The Barlinnie Story

by Robert Jeffrey

  There are good reasons for this:

  Drumming is good physical exercise.

  Drumming is catharctic – it is a kind of ‘beating’ after all – and it may be emotionally healthy.

  Drumming involves counting, listening, and rhythm; it is therefore good brain exercise.

  Drumming is often thought to have a spiritual element due to its capacity to induce trance-like states.

  Drumming is seen by some as having a ‘natural’ element – establishing contact with ancient folk memory and as such making contact with nature and primitive man (fanciful but not impossible).

  Drumming promotes dancing and singing which also have social/community and health-giving qualities.

  Perhaps most importantly, drumming promotes community and closeness – historically drums have always been played where people gather, encouraging togetherness and uniformity (think of the Scottish military marching band versus African tribal dancing).

  A single drum is a rather sad thing … lots of drums are dramatic.

  On a more subtle angle, the men’s movement wanted to reclaim drumming – it is a peculiarly male and even warlike activity and as such it may be appropriate in all-male settings such as prisons where a macho culture might link some ‘artistic’ and creative enterprises with femininity and the effete.

  Drum beats affect things like pulse, breathing rate, the speed you drive at etc, and many people firmly believe that drumming and similar rhythmic activity (any music/poetry) helps us modify our emotions and moods. Exercise is regularly prescribed for people with depression; drumming and music therapy are often also recommended.

  Because drumming can be threatening (due to its warlike component) and often involves strong emotional release, it is not suitable for a compulsory curriculum … but if people have the opportunity to opt in, they mostly do! It is a good move to use it in prison theatre.

  Sitting in the Kirk in Barlinnie for a normal service or maybe some quiet contemplation, it’s possible for a brief period to forget you are in a penal institution. It is perhaps the only place in the whole of the establishment where it is possible to feel ‘outside’ inside, because it is so like a normal place of worship.

  A prison of this size is constantly evolving and almost every year there has been change. In 1967 there was a major extension to the perimeter to create the present industrial complex where the production of shelving and garden furniture has taken over from oakum teasing and the like. In the new work sheds the prisoners learn, under the watchful gaze of trained instructors, the techniques of state of the art timber cutting and fabrication. This is a costly service to provide and because of the prison environment the equipment cannot be used in a fully commercial way and the hours of operation are necessarily restricted. Whatever the prisoners make is sold, but it does little to contribute financially to the millions a year it takes to run the prison. Which is a pity, but the operation in the work sheds, particularly working with timber, is a valuable introduction to normal life for many of the prisoners who have no experience of a factory environment. Or indeed of regular work. The creation of valuable artifacts is also, for many, a much-needed source of satisfaction in such a grim place. One snag is that because of the continual rotation of prisoners from one establishment to another, and some of the shorter sentences being served, it is not possible at the moment for prisoners to get work qualifications that would help them to jobs on the outside.

  The years since the Evening Citizen reported on the light-coloured sandstone walls dominating the east end of the city have seen that stone turn grimy, blackened by the smoke of factories and coal fires from the houses that soon sprang up round the walls. A bit of sandblasting would not go amiss though there are other more pressing priorities – like the almost constant refurbishing of the internal facilities. This does not come cheap. The refurbishment of D-Hall for example, completed in 1997, cost £5 million.

  Other milestones in the life of the fabric of the prison included the surprising inclusion of fitting out a female section, needed because of the closure of Duke Street Prison in 1955 which had become the city prison for women. The cells used to hold the women sent to the Bar-L eventually became home to the Barlinnie Special Unit from 1972 to 1994, after female offenders were placed elsewhere.

  These days the majority of women offenders in the west of Scotland are held at Cornton Vale near Stirling, a much more rural environment than that of Barlinnie. Around 230 women (including young offenders) are held there and it is interesting that a prison built as recently as 1975 is still having overcrowding problems and refurbishment programmes. No matter how thorough the long-term planning is, forecasts always seemed to be defeated by growing numbers of prisoners, of both sexes.

  Despite the upgrading over the years there is no doubt that Barlinnie is showing its age, apart from the problems of overcrowding. Much money could still be spent profitably on improving conditions without going over the line that allows the tabloid pundits to rant on about it being a ‘home from home’ and a ‘cushy lifestyle’. The library is a case in point. This is a key facility that should be heavily used. Sadly a considerable portion of the inmates have reading and educational problems that keep them out of the literary loop. But those who use the library would, in my opinion, benefit from a better browsing area and a few soft seats creating just a little of the ambience of a Waterstone’s or the late, much-missed Borders (needless to say without the lattes and hot chocolate, never mind the muffins and croissants!). That would make it a better place to instill the reading habit.

  Away from the library, close to the reception area, there exists a now unused, but undestroyed, area that would pop the eyes of anyone who believed life in prison was a cushy option: the dog boxes. These are mini windowless stone cells hardly the size of a cupboard. Now disused and discarded and, like shackles and the infamous Peterhead cages, redundant in the modern prison regime, they are one of the first things a prisoner sees. Their function was to hold prisoners in the queue for admission, waiting for their prison garb or waiting to move from one section to another. Here men were kept sitting in uncomfortable, constricting darkness. It was almost impossible to turn round and completely impossible to really stretch out. Inside a dog box you really knew you were ‘inside’. And at least we have moved on from that. Some criminals I have interviewed down the years told me the dog boxes were the feature of life inside they hated most.

  Among the most important areas of the prison – at least to the inmates – is the agents’ room, where prisoners are allowed to confer with their lawyers. Down the years this too has been upgraded. Prison officers and the Governors have no trouble with inmates meeting their legal eagle of choice inside the prison walls. The prison service and the lawyers each appreciate they have a job to do, albeit different, and generally show each other mutual respect. In the Bar-L such famous pleaders as Laurence Dowdall, Joe Beltrami and Donald Findlay have listened to hard luck story after hard luck story from headline making murderers to fraudsters and burglars, even the small time crooks the prisoners themselves call ‘gas meter bandits’. These are world-weary men who have heard it all before. But you can always get a surprise, even in Barlinnie. Frazer McCready, a lawyer now working in the Stirling area, with extensive criminal law experience, told me of a scary happening that also had its funny side. He was a raw, eager young lawyer visiting a couple of clients in the old agents’ room. Unknown to Frazer, these two had had a bit of a falling out over a girl, a not unusual occurrence among the Glasgow criminal fraternity. When Frazer had finished chatting to the first guy, and getting his story down on to his legal note pad, the accused was taken away to a secure area to wait until the second interview was over, as he was under protection in the jail at the time.

  Frazer says: ‘I was halfway through seeing my second visit when the first accused who was being escorted back to his hall burst into the room, attacking my second client. They were both big guys and were soon knocking lumps out of each other. Extra office
rs were quickly on the scene following the alarm but they took a good five minutes to split them up. It was only after they were both taken away that one of the officers stated: “Was there no a lawyer in here? Oh fuck, where is he?” It was only then that they found me in an empty room across the hallway having done the only brave thing I could have thought of – crawled out on the floor during the barney. Fortunately neither of the love rivals was prosecuted – to my relief – as no doubt I would not have been in a position to act.’

  One of Frazer’s colleagues also had a humorous introduction to legal work in the Bar-L. In his case his client asked, at the start of the meeting, if he could stand on the legal eagle’s chair. Frazer’s pal did not want to upset the client and so got off his chair to allow the prisoner to climb on. He stood there for a few minutes staring through the bars and, when asked what he was doing, the prisoner replied he just wanted to look out the window – as he had not seen the outside world for the last two weeks!

  * * *

  The young Mr McCready’s first impressions of Barlinnie, fresh from academia, was like that of most young lawyers. It was a big, cold, unfriendly place, but ‘once you get over the initial shock of being in the jail it was not a bad place to visit. I would say most accused appreciate a visit from their lawyer – it breaks up the boredom of the place. Some accused simply ask you to stay on as long as possible and many’s the time I’ve heard a prisoner saying, “could you not just stay a bit longer and talk to me?”’

  One of the biggest changes Frazer McCready has noticed in recent years is the increase in prisoners with ethnic backgrounds in Barlinnie. Every visit with a non-English-speaking prisoner requires the assistance of a qualified translator. Given that most, if not all, remand prisoners are on legal aid, the State must be paying a fortune for translators. But, without doubt, it’s all a necessary part of a fair system of justice. Incidentally that prison humour thing surfaced again on Frazer’s first visit to a client in jail when a smiling warder suggested that a striped shirt was not a good idea if he wanted to get back out!

  Not all visits by lawyers to the prison were jokey affairs. In 2006 a 32-year-old woman solicitor was jailed for supplying heroin and diazepam to an inmate, using the lawyers’ consulting room as the place for the handover. Her defence was largely based on being coerced by a gangland figure into taking the drugs inside. The errant lawyer also had mental health concerns but, sentencing her in the High Court in Edinburgh, Lord Kinclaven said: ‘Your case, like many others in this court, clearly illustrates the damage and the devastation that can be caused by involvement with drugs and the drugs trade. I have taken into account what has been said about the circumstances of the offending, coercion, pressure, threats of violence, reference to a handgun, fears for safety, the apparent lack of financial gain, the cooperation with the Crown, and the fact that your legal career is over. But I am satisfied that the court does require to impose a custodial sentence.’

  As background to this interesting little tale of drugs and jail it should be pointed out that every day in life around 25% of the prison population of Barlinnie is dished out methadone from the in-house medical centre and that dealing with addictions is a major part of the reception process. Everyone in the jail is aware of the presence of illegal substances and the pressure on visitors to supply them and in this case the investigation began with a tip-off from an inmate.

  So what is to be done with Barlinnie? Politicians of all stripes, one of the most respected Chief Prison Inspectors Dr Andrew McLellan, the ex-Governor McKinlay, and the Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill were all on board the same train when interviewed by Evening Times man Russell Leadbetter recently. Dr McLellan warned that it was not just Barlinnie that was a problem – he said our entire prison system was facing crisis. A new jail or two would not solve the problem. Many are needed. Mr MacAskill praised the staff for doing an excellent job in difficult conditions with difficult people. In particular he said prison governors and staff in Scotland were ‘manfully seeking to cope, but we have to lighten the load.’

  Clearly one way to do that is to keep people who really should not be there out of prison, making more use of home detention curfews, community service and electronic tagging. Mr MacAskill will find few to disagree with his observation: ‘If we are to allow them (prison staff) to do their proper job – to make sure people are punished but rehabilitated, and dangerous and serious criminals are incarcerated – we cannot continue to have prisons simply as a receptacle for people with minor problems committing minor offences.’ That is blue sky thinking, but in itself will not solve the problem. More bricks and mortar are still required.

  Back in the 1880s those in charge of the prison service were far-sighted enough to let the prisoners of Barlinnie help with the building of the new prison through their work in the prison quarry which provided building materials. Would it be an impractical fantasy if, in these enlightened days, we devised a plan to move prisoners from the Bar-L to new fit-for-purpose establishments little by little? Letting the prisoners assist in turning the five great halls of Barlinnie – A, B, C, D, and E – into dust would be the ultimate act of symbolism in society’s attitude to the wrongdoer.

  4

  HUMAN RATS, CHESS AND OUT THROUGH THE WINDOW

  The reputation of Barlinnie is a fearsome one to folk who live life on the right side of the law. As they glimpse it driving past on the M8 heading for the genteel delights of Edinburgh, ready for a credit card raid on the upmarket shops of the capital or a bite to eat and a moment or two of Mozart, a shiver can run down the spine. If they think about it at all in any depth, their imagination confers on the prison the status of the ultimate hell of life in Glasgow. The solid citizen may know little of what it is really like inside, but they know enough to make the thought of life behind bars in such a place the stuff of nightmares.

  In this sense prison is truly a deterrent though it has to be pointed out that those who fear incarceration most are, in any case, those least likely to have their collar felt by a cop and taken on a trip to court, a lecture from a Sheriff or judge, and onward to ‘the big hoose in the east end’ in the famous blue bus (now replaced by vehicles provided by a private security company) shuttling between the prison and the courts. For anyone who has never been inside, it is revealing to hear the tales of old lags. The perception of the career criminal on jail life is, not surprisingly, rather different to that of the innocent.

  Walter Norval is a case in point. The city’s first Godfather was almost hungry to get into the place. A wild and lawless life in Maryhill which started with robbing wee sweetie shops and escalated to armed bank robbery and attempted murder had conditioned him for his first experience of Barlinnie. His youthful experiences with his gang known as ‘the Wee Mob’ had made it a certainty that long spells behind bars were sure to follow. And they did, starting in 1945 when he had been arrested after a robbery at a tobacconist’s shop and found himself taken from Glasgow’s Northern Police office to Barlinnie. Norval in his early days in Maryhill had rubbed against a couple of archetypical Glasgow hard men John Foy and Joe O’Hara, a duo who strutted around brawling and fighting at any opportunity. Collectively know as the ‘Kings of the Garscube Road’, they ran big money pitch and toss schools on the banks of the Forth and Clyde Canal among other nefarious ploys. They took a shine to young Walter who no doubt reminded them of the cocky fighting ‘fuck ’em all’ attitude of their own youth and their disrespect for the law. Walter spent hours listening to the tales of his criminal mentors. Tales that included experiences in Borstal, Barlinnie and other criminal establishments.

  So it is not surprising that he had fixed in the back of his mind that doing time added street cred to the would-be hard man and gang leader. Many others in the criminal fraternity shared the belief that doing time in the Bar-L was a necessary step on the road to the top in crime. In a long career of law-breaking, Norval would end up as something of an expert in penal establishments. A brief spell in the army as a conscript
(he was pretty swiftly given an ignominious discharge, of course) saw him doing the rounds of some of the toughest jails in England. In the days of conscription in the forties and fifties, many a bolshie youth simply decided not to register and got away with it. Norval however was ‘on the books’ already, as it were, when he reached National Service age. His Borstal time saw to that. Fresh out of the infamous Polmont institution and back on the streets of Glasgow, hungry for trouble, he had to watch his back more carefully than most – the boys in blue were after him and so were the military police. As a fledgling hard man he was in no mood to volunteer to serve king and country.

  But he was nabbed one night and found himself in Maryhill Barracks en route to Richmond in Yorkshire in the worst piece of recruitment the Green Howards ever made. He almost immediately did a runner back to Glasgow but was recaptured in a month or so. Back in uniform the series of inevitable courts martial began. After the first he was sent to Colchester military prison. Even at this stage he had, of course, sampled both Barlinnie (as an untried prisoner) and Borstal, but Colchester was something else. A natural-born member of the awkward squad, he spent long hours in what was called ‘the wet cell’, a stinking place reserved for hard cases.

  This was a primitive place and prisoners were graded according to behaviour with privileges granted to those who conformed best. This created a sort of inverse league table of malcontents. True to character, Walter Norval was granted Stage One status – the lowest of the low or maybe you might just say the most difficult of the difficult. It was so bad that he had to get the help of a Status Three prisoner to get in on the ‘snout’ racket in the prison. Tobacco, its consumption and control, is a major player in any prison trouble. That was shown clearly in the Barlinnie riots in the 1930s (discussed later in this book) and it continues to this day in every prison in the land. Though now the problem is compounded by illegal drugs.