water and a decent brand of tea.
There is also one communal toilet for the whole Division, for use when cells are locked and prisoners have to stay out, between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. The flush of this toilet is broken, there is no seat and the wash-handbasin is full of grime, cigarette butts and balls of hair. Not that it matters, as the tap is not connected anyway. I’ve seen inmates use old bottles or empty milk cartons rather than go in there. Sometimes they even just urinate in the corner of the shower room.
In Division XI, on the top floor, there are the last 20 cells, arranged like the other floors with 10 cells on each side. There is also another small fridge on the landing and a large room set aside for those inmates working on envelope folding. This is one of the prison jobs offered to prisoners. Inmates would cut and glue paper to make thousands of envelopes for various companies.
The workload is never ending, the pay a pittance. But the area is always a good source of paper glue, Sellotape and spare paper – very handy for sending larger letters and cards home to the kids. These envelopes are mainly made by the Arab and African lads and it’s a bit of a closed community, but they were always willing to help with any spare bits they could give. I managed to work for them for a few months in 2008 when nothing else was available; it was slow, low-paid work, but invaluable.
Also, on this floor, there’s a small communal room converted into a mosque; a carpeted room adorned with verses from the Koran in Arabic. Roughly a quarter of the Division at one point was Muslim. There is a main mosque and quite an ornate, pretty church in the old part of the prison, but the newer side also has a room used as a mosque in each of the three Divisions. The way I saw it, even on a mainly Catholic island, the Muslim inmates showed more faith and kindness.
There are six shower rooms, but four of them have been closed for years, the fifth one is in a terrible condition, and the only “good one”, which I helped refurbish in 2012, has only two showers and no sinks – although the plumbing was installed, the sinks were never fitted. At one point, work began on the three out-of-order shower rooms but after six months there was no improvement in sight. The shower we finished in 2012 was senselessly smashed back to the bare wall and left closed for years. I realised in my time inside, that jobs were created just to provide employment, distraction and spending money, never with the purpose of a job well done.
All communal rooms, corridors and shower rooms are in a bad state of repair with flaking paint, rising damp and all sorts of mould in the most vivid range of colours. Even ceilings have old plaster and paint flaking off. If you’re unlucky enough to be sitting underneath you can be covered in a shower of paint and plaster without a moment’s notice, and if you’re really unlucky it could rain the odd lump of concrete. I’ve seen stuff land in coffee and food. It’s not the first time that this kicked off fights, as inmates think that they were thrown in malice.
Every surface that is either too high or too low to be reached is thick with dust and grease, so on particularly windy days, bits are dislodged and blown around the Division.
Unfortunately, although the Division was only some 15 years old when I first went there, it already had dreadful water damage from botched building work which adds to the levels of humidity all year round.
Prison cleaners are the inmates themselves. They are only paid €18 a month, and therefore cleaning is done to a basic minimum, leaving the Division filthy. Cleaning materials are sparse at best, floor wash detergent and bleach are so watered down that they become almost useless. Mops are old and threadbare and rarely replaced, which adds to the general dirtiness of the Division and the cleaners’ apathy. Even when floors are mopped, they tend to smell like a wet dog. I’ve stared at a huge stain on the wall in the main Division for over four years – the stain came from an apple thrown during a food fight. No one ever scrubbed it clean.
During my stint as a cleaner, I ran a little experiment. I didn’t clean the room and corridor I was supposed to clean for almost four months. When the officer in charge of cleaning called me has asked if it was “too much for me” and suggested that maybe he could find me “a job that wasn’t as taxing”, I told him they could keep the job and give it to someone more deserving. In truth, I just wanted to see how long it would be before someone realised that the cleaning was not being done. The answer was four months. Throughout my time there, it never really got any cleaner.
Rubbish bins, normally overflowing, create huge wafts of festering sour smells throughout the Division. Flies and cockroaches are persistent and relentlessly plague your life at night. Ants and mosquitoes are also prolific. Many nights I’ve been woken up by ants and mosquitoes biting me and by cockroaches walking over my body and face. Even in hell we are never alone.
All inmates’ jobs in the prison from cleaning, kitchen work, carpentry, to building work, are paid at €18 a month. Making envelopes, decorating souvenir plaster moulds and assembling Playmobil toys are all paid by production and vary in pay. Playmobil work is the easiest to get, as the other two have long waiting lists and again, it depends on who you know.
It works out at about €1 an hour: to piece together a set of 1,000 toy figurines at a time, takes you up to 15 hours. Most prisoners sign up for this, turning the Division into a factory of plastic and cardboard boxes with dolls’ parts everywhere. As work is assigned and controlled by prisoners in charge, it is widely open to corruption and racketeering, causing many an argument on work distribution. Everyday, prisoners come out for the morning fall-in looking like zombies after working through the night in their cells. (Fall-in takes place five times a day: inmates stand outside cells and respond “Sir”, to the roll-call of the officer in charge.)
I have often stayed up all night to get dolls ready for the morning deadline. The company delivering the dolls would bring them late in the afternoon and would want them on the lorry out of the prison by the next morning. So much repetitive work is mind-numbingly boring and causes huge blisters and calluses on hands after thousands of clicks of that rough plastic. I’ve even seen some inmates’ hands bleeding because of it, and they wrap their hands in Sellotape to be able to finish their set of dolls. For years I’ve seen paedophiles making children’s toys and wondered about the ironic absurdity of life in this prison.
Many inmates suffer with terrible lower back pains, as working conditions are so poor. The tables are not really at the right height to sit at and there is not enough space for everyone, so most people work on their beds in their cells, putting an old blanket down on the bed, then piling the bed high with thousands of pieces of the toy; they then perch on plastic stools or boxes, clipping the tiny pieces together for many hours at a time. I suppose the older you get, the harder it becomes and if I ever felt pain, or miserable, I’d look at the older lags, some almost 70 years old, persisting with the torment to earn a little extra money for themselves and their families, and I felt slightly less entitled to moan. I discovered again and again, that the willpower of some people is just extraordinary and their persistence to get them through tough ordeals is truly humbling.
The Playmobil company website boasts that “Playmobil’s certified high quality is guaranteed by using company-owned European production sites in Germany, Malta, the Czech Republic and Spain.” I wonder if the company or the consumer has any idea what truly appalling conditions their product is being produced in? I hesitate to use the word “sweatshop”, but it’s very close to this. Although many need the money that it provides, surely the conditions should follow those of normal working conditions outside, governed by legislation?
One night, after an article had come out in the local paper, quoting me on such issues, the officer in charge of the Playmobil phoned me in the Division, as did someone from some company connected to their assembly. Menacingly they told me that no one was forcing me to work on the assembly line and to keep my comments to myself. People in the wrong often get defensive. I laughed it off, but also felt threatened and baffled as to how such outside lines were allowed into the prison, when some nights it was so hard to receive phone calls from our families.
Most of the inmates’ wages go straight back into the prison via the tuck shop. Shopping is available once a week by filling in a tick Orders’ Form sheet. There are two sides of A4 to choose from, mostly junk food and toiletries. For years we pleaded to be able to buy fruit or healthy products from the tuck shop but this always fell on deaf ears. You can purchase water and other soft drinks, chocolates and crisps, tea, coffee, biscuits, washing products, detergents, cigarettes and tobacco.
With 600-plus customers with nowhere else to shop, it is very good business. Prices are subject to change without warning, and they are often more expensive than outside. This system reminded me of a topic we had covered in my Welsh history lessons where a shop owned by the coal mine sold a limited range of goods to the miners’ families and with no competition, prices were always kept high.
Malta is bound by law to provide non-smoking rooms or non-smoking Divisions, but none are available making the atmosphere unbearable for all non-smokers. One elderly inmate, who was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, was kept in a Division where the majority smoked, even after half his lung was removed. Cigarettes are huge business, even in prison.
Just a month before I left, a notice went up in all the Divisions, stating that the limit of €80 per week per inmate for shopping from the tuck shop was to be enforced. Before that it was almost limitless, apart from a cap on tobacco – which as everything in the CCF varied for each person. Some days, some inmates’ shopping would be so abundant, that it had to be delivered in rubbish sacks. Most of the shopping would find its way in a particular cell of a particular inmate, that both con and screw knew doubled as a pawn shop.
It was widely accepted. And most divisions had someone like this – lending cards, tobacco and even money outside to pay drug debts.
On weekdays you can purchase up to a maximum of two phone cards at €5 each. On Fridays you’re allowed up to four cards for the weekend. You scratch the card to reveal a number, which is then entered into the phone. They’re precious, these cards – easily lost or stolen, or even read over your shoulder while you are putting in the numbers. It was even possible to borrow phone cards from officers or to buy under the counter.
On February 1, 2017, a new phone card system was installed. Every inmate was given a number, which was topped up, to stop phone card trafficking. Now inmates just traffic the numbers. I myself bought the number off a deaf guy, so once a month I’d get another €10 to phone. A saving of a few Euros for me, and an extra income for him. In his 11 years he was never able to use them anyway. No one cared.
Bottled water is a necessity, as the tap water is so unpalatable that no Maltese person would drink it without boiling it first, and the boiler in the Division doesn’t boil water – it only heats it up. Bottled water must be bought – six bottles of water a week for an eight-year sentence will add up to €931.84. In summer months, consumption can double.
Tap water in the Division was always a problem. Sometimes it was turned off without warning, at other times it came out rusty and once was even contaminated with diesel.
I went to the directors many times about these things. One time, one of the directors told me, “I drink it, to me it tastes fine.” I pointed at his clean, 25-litre hot-and-cold water dispenser in the corner. That was not the same water I drank from the tap. I was “asked” to leave.
Then there’s the pharmacy. Apart from medication, it stocks anything from wet wipes, protein powders for bodybuilding, to fruit teas. If it can be bought outside, more often than not it can be bought inside. There was a time when you could also purchase vodka in mouthwash bottles; mobile phone credit; Viagra and steroids – but this service was eventually stopped, even though nobody seems to have lost their job for supplying contraband.
Every month prison inmates receive two free phone cards, four rolls of very poor-quality toilet paper, one bar of soap, 1kg of sugar and 200g of laundry powder. There are no washing machines available in the men’s part of the prison.
The female side, and the vulnerable persons’ unit, do have them, but for everybody else it’s washing in buckets. There aren’t even washing sinks available so jeans, jumpers, even duvets must be crammed into buckets and washed as best as one can. In the summer, drying clothes is not a problem, if you can get to the washing lines first, but in winter, wet clothes are draped over banisters or on makeshift lines put up inside cells and hung in front of fans 24 hours a day.
Clothes can be sent outside to be washed, but if you’re a foreigner, and you don’t have anyone on the island to take your washing, then buckets it is.
It’s the same principle with food. Family are allowed to bring in food once a week. There are different regulations on what is allowed in, and what quantity, but this seems to change depending on the officer on duty and the inmate.
I am very lucky to have had a good friend outside, my best man at my wedding. Leighton stood by me all my time inside. He, his partner and his mother Jen, visited me most weeks and brought me bags of good food and treats from the outside. This meant so much to me, it broke up the monotony of the menu and provided me with a more balanced, healthy diet. The majority of foreign prisoners do not have this luxury.
Since being deported, I’ve only seen Leighton once. Maybe with this he’ll know how much I valued his and his family’s help.
Writing
From the very first day I was imprisoned, I started writing and keeping notes. Initially I didn’t really know why. Maybe I was trying to understand my situation and myself a little bit better. Every day I would take notes of everything that happened around me and jot down my feelings. I even wrote down the daily menu and tiny details such as what fruit we were given.
I became a record keeper of not just my life, but all those around me. Prisoners would come up to me and ask, “Hey, Daniel, when did my television get confiscated?” or “When was I sent to the punishment block?”
I recorded almost a decade of my life. A decade. I know what I ate, what day I ate it and what time I ate it. I know how much water I drank, how long I spent talking on the phone, how much time I spent with my wife, my children and how much time I spent on my own.
I
found myself smuggling out thousands of pages of writing. It was the only way to speak to my wife properly. She was, unwittingly, my psychologist and helped me get through the madness I was witnessing around me.
Letters, phone calls and visits were always monitored; deaths and problems in the prison never made public; and my own voice in my own trail was unheard. So, I sent out of prison anything I could get my hands on: drawings, photos, prison rules, anything. Visiting friends and family, guards and released inmates helped me deliver beyond the walls any piece of the lost puzzle my life had become.
Smuggling out of prison was a joke. The only issues I had was volume. I made false bottom bags. I sealed volumes of paper in plastic inside large juice cartons topped up with juice; I’d drink the juice with visitors, and then they’d take the carton. The same with boxes of chocolates or croissants. I made dual layered cards and letters, and posted them through the correct prison channels. I had prison officers and inmates working outside for the day take countless letters and post them to my wife. Misdirection is key. I was inventive, but mainly in the CCF they look for things coming in, not going out.
I bought A4 lined books at €1.40 each from the prison shop. My wife abundantly sent me diaries and journals, one even causing an hour-long debate on whether the said volume could be considered as a lethal weapon. I chuckled to myself at their “it’s empty anyway”. I had more paper than I could fill, let alone send out. I remember reading that Nelson Mandela had to write on toilet paper, as writing paper was so scarce. I was again lucky in that aspect; I could record everything.
Inmates and officers knew that my cell was full of books, pens and paper. Whenever officers would come to search the cell, they’d always pass on the task to search my mountains of paperwork to each other. None ever did because the task was too daunting. My incessant writing was a lonely oddity in that place. A running joke, I’m sure, among some cons and screws. But a prisoner’s voice is seldom heard, and I was damned sure I would speak out and make all our voices heard.
Daniel Holmes: A Memoir From Malta's Prison: From a cage, on a rock, in a puddle... Page 3