The Barlinnie Story

by Robert Jeffrey

  When David Scott penned his thoughts there were only six men in the Unit and they were said by the press to be the most dangerous prisoners in Scotland. He observed that three may have been disruptive but that ‘only two could properly be described as dangerous’. He went on to remark: ‘There are always two sides to every story, but whatever the rights and wrongs in the circumstances surrounding the assaults on staff that these two were involved in, one thing is certain. And that is they have taken everything the Scottish Prison Service could throw at them. It seems to me that these two were at a stage when they had absolutely nothing to lose. And if a repressive penal regime continues to breed violence, it stands to reason that officers are going to be hurt, or even killed.’

  Scott went on to ponder whether a solution being experimented with in jails south of the border was the answer. There, a fearsome regime called the Cooler was being tested and the suggestion was that is was more effective than the ‘soft’ option of the Special Unit. Troublemakers sent to the Cooler had to ‘behave’ for 180 days before being allowed back into the normal prison regime. Scott reported, ‘In this situation you are a separate unit responsible only to yourself. There you win or lose by what you do. If you misbehave no one suffers but you. In the Special Unit it would seem that the inmates do have a lot to lose. They have a responsibility, not only to themselves, but to others too. One wrong, irrational or impulsive move could ruin this experiment. It could mean goodbye to a situation where some kind of human existence is offered for the many years of imprisonment that lie ahead. It could mean goodbye to the chance of proving one can be rehabilitated in a system which, in the main, is not geared to this type of work. And it could also mean goodbye to a real opportunity of eventual release, not only for the errant inmate, but for others in the Unit, and for those who might have followed.’ Any man who destroyed that concept would have to live with a heavy conscience.

  Scott ended this astute piece of journalism by saying that if it appeared he had been arguing a case for the Unit he had not consciously done so. He added, ‘What I do believe is that the crimes committed by the five who have been there most of the 22 months that the Unit has existed were dreadful and that there was no possible excuse for them. Indeed it is only fair to say that four have offered no excuse. All have however expressed regret and sorrow. (One continues to protest his innocence.) I believe I have seen a dramatic, almost unbelievable change in outlook by one of the men, whom I have known professionally over a period of years. There are those who say they [the Unit’s inmates] deserve a break, that they have suffered enough over the years. My natural instinct is to say so have the relatives of their victims. But I have not visited them and that might be a story for another day.’

  He ended his perceptive observations on the early days of the BSU powerfully: ‘The Special Unit has had teething problems. No doubt it will be the object of further public criticism. Despite this, I am persuaded that it is making a valuable and long-overdue contribution to penal reform in Scotland. Having met and got to know officers and inmates, I wish both groups all success. They will need it.’ Too true. Public criticism rained down on the Unit for almost its entire existence, a constant corrosive poison that in the end contributed much to its demise.

  Another of Scotland’s most famous reporters, Stuart McCartney, a long time Express man, wrote extensively on his visit to the Unit – a visit that came about because the prisoners wanted the press to see for themselves what the place was like. Stuart wrote that the men in the Unit were members of the world’s most exclusive club, a grouping of the most dangerous men in the Scottish prison system, a motley collection of killers serving life for murder or manslaughter. This club was for dangerous men only. What he saw when he met the members of the ‘club’ astonished this vastly experienced journalist. Here he was having coffee and biscuits with men, many of whom he had seen sentenced, a reporter watching as they defiantly laughed in court when sent down. Now he listened as one of the hardest of the hard earnestly told of his ambition, on release, if ever he was to be released, to devote his time to helping the youth of the Gorbals. Another, a villain Stuart had tagged as beyond redemption, said that in the Unit he had found hope for the first time in his life.

  Alex Stephen, Prison Service Controller of Operations, and one of the real driving forces behind the formation of the Unit, told the Express man that the prison service had to find ways to handle long-time violent prisoners, especially as capital punishment had been abandoned and hopeless lifers with nothing to lose were wrecking the system with dirty protests and attacks on prison staff. ‘We had to decide when setting up the Unit how a man would react when he realised that eventual release was unlikely, or at least so far distant as to be meaningless. How do you rehabilitate someone who may never get out?’ Alex Stephen was too wise a man to claim instant success but he pointed out that in the first ten years or so there had been no serious assaults on prison officers.

  The prisoners were equally straight, with Stuart once saying: ‘I came to know myself in here. I never thought I could be the type of human being I am today. I have matured in here and I know my maturity came too late. I can only pray to God that someday I will get out.’ Another dangerous man in this exclusive club said with insight and realism: ‘If it had not been for this place I would have been dead. Or OTHERS would have been.’

  That little magazine, The Key, was itself, of course, controversial. What aspect of the BSU wasn’t? The first issue had a “print run” of 750 and it seems it was a sell-out. Though that doesn’t look quite so good when it is considered that most of the sales were at an exhibition of prisoners’ art at the Richard Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh and that most of the buyers were foreign visitors. This was not really the intention. The real purpose was to open minds inside and out of the BSU as to what was going on there and what it could lead to in the way of prison reform, and to stimulate debate. The second issue ran to another 750 copies but it seems it was mostly bought by officers rather than inmates; maybe the arty tone was too much for prisoners brought up in the Murdochised world of Page Three ‘stunnas’. And some governors were not too keen to have it distributed on their premises. To some these few sheets of paper stapled together and giving the caged intellects of the Unit space to dispense their ideas was seen as a threat to authority. The Key only ran to three issues.

  I suppose you could say that the magazine was something of a collective work of art by the inmates of the Special Unit, but of course it was the sculptures of such as Collins and Boyle that gained the most attention. There was huge optimism about the Unit in its early days. That optimism and a feeling that not only was this pioneering penal work but that it was bound to succeed and last comes strongly out of reading The Special Unit – its evolution through its art produced by Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre in 1982. Ludovic Kennedy called the book ‘the inside story of one of the most imaginative prison reforms ever attempted’. And the sleeve quoted both Nietzsche and an unnamed Special Unit inmate. The philosopher opined: ‘The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast are the increase in fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of desires; so it is that punishment tames the man, but does not make him “better”.’ The prisoner said: ‘This place is a big mansion house with a hundred different doors in it. Each one you open up there is a different scene inside and your mind starts to open up.…’

  Of that there can be little doubt. The Special Unit did open minds. In the general run-of-the-mill prison establishment there is an old saying that you can only help those who want to help themselves. And that even applied to the Special Unit with its handpicked inmates. Barlinnie governor Alex Thomson said in 1981 that ‘the move [of violent prisoners to the Unit] is not always successful. One or two men have had to be moved back to ordinary prisons either because they couldn’t cope with the pressures the Unit puts on a man or because they were not responding.’

  In an interview with the Sunday Post, Mr Thomson, who moved on to b
ecome principal of the Scottish Prison Service College after three and a half years in charge of the Unit, gave Glaswegians an interesting view of the prison within a prison. The Post’s many readers were told that ‘There are four standard cells seven feet wide and ten feet long on two landings, one above the other, and looking on to a corridor about 15 feet wide. Outside there is a room about the size of two living rooms which is used as a TV and communal room, a small kitchen, a couple of offices used by staff and a communal ablutions room. [The cells still had chamber pots, as did the rest of the prison, as slopping out was the norm.] There is an exercise yard the size of a tennis court and a small garden and greenhouse, all separate from the rest of the prison. The Unit has its own security system.’

  At this stage in its development the Unit had three officers always on duty to supervise the eight prisoners. Allowing for shifts, holidays, illness, etc, this meant that there was a staff of 18. The officers in the Unit were specially selected for the job though any officer in the prison service was allowed to apply for a week’s work in the Unit to find out how it worked. The routine involved unlocking the cell doors on weekdays at 6am and locking up each night at 9pm. At weekends the unlocked hours were 7.30am to 5pm. Prisoners were allowed to wear their own clothes and have more or less unlimited visits. There was no work programme though the prisoners cleaned the area themselves. There were no duties but each man was expected to create a programme of study or other work. This worked well in the early days with such exceptional men as Winters, Collins and Boyle involved in artistic enterprises, but in the final years critics were complaining about prisoners who slept in till midday and spent the afternoon with visitors and then lay about watching TV at night.

  The founding ideas of giving these desperate men responsibility and respect led to meetings galore and much discussion. On Tuesdays the governor, prisoners and staff gathered under an elected chairman who could be a prisoner. The idea was that anything relevant to the Unit could be discussed. There were also informal meetings on Fridays and special meetings to cope with problems that had turned up as well as group meetings where prisoners with personal problems attempted to work them out with two of the staff and two other prisoners. The point of these seemingly endless talking shops was to teach prisoners social responsibilities, often for the first time in their lives.

  Since they were out of the mainstream prison system and denied the chance to earn money in the workshops, the BSU prisoners were give a ‘wage’ of £2.09 to buy tobacco, sweets, papers, toilet articles and so on from the canteen. Once a week a prisoner – chosen by the committee – was allowed into Glasgow under escort to buy items unavailable in the prison and approved by the governor. In an interview, Governor Thomson was realistic enough to say that it was too early to make a judgement about success or failure. Too true, as the experiment had another ten years or so to run. But he did point out that in 1981 none of the five men who had been through the Unit and released had ‘been in the least bit of trouble’.

  So much for the nuts and bolts of the Unit. But its founders and chief protagonists had much more high-flown hopes and ideals. In a deep piece in The Special Unit – its evolution through its art, clinical physiologist Ian Stephen looked at the role of education in the Unit. He found it vital that a prisoner in the Unit was enabled to develop ‘skills and abilities which are latent but unexpressed within him’. He pointed out that although intelligence is not one of the criteria for admission to the Unit, nearly all the prisoners who have passed through it are of at least average intelligence and ‘a large number have fallen into the superior range, i.e. the potential to achieve degrees at university level, had social and educational experiences permitted’. The number was said to represent a significantly higher proportion than can be found in the general population. When the book was published, three prisoners were studying with the Open University, others had undertaken O Grade courses, one was involved in a short-story writing course, music was being studied and, of course, the Unit’s involvement in sculpture at the highest level was ongoing.

  It is interesting, too, that Ian Stephen points out that the decision to allow the prisoners to design their own work study programmes, something much criticized by those agin the ethos of the Unit, was valuable. He pointed out, ‘This is no easy task when one has been accustomed to others laying down daily work schedules for you and requires considerable discipline and responsibility.’ This lavishly illustrated book – the pen and ink drawings of Hugh Collins in particular are hugely impressive – is an antidote to some of the hysterical vapourings of the tabloids. The Unit may have lost its way in the end, but this book intriguingly charts at least part of the journey to ultimate closure. Ludovic Kennedy perceptively writes of the hard men such as Collins, Boyle, Winters, Bob Brodie and Tom Galloway: ‘It is no surprise that they proved to be talented; for they were or are all men of unusual energy, and one can see now that their capacity for violence was the distaff side of their capacity for creativity.’ Yet he goes on to say that the attention paid to the artworks of the prisoners may well have blinded some to the Unit’s primary aim, which is not acclaim for the art but therapy for the artist. In his view what the Unit was doing was to give men whose psychological growth had, for one reason or other, been stunted, the opportunity for self-discovery; and by so doing to change fundamentally their attitude to society.

  In books like The Special Unit – its evolution through its art and also in The Key there is optimism and honesty from both sides of the argument. The short-lived little magazine even ran a critical article by a prison officer who vocalized the concern of the man in the street who feels that when the Unit is written about there is too much praise for the artworks and not enough regret and concern for victims. This lack of concern about the victims was, of course, a criticism also made by David Scott. The prison officer who penned his little piece also criticized Jimmy Boyle for not taking the opportunity in Peterhead to attend classes on art. This seems a fair point, as even in the seventies there were good educational opportunities in most prisons. But you can only, as they say, help someone who wants to be helped. And the Special Unit did create that desire in previously violent men and that must surely be seen as some sort of success. But the story of the Special Unit is much more than the flimsy pages of an amateurishly produced magazine, however significant, or good reviews on the arts pages of the broadsheets.

  12

  A MURDERER, A BAMPOT AND LIVES TURNED AROUND

  To the thousands who followed the emerging story of the Special Unit, as told week after week in the city’s tabloids, it was simply sex, drugs, rock and roll behind bars. The deep thinking and the humanity that infected the project is its early years was not headline material. The other stuff was.

  The two leading characters in what was almost a prison soap opera were, of course, Jimmy Boyle and Hugh Collins, undoubtedly the most well-known of the Unit’s success stories. They were very different people. Boyle’s CV is like no other – gangster, murderer, sculptor, novelist, wine buff. Not too many can claim that. Once said to be the most violent man in Scotland, he was jailed in 1967 for the murder of another lowlife gangland figure, William ‘Babs’ Rooney. He has denied that he committed this killing although not his gangland past. The sentence was life. He immediately became what the prison reports politely call ‘difficult to control’ and spent long spells in solitary and in the infamous cages of Porterfield, Inverness. He was particularly violent to prison staff and the brutality of the cages did little to calm a tortured soul. The so-called cages, which were reserved for prison troublemakers, were temporarily closed in 1972 after some of the most violent disturbances in a Scottish prison when five prison officers and four inmates (including Boyle) were hurt.

  It seems strange now, looking back on that violent era and the obvious fact that the cages were no solution, that they were reopened and back in use in 1978 before finally being abandoned and demolished in 1994. Ironically, around the same time, the Special Unit was closed
. It is a deep source of puzzlement that, as the Special Unit and its basic belief in redemption rather than retribution, crawled slowly to its controversial conclusion, a few miles up the road in the Highlands men were still thrown into the cages that had ‘animalized’ Boyle.

  Hugh Collins is a contrast to Boyle. He is on record at almost every interview he gives of telling of his regret that he took a life. He says his own life was never the same again. Boyle seems less troubled by his crimes and his past, seemingly claiming on occasion that the brutality and pain of his own life of long years of confinement has perhaps blinded him to an earlier and incredibly different way of life. He has attacked those who have publicly grudged him any material success he has had since release by saying: ‘The only thing I can say about people like that is that they have allowed themselves to become prisoners of my past. I have moved on but they have allowed themselves to be stuck. My life has moved on beyond my wildest dreams. There is a thrawn jealous aspect to some people’s attitude.’

  It is a point of view, but to my mind, Hugh Collins’ reaction to the Special Unit, and his ‘redemption’ – and if that word is too strong, ‘life change’ – is more complex and interesting. The younger man, Collins was jailed in 1975 for the gangland murder of a rival, Willie Mooney. In a laceratingly honest interview on his criminal days and what he had become he said: ‘I was never a gangster, only a bampot. The only person I can apologise to is dead. The only man who can forgive me is dead.’ The killing of Willie Mooney led to 16 years in jail, long nights awake and in fear. He says: ‘I was afraid of death. I was afraid of rejection. I see now how my violence was the product of fear.’ That’s the sort of mind and thinking ideal for ‘treatment’ rather than a midnight visit from a ‘batter squad’ and Collins got it in the Special Unit. Introduced to sculpture, he found some release and peace. His story shows the best side of the Unit and it was played out before the concept of the reformers became contaminated by controversy, drifting discipline and too much outside interference.