So an American man of God became the Church of Scotland’s first full-time prison chaplain. Whether visiting the Bar-L or any other Scottish prison, Bill had a golden rule for his new role: ‘Regardless of what the crime involved is, I don’t want to know the details of why any man or woman was sent to prison before I meet them. I am human like anyone else and could be prejudiced and that is something I must try hard to avoid.’ Bill, who had acquired the nickname ‘the Godfather’ in his previous existence in Easterhouse, saw his new role as supporter of the long established part-time chaplains. One of his most valuable roles was visiting family members of prisoners when a prisoner told him of his worries. One of the saddest things that happens to a prisoner is when letters from loved ones outside the walls stop coming. The prisoner is left in the dark about what is happening to his nearest and dearest, his imagination running riot. It is a particularly unpleasant form of mental torture. At times like these the chaplain is the natural, and often correct person to turn to.
Sorting out such matters was all in the day’s work for a man who liked to mix and talk in the streets with late-night people. Bill so often got to the scene of street trouble first that one chief constable gave him a card to carry to show to any inquiring constable on the beat exactly who he was. Handy, too, when he ran a soup kitchen in George Square. Along with his Roman Catholic colleagues, Bill and the other chaplains had to work within the rules and regulations of the prison service and to preserve a total confidentiality. One interviewer told him that sometimes a prisoner would see the chaplain as a soft touch and asked, ‘Are you one?’ He got a devastatingly truthful response: ‘Maybe sometimes, but so often there can be a hidden reason why a prisoner seeks your help and you’ve got to find what might be there.’
One of the many who found salvation in Barlinnie was Bill McGibbon, who graduated from gangland to the God squad. Religion came more directly into his life rather than at the direct intervention of a chaplain. He served a stretch after being sent down for attempted murder. One night in the loneliness of the great prison he dreamed that one day when he was at last a free man he would return to the prison to spread the word of God among the hundreds of Godless inmates. So it happened and in 1993 he told his story of returning to tell hard cases that ‘Jesus loves them – even if their mothers don’t.’ Bill was a founding member of the Scottish Offenders project, a group that bought a flat in Glasgow’s Southside to help rehabilitate ex-prisoners, particularly released lifers who faced all sort of problems when finally outside after years in jail.
Bill McGibbon, a remarkable character, had grown up in Bridgeton in the east end where many of the locals were regulars in the Bar-L and where in those days the razor gangs ran wild. Although he had day jobs in the meat market and work in a shipyard at night he still found time to run with the infamous Baltic Fleet and Brigton Derry. Not a man to mince words or hide his history, he told one Glasgow reporter that ‘your razor went everywhere with you.’ Though he credits that dream in the cells as a turning point, the influence of prison chaplains was also in play – his conversion to a life in the service of religion had begun with Bible classes in the Bar-L. Years of working to convert others who had gone down the wrong track in life followed.
Surprising as it is to someone with no experience of life in jail as has been remarked earlier, there are more smiles behind bars than you would expect. The chaplains get a fair share of humour from the inmates they befriend. A joke shared is a good joke. The Herald diary has printed some classics over the years. One involved Father Jim Lawlor, one of the Roman Catholic chaplaincy team at the prison. Father Lawlor was visiting a youngster recently admitted. It was obvious the youngster was not too comfortable to be visited by a priest, but in an effort to put him at his ease Father Jim asked him his age. ‘I’ll be seventeen in two weeks,’ was the answer. ‘Oh,’ said the priest, ‘that means we are both Capricorns’. ‘Not me,’ said the new inmate – ‘I am a protestant!’
One of the great religious characters in the Barlinnie story was Father Willy Slavin who spent ten years as the prison’s Catholic chaplain as well as making waves in the newspapers as a long-distance cyclist and co-coordinator of the Scottish Drugs Forum. To this day no one has known more about prisons and drugs than Father Slavin. He was outspoken about society’s continuing habit of the courts filling prisons with addicts who he believed needed help rather than being banged up. Thankfully his thinking has now, to a certain extent, been acted on. There are still too many addicts behind bars, but now at least they can get some help from ‘in house’ medical experts and the facilities of a well-equipped health centre behind the walls.
On admission, drug problems are assessed in depth. Father Slavin was at odds in the early nineties with the Scottish Office on whether or not the Scottish Prison Service was doing enough to tackle drug addiction behind bars. And that, no matter the improvements recently, will always be a contentious issue. Can enough ever be done?
One Kirk chaplain, Alex Wilson, a cheery man who walks the walk inside the walls and seems to know everyone from inmates to staff, introduced me to another man who is a legendary part of Barlinnie history. Eddie Simpson is a tall, courteous Church of Scotland minister with a ready smile and that great attribute to anyone working in a prison – a huge sense of humour. That comes out as you talk to him, as does his sense of compassion and reality. Eddie Simpson is a minister of the Kirk who knows the score, and his fellow man, after a quarter of a century or so as a part-time chaplain in the Bar-L. A first-name type of guy, Eddie was the minister in Giffnock South, a parish miles away from the east end in distance in what some could think of as another world. But not Eddie, who was as at home with the hard cases in the Bar-L as he was with the businessmen and women of the southside. He served God with equal dedication in different ways in both places.
Eddie Simpson first walked through the fearsome main gate in ‘83, requested by the Kirk to take on the role of part-time chaplain. It wasn’t the most popular job, but he accepted the challenge. Apart from a couple of visits when he was ministering in rural Ayrshire, in the pleasant seaside town of Girvan, he barely knew the prison. It was a much different place then – now the warders are carers as well as keepers, and reassuringly for a man of the cloth, redemption seems to be winning that eternal prison battle over revenge or retribution. At least on points. But back in the eighties, before the troubles with rooftop riots had spawned a new strategy in Scotland’s prisons called Fresh Start, many of the prison officers were ex-military with little training who walked in the footsteps of men, with notable exceptions, who were basically the ‘key men’ of the old-style prisons. To them the custodial duties took priority over any caring aims.
When Eddie started, to say the regime was much harsher would be masterly understatement. When he thinks back he remembers one odd little aspect of life in the days when prisoners had no access to phones to keep in touch with families, no television to relieve some of the colossal boredom, and little in the way of training for release or encouragement to turn your life around. One of the first indignities inflicted on the newly convicted was that your watch, if you had one, was taken from you and nowhere in the five huge halls was there a clock. On visiting a cell Eddie remembers the almost inevitable question was ‘Hullo boss, what’s the time?’ The lack of clocks in the jail is interesting. Is it because the inmates should not be reminded of the time and how slowly it can pass? I doubt it – that other iconic prison, Alcatraz, had in its heyday a huge clock that could be seen from most of the cells. Indeed the American cons incarcerated on the island in San Francisco bay called the area where the clock was ‘Times Square’, to remind them of the buzz in the Big Apple.
Another memory of the bad old days in Barlinnie is that each cell had a coloured card on the door – white for Protestants, green for Catholics and pink for Anglicans, all anachronistic in these multi-faith days. Eddie also remembers in the early years the banging on cell doors and screaming. It was a nightmarish sound that went
on almost constantly and could be heard even outside the doors of the huge halls. No TV – or methadone – in cells in those days to calm and occupy the imprisoned. There was also the loathsome task, swept into history with the end of slopping out, of the morning ritual of the ‘bomb squads’ who went round the outside walls of the halls picking up the excrement wrapped in newspaper thrown out the windows of cells where the chamber pots were full to overflowing.
Perhaps it is the overdose of ‘thinking time’ that prison gives, but many prisoners, not just the 60 to 80 or so who turn up for the Sunday Kirk service, are troubled souls who seek advice on spiritual matters, sometimes more directly than a Giffnock resident might approach the problem. Eddie tells of a guy in his seventies, a Bar-L regular well known to the Chaplain, who knocked on his door one day and said that, now he was growing old, maybe he should find out something about his Maker. The Gideon Bible is a reading staple in prisons, too, with many inmates asking for a copy of the version specially prepared for prison use. This little book has a preamble telling how it should be used. It lists emotions like sadness, feeling low, shame, guilt, regret, depression, etc, and points the reader to passages in the scriptures that might help. Eddie recalls one sad youngster saying to him, ‘Where do I start? I’ve got every effing one of them.’ Meetings of prison groups, interested enough to talk over religious and other prison matters, can be a bit different to Bible classes or scripture study on the outside.
The coffee and biscuits are similar, but the mores a little different. Eddie had a prisoner friend who attended such meetings and helped out with the coffees. But he was a little economical with the washing-up liquid. It was good enough for him to ‘sine’ out the mugs with a quick splash under the tap. A tad more fastidious, Eddie asked the inmate to make sure his was washed properly. The host went off to the kettle in the meeting room kitchen and returned with a tray of steaming coffees and a plate of custard creams and politely asked, ‘Who wanted the clean cup?’
That 80 or so – sometimes it’s more, sometimes less – who attend the Kirk’s Sunday morning services is a creditable number when you consider there is a separate Roman Catholic mass and that the Muslims have their own religious services. And the Bar-L congregation is not bolstered, as it is outside, with wives and children. In percentage terms it is pretty good. The Catholic chaplains and Kirk ministers cooperate fully with shared services at Christmas and Easter and in the daily ministering to the needs of the inmates.
The church behind the walls is unique in the prison. It is, for instance, the only place where those in the segregation unit, sometimes there for offences against children – the so-called ‘beasts’ of the jail – can mingle with the other convicts, though there are always some officers in the background. Services are seldom interrupted. Eddie does recall one dramatic little episode of the kind unlikely to occur in most kirks. One Sunday a prisoner, a hard ticket noted for rooftop escapades in the past, took it upon himself to clamber on top of the furniture and climb up towards the roof to hide in the rafters. The service went on as if nothing had happened. And at the close the climber was hauled back down by the officers and taken to his cell. He apologised to the chaplain the next day. Just another incident in prison life!
The chaplains of different faiths also share the job of interviewing new arrivals to offer them any help and understanding they can at one of the most traumatic moments in a prisoner’s life. This shared duty can mean that a rabid Orangeman can meet a Roman Catholic priest as his first insight into religion in the prison. But even that seldom produces any bad feeling; it is normally just accepted.
Every prisoner has a right to a visit from a member of his faith – Protestants, Catholics, rastas, Muslims, Mormons whatever. This is the main task of the full-time Kirk minister and four part-time chaplains. There are also three Catholic priests, one nun, and one Muslim Imam on call. After a night in the First Night centre, a relatively new and humane initiative designed to ease some of the shock at beginning a sentence, the chaplains play a role in the induction process meeting that explains, particularly to first timers, how the system works. This is a really valuable tool in defusing tension in the prison. The cons know their rights inside the prison and the rules are clear. If they want to write a letter, or sadly a too often occurrence, have someone write one for them, or if they want a chaplain to visit or to make a complaint, they know who to turn to.
The chaplains are in demand when prisoners have problems at home, particularly bereavements. Even here there can be a touch of humour. One minister commiserating with an inmate on the loss of a family member who had committed suicide, asked politely what had happened, to be told the deceased ‘had taken a bad turn’. The cons can get close to the ‘God squad’. On one occasion Father Larry McMann was talking in the prison about a recent break-in at the priests’ home where he stayed. ‘Talk to the boys about it,’ someone suggested, ‘they might be able to help.’ So Father Larry duly recounted his story to a group of guys, not unfamiliar with the break-in scene in Glasgow, giving them the sordid details and in particular bemoaning the loss of a nearly new Toshiba DVD player. The cons listened carefully, no doubt considering what they could do about this outrage. And as the priest walked away from their chat one shouted out: ‘Does it have to be a Toshiba?’
Eddie, too, has had more than his share of laughs. Once he was in a cell discussing a matter of concern which was that the prisoner had wanted to donate his body to medical science. During this chat the con’s cellmate lay faking sleep, and lack of concern about the conversation, with a blanket over his face. One of the prisoner’s worries was that his body was ‘not in good enough shape’ to be of use. At this the cellmate was interested enough to remove the blanket and remark, ‘I telt him to try McKellar (the famous maker of sausages).’
But behind the rough and ready everyday humour, the chaplains face the reality of dealing with and trying to make sense of hundreds of wasted lives. Eddie Simpson is saddened that in these so-called enlightened days of the twenty-first century, many of the young inmates of Barlinnie arrive pasty-faced, under fed, ravaged by drink or drugs, just boys who have often never been more than a few miles from their slum home, boys who have never been on a plane or holidayed in fresh air and sunshine. Boys from broken homes who have never had parental love or concern. His worries echoed that of the famous minister Cameron Peddie who, in the forties, valiantly tried to help the disadvantaged youth of the Gorbals and often remarked how ‘sickly’ many of them were. Peddie thought some of his boys even relished a stay in the Bar-L for the advantages of regular meals and regular exercise. Eddie Simpson and his colleagues have, as one of their tasks, to maintain any feelings in those who have least some experience of religious awareness and install in those who have none at least a smidgeon of interest in matters of conscience. Anyone who has contacts with lawbreakers knows that a simple lack of conscience, as experienced by most people, is often totally missing in the offender. They don’t do conscience. They care nothing of what their criminal acts do to other people.
Eddie illustrates this with the story of one Barlinnie regular. On the outside he lives in fine style in a suburban bungalow, drives the inevitable four-by-four, holidays abroad and never ventures out without a thick wallet. All financed by crime, mostly non-violent. This guy is completely without conscience. His logic is that in thirty years or so of this type of crime he has ‘only’ done four years in jail. On release he will resume his old lifestyle. No doubt about it. He reckons the time inside is worth it, balanced against his lifestyle while free. And in any case it might be years before he is ‘collared’ again. Quite a challenge for any chaplain.
The conscience issue also popped up some years ago when the Department of Accounting and Finance at Glasgow University pioneered an optional course for accounting degree students devoted to the study of accounting ethics and the development of ethical sensibility. Course leader Ken McPhail said: ‘Qualified accountants are disturbingly ill-equipped to respond to the c
hallenges of the new business environment. Students are not provided with an understanding of where accounting fits into the broader political economy or the critical and ethical skills that will be required to respond to the changing role for accounting in the new business environment.’
Perceptive stuff when you look at it in the context of the recent collapse of the banking system and the ethics, or lack of them, of the so-called Masters of the Universe who ran the banks into the ground with greed and inefficiency. Part of the university course included a visit to Barlinnie in an experiment to see if the location where students experienced ethics education had any impact on the way they engaged with social issues. It would also be a sharp reminder that business crime could end up with the accountant behind bars. It also helped illustrate how business decisions affect people’s lives.
The students right away got some practicalities – numbers are important in a prison: numbers in and out, visitors, inmates and staff are regularly counted. If there is a discrepancy, everything is shut down until the account balances. Less theoretical was a visit to the cells. Slopping out prevailed at that time, and the three-foot-square dog boxes for holding prisoners were still in use, and the young visitors were suitably horrified. One prison officer dealt with the conscience issue by pointing out that many inmates treat other individuals as objects and many cannot see they have done anything wrong. The study group, the university reported, ‘was able to relate this to the problem of objectification within accounting and business and how treating individuals as objects – as categories like wages and expenses – make it easier for accountants to treat them in an unethical manner.’ This was not the normal sort of ‘education’ dispensed inside the walls of the Bar-L. But as recent events have shown, giving a conscience to the ‘bean counters’ is no bad idea.
The Barlinnie Story Page 8