Passport To Hell: How I Survived Sadistic Prison Guards and Hardened Criminals in Spain's Toughest Prisons

by Terry Daniels

  It was a four-hour drive to Topas so I passed the time by gazing out of the window at the scenery. I remember thinking, 'Wow, I didn't know Spain could be so green.' It was strange to see vast expanses of grass growing in such a hot country. The wide, open spaces reminded me of Wingrave and made me feel homesick.

  As we journeyed on through the picturesque countryside, the realisation hit me that this could be the last time I saw trees and fields for the next ten years. If I had to do the full decade then I would probably forget what a tree looked like by the time they let me go. The greenery gradually grew sparser and signs of civilisation began to reappear as the bus approached Ávila Prison. I was hoping that they were planning on dropping the Romanian girl off there but it soon became apparent that we were picking somebody up. A skinny, little, blonde-haired girl was waiting outside the jail, ready to be herded onto the bus.

  Our new passenger was German and couldn't speak Spanish or English. Anyway, I wasn't feeling too chatty. The image of Mum being told that I was no longer in Soto still dominated my thoughts. Those bastards probably wouldn't even explain to her that I had been moved. She would no doubt be left wondering where I had disappeared to until I managed to borrow a phone card from somebody in Topas and fill her in on what had happened.

  After several awkward hours of sitting in silence, attempting to avoid eye contact with the Romanian, I finally caught sight of the prison and felt a shiver travel down the base of my spine. The building had the same air of menace to it that Maghaberry had. Giant stone walls towered above the main body of the jail, hammering home the fact that it was somewhere that nobody could ever hope to escape from. Guard towers poked their heads up from above the parapets at regular intervals, as if to emphasise how much of a risk the inmates behind those stone walls posed. Everything about the place screamed 'danger' at 1,000 decibels.

  Topas is one of the harshest prisons in Western Europe. Famous inmates have included serial killer Rodríguez 'Old Lady Killer' Vega, who sexually assaulted and murdered sixteen elderly women in the space of a single year; Islamic terrorist organiser Mohamed Achraf and former ETA leader Eugenio 'Antxon' Etxebeste. The jail housed a total of 1,600 inmates, 1,500 of which were male and 100 female. Roughly half were foreign nationals, which meant that there might be some other English girls in there.

  The minute we got inside the prison, the reception staff were upon us, bawling in our faces and throwing their weight around. I had no idea what they were so worked up about. They kept shouting at the German girl, who stood there ignoring them with a vacant look in her eyes, as if she didn't know what planet she was on. The next thing I knew, she had been dragged into a side room and beaten all over her body with a baton. I remember thinking, 'OK, this place is hardcore.' I had only been in the prison for a matter of minutes and somebody had already been battered to within an inch of her life.

  The poor girl was brought back into the room with huge, dark-purple bruises adorning her skin. I later learned that the reason that she hadn't responded to the guards was because she suffered from schizophrenia. She had been away with the fairies and couldn't understand what they were saying. The Spanish prison authorities really had a lightness of touch when it came to dealing with mentally ill people. The way they looked at things, there was nothing that a baton round the head wouldn't cure.

  '¿Hablas español?' one of the screws asked me.

  'No sorry,' I told him, 'I'm English.'

  'OK wait,' he said.

  He left me in the care of the other two guards, who were still shouting hysterically, whilst he went to fetch an English prisoner to translate for me. The lad that he came back with was a tall, dark-haired drug dealer from London. He seemed nice enough as convicts go and offered to take me to the wing and let me use his phone card so that I could ring the Consulate.

  'That would be a massive help,' I told him. 'I owe you one for this.'

  My new translator motioned to one of the guards to take us further into the prison and the guard escorted us through a set of electronic doors into a large room filled with crooks of every race, creed, colour and nationality. It was as if the criminal underworlds of Africa, Europe and Latin America had converged together under one roof. Bulgarians, Venezuelans, Colombians, Romanians and Brazilians casually milled around the place, going about their daily business. One thing was for certain: nobody was going to single me out because I was a foreigner.

  The guard walked me straight over to the phone and waited whilst I keyed in the Consulate's number. I prayed that the staff had rung Mum up to tell her not to bother visiting but knew full well they wouldn't have. The second I heard a voice on the other end of the line, I started firing questions off.

  'Did you know that I was being transferred? Did you let my mum know? Does she still think I'm in Soto? She's visiting me in two days and if you haven't told her then she's going to come across from England for no reason and I won't be there and she'll have wasted her journey...'

  'Calm down,' the Consulate woman told me. 'I'm sorry but we haven't been able to get the message out to your mother. We have only just found out about the move ourselves.'

  'Well there's no point doing it now then,' I sighed. 'She's probably already on her way to Spain. You've got no idea what you've put her through. You need to send somebody over to the prison as soon as possible because I don't know how I'm going to hold up now that I'm not going to get to see my mum.'

  I had a feeling that I would be unable to cope with life in Topas and wanted somebody to voice my concerns to. The prospect of being able to talk things through with somebody who was genuinely concerned about my plight had been the only thing that had kept me functioning. Now I would be lucky to avoid going the same way as the German girl.

  I hung up the phone and told the guard to take me to my cell, resigning myself to the fact that there was now no chance of the visit taking place.

  'Come,' he said. 'I show you your room.'

  By this stage, I was used to being locked up in cramped conditions so I didn't bat an eyelid at my tiny, claustrophobic digs. I was more concerned about the fact that my new cellmate was the Romanian from the bus. Something about her made me feel incredibly uneasy. She was the type of person that I would have crossed the road to avoid if I was in the outside world. I didn't like the idea of spending hours each day locked up with her but didn't want to risk complaining and getting a baton round my head so I kept my feelings to myself.

  The guard left the cell unlocked because we had arrived part way through association so I made the brave decision to venture out onto the wing to try and find some other English cons. By this stage I had been in three different jails so being the new girl wasn't half as stressful as it had been when I first got locked up. The other prisoners stared intently at me but didn't seem particularly aggressive. They were probably just trying to figure out what I was in for because I stood out from the crowd.

  As with Soto, most of the girls in Topas looked quite rough. A good number of them were wearing black, which is how Spanish widows dress. Most of them were only in their forties so their husbands must have passed away quite young. Maybe their fellas had all been involved in crime and died a violent death or maybe it was the pain of losing a loved one that had driven these girls to break the law. Whatever the case, I got the impression they had lived hard lives.

  Staring soon progressed to walking across to get a better look and within the space of a few seconds, a crowd of inmates had surrounded me, chattering excitedly away and asking questions in Spanish. Some of them were gypsies, some were South Americans. I hadn't got a clue what they were saying so I just repeated 'no lo entiendo' over and over again.

  I was on what must have been my fiftieth 'no lo entiendo' when I spotted a skinny, black girl pushing her way through the crowd towards me.

  'Come on, out the way,' she shouted. 'Give the poor girl some room to breathe.'

  She spoke English! There were other Brits in there amongst the hordes of Latinas and Eastern European
s after all. She spoke with an accent that sounded like a cross between London and Spanish, presumably because she had been in Topas for so long. I would be sure to attract some funny looks if I went back to Buckinghamshire talking like Manuel from Fawlty Towers.

  'Are you OK there? It's good to see another English girl in here. There aren't too many of us in this nick.'

  She looked like a drug addict but seemed friendly enough.

  'Yeah I'm holding up all right,' I lied. 'What's it like in here then? It seems quite grim from what I've see of it.'

  'It's like a lunatic asylum. The guards are animals, the food is terrible and we get so many people overdosing and trying to kill themselves that I've lost count of them. If you're not Spanish, they won't give you a job so you've got nothing to do and no way of getting any money.'

  This didn't bode particularly well.

  'My name's Katie by the way. What's yours?'

  'I'm Terry,' I told her. 'Pleased to meet you, Katie.'

  'Likewise. I didn't mean to scare you; it's just better to tell things how they are. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't bad in here but I'll help you out if you need anything and try to make things easier for you. You smoke?'

  I nodded enthusiastically and she handed over a couple of cigarettes.

  'The only good thing about this place is that there are blokes as well as girls. We're mostly kept separate but there are times when we're allowed to mix. You want to get yourself a boyfriend; it'll help you pass the time. I got married in here, believe it or not. Eh, they'd never believe that in an English prison, would they? Can you imagine the look on their faces if you told them?'

  Spanish jails got more bizarre by the day. Quite a few inmates get married. I guess prisoners who are doing long sentences don't want to have to wait until they're released before they start the hunt for their soul mates.

  Katie told me that the prison was divided up amongst the various different nationalities.

  'The Latin Americans are mostly drug mules or prostitutes,' she explained. 'They tend to come from shanty towns in places like Venezuela and Brazil. Then you've got the Romanian pickpockets, the Bulgarians who are mostly in for credit card scams, the Africans and the Spanish. Most of the Spaniards are either ETA girls or gypsies. The ETA girls are all very friendly but some of the gypsies might be a bit off with you. They've got a thing about English girls who live in Spain who can't speak any Spanish.'

  I wanted to butt in and tell her that I was only over there because the police had flown me back across to serve my sentence, but stayed quiet and listened. She seemed to enjoy sharing her prison knowledge with me and I was eager to lap up every last nugget of information.

  I chatted to Katie until it was time to be banged up again and then retired to my cell to spend the night with my good mate the Romanian. There was no point attempting to make conversation because I might has well have chatted to a brick wall. For all I knew we could have got on really well if we had both spoken the same language, though I severely doubted it.

  The only advantage that Topas had over Soto was the temperature of the rooms. My cell was very cosy, which meant I actually got some sleep for once that night. I drifted off, cursing to myself about everything that the Spanish authorities had put me through. First they took my freedom, then they had deprived me of the opportunity to see my mum. It was difficult not to feel extremely bitter towards them.

  I spent most of my second day in the prison alone in my cell reading some books that Katie had lent me. The wing was crowded, noisy and unwelcoming, especially given how antisocial and depressed I felt. The fact that I was unable to speak Spanish made me feel so isolated. Prison is the loneliest environment that you can imagine and being locked up in a foreign country is even worse than being inside in the UK. My appetite had completely disappeared so I didn't eat any of my meals. All that I could think about was how worried my mum would be when she found out that I was no longer in Soto. The only crime that she was guilty of was caring about her daughter, yet she was being made to suffer more than anyone.

  I awoke the following morning to the sound of people shouting through the windows to the men on the wing opposite. When you're in prison, you're bombarded with non-stop noise from the minute you wake up until you go to sleep at night. Yelling, banging, slamming and screaming fill your every waking moment. It wasn't what I needed on the day that my mum should have been visiting and made me want to pull the covers back over my head and pretend that I was still asleep.

  I managed to drag myself out of bed and over to the shower, where I closed my eyes and let the warm water flow over my face, hoping that it might somehow wash away the pain of being locked up. Part way through soaping myself, I heard the cell door slide open and had to run and grab a towel to cover myself up before a Spanish prison guard poked his head into the room.

  'Teresa Daniels, visita.'

  Eh? Had Mum found a way to come and see me after all? I almost threw the towel up in the air in my excitement but just about managed to rein myself in before the screw was treated to a free peepshow.

  'OK give me a minute,' I told him, attempting to stay calm but feeling like a kid on Christmas Eve. 'I'll be out in a second.'

  I quickly put some clothes on and rushed out of the door. I should have known Mum wouldn't let me down. She was the best mum in the world.

  The guard ushered me down a corridor into the glass-panel visiting room. As I drew close to the divide that separated the inmates from their relatives, I saw Mum waiting for me on the other side with a smartly dressed, middle-aged bloke I'd never seen before. I was over the moon that she had made it and felt like running over and hugging the glass screen.

  It was a bit weird having to talk to my mum through a divide but I was so relieved to see her that I soon got over it.

  'How on earth did you track me down?' I asked her, my voice shaking with emotion. 'And how did you organise a visit here at such short notice? I knew you wouldn't give up Mum. I had a feeling you'd come.'

  Mum was beaming from ear to ear. She had obviously been missing me as much as I'd been missing her.

  'Well we've got the Daily Mirror to thank for that,' she said. 'I got in touch with them after the guards at Soto told me you'd been moved and promised them an exclusive if they could find out where you were and get me in to see you. Tom here's covering the story for them.'

  'That's great,' I told her. 'It's about time the world knows what it's like in here. I'm not sure how long I can cope in this horrible place. I've seen a woman beaten horribly by the guards, nobody speaks a word of English and the food's inedible.'

  Tom scribbled down everything that I said in shorthand then asked a couple of questions about daily life behind bars in Spain. I told him about the lack of medical attention, cruel, unsympathetic staff and the constant threat of violence. The prison governor would no doubt be pissed off that I had slagged off his jail but what more could he do to me? Nothing that he conjured up could possibly be worse than the conditions that I was already living in.

  'It sounds horrendous,' Mum told me once I had finished describing the prison. 'I'm doing everything that I can to get you out of here as soon as possible. We've had a fundraiser for you in the village and made quite a bit of money. Dr McCarthy's writing to the prison to tell them that too much stress could make your brain start bleeding again, so hopefully that should make them treat you with a little bit more respect. Everybody at home misses you like crazy. Kelly sends her love and Emma hasn't been the same since you left.'

  Hearing about how the community back home were rooting for me made me proud to be from Wingrave, but also made me feel a little bit sad because I wished that I was still there, getting on with my life. The visit only lasted forty minutes, which seemed to go in the blink of an eye. Before I knew it, I was saying a tearful goodbye to my mum and hanging up the receiver on the phone. Mum looked heartbroken and blew me a kiss from behind the glass.

  'I love you too,' I shouted, as the electronic visiting-room doors sl
id open to let me out.

  I was pleased that I had got to see her but gutted that I would have to wait at least another week until my next visit. It was back to the world of psychos, lowlifes and scumbags for the time being. I hoped the guards would take steps to improve my treatment after reading the article in the Spanish language version of the Mirror but had a suspicion that it might make them even worse than they already were.

  Prison life was more tense than usual over the next couple of days as I braced myself for the screws to drag me off and baton me for giving their nick a bad name. Fortunately a girl from Holland asked me if I wanted to move in with her so I didn't have to spend any more time cooped up with the Romanian. The Dutch girl had been best mates with Rochelle in Soto and spoke perfect English so I said yes straightaway.

  My new cellmate was called Sara and she had been caught smuggling coke across from Venezuela. She was short and fat but seemed relaxed and good-natured. She also had a television which was a lifesaver in the evening when there was nothing to do apart from sit and stare at the walls. Inmates were allowed to buy tellies from the jail but very few were able to afford them so it was a bit of a luxury. None of the programmes were in English but watching somebody speak a language that I was unable to understand still beat counting down the seconds until the next association.