Welcome to my world. It’s a journey through the penal system. This chapter covers all of the prisons and special hospitals I’ve been in over the last thirty years.

I want you to strap yourself in and come with me on the ride of a lifetime. It will open up your mind and blow a hole clean through your soul.

This journey is on the very edge of the razor … if you slip, you are dead! The hole is bottomless, black and empty.

This is a book on a lifetime of prison madness. If you have read my books you already know I’ve been certified insane. But who has the right to say who’s mad?

What is normal? Is a psychiatrist normal? They say they are madder than the lunatics.

Did you know there is a high rate of suicide and nervous breakdowns among psychiatrists? Alcoholism, too! They are fucking insane … take it from me!

Some of the Greats were a bit strange. Were they insane? Just because they are not normal don’t make them insane!

 

LOCATION:       Newport, Isle of Wight – get there by ferry or hovercraft.
CAPACITY:       400 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       Closed‘B’ – Male (mainly sex offenders).
OPENED:       1963 as a prison for Category ‘C’ males and in 1970 became a dispersal prison.
HISTORY:       Dubbed ‘The Island’ because of its location, was closed down in 1983 when prisoners wrecked the place.

This jail is right next-door to Parkhurst Prison on the beautiful Isle of Wight. You can get to the island from the mainland by ferry or hovercraft. Albany was the first maximum secure dispersal prison with electronic doors, and it was influenced by the Lord Mountbatten report in the early 1970s that was brought about because of the many prison escapes.

I actually first landed here in the mid-1980s and from day one I felt the ‘atmosphere’ – shit. It is a very claustrophobic place with tiny square cells and little space to do anything in. The whole place reeked of despair. It had seen its share of riots, shit-ups, violence and hardships.

But nobody had ever escaped from here, which is probably why it had this imposing atmosphere about it. But it had one saving grace – lovely fish and chips on a Friday. I mean it, their fish and chips were as good as any in the country. And it had a bloody good canteen that sold a good selection of cakes and fruit. And you could order ‘meat’.

Each wing had its kitchen area, so you could cook up a nice meal. It also had a great gym.

Sammy McCarthy (ex-British featherweight boxing champ) was the gym orderly. Sammy copped eighteen years for a blag with East End gangster Harry Batt. Harry was an old pal of mine, one of the best.

Once, Sammy was cleaning up in the gym, whistling away, when all of sudden a loud-mouthed con got very argumentative; he was actually abusive to Sammy. Now this guy was maybe 14st. Sammy was just an old man, still a flyweight. ‘Excuse me,’ Sammy said, ‘Could you please calm down and treat the gym a bit nicer?’

‘Fuck off you little …’ That is all he managed to get out. Sammy had let one fly – BANG – the loudmouth was out cold.

That is Sammy – a total gentleman. And one of the nicest cons I have ever met. A wonderful man!

There was a con in Albany, a gay chap we called ‘Mary’. He was harmless, but I must say, he did look like a bird. A lot like that Una Stubbs who used to act in ’Til Death Do Us Part.

Anyway, Mary worked in the tailor shop and some con was bullying him, but it turned out Mary was no walkover. The con ended up dead with a pair of scissors through his chest.

It was also here that my next-door neighbour hung himself. I could actually smell shit. I thought it strange. He had topped himself by tying the sheets around his neck, tying the other end to the bars and jumping. It’s fact, people who hang themselves always shit themselves. The bowels and bladder just empty automatically when the muscles relax.

This may sound insane – death also has a smell to it. Don’t ask me to explain that because I can’t. But death lingers on in the air we breathe. It is a very strange smell, and would you fucking believe it, this con that hanged himself actually owed me four Mars bars. We had had a bet on the football, and I won, not that I’m saying he topped himself to get out of paying me.

Albany did have a nice big field which we used to run round on weekends. And in the summertime, the Island, as we called it, was the place to be. We were all tanned and looked liked we’d just spent the week in Tenerife. Do you know that if you got sunburn then the prison authorities classed it as being self-inflicted and they didn’t have to give you anything for it? Kind-hearted bastards! But despite the sunbathing, it was still a bad jail to be in, nobody seemed to be happy, so I wasn’t surprised to learn that it had been torn apart by the cons in 1983.

When I was there, Jennifer Rush’s ‘The Power of Love’ was number one in the pop charts. Fuck me, you may well ask, how can I remember that? Easy – I smashed the TV set because of it! During the song, cons were making too much noise and it upset me. Could that girl sing! What a voice …what a song. One of my all-time greats.

My time at Albany came to an end when I was in the kitchen; I hit a Rastafarian with a wok a dozen times over the crust. I caved his big, fat, ugly head in, the thieving bastard. He was a cell thief. He had to have some!

I actually wanted to cut his fingers off but my pal, Big Albert, said, ‘No, Chas.’ So I thought, fuck it, I’ll just cave in his canister!

I am giving Albany 1/10, and that’s only for the fish and chips.

LOCATION:       Armley, Leeds.
CAPACITY:       1,250 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       Dispersal and Remand – Males.
OPENED:       1847 and only had a capacity of just over 300.
HISTORY:       Has had extra wings added to it over time and now acts as an allocation prison, sending prisoners received from the local courts to more permanent accommodation. Although this prison is officially titled ‘Leeds Prison’, it has become commonly known as ‘Armley Prison’.

This prison was originally designed on the ‘modern penitentiary principle’ of four radial wings. Firstly, it was a local prison catering for those around the West Riding area of Yorkshire. It played a role in judicial executions from 1864 to 1961 when ninety-four (including one female con) were executed within the prison. In 1864, the first double execution took place outside of the prison walls, which was to be the only public execution. The execution took place with up to 100,000 sightseers looking on as James Sargisson and Joseph Myers met their deaths and were left to hang for the time limit of one hour before being cut down and buried within the confines of the prison.

The most famous prisoner to be housed at Armley Prison was Charlie Peace (1832–1879), an infamous Victorian criminal. In 1879, Peace was executed by hanging in Armley Prison. A violent blagger of his time, Peace was serving time for robbery, murdering a copper and the attempted murder of another copper. By time Peace was nineteen years old he was already on his way to becoming a hardened career criminal, just like me!

At one time in Peace’s career, he actually moved to Hull and opened a café but he still continued burgling and would always carry his piece (revolver). In one incident, a copper trying to arrest Peace was shot and killed; in the mélèe, Peace escaped. Would you believe, though, that two other men (totally innocent) were arrested for the murder! Two local villains, brothers John and William Habron, were arrested for the crime. William was convicted and sentenced to death but fortunately reprieved and later pardoned.

Charlie Peace shot and killed another man in a love triangle and then escaped capture when he hid out in London for over two years where he continued with his burglaries. Eventually, Peace was caught committing a burglary; he gave a moody (false) name, but was grassed up by his mistress who thought she’d collect the reward money. Police travelled from Yorkshire to Newgate Prison, where Peace was held, and correctly identified him.

Peace stood trial at the Old Bailey in November 1878, and on the charges of burglary and attempted murder he was sentenced to life in prison. But it doesn’t end there. There was the slight problem of another murder he had to answer for. The love triangle killing of a Mr Dyson saw Peace being shipped to Sheffield, where he was charged with murder on 18 January 1879 and, at his subsequent trial, it took the jury ten minutes to find him guilty; he was sentenced to hang. This was a celebrated case and caught the imagination of the public.

While Peace was in the condemned cell, he confessed to the murder of the policeman he had killed during the bungled burglary and, as a consequence, William Habron was given a pardon.

The date for hanging Peace was set for Tuesday, 25 February 1879, and it was to be a private affair, although four newspaper reporters were present. The following day, a large piece appeared in the press, and even Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum had the execution scene on show.

The only woman to hanged at Armley Prison was Emily Swann. This was a double hanging; alongside her was John Gallagher, 30, her lover. Both were hanged on 29 December 1903 for the murder of Swann’s husband, William.

For those wishing to collect data about Armley, I can tell you that the last double hanging at Armley was Thomas Riley and John Roberts on the 29 April 1932. Soon after this, double hangings stopped because of the time it took. Not out of concern for the condemned!

The last hanging to take place at Armley was that of Zsiga Pankotia, 31, a Hungarian national, on 29 June 1961. The executioner was Harry Allen.

And then I landed there a few years later.

I landed here back in 1975 for the first time and it started from the second I got off the van – eyeballing, pushing, shoving and verbal. Nothing seemed to have changed since the last hanging.

A gauntlet of gruesome-looking types met me, and led me all the way to the bowels of hell. Shining tunic buttons, polished boots and pudding-bowl haircuts … what a neat bunch of bastards they were. Nowadays, half of them look like tramps. Back then, it was a pleasure to take a beating from such a smartly turned out bunch of screws when fighting them.

Their block was down under B Wing. It was like an old castle dungeon and, in fact, the place was built like a fortress.

This place wasn’t just put together with bricks and mortar, but big slabs of Yorkshire stone. It was cold and made you shiver to the bone; no heating, one blanket and a smelly mattress added the finishing touches to the décor. I can imagine what the condemned felt like while waiting to be executed. In fact, execution was preferable to this. 

There was no window (glass or plastic), just cold wind blowing in through a hole where a window used to be with the stink of despair rushing in with it.

The place was infested with vermin – rats, mice and screws. They served my meals cold. The reason for my being sent to Armley was over some assaults on screws in another jail. Hence the reception committee. They were waiting for me! That’s how it works in jail. If you attack a screw, you attack them all. You attack their system. So they love it when you arrive.

And Armley was the tough jail of the North; it also had the highest suicide rate of YPs (young prisoners). Armley jail saw three young prisoners take their own lives by hanging, all within the space of five months, from May to October 1988, and then a further two hangings in the beginning of 1989 – both were YPs.

I knew my stay here would be a crazy time, so I gave it my best shot … that’s where I ripped my door off and wrecked their precious little block. It was truly worth the drubbing I got for it. I remember that I was making my way through the cell door. A fellow con, Dave Anslow, was also making his way through his door. I managed to get through my metal door; then they had to close those cells down and we both ended up in ‘strip cells’.

They had to call in reinforcements and a score of screws, some with dogs; they were all right outside our cell doors waiting for us – our plan, obviously, never worked.

Armley is run with an iron fist. Some screws put a pair of steel-capped boots on and look as if they feel they’re entitled to kick the shit out of you.

Another gauntlet awaited me after the roof job in Walton Prison. Once more, I felt their punishment in 1985 so I write from the painful truth – Armley is a hellhole and, for a young lad, it’s probably terrifying.

Believe me, it was awesome. It even amazed me, and that’s saying something because nothing amazes me.

In fighting them, I was black and blue. As if that wasn’t enough, they left me in the box; I was stripped off like a Christmas turkey. What a way to treat a guest! Especially in Her Majesty’s house of correction. Disgusting!

The doctor came to see me; I spat a mouthful of blood all over him. ‘Fuck off, you vet!’ My lawyer at the time was Ted Saxon. He came to see me. What a joke. They took his pen off him and give him a tiny pen an inch long!

They told him, ‘It’s in case he stabs you.’ Ted told them I would never do that to him. But that is how they like to work. They seem to get a kick out of intimidating people but it doesn’t work on everybody.

You might recall the ‘Free George Davies’ campaign in the 1970s. A big campaign to get George out of jail for a robbery he did not do. It took years to prove it. In the end, the campaign won.

You might recall the Headingley cricket pitch incident in which the cricket pitch was dug up at the famous Yorkshire cricket ground as a protest to speed up the freeing of George. It was Chapman who copped for it, a diamond of a geezer. He came into Armley on remand over that. I met him there. What a smashing chap he was.

Another top chap I met in Armley was Harry Marsden, a Newcastle armed robber; he was about ten years my senior. Only a small chap, jet-black hair, with deep-set eyes, what a fighter. Harry had the heart of a lion.

He just steamed into those Leeds screws like skittles. Sadly, Harry suffered some serious physical opposition and spent years in isolation, but he won in the end. He made it home and made a decent life. I’m still in touch with Harry to this very day.

The guy beat cancer, too. I told you he was a winner. Harry reminds me a lot of Frank Fraser, a gentleman, but fuck with him and you are crippled! He got out of prison and, eventually, after more trouble, he turned his life around and became a boxing coach in the amateur ranks. He even opened his own boxing club and made me Life President of it.

Armley bent and smashed a lot of good people … it broke men into mice. Paul (Sykesy) Syke’s arms got broken; Paul fought for the British Heavyweight title against John L Gardner. Sadly, he lost. Dominick Noonan’s arm also got broken and Joe Uradits received serious injuries all as a result of fighting with screws.

I recall John Massey – he was moved to Armley Prison after he beat a prison doctor up; it was what the man had coming to him. After he arrived at Armley, he had a really hard time. Later, John had the last laugh – he escaped!

I will add this; all of those suicides in Armley in the 1970s and 1980s, 90 per cent were youngsters! They were terrified! Driven to despair! I would say to all those bad screws from that era, hang your heads in shame, as you lot were responsible for that and you lot will have to face that in your last breath on the planet. This really is a hanging prison.

But like all jails, there were decent screws and some characters, like Roger Outram. He was a screw when I met him there and then he worked up to become Governor in Belmarsh Prison.

When he was a screw, he was a tough guy, a big fella, hard as nails. A typical Yorkshireman. Loves a pint. Loves a fight. But he was a fair man, never a bully. I have known him stand toe-to-toe with a con and shake hands afterwards. He never needed nine fellow screws to back him up. And he turned out a decent governor, too! Men like that, I can respect. But the ten who jumped on my head and those who bully YPs to the point that they hang themselves, I fucking despise the maggots.

Some maggots even bring in drugs for cons. A screw from Armley Prison was jailed for two-and-a-half years after he admitted attempting to supply heroin to an inmate. I’m dead against drugs, and this reinforces what I have already said about screws supplying cons with drugs.

At Leeds Crown Court, Martin Wood, 42, was convicted when the court heard how police drug squad officers stopped him as he arrived for work at Armley Prison, Leeds, in January 2003.

The undercover police searched Wood’s car and found 2.93gms of heroin wrapped in cellophane and hidden down his underpants.

Would you believe that Wood told the coppers that he thought it was cannabis he was bringing into the prison for a man called Dickinson in E Wing.

Armley, I believe, has all changed now, but it is still Armley to me. Always will be. Belsen is Belsen. Colditz is Colditz. Alcatraz is Alcatraz. And Armley is Armley.

A bit of paint or a new wing doesn’t take away the ghosts of the past. Why kid yourself?

I am giving Armley 1/10. That is for the cell door I ripped off that cons said couldn’t be done. Stick to your Yorkshire Puddings. Leave the door game to me.

LOCATION:       Maghull, Liverpool.
CAPACITY:       436 beds. Ashworth High Security Hospital today consists of two sites – Ashworth East and Ashworth North. Ashworth East has six refurbished wards, two newly built wards and the Wordsworth Ward, a new sixteen-bedded ward. Ashworth’s female patients are located on the East Site, as well as a large number of mentally ill men. A high wire wall provides physical security. Ashworth North has seventeen wards with a total capacity of approximately 370 patients.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       Special High-Security Hospital.
OPENED:       In 1878, it was sold to the overseers of the Liverpool Workhouse – Liverpool Select Vestry, who used the large house as a convalescent home for children from Liverpool workhouses. Eventually, in 1911, construction began on a new hospital to be used as an epileptic colony.
HISTORY:       In 1914, the ‘Lunacy Board of Control’ bought the whole estate, including a large unfinished hospital. Before it could be pressed into use as a State institution, however, the hospital was taken over for the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers from the Great War.

In 1920, the Ministry of Pensions took the hospital over and it was not until 1933 that the hospital became a State institution.

In 1948, the hospital became part of the new National Health Service and, in 1959, the Ministry of Health took over responsibility for running the Special Hospitals.

In the 1970s, further enlargement came when the decision was taken to build a fourth Special Hospital to relieve overcrowding at Broadmoor. There was still land available from the original estate in Maghull and 50 acres of land were made available for the new Park Lane Hospital.

In 1974, Park Lane opened in stages up to 1984. Unlike Moss Side Hospital, a high-security wall, completely separating it from the rest of the site, surrounded it. Moss Side and Park Lane shared some facilities but operated as independent hospitals.

In 1990, one of the first acts of the new Special Hospitals Service Authority (SHSA) was to merge the two hospitals.

On 19 February 1990, the new hospital, Ashworth, was born. The old Moss Side Hospital became known as Ashworth South and East, and Park Lane was renamed Ashworth North. Ashworth South, the original Moss Side Hospital, closed in 1995. I have also spent time in Moss Side, making me unique in that I’ve been in all the best lunatic hospitals.

In March 1991, the hospital was severely criticised in a Cutting Edge television programme, alleging widespread abuse of mentally ill patients by staff at Ashworth.

A public inquiry was chaired by Sir Louis Blom-Cooper QC, which put forward ninety recommendations. There was a call for wholesale culture change at Ashworth. This led to a further reorganisation of the hospital and much work to try to change the culture of the institution.

In April 1996, the hospital became a ‘Special Hospital Authority’ when the High-Security Psychiatric Services Commissioning Board (HSPSCB) succeeded the SHSA.

The capacity of 520 beds was gradually reduced. As one of the three Special High-Security Hospitals (Ashworth, Park Lane and Broadmoor), Ashworth receives patients from the North of England, Wales, the West Midlands and North-West London.

Approximately 80 per cent of patients have been convicted of a criminal offence, most of whom are subject to restriction orders. The average length of stay is eight years – a small number of patients will never be ready to leave and will spend the rest of their lives at Ashworth.

I landed in the cuckoo’s nest in 1984. It was about the time of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. And, boy, was it an eye-opener. Ashworth was originally Park Lane Asylum. There was a swimming pool (over-heated), a gym and a big shop to buy clothes and food. Visits were brilliant.

The lunatics were smoking cigars there and eating chocolate cake. Talk about spoiling us. TV in cells … sorry, ‘rooms’.

And the screws … sorry, ‘nurses’, some of the women were like Page 3 birds. But there is always a downside to such a place – too many nutters for my liking.

Let’s not forget, it is a top-security asylum. It is like the Big Brother house, but 100 times bigger and more secure.

I only survived there for six months. I ripped open a lunatic’s face with a sauce bottle. The nutter bled all over the new gym kit I had on. You would have thought he could have bled away from me and not over me.

But I will tell you now, it was here that I realised that the psychiatrists are definitely madder than us lot. Remember, they work with madness day in and day out, year after year. It has got to rub off on them. And believe me, it does. They are all fucking mad.

I am giving Ashworth 8/10, simply as it was a comfortable stay. Break out the Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.

LOCATION:       Thamesmead, London.
CAPACITY:       850 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       Dispersal, Remand and Category ‘A’ – Male.
OPENED:       1991 and only had a capacity of just over 300.
HISTORY:       A prison mainly for prisoners considered to be high risk or likely to want to escape. A special wing houses seventy prisoners convicted of mainly sex offences.

Oh yeah … one of my favourites is Hellmarsh! I had some lovely stays here. My first spell was in their SSU (Special Secure Unit). By 1993, it was a maximum secure unit and was the most secure unit in Europe. 

The prison housed mostly terrorists and top-class blaggers, some spies, serial killers and little old me.

I was there over a ‘bank’ and a few other minor charges – innocent, of course!

Sadly, the Governor at this time was a little fat fellow who smoked a pipe. I told him straight, ‘Fuck off before I ram the pipe down your neck.’ It is always best to make it clear how you feel – clears the air.

I had a few old pals there at the time – Rocky Lee, Pete Pesato, Rab Harper and Del Croxen. All good armed robbers. They were on the wing part of the unit. They kept me in the seg block on my own. But I was sweet, and the block screws were diamonds. A right good bunch.

The food was shit, though, but I could buy tins of fish and fruit from the canteen. So I was well sorted. I also trained hard. All day long, press-ups, sit-ups and I ran on the yard.

It was here that Del Croxen died in his cell. He was only in his 30s. A great man.

I was allowed out of the block to go to a service in the prison chapel with the lads, which I thanked the Governor for. I said a little piece for Del in respect. It’s an old saying of mine. I am not sure who wrote it, I am not even sure if it is right, as I may have changed it over the years:

I don’t know why I chose to say that, but, it felt right. To me, it says it all. And I hope Del would have approved.

Peter Pesato also read a piece, and it was a lovely service, sad and respectful.

I first met Del in Wandsworth; it was Frankie Fraser who introduced us. I would have loved to be on a robbery with Del, as he was a good blagger.

It was around this time the IRA lads upset me. The day we had Del’s service, that night I could hear them playing their rebel songs and throwing out burning paper and singing. They were always throwing out burning paper! I felt it was disrespectful to Del, and I made it known. It stopped. 

But it was too late for me. It played on my mind, as I am a very sensitive man. So it set me off on one of my mad spells. I wanted the door off.

It was on my second stay there that they gave me a break and put me up on the Cat ‘A’ wing. It was there I knocked out a con and stuffed him inside the industrial washing machine. He had it coming, one disrespectful slag. Playing his music until all hours. Shouting his mouth off, he was only a drug mug. I told him to slow up, but he got lemon, so – BANG – out cold he went!

I would have put him in the incinerator outside, fucking low-life rat. Fortunately for him, a pal stopped me turning on the machine. He vanished soon after that and it was all peaceful again.

That was until the Iraqi hijackers turned up. I wrapped ’em up, costing me another seven years. Seven fucking years I get over the Iraqis, and the armed forces get medals! I told you this journey is insane.

Belmarsh is a good jail, with some good screws in it, but the food is shit. The cells are good, with nice windows, an iron bed and good showers, too. Visits are reasonable, considering it’s mostly remands in the prison, and on a good day the screws give you extra time.

My visits were always in the seg block. And the screws even made my visitors tea, and were polite to them.

Old Lord Longford – Frank to me – would visit me every month here. Frank’s visited me for years, all over the country; he put me in his two books, Prisoner or Patient and The Longford Diaries.

Sadly, he is no longer with us. I loved the old boy. He always made me laugh. He had some good morals, but he got a bad name over his fight for the now dead Myra Hindley. I told him straight, ‘She is a fucking monster.’

And how do you tell an old man to clean his shoes? He was twice my age, and lived a full life. I am nobody to tell anybody how to live his or her life, plus he was a lord. So let us be respectful. I couldn’t say ‘Bollocks’, could I?

Apart from my couple of slip-ups, I was good there. But it still cost me seven years. My slip-ups are costly.

I am giving Belmarsh 10/10, simply because I was happy there and they treated me well.

LOCATION:       Cambridge Road, Bristol.
CAPACITY:       400 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       Local – Convicted, Remands and Long-Term – Male.
OPENED:       1882.
HISTORY:       Originally opened to house prisoners from the Bristol locality. It dates back to medieval times, and was the workplace of that famous executioner, old Albert Pierrepoint (1874–1922, from Bradford, Yorkshire). He managed to do his duty at 109 executions … how many were innocent? There are ghosts in that place. Take it from me; in fact, take it from the screws! They have seen them. It is a spooky old place. In 1990, it had a prisoners’ uprising.

I have landed here three times, once in the eighties and twice in the nineties. Each time, fuck all had changed. Bear in mind I am always destined for the seg block. I recall that it was on my first stay at Bristol that I got kicked in the nuts; I ended up on a dirty protest. Not really my scene. These dirty protests are called ‘shit-ups’ for obvious reasons! For those of you with a limited imagination, let me tell you what a shit-up is – you spread your faeces on the walls of your cell, over yourself, over every surface.

These shit-ups are not a pretty site and often cause screws to run out of your cell retching their guts up in disgust at the sight and smell of it all … you can’t do anything but have a smile on your face at the sight of this.

But in acts of desperation, we all have to do what we need to do. Most people outside can’t relate to a shit-up, but it can work, believe it or not. So if you’re ever in the position of having to carry one out, then at least you have an idea of what it’s all about.

I covered the four walls and the door with shit. I even smeared it on myself. Why? Simple – I was fucking sick and tired of the system fucking me about. But all in all, Bristol is a strange old jail.

From the exercise yard, in the seg unit, you can see some houses over the wall (a loft window). A rare sight in any jail, if not a security weak link.

Anyway, one day, I was walking around the caged yard and I saw something move up in that window. I pretended not to look, but I saw it – a naked woman! Whether she was flashing at me or it was an accident, I don’t know, but, God, I saw it!

Well, I am only human. Flesh and blood. A young man. How do you think I reacted? I shouted up, ‘Stick your body closer to the window!’

I dropped my trousers and shouted, ‘Hey, look at this for a two pounder!’ In no time, the screws were on me and back inside I went. Fucking spoilsports.

This is one of the really old-style jails that has got a lot of character to it, and some of the ‘old school’ screws are there. They are the best screws you can get, so much better than the new breed of screws.

I am giving Bristol 5/10. They do a really nice drop of porridge, too, and they do a lovely bowl of soup.

LOCATION:       Brixton, London.
CAPACITY:       825 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       Category ‘B’ – Male.
OPENED:       1821, a real old piece of overcrowded madness.
HISTORY:       The land was bought in the early 1800s and a ‘House of Correction’, as it was known back then, was built. Originally designed to house just over 150 men, it did, in fact, house three times this amount, so nothing much has changed there since then. Eventually became a prison for females, then a military prison and eventually reverted back to an all-male prison, which it remains to this day.

Do you realise, it is 16 years since I was last here? Hey, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?

It was 1988 I was there, held on ‘D’ Unit, which was maximum secure. There were only twelve of us on there. All of us were remanded and all looking at ‘Big Bird’ if found guilty; I am talking big-time porridge, enough to fill up a swimming pool.

On this unit, all this time, were Charlie McGuire, cop killer; Ronnie Easterbrook, armed robber; Valerio Veicci, armed robber; Finbar McCullen, IRA; Liam McCotton, IRA; Mickey Reilly, armed robber; Tommy Hole, armed robber; Wayne Hurren, armed robber; John Boyle, American Mafia drug king; Denis Wheeler, drug king; and Vick Dark, armed robber – which, including me, makes the dirty dozen! Do you get the picture? It was serious stuff.

Out of all of these guys, only two won their trial and went free – John Boyle and Finbar McCullen. The rest of us got bird. Some were lifed off, with recommendations for thirty years.

Poor Charlie McGuire has since died, passed away in his cell. And Valerio Viccei got extradited back to Italy to finish off his twenty-year sentence. He got some jam role (parole) and got shot dead by a trigger-happy copper. Tommy Hole was shot and killed in a bar-room hit. It’s a bloody dangerous game this! Here today … shot tomorrow. And blown away into orbit.

This unit is small. It has two special cages. Guess who was in one? Yeah, yours truly. I always seem to end up in a cage for some reason, and that is fate. Destiny!

Like some apes get caught and put in a zoo, that is the story of my life. But we did OK in there. We could spend £50 a week in the canteen … if you had £50, that is. (Some don’t have 50p.) Me, I have always got a few bob stashed away for a rainy day.

Well, I don’t smoke, or fuck with drugs; I have no vices in jail so I’m sweet. And I have got some good pals, who look out for me. As I look after them. It’s a family thing, see. We all think as one. That is how it works. Should you have the unfortunate piece of bad luck to end up behind bars in the clink then remember to have a good support team behind you. Prison isn’t a place to go it alone, even for the likes of me … remember that.

I don’t take a penny off my blood family. In fact, I don’t even like to bring them into my world of criminality, because they are all honest, you see. They don’t understand my way of life, as I do not understand theirs. My mother is my angel. So I keep it at that. But my pals are my true brothers. My real family.

So, Brixton ‘D’ Unit. It was here I crashed in Liam McCotton’s canister. No hard feelings. He is a top guy. I admire the way he took it. I also got a screw’s nose and twisted it! (Only for a laugh.) Not that I would do it in a nasty way. But he was sticking his nose into things that did not concern him. So in these sorts of situations you need to twist a nose or two just to show that it is bang out of order.

I remember, one day, I was upset over the food being cold. So I picked up the tea urn and poured it all over the food waiting to be served out to us on the hot plate. We all got fish and chips that night as a treat. Another day, I picked up the office desk above my head. I am not sure why I did that. To be truthful, I am not sure why I do a lot of things.

It was there I fixed a pigeon’s wing. I found it in the yard, it was shivering and cold, and its wing was not right. I wrapped it in my shirt and brought it back to my cage. I washed it in some shampoo and dried it. Brushed it with my brush. And set about healing it. I fed it bread and milk. And I sort of made a bit of a splint with a plastic spoon and strapped it around its body.

After a week of this, I thought, ‘Yeah, it is time!’ I took it out on the yard and threw it up in the air, it would either fly or crash. It flew round the corner of the unit. I swear it looked down at me and smiled at me, I swear it did. I don’t really know how I did it, but I did. I was right proud of that. Because of that, I knew what the Bird Man of Alcatraz got out of healing birds.

It was later that two IRA lads escaped with a gun, and Brixton stopped taking Cat ‘A’ prisoners. And it was then that Belmarsh that took all the ‘A’ prisoners. A shame, really, as Brixton was a good old jail.

This was a dirty old place, mind you, infested with vermin, maggots, rats and roaches … and screws. But I liked Brixton. I got on well. And I think the screws were a half-decent lot. They sort of let us get on with it. Well, they had little choice because we would have demolished the place. It was on this very unit, years before, where Stan Thompson escaped with Big Ron Moody and Gerald Taite. They all got clean away.

Taite made it back to Ireland. Big Ron never did get caught but he later got shot dead in a pub gangland hit, and Stan just drifted back in.

But it was a lovely escape from such a secure unit. They dug through three cell walls and made it out.

I am giving Brixton 7/10. Yeah, it is worth that just for the memories. I have never been back since; sad, really.

LOCATION:       Crowthorne, Berkshire.
CAPACITY:       404 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       Special Secure Hospital – Male and Female.
OPENED:       1863.
HISTORY:       Broadmoor Hospital was originally named Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. The first patients to arrive there were ninety-five women in 1863; male patients arrived the following year. The asylum had been built following the Criminal Lunatics Act of 1860;
        it’s uncertain why Crowthorne was chosen as the site. The Mental Health Act of 1959, which came into operation in 1960, changed the name to Broadmoor Hospital making it into a Special Hospital for psychiatric patients of dangerous, violent or criminal propensities; its role was to treat these patients.

In 1979, the prison van pulled up in this asylum – I was inside it. This is the ‘Big House’ of all the institutions in the UK. Don’t let anybody tell you different. If they do, then send them to me. Because I am telling you, this is the daddy of them all.

For 141 years, this giant of a place has stood on the hill in Crowthorne village, Berkshire. The old austere, Victorian red brick with beautiful carvings give it an air of authority, so splendidly built in its magnificent countryside setting.

Sounds romantic, eh? Well, it is hell on earth! And I became their number one devil. For five long, hard years, I lived under this asylum roof. Oops … tell a lie … three times I was actually on the roof.

Broadmoor was a place of sheer amazement and electrifying incidents, some horrifying scenes, and even murders and plenty of near-murders.

Sometimes, the murders are a blessing. As it is an escape from hell.

To survive a murderous attack from a lunatic, one has to live that nightmare for ever.

There was the mad, fat lunatic who had a knife stabbed into his ear, it penetrated his brain. Cabbaged, or in his case, double cabbaged, as he wasn’t the full bottle of lager to start with. Or what about the lunatic who got raped with a broken bottle by a psychosexual madman. Not nice. But what do you expect? Fruitcake and coffee? Or the religious freak who stabbed the Jew in the neck with a pair of scissors. Why a Jew? Who knows? Ask him why!

Broadmoor has got stories that would turn your hair white overnight. And for once, I will say that those screws – er … nurses – have got their jobs cut out. They have got to have eyes in the back of their nut. Because at any time, anything can happen. There is no place like it on earth. If so, tell me where. It is hell on earth.

It makes Parkhurst seem like a Wendy House. Ask Sutcliffe, the Ripper. He walks around bumping into things. One eye ripped out, the other one almost. Sad, really … should have been both!

And what about the time David Francis was taken hostage by Bob Maudsley and John Cheeseman. Guess what? They cut his bollocks off and caved his skull in. All in a day’s work, I guess.

That is Broadmoor in a nutshell. Dangerous. You can’t afford to drift off to sleep in the day room … or you may not wake up again.

The food was excellent, but it is a quarter-of-a-century since I ate there. I am sort of only in the past. Not in the future or the present. So it could be like Butlin’s now. But I doubt it.

How can it change with mad axemen walking about? Serial rapists and child sex killers.

That evil bastard Erskine is there, too … who? That evil slag who killed and raped all those old people in London. Some were old men. How can it be safe with monsters like him prowling about? I bet the old lunatic hasn’t dared have a shower since he has been there.

But I must say, there were some lovely old mad men there, too. Old boys who had spent forty years there. Some who had sat in the death cell waiting to be hanged, only to be reprieved and sent to Broadmoor. I met them all there. The good, bad and crazy mad! But think about all the pain and misery, all the violence and madness.

I am giving Broadmoor 10/10. Why? Simply as it is the Number One Mad House on this planet. And I gave five years of my life to Broadmoor and I am proud of that.

And not forgetting the beautiful grounds and flowers and trees. And all the lovely Berkshire countryside, even though I only saw that from up on the roof.

LOCATION:       Bicester, Oxfordshire.
CAPACITY:       900 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       Dispersal, Local and Remand – Male.
OPENED:       1992.
HISTORY:       One of the so-called ‘new breeds’ of prisons. Now also acts as a training prison.

I landed here for the first time in 1993, I was only held in the seg block while one of my many trials went on at Luton Crown Court on 6 September 1993, with Patrick Felix, my co-accused. We were up for robbery.

And I have got to say, it was a nice stay at Bullingdon! Clean and humane. As you can see by the aerial shot, it’s a nice, neat and compact place – no messy wings spread about the place making it look like an octopus ready to take off.

The food was good, and lots of it. And I can’t think of even one bad thing. Only I fucked it up.

I went on a legal visit and wrapped my lawyer up; I tied him up and barricaded the visiting room!

It was just one of those insane days. Like a train out of control, no brakes. It has got to crash. But it was not the jail. It was me.

I am giving HM Prison Bullingdon 9/10. Why should I blame Bullingdon for my own madness? Even my lawyer sacked me! It is bloody terrible not to be wanted. When a lawyer sacks you, you are in trouble.

LOCATION:       Newport, Isle of Wight – get there by ferry or hovercraft.
CAPACITY:       550 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       ‘C’ Training Prison – Male.
OPENED:       1912 by Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary of the day.
HISTORY:       This prison was originally a Detention Centre, adjoining HM Prison Parkhurst. Eventually it became a Borstal, then back to a prison, then a Borstal again, and then a corrective training regime kicked in, but was soon slung out and it became what it is today, a Category ‘C’ prison.

This is the one of three jails on the Island. It is directly at the back of Parkhurst Prison. Unlike Parkhurst and Albany, it is not a jail for long-term prisoners, but their seg block was being used to take us at times of trouble. I was one they took. It was in the mid-1970s just before I was ‘nutted off’ and sent to Rampton Asylum.

The van drove me out of Parkhurst; I was in a straightjacket and ankle straps with half-a-dozen screws on top of me. But I still managed to bite one on the leg.

Once in Camp Hill Prison seg unit, they took it out on me and left me in their strip cell. Strangely, the next day I was moved back to Parkhurst the same way I had left it. That was the only time I landed in Camp Hill.

So, it is really impossible for me to give the place a run-down, as the bastards never even gave me a cup of tea, and my breakfast was thrown on to the floor. So much for hospitality!

The bunch who thought they were hard men for taking it out on me while I was defenceless can look back on that and praise themselves for being ‘real’ men.

I am giving HM Prison Camp Hill 2/10, and that is only for getting rid of me the next day – they were probably scared in case I bashed any of them. I am not a nasty, embittered, evil man, but good fucking riddance to Camp Hill.

LOCATION:       Old Elvet, Durham City.
CAPACITY:       1,000 male and 120 female beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       Dispersal, ‘B’ local, Close Supervision Centre – Male and Female (High-Security for those females serving 4 years+).
OPENED:       1819 during the reign of King William and the same year Queen Victoria was born – this place is old!
HISTORY:       Talk about a history! You can see Durham Cathedral from its exercise yard. You used to be able to hear the mixture of chatter, banter and brass bands coming from Durham Miners’ Gala when it was on. The big clock in the town centre would rattle off the hours, every hour.

In 1810, Durham Prison’s construction started at Elvet when the prison was designed to replace the jail in the Great North Gate. The simple reason for this was to help alleviate serious traffic congestion. A pledge of £2,000 towards the construction was made by Bishop Shute Barrington.

On the 31 July 1809, Sir Henry Vane Tempest laid the foundation stone. The second architect to take over died during the construction, the former architect being dismissed. Finally, Ignatius Bonomi completed the construction. Durham Prison, when it opened in 1819, had 600 cells.

Not surprisingly, Durham was a hanging prison and, in total, 92 men and 2 women were executed by being hanged at Durham between 1800 and 1958. Only 14 of these executions were public. Prior to the prison opening and up to 1816, hangings took place in the grounds of what is now the nearby Dryburn Hospital.

Fast-forward in time, and the moonlight glints off the razor-sharp knife that Laurena holds in her hand. She steps closer to the bed, where her husband sleeps unsuspectingly. Slowly and deliberately, she pulls the covers away from his naked, unprotected body … exposing his penis. He lies still, not knowing the damage about to be inflicted upon his body. She raises the knife and brings it down …

It was the story that shocked the world. Overnight, John Wayne Bobbitt was the man everyone was talking about, but who no one wanted to be. It was a story that sent fear into the hearts and groins of men everywhere. That was a modern-day crime, but there was an original Laurena Bobbitt.

The last person to be hanged at the old Dryburn hanging site was Ann Crampton. She had also been found guilty of cutting off her husband’s penis while he slept. She suspected him of having an affair. On 25 August 1814, Ann was executed. At this time, society was male dominated; cutting off his John Thomas was the equivalent of destroying his manhood.

In 1816, a new courthouse was built and this included a new style of gallows known as ‘drop style’. The gallows were erected on the steps outside the new courthouse, which was right next to the prison. The first execution to take place outside the courthouse was when John Grieg was hanged on 17 August 1816 for the murder of Elizabeth Stonehouse.

The last public execution outside the courthouse took place on 16 March 1865 when Matthew Atkinson was executed for the murder of his wife at Spen, near Winlaton, Tyne and Wear. When the trapdoor bolt was drawn, Atkinson dropped downwards and the rope broke. They got him on the second attempt.

After the Act of 1868, all executions had to take place within the prison walls. The abolition of public hangings resulted in the gallows being set up in one of the prison yards; this was set over a brick-lined pit. This was replaced when an ‘execution shed’ was built.

The first of these executions in Durham Prison’s grounds was a double hanging that took place on 22 March 1869, when John Donlan, 37, and John McConville, 23, were executed for unrelated murders.

Although Rose West is housed in Durham Prison’s ‘She’ wing, she was not the earliest of prolific female serial killers. This distinction falls to the mass murderer Mary Ann Cotton (1833–73); her count of 15 killings – although some twenty people connected with her died mysteriously over a period of twenty years – remained unrivalled until the 1980s.

After a series of mystery deaths, bodies were exhumed and it was found that arsenic was the cause of these deaths. After a short trial, Mary was found guilty on one specimen charge of murder.

On 24 March 1873, Mary’s body fell the 18in drop when the trapdoor was released. It is reported that she began to struggle violently for three minutes before dying an agonising death. Her ghost is still supposed to haunt her old home in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. After this, the ‘long drop’ method was used for hanging executions, which was a relief to all those watching.

There was even a triple hanging on 5 January 1874, when three murderers were convicted of unrelated crimes: Charles Dawson, Edward Gough and William Thompson. This was all to do with saving money.

On 2 August 1875, Elizabeth Pearson, 28 – the second of only two women ever to be executed at Durham Prison – was hanged after being found guilty of poisoning her uncle in the hope that she would be left something in his will. The hanging was a triple execution; all three were simultaneously launched into oblivion. Alongside Mary were two male murderers. Both executed women are buried next to each other.

The last person to be executed at Durham Prison was dispatched with on 17 December 1958. The execution was carried out on Brian Chandler, 20, for the murder of an 83-year-old woman, whom he had robbed.

In the 1900s, Durham retained a permanent gallows; it was one of only a handful of prisons to do so. At that time, the execution block was on the ground floor of one of the wings near, it is said, to D Wing. Remember, when executions took place, they needed to allow room beneath the gallows for the body to drop; therefore, the gallows were usually on an upper or raised floor. In this case, the body of the condemned fell into a basement area below the trap in Durham Prison. The execution block still remains to this day, but the adjoining execution chamber and the trap doors have long been removed and the drop pit covered over. The room is still there, but is better off being used for its current purpose … storage!

The prison has a special ‘She’ wing that was opened in 1974 for females serving four years or over; this is H Wing and housed the likes of Myra Hindley, and currently houses Rose West. At its height, the prison held 1,700 prisoners.

Would you believe that this prison was successful in attaining the 1998 Butler Trust Award for ‘Outstanding Contribution to the Quality of Prisoner Care’? I hear they now mix nonces with ordinary cons; strange way of working, isn’t it?

This place fascinated me. It is built in such a beautiful, picturesque place, by the river and cathedral, all so very heavenly, but behind its walls it is hell.

I first landed here in the mid 1970s and I’ve been back to this prison, the second most northerly in England, several times. In fact, quite recently, I was caged there for eight months in their special secure unit on G Wing. But for me, I am kept in a special cage. Total isolation. They had two wings (G and I) for special cases like me, each holding nine prisoners.

Durham Prison is a very old jail, over 200 years old, but it is a strange place as it’s one of the few jails that caters for male and female cons, all segregated, of course.

The infamous, now deceased, Myra Hindley spent many years on their female wing. As I’ve already mentioned, Rose ‘Dog’ West is on the wing. It seems that old Rose is trying out the lesbian scene; I was told by one screw that the search team found a huge vibrator in Rose’s cell. I asked how huge.

‘Awesome, Charlie.’

‘How fucking awesome?’ I asked. When he told me, I could not believe it.

‘Inhuman.’

She is just a sicko. A sexually perverted monster. Mind you, four women prisoners committed suicide in the space of a nine-month period here in 2002. Doesn’t that tell you something about the regime? An ‘open’ verdict was given by the Coroner’s Court in September 2003 for one of the four suicides, during which time the female population at the prison increased by 150 per cent.

Some women cons actually have affairs with women screws. I recall an incident when a female con fell for a woman warder. Sharon Miller, 45, had fallen for the warder while on remand at Gloucester’s Eastwood Park Jail.

It all got lemon, though; the two became lovers after Francesca Westcott left the prison service, but she called off their six-year affair late in 2001. Miller just couldn’t take it and she began to bombard her with telephone calls and even assaulted her. Eventually, Miller travelled to Bigyn Road in Llanelli from her home in Somerset armed with gallons of petrol. Two houses had petrol poured through their letterboxes and two families had lucky escapes. These dykes, they just go mad! Miller got ten years.

Durham is run by the militant POA (Prison Officers’ Association) union. They have a stronghold up there (always have had) and I have always felt that the governors up there are too respectful of the POA. So they’re never really bold enough to make on-the-spot decisions. That is my own personal opinion based on my time spent there.

I remember a young con hanged himself there in the eighties and I pulled one of the many different grades of prisoner governor at my cell door as he was doing his morning rounds.

I asked him, ‘Can we organise a bit of a whip round for some flowers? If all the cons in the jail put in 50p each, we could have a nice few bob and give it to the lad’s family.’ The bastards never wanted to know. I believe it was the screws who were against it. If it was, then they are fucking scumbags.

They also had some of the most bigoted screws in the country; they hate blacks, and despise Cockneys or any southerners. So if you are unfortunate enough to fall into one of these categories, be warned!

They seem to be very tight-knit lot up there and very jealous of anybody who’s done well for themselves. The jail is mostly full of junkies or burglars, or out-and-out thugs.

These are a hard breed of men – love a drink, love a fight. A lot of violence up that way. Even the prison officers get involved in fights on the pub and club scene in the town centre, which is predominantly frequented by the many students who attend the university and its many annexes.

There is no real organised crime to speak of up there (more the spur-of-the-moment or drunken-stupor crime), more pot luck. They have a serious drug problem; the jail is full of drug crime, a lot of smackheads, mugging people for their next fix. They brought in special sniffer dogs and random drug-testing on cons. All that did was make cons drop the soft drug of cannabis (that stays in the system for twenty-eight days) and move on to drugs like smack that can be washed out of the urinary system within twenty-four hours.

Food? They do a lovely curry up there and there are some top screws. There is a brilliant dentist there, a woman! She also does Frankland High-Security Jail, too.

A good education department. But the jail reeks of despair. Something very eerie about Durham, probably all the ghosts of the condemned cons they hanged there. Big crows sat on the wall looking at us as we walk around the yards. I always said, ‘I bet they are cons who were hanged and have come back to haunt the place.’

Many screws have had them crows shit on them as they fly over. But I have never known a con being hit by them. So I could be right. Spirits … back as birds.

Every hour, you will hear the bells of the Cathedral, and on a Sunday it is bloody murder with those church bells! Clang, clang, clang! One evening a week they do it, too. I am sure it is just to wind us cons up. I have been told that you can go up into the Cathedral’s tower and look down on the exercise yard of the prison … any ex-cons nostalgic enough might go and do it, but not me.

Near to the prison there is a fish and chip shop, near the wall; on some nights, we could smell the aroma drifting over the wall. That winds me up, too, because I love fish and chips. You can also hear the drunks on their pub-crawls every Friday and Saturday night.

I actually changed my name from ‘Bronson’ to ‘Ahmed’ up in Durham by deed poll. I did it out of respect for my wife’s late father.

The cage they kept me in up there is a 12ft by 8ft cell with a steel cage door behind the solid steel door. So in the cell there are two doors keeping me locked in. They also have a cage on my window. My furniture is made up of compressed cardboard; even the chair is made from this horrible stuff, and you can see your furniture fall to bits before your very eyes and around your very body! You can be sitting on your chair one minute writing a letter and suddenly, the next minute, the chair buckles beneath you and you’re on the floor. Well, I am 16st.

I am fed through a flap in the lower part of the door; I am let out just once a day for only one hour’s fresh air in the yard. I will be searched and metal detected. There will never be less than eight screws escorting me; electronic cameras follow my every move.

The other 23 hours a day, I will be caged up alone. My visits (social and legal) are through the door. Now you see why Durham Prison is hell on earth for me.

When I went to the dentist, ten screws took me over there and some were accompanying me with dogs; I was double-cuffed, and that was even while I was in the dentist’s chair.

The female dentist, I could see, felt embarrassed. But that’s Bronson’s life. This is how I live inside, under extreme daily security.

My sadness is the effect it has on my wife and daughter. Not being able to cuddle them. Touching their fingers through the cage wire like I am a fucking beast in a zoo. It is torture to see it; it kills me inside to do it. But it rips their hearts up to see me in such inhumane conditions.

I will give HM Prison Durham 1/10. Well, I could have given it nil. The 1 is for Tony the art teacher who helped me a lot. And Kath the lady who worked on the censoring of my mail, she was lovely. A wonderful human being. Always got a smile and a kind word. I bet she was a smasher in her youth. She is still a looker in her fifties, and her heart is in the right place!

LOCATION:       Brasside, Durham.
CAPACITY:       670 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       High Security and Category ‘A’ wing.
OPENED:       1980, albeit on a temporary basis to relieve overcrowding in mainstream prisons due to POA industrial action, which resulted in the Army having to be brought in to man the prison for a period of four months. After the POA failed in their action over Continuous Duty Credits, the prisoners housed there on temporary basis were returned to mainstream prisons. The prison proper opened officially in 1983 after building work was completed.
HISTORY:       Originally, the prison was earmarked to become a dispersal prison, but is now a high-security establishment.

This is most northerly maximum-secure jail you can go to in England; it is well past Scotch Corner, and on the outskirts of Durham city.

I first landed up there in 1990. Since then, I have been back there many times. It’s crazy! So much for helping me to maintain ties with my family, who are hundreds of miles away from the place. I may as well be on the moon. It’s bloody ridiculous for families to travel so far.

In fact, it is disgusting. You imagine a mother with children travelling all that way just for an hour’s visit. Then all the way back home again. It is a bloody crime on it’s own to put so much stress on loved ones.

Adding it all up, I must have spent a good part of my thirty years inside up north. It is a wonder I don’t talk like them … but I divvent let that gan te me ’ed, like!

It was on my second stay up there; I was out on the yard with 200 other cons when I lost the plot! (Not like me, is it?)

I was chatting away to Kenny Noye and Vick Dark when I just flipped. I ran across the yard and hit this geezer in a black suit, and put him on my shoulder and ran off with him.

I wanted to smash my way into a wing office and take control. Would you believe, I did not even know who he was. Obviously he had to be an official, either a governor, or a doctor, or a teacher, or maybe a member of the Board of Visitors. Maybe even a Home Office rat. It turned out to be Mr Masserick, the Deputy Governor. Oh well … that’s life.

Frankland Prison holds some right dangerous fuckers and it often explodes with violence. It is a very claustrophobic jail and has a serious drug problem. So you can imagine the backlash. I once went in the shower only to ‘almost’ step on a syringe. It terrified me. If I had stepped on it, I could have been infected with AIDS or hepatitis C, or whatever the junkies had, TB or whatever. It was a serious health hazard.

And it was a joke to some to slip acid tabs into cons’ drinks and then watch them go crazy. Personally, I couldn’t see what the fun was. They are sick bastards to do that. You get the pricks outside doing it in pubs and clubs. God help them if they ever did it to me. I swear I would kill the slags, I just know I would flip out. Those drugs are evil. Always will be to me.

Frankland’s got a good gym but, sadly, I got banned from it, as I was about to cave the gym screw’s head in. So I did all my workouts in the yard and in my cell. I really don’t need their silly gyms. Read my book Solitary Fitness and you will see why.

The place had a great canteen. We could buy proper food to cook. And it had the best field out of the entire maximum-secure jails. Only one con has actually escaped from the jail itself – Frank Quinn. He slipped out in the laundry van. Others have got away from hospital escorts.

It was built in the 1970s and has seen it all – riots, arsons, rapes, stabbings, cuttings. To my knowledge, there have been no murders. That has to be a miracle.

Old Harold Shipman was up there, but they moved him in 2003 to Wakefield for an eye operation or something.

I met some smashing lads up there and they remain strong pals today. It is amazing just how many southerners actually get sent up there. I am sure it is a conspiracy to destroy all contacts and to fuck up our family life. Prisons are not happy with just locking us up, they want to punish our loved ones as well.

My old mate Ronnie Abrahms (the Screaming Skull) died up there. He had served over thirty years, all to die in a cell. He was a top legend, was our Skull. A complete one-off. There will never be another like him. I miss old Ron. It was also here that I got the news that Ronnie Kray had died. That was a bloody sad day for me, as Ron was the best friend I ever had.

I remember strangling a con in the TV room; it was fortunate for him that a pal of mine intervened. The fat piece of shit was forever farting. He only had to move and he’d let rip. We were all watching a football match, Spurs v Newcastle. So the northerners outnumbered us southerners 5-1, but it was all in good fun. And I had the fat piece of shit sitting next to me.

After the twentieth fart, I got sick of it and I just blew up. And before I knew it, I was on him, strangling him. His eyes bulged, his lips were starting to turn blue and he was about to leave this planet. As I say, a decent lad helped bring some sanity to it all. But the frightening fact is, out of a room full of cons, all sat there watching me kill a man for farting. Only one guy helped stop it. Now that is what you call insanity.

I could have killed him, and left him dead, and we would have all carried on cheering our teams on. That is prison life in a nutshell. It is just another day for us. We are all deep in the madness. You have to be mad to survive.

Frankland, to me, is a powder keg, but a very lively jail to be in. Just take this one piece of advice – stay clear of the drug scene. Because if you enter into that, your whole life will end in misery. Please believe it, as I have seen it time and time again.

I am giving HM Prison Frankland 7/10, only because of its electrifying atmosphere.

LOCATION:       Full Sutton, York.
CAPACITY:       600 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       High-Security, Category ‘A’ and Remand – Male.
OPENED:       1987.
HISTORY:       Always to be intended as a max-secure unit and now is under the remit of the Directorate of High-Security Prisons, a law unto themselves. Very sneakily, they also made the place into an assessment centre for sex offenders.

First, I’ll start by saying that the prison is not normally a remand prison, but it has held people there on remand. One of the most famous remand prisoners held there for over a year from 2001–02 was John Sayers from Newcastle’s Geordie Mafia. A great guy, and he walked free from a £22m murder trial held in Leeds.

This place opened up in the late 1980s. I first landed there in 1988. It is a real nasty maximum-secure jail. Considering it has only been around for seventeen years, it has seen it all. Several riots, murders, arson, suicides, cuttings, stabbings, assaults on screws. And some of those were down to me. I even grabbed an official hostage there.

I spent a great Christmas up there with Freddie Foreman and Eddie Richardson. And with proper booze, too. Some bent screws … £50 a bottle of vodka. He must have made a fortune out of us lot! I squeezed three bottles myself, but that was my lot. I am not into making screws rich. Greedy pig … 50 quid a bottle!

But I have got to say, Full Sutton was a bloody good jail then. We had it all – gym, field, cooking, good visits. The cons run that place, big time.

The screws just unlocked our doors and let us out. I tried to electrocute a con there … he was a smackhead. He owed my pal 200 quid and he had no intention of paying up. It was more his attitude. Arrogant, 19st of shit.

So, when he was in the bath, I plugged in the electric floor polisher and slung it in the bath. It somehow bounced off his head and fell outwards! So I ran and tried again but by this time he was up and running. He ran all the way to his cell and banged himself up.

I was gutted! I went to his door later and spilt a load of petrol through the crack. Comes in handy that lawnmower on the works. You should have heard the rat screaming; he didn’t half go up. But the spoilsport screws came running to save him with fire hoses.

And did you know that it was a con who invented a valve in the early 1990s that is now integrally built into cell doors? This valve allows a fire hose to be connected to the door from the outside landing and have the water aimed around the room while the hose sits in this multidirectional valve. It was invented to overcome those prisoners who barricaded themselves into their cells and set fire to contents. I bet they never thought about cons setting fire to those inside the cells when this invention was made. 

I was there when Mickey Jameson topped himself. He got life in the 1970s along with Jimmy Anderson for killing four people in East London. Sad day that.

I had a riot of my own there. I went bananas in the hall, I wrecked it. Two Scouse brothers started me off, but they legged it and left me to face the screws. I really blew it that day. But what’s new? I did one screw with a table leg and another with a broom. Such is life … I got worse later. It’s evil.

I went back there four or five times; each stay ended in violence. But I still enjoyed my time there. Even in the seg unit, the food was good, and you could get a shower every day. There are times if I cannot get access to a shower then I’ll have a strip wash in my cell. My workouts cause me to sweat, and there’s nothing worse than the smell of a sweaty body.

There was also a good canteen there. You can buy cakes and bags of fruit and nuts and other goodies. But I have not been back for a few years.

Old Billy Wilson was my old buddy there; Bill was in his sixties, and an ex-fighter, a big proud man, serving life. He had one of those silver tashes and his cell walls were covered with boxing photos of the greats – Marciano, Louis, Dempsey and so on.

Bill always wanted to shape up; sadly, he was a bit paunchy. I would sit in his cell and listen to all his old times; I’d heard them 100 times over. He was such a man of pride that he even fucked off medical treatment. He had cancer of the kidneys … bollocks to the lot! Old Bill died. He never did get to work out his dream, but I won’t say what his dream was as it was told to me in private. A man’s dream is personal, see. But it was a lovely dream that kept him going for years inside, only to be wiped away by cancer. I really loved that old git.

Full Sutton, for such a modern jail, holds a lot of misery. A lot of the violence was down to drugs. There must be a lot of AIDS in that place, as they use dirty needles. Plus there are a lot of young lads paying their debts off by getting their arses shagged or sucking dick! It is tragic, but it is life for a smackhead. You can’t help them, they used to help themselves, but it is sad to see it. Mums and dads sending them in presents, all to be sold for smack.

People ask why do I hate drugs so much? Well, I will tell you. In the 1970s, in the asylum, I was forced to take drugs by injection. They held me down and pumped into me with a syringe full of psychotropic shit. That is why!

And I despise drug addicts because they are weak, dangerous people, so that is why places like Full Sutton breed desperate people.

I am giving HM Prison Full Sutton 4/10. But I did kick ass, didn’t I?

LOCATION:       Market Harborough, Leicester.
CAPACITY:       350 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       Category ‘B’ – Male.
OPENED:       1966.
HISTORY:       Became a dispersal prison and then later became a Category ‘B’ prison for long-term cons (5 years+). Now leans towards a therapeutic regime with prison psychologists and counsellors. But why close down Parkhurst Prison’s centre, which was run by the renowned Dr Bob Johnson?

Fuck me; I had some fun and games in this gaff. I first hit here in the mid-1980s and again in the ’90s.

Gartree was built about the same time as Albany Prison; it was one of the dispersers for High-Risk Category ‘A’ inmates.

Well, that was until December 1987 when Johnny Kendal and Siddy Draper flew out in a helicopter, hijacked by Andy Russell. What a fucking classic that was. First and last chopper escape in England. Now I have said that, there’ll probably be another one next week.

Gartree is a modern jail, a two-tier, flat-roofed building housing A, B, C and D Wings. It had a great gym and a good football pitch with a proper running track. We could cook our own meals.

It all sounds nice, but Gartree was a powder keg, and it often blew up. What the prison HQ failed to accept is that they couldn’t expect to put so many high-risk prisoners under one roof and hope to keep the peace.

Face facts – if you put IRA with UFF, they kick off and they did just that in Gartree. Not just with the Irish but with everybody. And the end result was riots, violence and destruction. That place really was a war zone.

I remember Michael Hickey spent three months up on the roof, the longest ever prison roof protest in the UK. He was one of the Bridgewater Four, later to win his appeal. And he did those three months in the winter. A right achievement, amazing.

Con killer Fred ‘Butcher’ Lowe stabbed a sex case to death; he put forty holes in him. The blood ran like a river. Fred was laughing as he did it. The laugh of a madman.

The cop killer Freddie Sewell almost broke out but got caught on the fence. He spent two years in isolation after that.

The daddy of the prizefighters Roy ‘Pretty Boy’ Shaw, who wrecked the fucking place.

The monster Ian Brady went insane there in his isolation cell in the hospital wing; he began to eat and drink his own body waste.

A con cut his dick off, as he wanted to be a woman; another con cooked some budgies in a pie. There were hangings, cut-throats and overdoses.

The IRA cons were pissed up every weekend with hooch; the Jocks were slashing each other; the Afros were smoking their dope; the smackheads were junking it up; the faggots were pumping arse.

It was a crazy jail. Many cons lost the plot and got nutted off and were sent to Broadmoor.

There were hostage sieges and hunger-strikes. It really was a powder keg.

I come out of my cell one day and went berserk; it was on A Wing. Most of the cons ran and banged themselves up. I chinned three screws and kicked one down the stairs, then smashed the whole wing up.

I left there with a bad head, I can tell you, but Gartree for me was a real test of your sanity. You were pushed to your limits. And I enjoyed it!

I am giving HM Gartree 7/10 for the simple reason, I love a challenge.

LOCATION:       Sutton, Surrey.
CAPACITY:       700 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       Local and Category ‘A’ – Male.
OPENED:       1992 at a cost of £91m.
HISTORY:       Anyone recall the infamous mental hospital of Banstead? This place is built on that site. Most of the buildings proved to be unsuitable, so this new prison was built. On part of the site, another prison was constructed – HM Prison Downview.

This is quite a modern jail, built on the same design as HM Prison Bullingdon and around the same time. I landed in High Down seg unit in the mid ’90s and again in the late ’90s.

Both times I was held in their seg unit. The first time I only lasted a week when I gave the Governor a right-hander and tried to stab his eye out with my toothbrush. I was having an off day. Not like me!

But I have got to say now, the food there was brilliant, and plenty of it. And the cells had toilets and sinks, with nice windows and a lovely bed!

It really was a decent, humane place and the screws were as good as gold. Unfortunately, the Governor I served up was an ex-screw in Wandsworth some years back, I remember him well. He set me off on a bad spell.

While I was there, a con hanged himself. But he was a multiple rapist, so no tears then. He should have hanged himself by his bollocks and let me in to kick the dog to death! I shouldn’t really say dog, as dogs are lovely animals.

I will give HM Prison High Down 7/10. It is hard to give a jail points when you see so little of it. If I had made it up on the wing, then maybe I would have given it a 10 out of 10. Who can tell?

LOCATION:       Hedon Road, Hull.
CAPACITY:       700 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       Local and Category ‘B’, Remand and Young Offenders – Male.
OPENED:       1870.
HISTORY:       What this prison hasn’t been in its time in relation to detaining prisoners is hardly worth mentioning. It was originally used to house male and female prisoners, then acted as a military prison, then as a depot for civil defence, then as a Borstal, then a max-secure unit and then it hit a brick wall! A riot broke out on 31 August 1976 and continued for three days.

The conclusions of the inquiry that followed the riot shows the causes as the culmination of a series of disturbances throughout the dispersal system, dating back to the roof-top demonstrations of 1972. This was the most serious incident involving loss of control, since the Dartmoor mutiny before the Second World War. A total of 60 per cent of the prison population were involved in the riot, and the damage to the prison was estimated at £750,000. Hull Prison was out of use for about a year and staff morale, supposedly, suffered a setback. What a shame! Although the riot went on for a number of days, no prisoners escaped and staff and prisoners alike sustained no serious injury.

By the time the Hull Board of Visitors had finished their disciplinary hearings, they had removed almost ninety years of prisoners’ remission. They did this without allowing any of the prisoners to be legally represented, they refused to allow defendants to cross-examine prosecution witnesses and the prisoners were rarely allowed to call witnesses in support of their defence. Understandably, the prisoners complained to the courts. This is where prisoners’ rights began to change for the better.

In 1986, the prison changed its status and housed Category ‘B’ inmates, apart from having a special unit for the likes of me, but it closed in 1999. The unit is sometimes used to house supergrasses ready to attend court to give evidence.

Until the Hull Riot in 1976, this was the number-one dispersal jail in England. Anyone who was anyone was here. Top faces such as Great Train Robber Charlie Wilson; the IRA Old Bailey bombers Roy Walsh, Martin Brady and Billy Armstrong; the Balcome Street Mob; the mass killer Archibald Hall; some of the Kray henchmen; Frank Fraser; Roy Shaw … oh, and me!

I first hit Hull in 1974. From my cell window in the seg block I could actually see the Humber Bridge being constructed. The docks were opposite the jail.

That lovely sea air, the smell of fish, those squawking seagulls. On a windy night, the smell of beer and fish and chips and laughter would drift into my cell.

Hull was without a doubt a fucking good jail. But like all the top-secure jails, it had its fair share of trouble. I once witnessed such a violent attack on a con, it actually made me feel sick. The poor sod’s face was on the shower floor. I have never seen such a ferocious attack, ever. It was like being in a fucking slaughterhouse; that con’s face was just ripped to pieces. Now if that wasn’t enough, he then got sliced down the back; blood just pissed out.

Another time, I witnessed a guy’s head caved in with a gym bar; and I witnessed a dumb bell smashed into a con’s head. It really was a violent jail.

It was there I cut up John Gallagher, and later, when he was released, he killed four people. The slag even made a statement against me!

I also grabbed two hostages in Hull, the first being Governor Wallace. I got an extra seven years for this piece of shit. Then I nabbed Phil Danielson, a civilian teacher. For this siege I got a life sentence. Incidentally, it was the longest siege in the history of the UK penal system in which a hostage had been taken.

In another incident at Hull Prison, I also got on the roof. Without a doubt, the greatest sight! There are a load of flats just over the wall of Hedon Road, and in some of these flats there are women of the night.

You should hear the things they shouted at me – ‘Get ‘em off,’ ‘Show us your dick,’ and ‘Give it a pull for us.’ What a foul-mouthed load of tarts … I couldn’t believe it. After all, I was only a youngster.

It was here in 1975 I last saw my son, Michael, as a child. He was three years old. His mum walked out of my life and I never saw him again until he was 25 years old. Some twenty-two years had passed us by. It is really the only regret of my life. Apart from that, I really don’t give a fuck.

It was also in Hull I won my first ever Koestler Award for art. I have now won a total of eleven and have retired as the first con ever to win eleven of these awards. The race was on between my old mate James Crosbie of Scotland and me to see who would be the first to reach ten Koestlers; he ended up on nine and I exceeded the magic number. James was once considered the most dangerous man in the Scottish penal system; he was a great blagger and got away with plenty of big money.

Over the years, I have been back to Hull no less than eight times. Each time, I seem to end up in trouble. I have even demolished their unit. I have chinned a total of nine screws there. I have shit up three Governors. Once, I left Hull in a wheelchair, strapped up in a body belt and ankle straps and wheeled to the van.

I have been injected there many times, and I’ve also been beaten. But I just love the place. It is a unique jail. A total one-off. The food is brilliant; well, it was on the unit. Proper fish, big pieces of it, nice fresh salads, even the porridge was made with milk. They make a treacle tart in Hull like no tart I have ever had – it was beautiful.

Hull was also the only jail in the UK with a boxing ring; it was great. Floyd Patterson once came to the jail and put on a show. But with the crowd running the prisons nowadays, they stopped all that. But it fucking worked, that ring was brilliant, we all enjoyed it. We would have bets on fights. I won all mine … bets and fights.

Back in those days, the gym screws were a good bunch, they just let us slog it out, as long as we weren’t using blades and table legs. But today, you’re lucky to get a punch bag with these fucking imbeciles; they can’t see how a ring can help youngsters relieve their frustrations. That’s why I’ve got so much respect for people like Harry Marsden who has taken countless youngsters off the drug scene and helped put them back on the straight and narrow because of his boxing club.

Yeah, I had some great times in Hull. A lot of bad, too! I once cut a con’s arse with a Stanley blade right across the cheeks. He opened up like a tomato! After that, he never nicked out of anybody’s cell again. The fat rat couldn’t sit down for a month; fifty-eight stitches he had. His arse must have looked like a mailbag.

It was also there that I scored my first and last hat-trick on the soccer pitch. I admit, I’m far from a good player. I’m more of a goal-maker, I’m a runner. I will run all day long. But the match, I just had the hot buzz. I just knew it was on. Bang. Bang. Bang. All good goals.

You don’t forget days like that and it must have been taped, as Hull was full of Big Brother CCTV.

Plenty of memories. Awesome memories. But Hull jail ended up costing me a life sentence.

I will give HM Prison Hull 9/10, simply because it is just a big part of my life. I learned so much from being in there, such as: never bend down in the shower to pick the soap up; never sit in the front row of the TV room; never walk into another man’s cell without tapping the door.

Believe me, three good tips there.

LOCATION:       Milton Road, Portsmouth.
CAPACITY:       200 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       Category ‘B’ Lifers – Male.
OPENED:       1877.
HISTORY:       First used to accommodate criminals from the Portsmouth area up until pre-World War II when it was used to detain those likely to cause political trouble or on suspicion of spying. Taken over, after this, by the Royal Navy, it became a Naval Detention base. After a short spell of not being used for anything, it became a centre for Recall Borstal Boys and remained so for just over twenty years until 1969.
        It then became a Category ‘B’ prison solely for life-sentence prisoners who had committed a domestic murder, the only prison to cater for this sort of prisoner. Now, though, the prison takes all sorts of lifers regardless of who they have killed … you just can’t get a decent class of murderer any more these days!

Now this place looks like an old fort, it is an all-lifers’ jail. Most of the 200 cons it holds are old men who have served years and years.

I was on my way to Albany on the Island in the ’80s when the van broke down, and a police van arrived and took me to Kingston Prison to be held until an escort could be arranged.

Once in the jail, I was put in their seg unit that was only about a four-cell capacity, and unused. A screw told me, ‘We rarely have need to use it,’ as most of the cons are old and institutionalised. It seemed they were happy, mugs of Horlicks and bags of seed for their budgies. They gave me dinner; it was bloody lovely, one of the nicest prison meals I have ever had.

I had just eaten it and my door crashed in; it was the Albany screws. ‘Ready, Bronson.’

I was gutted. I could have spent a cosy six months in this little castle, it just felt so peaceful. Even the screws were so laid back and relaxed. I noticed that most of the screws wore shoes and not boots. They really seemed a decent bunch. There was no intimidation – or eyeball stares – it was such a shame I was just passing through. But in reality, it is better not to stay in a graveyard. Because that is basically all it is. ‘Dead men breathing.’

I will give HM Prison Kingston 7/10, just for the good dinner and laid-back screws.

LOCATION:       Welford Road, Leicester.
CAPACITY:       300 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       Local Prison and Remands – Male.
OPENED:       1825.
HISTORY:       Since 1825 right up until 1990, building work has seen the prison expand from being a very large gatehouse to a prison with a visitors’ centre and administrative offices.

This is in Welford Road, in the centre of Leicester, with Filbert Street, the Premiership football ground, close by. On match days you can hear them cheering.

Looking at the prison is like looking at an old castle; in fact, it is a castle. This is quite a unique jail as it is just one big long wing; take a look at the aerial photo. And the wing is cut into sections; one end is for remands, the middle is for the convicted, the bottom end is the seg unit, and the next bit is the protection wing. Then on the other end is the SSU – Special Security Unit.

Then there is the hospital wing, kitchen and workshops. That’s Leicester, a very cramped jail.

I first went there in the 1980s. Unfortunately, all my stays in Leicester have been short, and always in the seg unit, so I have not been up on the wing. But I have been up on the roof, so I have seen more than most.

Apart from the SSU section, Leicester is just a local jail. The unit part was brought in for the Great Train Robbers, the Kray firm and the Richardson gang. Since then, many infamous cons have spent time on there – Harry Roberts (cop-shooter), Billy Skingle, Joey Martin, Freddie Foreman, Reg Kray, Harry Johnson, Angel Face Probyn, John Kendall, Steve Waterman, John McVicar … then all the IRA lads, the drug barons and the spies. They have all been on there, some for years, others for months.

I was always kept in the seg unit under a ten-guard unlock – at least ten screws outside my cell door before it can be unlocked.

I was, in fact, the only con ever to have a police ID parade in their seg unit. And guess what? The witnesses never picked me out. Too fucking scared to, I bet! I swear to God, if they had of done so I would have attacked them there and then, I was just in the mood for a war.

I ended up ripping a door off there – well, I was bored, and a man needs to occupy his mind!

The food there was swill. I was always hungry there. But the screws were not a bad bunch.

I recall about 1986/87 when female screws started to work in men’s jails. It really was a big thing in those days to see a ‘screwess’. Especially in the morning when you unlocked to slop out your pot. It was embarrassing. What man wants to walk past a woman with a pot full of shit? Now you know why a lot of us used to crap in a paper and throw it out of the window.

Anyway, there was a gorgeous screwess and it turned out she was a sex change. It blew me away. I keep telling you, those screws are a funny breed.

I will give HM Prison Leicester 5/10, only because I enjoyed my stays there. I am not sure they enjoyed me, though, but let’s not get personal.

LOCATION:       Greetwell Road, Lincoln.
CAPACITY:       450 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       Local Prison and Remands – Male.
OPENED:       1872.
HISTORY:       A Victorian prison that continued the tradition of a prison being in Lincoln since medieval times. A vast refurbishment project has seen the prison transformed into a more manageable place.

I hit Lincoln Prison on about ten occasions in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.

Each time I was allocated to their seg block, apart from 1991, when I hit their SSU. There were only four of us in there – Tony Steel, Joe Purkiss, Paul Flint and me.

Tony was only eighteen years old when he came in; he is forty now, and has never been out.

Paul is a strong lad; he once almost kicked his way out of a moving van.

As for Joe, he is just a big fat slob, but we all love Joe, not got a big brain but a big heart.

The unit was small, comprising about eight cells, a small yard, a workshop and a multi-gym. Our visits were held in a small room on the unit.

A con in there called Kelly – he left before I got there – had taken a hostage in another jail; he was a dangerous fucker. He was also as bent as a nine-bob note, a raving poof. He used to have his ‘fella’ visit him and they got caught on the visit giving each other blow-jobs. Could you make this shit up? Doesn’t it blow your heads? It does mine.

The Governor on the unit was Mr Pratt – by name and nature. Sadly, I gave him a knuckle sandwich. BANG! So my time on this unit was short.

I recall once in their seg unit I was out on the yard for my one-hour exercise period which was in a caged-off fenced yard outside the kitchen and below the A Wing cons. Anyway, a pal of mine, Patch, walked into the kitchen, and shouted to me through the locked gate, ‘Hi, Chas. Need anything?’

I said, ‘Yeah, I am starving!’

Five minutes passed. A slab of cheese came flying through the gate and hit the fence. It was about half the size of a football. Then a big loaf of bread comes hurtling my way and crash, it hit the fence. But I am on the other side of the fence.

‘How the fuck am I going to get it, Patch?’ I ask.

‘Leave it to me, Chas,’ he says.

Five minutes passed and Patch was let out of the gate. He had a broom. The screw said to him, ‘Be quick.’

Patch pretended to sweep up and he shot over and picked up the goodies and then slung them over the 18ft fence. What a genius he was.

I ate half of it. Then it was time to come in. The six screws who’d come to get me looked puzzled, but they never even tried to take it off me!

Lincoln had some first-class screws, proper characters, like Big Mick Freeber. He was a diamond. He used to go and get me a load of chips from the kitchen. And on visits he used to give me an extra half-an-hour.

There was also old Jack Spencer. He was the only screw in thirty years who ever opened my door alone. At times, he shouldn’t have done. He has even sat in my cell with a mug of tea.

One Christmas, my door opened, it was about 8.00pm. He was there, alone, with a cake. He must be retired now. But I will always admire that man, a true gentleman. And he knew how to treat people; I always gave him respect. Screws like him are really so few, and he was no soft touch, a hard man, but he had a streak of kindness in him. Like the time I was in a body belt. It was too small, and really uncomfortable. It was causing me breathing problems; it cut into my mid section. I weighed 16st and they had restrained me in a small belt, as usual!

Jack made them take it off and get a bigger size. Most screws would have just left me in pain.

Lincoln’s not a big jail but it is compact, it is a very old jail, but the sort that I love best. It has got character. And a lot of ghosts, too!

I really do have some nice memories of the place, and to think that I was bashed up there several times.

I will give HM Prison Lincoln 8/10. See, I am not bitter.

LOCATION:       South Littleton, Worcestershire.
CAPACITY:       600 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT:       Category ‘A’ and ‘B’ High-Security – Male.
OPENED:       1971.
HISTORY:       Originally was a Category ‘C’ prison, then sexed up into a high-security status for those serving four years to life. Predominantly for long-term prisoners.

I landed here in the late 1980s and again in the ’90s. It is one of our maximum-secure jails, built in the sticks of Worcestershire.

A Governor I have a lot of respect for – and that’s rare, coming from me – Mr Whitty was, perhaps, the fairest man in authority I have ever met, and, boy, did he give me a break.

I totally fell off the edge at Lartin in one morning of madness. I wrecked A Wing, I attacked three screws, scalded four others and seriously assaulted three cons with an iron bar.

Everybody, including me, thought it was all over for me, and that I would be nutted off again. But, somehow, Mr Whitty stood by me and helped me over this period of blackness. And I mean he helped me so much that I have never forgotten him. And for the first time in my life, I actually felt guilty for my actions, as I felt I had let Mr Whitty down.

Yeah, it is a fact. Don’t ask me to explain it, I am not a psychologist, I just know this time was a very difficult period for me to work out. There I was, fucked-up completely, attacking people, destroying everybody in sight and, after it all stopped, I felt bad over it!

Normally, I would say, ‘Good.’ But this time, it was me who felt bad. The cons I hurt were scum anyway, sex offenders. So fuck them.

But the screw I attacked had done nothing to me and the damage I did was just senseless. I actually deserved all I got.

No sooner had I got all that behind me, I was off again on another load of destruction. Long Lartin really only saw the bad side of me and the truth is, it was a bloody good jail.

If I had to pinpoint it and try to explain it, I would say maybe I had fucked up and all the time in solitary I had spent had messed me up.

And when I hit Lartin, I just couldn’t cope with the openness of it all. It was a big open space with massive fields all round it, even though it was maximum-secure; it was all new to me. I was used to a 10ft square concrete coffin, not all this.

Two of my pals died in Lartin. Eddie Watkins took a drug overdose and left a note behind. Ed had got life over shooting a Customs officer dead. And Barry Rondeau cut his throat and bled to death. Barry was serving life, too; he stabbed a guy at a football match. These fellow cons were two of my best pals. I think that nearly pushed me over the edge. Death affects us all differently.

But Long Lartin had seen some violent incidents over the years. Fred Lowe killed his second con there.

There was one con stabbed to death in the kitchen, another was punched to death in the TV room and another kicked to death down some stairs.

It was there that George Ince got cut (slashed with a blade) down the field. He got cut for his playing about with Dolly Kray (Charlie Kray’s wife). But fair play to George, he kept his mouth shut as he did when a shotgun was put down his trousers in later years. He may have played about with someone’s wife but he was a solid, staunch guy. For that you have to admire him.

Then there was the time Alec Sears, Andy Russell and a few of the chaps almost escaped. But the makeshift ladder snapped when they were captured in the grounds, and Alec got his head smashed open by the screws. The whole jail erupted in an orgy of violence. Alec later died in a car smash in Spain.

I remember when Chapman, the Barnsley Beast, got it in the recess. He was hit with everything – sticks, lead pipes, boots, fists. Hell … he survived and fought back. It makes you cringe at what his poor victims had to go through with that monster.

The longest serving Category ‘A’ inmate in Lartin was John Straffen. Read Kate Kray’s book Lifers and you will see why he has served fifty years; it is a great pity they never topped him! The animal killed three little girls.

Lartin is full of men who have served 20, 30, even 40 years. But they all seem to walk about like it is a hotel and they’re happy. Maybe it is down to institutionalisation, or is it just insanity?

I walked into a cell one day. There was a youngster, twenty-two years old, sucking a black con’s dick and another con was riding his butt. It just about sums it all up in a nutshell. Sick! The lad was only serving a six-year sentence; he had fallen into the hole of no return. Drugs, vice and madness!

One day, I was on a visit, and I looked over at the table next to mine; that lad was on a visit with his parents. It was that day that I realised what a jail can do to people.

They are sad, sick and evil places. And my advice to any youngster would be: ‘Behave and get out fast and don’t come back.’ Or just stay out of trouble.