Collins, like Boyle, has undoubted talent as a writer and sculptor. One of his most famous pieces, ‘Christ, the Sinner’, was commissioned by the St Columbus Church in Glasgow but rejected owing to its explicit depiction of Christ’s genitalia, though it was subsequently shown in Edinburgh galleries. He tells of the release brought by his new-found skill. Art classes in the Unit gave him sculpting material and access to expert advice: ‘I was fortunate. I was no’ bad at it. When I had the idea to carve the statue of Christ I took it as a sign. This makes me sound like a maniac. It took me two years, but this is the bizarre thing; it was the best time of my life.’ He said he saw the long process of creating a religious work of art as a punishment, a penance. And when he put away the sculptor’s chisel and hammer he took to the word processor, producing books like Autobiography of a Murderer and Walking Away, books full of insight for anyone interested in crime and punishment.
Collins was in many ways the perfect prisoner for the BSU experiment. The regime could have been designed to reform him personally, at least in theory. But Collins was not blind to the faults in an experiment that changed his life and he has been outspoken in his criticism of some aspects of life in the Unit: ‘The Special Unit saved me, but it also tortured me. I was made into a pet lion for the social workers, the psychologists and lawyers who came there. Some of it was disgusting. These people were like groupies. They patronised you and got a thrill from being near you. Some of the women who visited the Unit would even sleep with you.’
But it is also revealing that the trust that had been built up by the special breed of prison officers used in the Unit was so strong that men like Boyle and Collins were daily given chisels and hammers and other potentially dangerous weapons. It takes guts to hand a chib merchant a razor-sharp chisel. Indeed a couple of those involved in treating the prisoners tell of the astonishment of such as Boyle and Larry Winters in particular being handed scissors across the table by their captors, chatting face to face. It didn’t happen outside the Unit. It was a powerful indicator that inside the Unit you were not treated as an animal, but as a man with brains and potential and some hope for the future. But such an easygoing regime in the centre of a hard prison where even a knife and fork in the dining hall could be a weapon was clearly not acceptable to all. A lot of the opposition to the Unit sprang from hard-line prison officers who had spent years in service and years when handing a prisoner a chisel was invitation to a potentially deadly attack. Their position is, looking back, to a degree understandable. The officers in the Unit were specialists, knowledgeable about the background of the formation of the Unit and basically sympathetic to its aims. Specially selected for the job. Life did not look so simple to the run of the mill officer earning his corn in a mainstream establishment supervising slopping out and restraining hard tickets ready to give him and his colleague a sly kicking at any opportunity.
The newspapers, too, almost from day one, were full of criticism – some of it rumour, some of it fact. Newly released prisoners from the mainstream jail passed the prison scuttlebutt to reporters eager to hear the worst of an experiment that in the end seemed to spiral out of control. Finally the prison authorities simply closed the place down. It might have been a better idea to introduce a firmer hand, cut down on the excesses, persevere and expand the concept and that seemed to be what Alan Bishop of the Prison Inspectorate wanted in 1994. But in the end the authorities folded in the face of relentless public criticism. Noises were made that this was not the end of the ethos of specialized small units for certain types of inmates and indeed that ethos was now to be spread around the country’s prisons. But the doors of the BSU were to close for good.
An official report late in the life of the Unit, ‘Small units in the Scottish Prison Service’, makes fascinating reading. It comments on the problems of the Unit and notes that these came about gradually over the years. But whatever the rights and wrongs of the decision to shut the Unit down, the authors of this report cannot be accused of a whitewash. They stated: ‘The near universal view is that in the absence of an active and continuously developing community the BSU has become stagnant and fossilized. Many of the current prisoners have spent lengthy periods of time (in once case ten years) in the Unit often actively refusing to move to another establishment, as this has been seen as a backward move, entailing too many sacrifices. A number of prisoners appear to have “dug in their heels” in the hope of eventually gaining liberation directly from the Unit, or at least a release programme prior to moving on from the Unit. This has, without doubt, led to considerable regime “slippage” to the extent that the regime is currently far more relaxed than was envisaged by the 1971 working party which stated that the Unit should retain “a firm but fair discipline system”.’ The report then went on to highlight a whole series of practices which it said characterized life in the Unit.
1) Visits have come to dominate virtually the whole of Unit life. There are very few visit-free periods and visitors can often be found in, and arriving at, the Unit when community and special meetings are taking place. While it is important that prisoners are encouraged to re-establish and develop their relationship with their family, and while contact with ‘outsiders’ can be beneficial and therefore very important, it is inevitable that the current frequency of visits reduces the scope for interaction among prisoners and staff. Indeed, some prisoners have hidden behind a stream of visitors, which has removed the need for them to interact with the Unit community on any regular basis with the result that the community has become less close-knit and less cohesive.
The second note was meat and drink to the critics, officially confirming the worst fears of outside observers on the subject of sex behind bars. It read:
2) In a supposed demonstration of the fact that the Unit ethos is based on the notions of responsibility and trust between staff and prisoners, visits have long been allowed to take place, unsupervised, in prisoners’ cells despite the existence of an Operational Instruction to the effect that staff should be present in the cells area when visits are taking place. An additional rule states that cell doors should remain open during visits. In practice, neither of these instructions are enforced on a regular basis and the cells area has virtually become a no-go area for staff with the result that the prisoners are effectively, but unofficially, permitted conjugal visits.
Other serious criticisms followed, building up a picture of what the Unit had become that was more powerfully critical than any previous examination of the regime.
3) Prisoners’ visitors are not searched on any regular basis or in anything other than a cursory manner. Again this is a practice that has evolved over time and which has supposedly been used as a measure of displaying the level of trust between staff and prisoners. It is difficult to determine whether this trust has been honoured and in the Unit’s early days the prisoners were brought to book by the rest of the community if there was any breach of trust by their visitors. It is clear from evidence supplied to the Working Party that breaches of trust have occurred. There have been incidents in the past where both prisoners and their visitors have been found to be under the influence of alcohol and while it is generally claimed that the visitors did their drinking prior to arrival at the Unit there have been incidents when intoxicated visitors have been found in possession of empty spirit bottles on departure from the Unit. There have also been incidents where BSU prisoners have been found in possession of unauthorized substances, indeed, several prisoners have been downgraded as a result of using alcohol whilst in the Unit.
Less sensational but equally telling as an example of how the Unit had, to some extent at least, lost its way was the next observation of the working party. The public perception of the old sex, drugs, rock and roll culture was that it was mitigated by the serious artistic overtones, with the violent men in the Unit spending endless hours in painting, sculpting and producing literature of high quality. In the end it seems that the concept of incarceration and art walking hand in hand was ‘out the
window’ as they say in Glasgow.
4) Only one of the current group of prisoners is regularly engaged in any kind of constructive activity and this is an activity from which he gains significant financial profit. The remainder of the prisoners spend the majority of their time entertaining visitors, reading, watching television or sleeping.
The Working Party document goes on to make many more telling but less headline-grabbing observations. The slow deterioration of group cohesions was illustrated by the fact that very rarely did the final group of prisoners cook or eat together, each prisoner preferring to cook and eat on an individual basis. This was in contrast to what was going on in a Unit in operation at Shotts Prison at the time when prisoners and staff in exceptional and special occasions sat down together to eat. The regime was certainly relaxed and it is easy to see what problems the policy on mail could lead to. In line with prison rules, incoming mail was not censored, but neither were letters opened and checked for contraband in the presence of the prisoners, as is the case in other prisons. A gram here, a gram there and a little help from my friends. … The report acknowledged that the ‘substantial’ regime slippage that allowed such departures from prison norm had taken place slowly over the years. It also observed that with the lengthy periods of time the existing prisoners had spent in the Unit that it ‘has been very difficult, and often impossible, for successive staff members or governors to retract “the privileges” which resulted from the “slippage”.’
There is no final end to the story of the Special Unit. Arguments about its success or failure and its legacy in the current prison system will continue in the talk on the streets and in more academic circles. Ron Ferguson is one of the names most frequently associated with the great experiment. Cowdenbeath’s most famous supporter is now a freelance author, columnist and broadcaster. He was minister of St Magnus Cathedral in Orkney for 11 years and is still based there, and he took time to pen the following account of his own association with the Unit and the conflict it caused even in church circles. He writes:
I first came in contact with the Special Unit in the late 1970s, when I was Church of Scotland community minister in Easterhouse. Community ministry was an experimental form of ministry established by the Kirk; the idea was for a minister to live in a deprived community and work with churches of all denominations, Protestant and Roman Catholic, in ways which would benefit the wider community. Rev Archie Russell (Drumchapel) and myself were the first appointees in 1973.
The street I lived in with my family had its own gang, the Torran Toi, and many of the families in the area had at least one member or relative resident in the ‘Big Hoose’. The experience taught me a lot about the circumstances in which violent crime flourishes.
I had been brought up in a mining community in West Fife, but nothing had prepared me for living and working in a community in which male unemployment levels were more than 50 per cent and crime was endemic. I learned at first hand that the herding of people into ghettos, into urban Sowetos, suited society at large. To stick disadvantaged people together into a reservation with few jobs or facilities and then demonise them was an effective distancing tactic, one which permitted a denial of responsibility.
Ordinary people, many of whom had had very abusive childhoods and who were struggling for survival, became ‘evil’ in the eyes of those who wanted none of the potential trouble anywhere near their own back yards. I learned about the gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Some people in the Kirk, quite proud of having one of ‘us’ living among ‘them’, would ask me: ‘Are you winning?’ Winning what, precisely? What I knew for sure was that others were losing, drowning even.
Over eight years, I got to know some of the most frightening and some of the most fantastic people I have ever met. The experience changed my life.
A remarkable friend of mine, George Wilson, a lay preacher, used to go regularly to the Special Unit at Barlinnie. Set up in 1973, it was the vision of two men, Ken Murray and a civil servant called Alex Stephen. As a prison officer, Murray – a man of gritty integrity, ahead of his time – was concerned that some of Scotland’s most violent criminals were simply being banged up without any serious attempt at rehabilitation. Murray and civil servant Stephen were convinced there had to be a better way of dealing with ‘uncontrollable’ prisoners than chaining them up or sedating them into passivity. The Unit was initially staffed by volunteer prison officers and run on democratic lines, with prisoners allowed a voice and a vote. The lifers were given access to teachers and art materials, and encouraged to express themselves without violence.
George Wilson was one of the volunteers. He was teaching a man serving a life sentence for murder how to look after budgies. It seemed bizarre to me. It gave ‘I’d like to wring her neck’ a new meaning. But no necks were wrung. The violent lifer learned how to care tenderly for budgies. And became more human in the process. George felt that I should visit. The only problem was that the Special Unit had been declared – by a vote of inmates and staff – a clergy-free zone. George spoke to them persuasively, and they voted. So I became the first minister to darken the doors of the Special Unit.
I got to know the infamous James Boyle. Under the old prison regime, Boyle had attacked prison warders, and covered the walls of his cell with his own excrement. But now that he was being treated as a human being instead of a piece of shit himself, he was making sculpture. The man had a talent. He made beautiful and expressive things. I learned about his background. What would I have become, if I had had his upbringing? I had no answer to that question.
Nothing could excuse his crimes. He had been a really hard man, working for loan sharks in the Gorbals. But was he pure evil, the monster the tabloids talked about?
The red tops screamed against the Special Unit. When Boyle was allowed out to attend one of his own exhibitions, people went crazy.
What I discovered was that there were powerful people who wanted him to fail, in order to prove their own theories that the likes of Boyle couldn’t change. One former Moderator was vehement in his view that the Special Unit should be shut down forthwith. There were church people who – and I choose my words carefully – wanted Boyle to re-offend.
The sight of a notoriously violent man changing was, strangely, too much for some clerics. His redemption wasn’t according to church formulae. He didn’t grovel enough, didn’t show enough self-loathing, didn’t use the right coded language. Somehow a changed, articulate Boyle was more of a threat than one who lived like a caged animal.
The rage became even worse when Boyle wrote about his experiences. Then when another lifer, Larry Winters, made a powerful sculpture of a naked Christ, the anger was truly murderous. Christ was the property of the Church, not of evil murderers! And despite the biblical accounts of the crucifixion, the Word-became-flesh was acceptable only if it was androgynous, sanitised and wearing first-century Palestinian Y-fronts.
I cannot justify the crimes of the Special Unit’s inmates; but nor could I justify the creation of urban ghettos, and the monsterising and scapegoating of people. I regard people like Ken Murray and Alex Stephen as heroes, as was Geoff Shaw, convener of Strathclyde Regional Council, who befriended some fairly desperate people and argued for prison reform. When I told Boyle I was writing Shaw’s biography, Boyle said: ‘Geoff had a magic about him. He always made you feel, you’re important to me. He always left you feeling good. He challenged everything you thought you knew about churchmen. We were all conditioned to accepting the Protestant/Catholic thing, but he challenged all that. He made you think.
‘Hardened prisoners aren’t good at expressing emotion. They would say, “Geoff Shaw, he’s no’ a bad c***.” That spoke volumes. He presented tenderness and love and all the things we were repressing. All the prisoners I knew respected him.’
The Special Unit closed in 1995 – too expensive, apparently. The work of rehabilitation is costly, but it is cheap at the price. Ken Murray, who had gone on to chair the social work committee of Strathcl
yde Regional Council, resigned his 50-year membership of the Labour party, accusing the Labour leadership of sacrificing principles to gain power.
The scales of justice are still tilted in favour of the rich and the powerful; it is not so much the good as the poor who die young in today’s Scotland. And I am also grateful to some desperate people, in Easterhouse and in Barlinnie, who taught me more than theologians about the meaning of that most precious word, redemption.’
You can’t get a more elegant and perceptive summary of the Special Unit than that.
13
AT WAR IN THE BAR-L ON LAND AND SEA
During the two great world wars of the last century life went on mostly as usual in Barlinnie, and the newspaper headlines featuring the largest prison in Scotland were overshadowed by news from the war zones and the latest casualty figures from the various fronts. But men of the people like the Independent Labour Party’s firebrand Jimmy Maxton still had an interest in what was going on in the prison on his constituency doorstep. Maxton, who died in 1946 and for years represented Glasgow Bridgeton, had some inside knowledge of prisons having spent a year incarcerated for campaigning against the First World War. He was a conscientious objector and given work on barges.
He was considered one of the greatest orators of his time and his questions to Parliament were carefully thought out and not without the occasional sarcastic observation, as on the occasion in March 1940 when he asked the then Secretary of State for Scotland ‘whether he is aware that part of Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow, is being used as a military prison; whether the prisoners in it are segregated from the ordinary civilian prisoners; and whether the military prisoners are under the control of the prison governor and the regular prison warders, or entirely under military control?’ One would have assumed that the Secretary of State would have been well aware of what was going on. In the event David Colville did not rise to the bait and contented himself by simply saying, ‘The answer to the first two parts of the question is in the affirmative. As regards the last part the military prisoners are entirely under military control.’
The Barlinnie Story Page 19