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.

Your sweat turns to ice

Your blood to treacle

Your tears to fire

There are no rainbows in hell

The stars are grey

The sky is crimson

The grass is concrete

The walls are stone

The glass is razor wire

Face it … you’re caged!

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 steelcapped 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 PRESENT: AT 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, pressups, 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.

 
OCATION: 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 fourcell 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.

I will give HM Prison Long Lartin 7/10. It does a lovely beef curry.

 
LOCATION: Norwich, Norfolk.
CAPACITY: 750 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Local Prison, Remands and YOI (Young Offenders Institute) – Male.
OPENED: 1887.
HISTORY: A bit of history to this one. Although the prison opened in 1887 with only two wings, a further two wings were added in 1996 to accommodate Category ‘C’ prisoners. The YOI part of the prison is not attached to the adult male prison, it is on an adjacent site.

I was only here for two weeks and spent that time in their seg block in the 1980s.

I must say now, it was a smashing couple of weeks; the cell was clean and spacious. The food was excellent. It always is good in these little jails. And the population at the time I was there was not a quarter of that of some of the big jails. Since my stay, the prison has opened Category ‘C’ units and a detox wing for smackheads as well as its own Health Care Unit.

Norwich is an old jail but well preserved. It is quite laid-back. Even the screws were a decent bunch. They just went about their jobs how thay were supposed to, humanely.

I said to one old screw, ‘Hey, guv, if I even get sentenced to hang, I will ask to be hanged in your jail.’

He asked, ‘Why?’

I told him because it would be nice to go with a bit of humanity and no bitterness. He looked puzzled. But I fucking meant it.

It was a stress-free fortnight for me. I even slept like a baby and awoke happy. Do you know, I actually felt guilty; it is surely a crime to be so happy in jail.

I will give HM Prison Norwich 9/10. Maybe it was too nice. It could kill you with kindness. Not a nice end.

 
LOCATION: Nearby to the County Hall on New Road, Oxford.
CAPACITY: Nil.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Leisure.
OPENED: 1166.
HISTORY: Oxford Castle ceased to be a prison in 1996 and over the next few years will be redeveloped in a partnership between heritage and commercial uses. Since 1166, there has been a prison on the castle site, and in 1236 the Chancellor of the University was authorised to use the Castle ‘gaol’ for ‘rebellious scholars’.

There was a separate wing, B Wing, for female prisoners, now destroyed. There were, in the early days, separate exercise yards for different classes of prisoners. At this time, it was common to be thrown into clink for owing money; remind me never to get a loan. The Debtors’ Yard was adjacent to the Debtors’ Tower. Except for the Governor’s House in the centre of the main exercise yards, most of the large buildings remain, although altered inside. The Castle Mill was demolished in the 1930s.

The prison building that stands today is the result of major rebuilding in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which saw a house of correction, internal courtyards and new wings added, all of which were surrounded by a castellated wall.

The last public hanging to take place at Oxford Prison was in 1863, but the hanging cell became a place for private executions away from the public eye where executions were held until the 1950s.

In 1884, hard labour was introduced in the form of stone breaking. A contract was pursued to supply the local Highways Board.

In 1848, as if all the previous building work wasn’t enough, a Governor’s house was built, which was placed safely outside the prison walls.

Most of the inmates were local to Oxford, and so were the prison staff. Towards the end of the 1980s, the hospital wing began to fill up with psychiatric cases, changing the prison population from almost exclusively normal villains and crooks. I should know, because I was one of them.

The deluxe cells were those overlooking the exercise yard; you would have a view looking out over New Road, and level with the Nuffield tower.

The death knell for the prison rang when European Council standards were brought in and an overhaul of the British Penal System in terms of sanitation systems and wash areas would mean extra costs for all of the prisons.

After the prison closed, the local council took advantage of this empty shell that is testimony to human suffering and rented out the prison buildings to film and television companies.

Many drama series were shot there, including Bad Girls, Inspector Morse and The Bill. Big screen movies like 101 Dalmatians, The Spy Game and Lucky Break generated extra cash to help fill the council coffers. Considering that fees started at £3,000 for a day’s use, the Council pulled in over £500,000 from more than fifty productions.

And now, jumping on the cash bandwagon are the developers. Personally, I would have turned the place into ‘Bronco’s’, a fitness centre and self-incarceration unit for those willing to pay.

I landed here back in December 1978; the van drove in and within five minutes of walking into reception, I chinned a screw. BANG!

I was jumped on and put in a body belt and carried back to the van, and off we went.

This had to be a world record! But I must add, we were only stopping off at Oxford for dinner. I was in transit heading for Rampton Asylum.

I was accompanied at the time by Parkhurst screws; they actually thought the whole thing was funny. What was funny? I actually had the Oxford screw’s tooth embedded in my fist. But the other funny thing was, I couldn’t be nicked for it, simply as I had been certified mad and was on my way to the asylum.

Who said you can’t beat the system? This proves that you can.

I will give HM Prison Oxford a 5/10, just for the memory.

 
LOCATION: Newport, Isle of Wight – get there by ferry or hovercraft.
CAPACITY: 450 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: ‘B’ and Protected Witness Unit – Male.
OPENED: 1838.
HISTORY: Although the prison first opened in 1805, it was designed as a Military Hospital. Something called ‘The Parkhurst Prison Act’ came into force in 1838 and the rest is history … just about. Back in those days, they kept prisoners in what they called ‘hulks’.

The forerunner to the punishment of being detained in a hulk was ‘deportation to the colonies and Australia’. This was clearly a form of social vengeance. Banishment was the new punishment, to be sent away from your own shores was becoming popular and replaced penal servitude.

After the feudal system broke up, the wandering, jobless and lower-class-filled slums added to the already full prisons. From 1596 to 1776, deporting these unwanted social outcasts to the colonies relieved pressure on prisons. Transportation to colonies ended in 1776.

Just before the ending of transportation, Captain James Cook discovered Australia in 1770. You lucky Aussies! The plan was to have convicts tame the new land, and 135,000 deportees were sent there between 1787–1875. The conditions in these ships were worse than the conditions in the jails.

The problem of increased prisoner loads stretched England’s facilities from 1776–1875. The (final) solution was to use the old ‘hulks’ or unusable transport ships. This represented an immediate solution to the overcrowding problem, and the hulks could be berthed in rivers and harbours.

Within these hulks there was no segregation, both young and old, male and female, criminals and miscreants were thrown together.

These great stinking hulks were moored off the coasts of England or moored in harbour under the ever-watchful eye of the turnkeys. One such hulk was called the ‘York’ and was moored close by at Portsmouth; they sent the first lot of boys from there to Parkhurst. What a relief this must have been for them to be released from the stinking hulk to a lovely cell. The hulk system of incarcerating prisoners continued until 1858, over eighty years!

The only time the prison swayed from being a male-only members club was when women were permitted to be prisoners from 1863 to 1869. After that short run it returned to male members only.

The maximum-security use of the prison was developed in 1968, just in time for the Kray gang when the prison became a secure dispersal institution.

The Protected Witness (Supergrass) Unit was opened in 1997.

Without a doubt, this is one of our most famous jails … or is it infamous? Whatever, it is a jail that holds many a horrific story.

I first landed here back in 1976; I was a young man of twenty-four years of age. As the ferry left Portsmouth Dock, I felt I was going far away from England.

Around this time, Rod Stewart had a hit record in the charts – ‘I Am Sailing’. Every time I hear that song, I can think back to that first journey over to the Isle of Wight.

For me, Parkhurst Prison was the hardest, toughest, cruellest jail in Britain. It holds the record for the most murders in any jail in the UK.

I was there for three of those murders – Johnny Patton killed McGhee on C Wing; Dougie Wakefield killed Brian Peak on C Unit; and Rogers killed Rocky Hart in the main kitchen.

McGhee copped it in the back with a 7in chib in the dinner queue. As he lay dead on the floor, cons just stepped over him as if he was a bag of spuds. Nobody sees anything in Parkhurst.

Brian Peak had his lot in his cell as he was painting a picture of a beautiful country landscape. Dougie strangled him with a bootlace, and then set about making a lot of holes in his body.

Rocky Hart got stabbed through the neck and back in an argument over a pork chop.

All three killers had killed before. All got a further life sentence. Only one has been released, and that was Johnny Patton … he left prison some years later in a body bag. He hanged himself.

Parkhurst, for me, was an exciting jail, as there was always something going on – parties, hooch, escape plots and violence. Hey, making hooch … now that is a favourite pastime of many a good friend of mine. I can’t recall how many cell parties we’ve had behind bars. When we couldn’t get booze smuggled in, then we’d have to drink some of the prison hooch we’d brew in our illicit stills.

One of the best drinks I’ve tasted was made from orange peel, fruit cocktail and water. All of this was heated in a prison sink and kept warm with prison-issue blankets; well, they do come in handy for something.

Then comes the hard part, keeping it away from the screws, ’cos some of the thieving bastards will drink it … it has happened to us before in Parkhurst! You then hide it away for between five and seven days, then extra sugar is added and it is kept warm for three more days. Skim the head off and get it down your neck … lovely.

Now, if you’ve got access to yeast, then you’re gonna have a real good party in a few days’ time! Yeehaaaa!

When yeast is added to crushed fruit, it starts consuming the natural sugars in the flesh of the fruit. This process carries on until all the sugar has disappeared and then the yeast will die. The resulting beverage (with a bit more love) could be the perfect Beaujolais, if you used grapes.

Should you have access to barley, hops and yeast, then you can make beers and lagers. To get bitter on tap, you need to get the yeast to fall to the bottom of the fermentation container and have a warmer temperature. Hey, I sound like a right alco, but it’s only ’cos I’ve had thirty years’ practice.

To make lager, you need to get the yeast to float on the top of the fermenting container (not aluminium, as alcohol reacts badly with aluminium) and have slightly colder storage conditions. The sugar that is fermented comes from the barley. Hops are added for their flavour and to prevent the growth of certain bacteria, which might cause the beer to go off.

The daddy of hooch is the spirit. Before I can go any further, you have to know how a spirit is made. When a spirit is created in a proper distillery, an already fermented drink is treated to increase its percentage of alcohol. You are increasing the alcoholic proof.

Only once have I had real spirit hooch, and that was just like drinking whisky. But when times are hard you just have to resort to the simplest methods of making hooch. We’d grab a plastic bucket, throw in some raisins, sugar, water and yeast and leave it under the bed. We’d keep an eye on it and so long as we didn’t get our cell spun over by the burglars, we’d have a party the following week.

We’ve even had the boys pick dandelions on the sports field and make dandelion wine. One of the funniest places we’ve brewed hooch is in the inside of a football in a prison gym. The fuel can for the lawnmower comes in handy, too!

Cons lived by a moralistic code, and screws remained screws. There were never any nonces (sex beasts) on the wings and grasses were severely served up big time.

The cons did their bird in the way cons should – like men. We worked out hard in the gym. We cooked our own grub. We had lots of sunbathing. We had good visits and we didn’t give a fuck.

Parkhurst Prison had a proper riot in 1969 and, believe me, they didn’t fancy a second one. That riot was the most violent prison riot of all time. Men like Frank Fraser, Timmy Noonan, Marty Frape, Stan Thompson – proper hardcore cons. The old breed, hearts of lions.

The cons all got smashed up, but so did a lot of screws; one even had his throat cut. That is what you call a riot. Floors drenched with blood. Broken bodies.

Parkhurst held the worst of the worst, but the best of the best, if you follow my meaning. It all depends what side of the wall you are on.

That jail had the ‘cream’ – the top bank robbers, the mobsters, the fraudsters. It even had its own unit for psychopaths.

I met them all at Parkhurst – the Krays, the Richardsons. Never mind Alcatraz and Capone. This was the place, our very own Devil’s Island. And we were doing our bird like men should, our way.

There was respect and a sort of atmosphere like no other jail. Call it menace … fear … tension. But it was right in your face – ‘Don’t fuck with us.’

The place was buzzing, and behind every door there was a story. A dream turned into a nightmare. One day it would be calm, the next there would be a hostage siege.

One week would pass by peacefully. The next there would be four cuttings and two stabbings or a suicide.

But even the suicides were mysterious. I have worked out with guys on a Tuesday, and by the Friday they are dead. Drug overdoses, hangings, slashed wrists.

I once watched a con rip another con’s eye out. The guy walked away laughing whilst the other con screamed. One con got a broom handle rammed so far up his arse he ended up with a colostomy bag. Another lost his nose.

Even screws got smashed up there. Cut up … stabbed up. It was that sort of place.

I remember when Billy Skingle and Cyril Berkett had it away from the SSU. Cyril got caught almost immediately. But Billy got right away and hid in the woods. Sadly, they found him buried under a pile of earth and so had him locked back up.

Billy was serving natural life for shooting a copper seven times in the canister. Billy was a funny fucker, he used to say, ‘It was a faulty trigger.’ It was years later he died up in Full Sutton Prison. But the truth is, Billy died the day the judge at the Bailey sentenced him.

Parkhurst Prison holds some strange mixed emotions for me. It was while I was there I fell on bad times; I was wrapped up in violence and attempted murder, I also suffered multiple stab wounds and almost died. And, to top it all, it was Parkhurst that actually certified me criminally insane.

So, it is a jail that I can never forget. Parkhurst plays a big part in my character make-up today. And some of the cons I met there and fought with and against have become life-long friends and enemies. So how can a man forget? How does a war prisoner forget? You ask those who suffered in those Japanese PoW camps. The actor Peter Wyngarde who played the TV character Jason King in Department ‘S’ was a child prisoner of the Japanese. When the Japs invaded Shanghai, Peter was being looked after while his father was away in India. He spent several years in Lung-hai concentration camp and had both of his feet broken and he was put into solitary confinement.

Well, it is the same as prison. They leave a scar.

To me, Parkhurst has to get good marks, simply is it was my most exciting time in any jail. It was character building. A challenge. And I loved it. Even the bad times were good.

Because, with every act of violence, you fought back with sheer madness. I spent a lot of my time in the dungeon there, battling with the screws. I cut one and I shit plenty up, and I had some good fights that they will never let me forget, but I have no real bitterness or hatred over it.

I was a young man put to the test. Crazy but true and I would love to do it all again, but I can’t.

I will give HM Prison Parkhurst 10/10. And I got on their roof. Nice view up there.

 
LOCATION: Caledonian Road, London.
CAPACITY: 1,100 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Local and Category ‘B’ – Male.
OPENED: 1842 at a cost of £84,186 12s 2d. Notice from the aerial photo that it was designed in accordance with Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon design consisting of a central hall, with five radiating wings (one being the small centre wing), all of which are visible to staff positioned at the centre. This is still apparent in today’s layout; very little has changed.
HISTORY: Again, look at the aerial photo of Pentonville Prison. The same four cellblocks you can see are the same ones built there over 160 years ago. Fuck all has changed, and you wonder where your taxes go when reformists say prisons have been improved!

Believe it or not, this was the first modern prison and opened in London in 1816 – the new Millbank Prison. There were separate cells for 860 prisoners, which could deal with the rapid increase in prison numbers. This increase was due to the way certain crimes had been dropped from the capital punishment listings and the slowing down of transportation as a punishment.

Pentonville Prison was allowed to be built after two Acts of Parliament were passed allowing for the detention of convicts sentenced to imprisonment or awaiting transportation.

On 10 April 1840, construction started and, by 1842, the prison was ready to open. Originally, Pentonville was designed so that prisoners could have their own cell. This was mainly a punishment consideration. 520 prisoners had their own cells, which measured 13ft by 7ft and were 9ft high.

Pentonville was to become the basic model for prisons in Britain and this prompted the building of a further fifty-four of similar design over a six-year period. Compared to Newgate Prison, conditions were vastly better and healthier.

Life as a prisoner meant that you had to do some sort of work, such as picking coir (tarred rope) and weaving.

I have heard that it costs about £150,000 per year to keep me securely locked up. Compare that to the cost of keeping a prisoner at Pentonville in 1842 – 15s (75p) per week.

Until Newgate Prison closed in 1902, condemned prisoners were not housed at Pentonville Prison. The closure of Newgate meant that Pentonville had to take over the responsibility of executions. This meant that extra cells for the condemned had to be built and the gallows from Newgate were moved to Pentonville. As like the other ‘modern’ prisons of the day, the execution facilities were housed in a purpose-built shed with a typical brick-lined pit some 12ft deep.

The most uncomfortable of walks for the condemned prisoner was when they had to walk from the prison to the hanging shed. This, again, was typical of most hanging prisons, as public hangings were abolished.

Some prisons acted rather sooner than Pentonville in providing hanging cells. Pentonville eventually moved the hanging facilities to within the prison in the 1920s. This saved the condemned prisoner the walk to the hanging shed.

The hanging cells were, as I’ve already said, on one of the upper floors. This was to allow the body of the condemned to drop the seven or so feet and then to account for the height of the body. So if the person being hanged was, say, 6ft tall and then the drop of the rope was 7ft, then that would be a fair old distance from the neck height of where the condemned was standing. This meant that two or three cells from the ground floor upwards were part of the hanging chamber, comprising a stack of three rooms in the middle of one of the wings. The topmost cell would house the beam from which the rope was suspended from a chain. This rope then hung down through floor hatches.

One of the cells below this cell housed the lever that opened the trap doors and the ground-floor room acted as the pit into which the prisoner was launched. All apart from HM Prison Durham used this type of hanging system.

Would you believe that people actually applied for the job as hangman? The course to be a hangman lasted for one week. Can you see your local college advertising such courses – ‘Hangman, a two-day taster course’ or ‘DIY Hangman for Beginners’?

At Pentonville Prison you could become a qualified hangman. They were taught how to calculate and set the drop, pinion the prisoner and carry out an execution with speed and efficiency using a dummy in place of the prisoner. As mentioned already, one of the most prolific hangmen to ever live was Albert Pierrepoint.

The dummy used by these trainee hangmen was called ‘Old Bill’. The trainees practised hooding and noosing Old Bill, getting the eyelet of the noose in the right place and learning the system of what was supposedly humane hanging.

The only humane part of the hanging was when the white cap was drawn over the head of the condemned. What else is humane about hanging someone? After attending the course, the trainees were given a test and that was it – a degree in hanging.

There were 120 hangings carried out in Pentonville Prison from 1902 to 1961. The first to be hanged on the 30 September 1902 was John Macdonald, who was convicted of murder. The infamous Dr Crippen was hanged at Pentonville on 23 November 1911.

During World War II, six spies were hanged at Pentonville under the provisions of Section 1 of the Treachery Act 1940. They were Carl Meier, Jose Waldeburg, Charles Albert Van Der Kieboom, Oswald John Job, Pierre Richard Charles Neukermans and Joseph Jan Van Hove. Hangman Albert Pierrepoint dispatched Waldeburg and Meier on 10 December 1940 and Kieboom a week later on the 17 December by Stanley Cross, having had his appeal dismissed.

The address of 10 Rillington Place sounds familiar, and so it should be. This was the start of multiple murders, which led, first, to Timothy John Evans (9 March 1950) and then, some years later, John Reginald Halliday Christie (15 July 1953) being hanged in Pentonville Prison by Albert Pierrpoint.

The last man to be hanged at Pentonville Prison was Edwin Albert Arthur Bush, aged 21, on 6 July 1961, when he was executed for the murder of shop assistant Elsie Batten.

It was 1976 when I popped in there, well after the last hanging had taken place. I was on my way to Wandsworth from Parkhurst and the van got a call to direct me there. I never knew why; probably a security thing to do with Wandsworth.

Pentonville only kept me three days and moved me on to Wandsworth. So my three days there is a bit short to assess the place, the food and the routine, but the previous hanging history is awesome! Bring back the birch; let’s have a whip round.

The seg block was like all the other old blocks in any jail, dark and gloomy with an eerie smell of decay and death. This place is now 162 years old. It looks it, too. The food was pig swill, even the water tasted old.

The screws were typical old school – peaked caps, shiny boots, starched collars, the military swagger. Half the prats never got past the rank of private in the forces. The odd one or two sweated it up to the rank of corporal. But that was only for grassing on their pals. The very few élite may have made it into the SAS. These were the best type of screws. Proper men. They never fucked about with silly psychological games.

The mattress was one of the old straw-filled ones, lumpy, and even the pillow was filled with straw.

Do you know, all these years later, I still can’t get used to sleeping on prison mattresses. The very thought of hundreds, even thousands of men being on it before me, wanking, coughing and farting. I still can’t face up to that.

I will give HM Prison Pentonville 4/10. Fuck knows why, but I have got to give it something.

PS – I never did go back! Thank fuck.

 
LOCATION: Retford, Nottingham.
CAPACITY: 437 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Special Secure Hospital – Male and Female.
OPENED: 1910.
HISTORY: Opened as England’s first State institution for mentally defective people considered dangerous.

Do you know that the now deceased former Prime Minister of England, Winston Churchill, when he was Home Secretary, held views that were no different to those of Germany’s World War II Chancellor, Adolf Hitler?

Churchill, like Hitler, was a strong supporter of sterilisation. The extreme views of Churchill were that 100,000 moral degenerates should be given forcible sterilisation! These views were considered so sensitive that they were kept secret until 1992.

Here is what Churchill said:

(Winston Churchill to Prime Minister Asquith, 1910, quoted by Clive Ponting in the Guardian Outlook 20/6/1992)

Rampton Hospital is a high-secure unit with a developing occupational therapy service which aims to provide individual treatment and group work for learning disabilities, mental health, women’s services and personality disorder service users. Clients are seen as in-patients on the wards and in day centres.

The occupational therapists facilitate group work in clinical dayservice settings. This is proven to be the most appropriate method of meeting a wide range of patients’ clinical needs given the finite occupational therapy resource. Staff devise and implement specifically selected and appropriately structured groups in response to the identified needs of the patients.

It was December 1978 when I landed in this funny farm and, believe me, I did not know that any such places existed.

I had just been certified criminally insane over two violent attacks at Parkhurst. One on a con and the other on a screw and it was at Newport Crown Court, on the Isle of Wight, where I was given an indefinite life section, or ‘sectioned off’. Such is life.

So there I was at Rampton secure asylum in a world of madness. What an understatement! Total fucking insanity beyond anything I have ever known. Rampton at this time was a brutal establishment.

OK, you are going to say, ‘How come? Why is it?’ Well, I will tell you. Because it was a place where serious liberties could take place. After all, we were classified as being insane. Who would believe a madman compared to the high rollers from the establishment?

I cannot count on my fingers or toes how many times I was beaten up, but it wasn’t the beatings that were the biggest fear, it was something far more sinister than you could imagine … it was the psychotropic drugs they forced me to take. If I refused to take them orally, I would be attacked and be given these drugs by injection.

The screws in Rampton are, in fact, psychiatric nurses. Now you tell me what sort of nurse wears size 10 boots and a prison officer’s uniform? Those nurses are not the sort of nurses you would want looking after you when you’re feeling poorly.

But they all got kicked back in the face, as a massive police inquiry took place over the brutality there and many were sacked over it. Had the lunatics dreamed that as well?

Rampton, at this time, was no different from a strict detention centre, or a Borstal. It was run on fear – ‘Do as we tell you, or you will be sorry!’

I spent eleven months on Drake Ward, which was the intensive care unit for the disruptive element and, believe me, we got it every day – cold baths, wet towel treatment, kickings, psychological torture, our whole day was made a misery.

We had to scrub floors, wash walls. We were like a load of slaves. There were only twelve of us on the ward. The screws outnumbered us.

At 8.00pm, it was bedtime. We had just a bed and piss pot. We were not even allowed a book to read. Bed was for sleep. At 6.00am, we would be up, slopping our piss pots out, marching about like lunatics.

But do ‘patients’ do this? So nurses make you do this? To me, Rampton was a hellhole. No wonder the police were brought in. After the police inquiry, and court cases, and sackings, the place cooled down.

Like the Scrubs inquiry, it all cooled down. But in time, they all slip back into hell. Rampton holds a lot of nightmares in the way it treated its inmates. Remember, this is a place that has been around for a good ninety-four years.

It is a gloomy-looking, red-brick institution, where madmen were probably sent to die. I met some old boys there who had been there for forty years and more. They had dead eyes, faces of stone.

Obviously, nowadays, it has all changed. They can’t get away with such atrocities.

Did you know that epilepsy was once regarded as a mental illness? And people were locked up for it. Did you know young girls having babies were also locked up in asylums? Our asylums are a disgrace. What they did to people from the 1920s to the 1980s was shameful. Lobotomies, leucotomies, electric shock treatment (without anaesthetic). Please believe it, they are a bloody disgrace. An insult to humanity.

This country should hang its head in shame for the human misery we have caused. But for me, it was the drug abuse. The liquid cosh. What right has anybody got to inject drugs into another human being? Animal rights activists fight for animals. Well, what about the lunatics? Do we not matter?

I have very few, if any, good memories of Rampton. Ask anyone who spent time in Auschwitz if they had any good times. They will spit in your face.

That is how I feel about Rampton. More so, as it was a hospital. So it should not have been like that.

Nowadays, I read, it is a nice place. With sickos there like Beverly Allitt. Discos! Bingo! Gym! TV! Films! Well, I never had any of that, I can assure you.

I will give Special Secure Hospital Rampton 0/10. Sorry, but I would be a madman to give it any more.

 
LOCATION: Warrington, Cheshire.
CAPACITY: 1,000 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: ‘C’ – Male.
OPENED: 1965.
HISTORY: Originally opened as a Remand Centre. Always suffering setbacks due to those nasty prisoners committing suicide and always overcrowded. Suffered riots and uprisings as well as poor reports by prison inspectors, this resulted in the prison becoming a training prison. Had a female wing, but this closed in 1999 and became a detox centre for female prisoners … it soon closed down after a few months. Operates a sex offender treatment programme. I didn’t know they had gas chambers there? How come sex offenders are considered more worthy than female prisoners?

I first landed in Grisly Risley, a shit-hole, in 1969 and I returned there six times afterwards; I must have liked it or something. I could write a book on this place alone. It really was a hellhole. It stunk of death. Suicides. It was a brutal place for youngsters. Some just cracked and topped themselves.

I actually witnessed my first suicide at Risley. And, believe me, it is not a nice sight. I was only a boy myself, seventeen years old, when I saw the lad hanging in his cell. It really had a bad affect on me. Nightmares. It really is not a nice experience. But what is really sick in jail is that once the body is taken out, the next day just goes on as if fuck all has happened.

Screws shouted their fat mouths off. With their big fat arses and beer bellies. I used to watch them and wonder, do they go home and start on and brutalise their own kids like that? Or bash their wives up … as many are divorced and like a drink?

I changed my whole character just by being in Risley. It all became a game to me. If I could get one over on the pigs … I would. And I met lads who became life-long ‘brothers’.

It’s in those places that real criminals are created. We come in naughty boys … we go out dangerous bastards. It’s a fact. That first bit of porridge sticks to you like glue. Does shit stick to a blanket? Does prison stick to a kid?

It sets like rock inside your guts. And you turn to concrete. You become as relentless and ruthless as the screws.

I could not count on my fingers and toes how many times I was beaten up by those pigs. But the reason for that was because I would not stay down, I came back worse. In the end, I think that they gave up and gave me a bit of space.

The cells were tiny. No air. Stuffy. The visits were in closed cubicles behind glass. On one visit, I butted out the glass in frustration. The food was shit. Risley had its fair share of riots. But considering it was a newish jail, built in the mid-1960s, it was a fucking disgrace.

There were rats there as big as cats! One night, I was looking out of my cell window when a guard dog caught one and tore it to shreds. The shriek of that rat went into my soul. It was then that I knew I was in hell.

Another time, I lost the plot and stabbed a guy straight through his eye. That just wasn’t me. I could never dream of doing such a nasty thing. But that’s what a place like that turns you into.

I burnt nonces with lighters and fags. I cut them. I stabbed them. I jumped on their legs ’til I heard a crack, laughing as I did it. If you live in a hate factory then you become it.

Fortunately, all the scum I ever attacked were either sex cases or grasses, and all the screws I attacked were bullyboys. So I have no regrets. I did to them what ten would do to me, but I did it on my own! And did I do it from behind? No! I came at them face to face. How I enjoy it!

It was in the gym; I felt I had lost my way. I’d got 150lb on the bar for a bench press. I saw this fat nonce come in the gym; he had been in all the papers for raping an old lady. So I thought, ‘Yeah, he can have some.’

I called him over and told him to have a go at the bar. As he lay on the bench, I dropped it towards his neck. Somehow, he moved in that split second. He would have died instantly and I would have died with him on a life sentence. I had to get a grip of myself before Risley buried me away with all the dead souls it created.

For a young lad, I was a tortured wreck on a mission to hell. It was years later in 1985 when I almost died in Risley.

But to me, this place was the start of my madness, it scars the brain, warps the mind. I have not really any nice things to say about the place. Only for the smashing pals I met there – Tommy Tedstone, Snowy, Andy Vassal, Sonny Carroll, Johnny Owen, Dominick Gallagher, Chrissy Hendrix, Barry Davis and his brother Ernie. Men I have grown up with. For that I am grateful to have been a part of it all.

A lot of people are not friends. They will leave you in the shit. Even watch you die. A true friend stands with you in times of trouble. My true pals have stood and fought with me against terrible odds. And I love them all for it!

The ones who ran – or stood and watched – I have no bad feelings towards, but they’re cowards. It’s for them to face themselves. Risley, sadly, broke many. But it couldn’t break me.

One of the more bizarre times at Risley Prison was when Keith Hull was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment for offences relating to her/his shop that was selling items of a sexual nature. Oh, and she got a £6,000 fine on top of the sentence!

Keith had become Stephanie and had truly changed into a female, but she was the only woman on the female wing who hadn’t been born a woman. Although she only spent three nights in Risley, it was three nights of hell, sleeping on a mattress on the floor and with nothing but a pot to piss in. After three nights, she was transferred to an open prison.

After three months, she won her appeal due to the sentence being too harsh. Good job she wasn’t put on the male wing!

I see Risley is another prison that now mixes sex offenders with normal cons. Many prisons keep sex offenders in separate wings but Risley, which is Britain’s largest Cat ‘C’ prison, integrates them. This has led to the sex cases avoiding other cons by segregating themselves. This is the mentality of prison governors for you, but all the more nonces to get beaten up … lovely!

I will give HM Prison Risley 3/10 for trying to break me.

 
LOCATION: Southall Street, Manchester.
CAPACITY: 1,200 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Core – Male (includes Category ‘A’ prisoners).
OPENED: 1868.
HISTORY: April Fool’s Day 1990 saw the start of the Strangeways Riot, which ended on 25 April 1990. An event in Strangeway’s history that is forever marked by the way it revealed systematic abuse of prisoners and their rights. This riot holds the record as being the longest in British penal history.

Strangeways Prison in Southall Street, Manchester, was built to replace New Bailey Prison in Salford that closed in 1868. Originally opened as ‘Salford Prison’ in 1868, it housed both males and females in separate units.

In 1963, the females were moved out to HM Prison Styal and the unit that housed the women became a Borstal allocation and remand facility. In 1965, the Remand Centre closed and the remand prisoners were moved to Risley Remand Centre. But by 1980, the prison system was full to the gunwales and prisoners were jam-packed like sardines (four to a cell) and the prison, again, took in remand prisoners.

The prison riot of 1990 caused a sharp improvement to the outdated facilities and much of the prison was substantially rebuilt. The old design was another one of the prisons using the panopticon (radial) concept that was being employed all over Britain at the time. Designed by Alfred Waterhouse in 1861, Waterhouse was assisted by Joshua Jebb, the Surveyor General of Prisons, who had also been involved with the design of London’s Pentonville Prison, as previously mentioned.

When construction was completed in 1869, the cost stood at £170,000. Originally, where the prison now stands was Strangeways Park and Gardens, hence the name ‘Strangeways’. You can’t miss Strangeways with its imposing watchtower and two large gatehouses.

Another one of the execution prisons, Strangeways became the setting for executions for the area after the closure of the original Salford Prison. Like all of the hanging prisons, this prison had the same basic set-up.

When executions were moved inside the prison, it was to be B Wing that housed the killing area. In total, there were 100 hangings carried out within its walls, a nice round figure to end on … how many of them were innocent?

The first woman to be executed by hanging at Strangeways was Mary Ann Britland, 38, on 9 August 1886.

Remember when I told you about Charlie Peace being hanged at Armley Prison? Well, our Mr Peace had an admirer in the form of John Jackson. The hanging of Peace set Jackson on a whirlwind life of crime that was to end in him being hanged for murder at Strangeways Prison, an execution that was carried out by James Berry on 7 August 1888.

One of only four females to be hanged at Strangeways was that of a namesake of the hangman Harry Allen. Margaret Allen was a butch dyke lesbian who dressed in men’s clothes and insisted on being called by a male name, namely ‘Bill’.

The execution (for murdering a woman who had come to borrow a cup of sugar) of Allen, 42, was performed by Albert Pierrepoint on 12 January 1949.

Probably the fastest hanging in history took place here when, on 8 May 1951, when James Inglis, convicted of murdering a prostitute, bolted for the gallows from his condemned cell and his escorts had to run alongside him. Executioner Albert Pierrepoint completed the hanging in just seven seconds! This was the nearest thing to a DIY hanging that you could get; Inglis even assisted Pierrepoint in pinioning his arms in the condemned cell … some people have a death wish!

The last of four women to be executed at Strangeways was Louisa May Merrifield, 46, who had been convicted of poisoning a seventy-nine-year-old, bed-ridden widow who lived in Blackpool.

On the morning of Friday, 18 September 1953, several hundred people wanting to see the death notices displayed besieged the prison. At this time, there was an unwritten rule in the Home Office that poisoners should always hang.

One of the last two hangings to take place in England and the UK was that of John Robson Walby (also known as Gwynne Owen Evans) and took place in Strangeways Prison on 13 August 1964. The hangman was called Harry Allen.

In a bizarre twist, while this was going on, simultaneously in Walton Prison, the second of the two last hangings in the UK was taking place and the name of the man being hanged was Peter Anthony Allen.

Rebuilding work and a change of name hasn’t changed the prison’s demeanour … it still looks a gruesome place. Although they renamed the place ‘Her Majesty’s Prison Manchester’, everyone still calls it by the old name.

I can’t believe that it is an amazing decade-and-a-half since the most famous riot took place, and I fucking missed it! I was actually in the seg unit in Parkhurst Prison when it all exploded at Strangeways. That was one riot I truly would have loved to have been involved in, but it wasn’t to be. Don’t life suck!

I first hit Strangeways in the 1970s, again in the ’80s and again in the ’90s. It is a tough hard jail. It is Manchester’s answer, with a vengeance, to Wandsworth Prison in London … cold and cruel.

Screws in the 1970s and ’80s where a brutal, cold-hearted bunch; they ran Strangeways with a rod of iron.

When you hit their seg block, you bounced off the walls. You left your blues behind. Men have begged and cried in that hellhole. Governors and doctors turned a blind eye to it all.

My good pal Tommy Flanagan’s head was used as a football; how he survived is a miracle – he was a right fucking mess.

It is no good. There are mugs who say it didn’t go on, or it can’t go on. The proof is for all to see. Strangeways was a brutal regime, run by evil scum. Basically, the word is ‘cowards’. Ten men punching and kicking one defenceless man can’t be anything but cowardly, can it?

There was a white line painted on the floor in their seg unit, and the rule was, ‘you walk around it … not on it, or over it’. If you did, they jumped you.

My first spell there, I said, ‘Bollocks to your line,’ and I can put my hand on my heart and say I never did walk around it nor ever would. Simply because the bullies don’t frighten me. I said, ‘You can beat the shit out of me, but the first opportunity I get … I will have one of you snakes.’ That has always been my way of life. So fuck their silly white line. And if everybody said ‘Fuck it’ then there would never be a white line, would there? You are not sent to prison to be humiliated; you are sent there to be punished. A silly white line is a made up thing to degrade you.

Strangeways pushed and pushed and pushed too far. Cons got sick of it. The screws were a disgrace to the prison service, and when it went off, what did the screws do? They shit it and legged it! They evacuated like the cowards they are. That just about sums it up.

The riot opened a big can of maggots; a lot of truths came out, but it cost the ringleaders years of their lives, especially Alan Lord. Alan had already served ten years of a life sentence. Now it is over twenty-four years on and he is still a Category ‘A’ man and still no chance of getting out. Others copped ten years and eight years and so on. But what did the cowardly screws get for all their violence? Fuck all!

Years and years of torturing cons. The food there was filth; the whole jail was a hate factory. A warehouse full of hatred, all boxed up in little stinking cells, it pumped in hate and spurted out bitterness.

I went back there in the mid-nineties, only for a month, just passing through on a tour of the jails. I must say, the seg unit was clean and the food was brilliant, and the screws were decent to me. It was a completely different place to what it had been.

The cons up there have a lot to thank the rioters for, because they lost everything to make it a better place. But it is sad to have to say it. A good majority of cons today are only shitheads, anyway. Filthy smackheads. They’re mugging old grannies to get their next fix. To me, they should be in a dungeon with fuck all. Because they are scum. They give Christians a bad name. What is the code of honour, the morals, the self-respect? The scum would have crawled around that white line and licked the screw’s arse for a gram of smack. And Alan Lord lost his freedom for you maggots! It really does sicken me, but that is how it is.

Strangeways to me will always be what it was. It is only a matter of time ’til it falls back into the hole of evil. And with today’s cons, it is all it deserves.

As the van rolled out of the gate I thought, ‘Why, God? Why did I miss that riot? Am I destined to be unlucky?’

I will give HM Prison Strangeways 3/10, just because it robbed me of the riot!

 
LOCATION: Wakefield, West Yorkshire.
CAPACITY: 700 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: High-Security – Male.
OPENED: 1849.
HISTORY: Housed local heroes until 1945 when it became a training prison. All that changed when, in 1975, it became a high-security dispersal prison. The majority of prisoners are lifers, some of who have committed the gravest of sexual crimes. Look at the aerial photo and you’ll see that there are four wings, one of which houses an assessment centre for the ‘Sex Offender Treatment Programme’. I mean, they honestly think that they can cure a sex offender! And Bronson can fly! A cured sex offender is a dead sex offender.

I first hit here, ‘Monster Mansion’, back in 1974. Since then, I have been back a dozen times, if not more, and every time to their F Block. I last visited there in 2003 and, as I write the finishing touches to this book, I am still here. No doubt, though, I’ll be off on my tours once again, so don’t go writing to me here until you’ve checked my address out on my official website, mentioned at the end of this book.

Let me first describe their cage. It is a cell with two doors, first one door and then behind that a second door, a caged door. The outside door is solid steel. The inner door is an iron gate with a steel mesh on it and a feeding hatch in the bottom. We are fed like beasts in a zoo. Shoes are kept outside the door. We wear a green-and-yellow boiler suit, called a ‘Canary Suit’ for obvious reasons. Our life is spent, twenty-three hours a day, caged up. You come out for your one hour in the yard, alone. Never less than eight screws wait for the unlocking of the inner door. Some days there are more than eight screws and some days there’s a dog, too.

It is the end of the world. You can’t go in deeper. This is the belly of the beast! The bowels of hell. This is living in hell. I don’t mean that the screws beat you up ’cos this lot in here at the time of writing seem to have left old Bronco alone; can’t understand why.

Just because you’re not being beaten up doesn’t mean that it is a cushy place, you’ve also got mental cruelty. You look around for things to occupy your mind. You might find a loose button and start to flick it in the air with your thumb, you count how long it stays up for and catch it, but when I’ve done this in the past, the screws soon cotton on and stamp on it, smashing it to pieces. Anything to stop you using your mind is a bonus to some of them, but you still get the odd gentleman screw, they know who they are.

I spent my time being as mentally creative as possible, anything to keep my mind active. I would train spiders and cockroaches. Now, a spider is a real predator, go to poke them and watch the brave ones rear up to defend themselves. You learn a lot from these things.

You wouldn’t think that spiders and insects could learn things; you wouldn’t believe that they could be taught, but with time and patience they can be taught many things. I had the time to teach them new things and to keep them occupied, which in turn fed my need to be kept mentally active.

An insect’s reflective and inbuilt behaviour can be learned and then used to train them. The secret is this; don’t try to teach them to think like a human, you have to think like them. Think like a spider. Think like a cockroach. You have to think ‘survival’ and think small. In such surroundings, a spider can become a great friend. I had a special one which I called Harry, naturally. Have you ever seen a spider stranded in a bath? He can’t climb out ’cos the surface is too slippery. I’ve heard that people actually buy ‘spider ladders’ so that the stranded spider can climb out of the bath … great thinking.

Well, if you use the fact that a spider avoids shiny surfaces, then you can determine where he/she will walk or climb. Now you are starting to think like a spider, see. A spider will not ‘web down’ on a full stomach, but it will in the evening. So you can start to build on this knowledge.

I had Harry trained to go into his little hideaway when I tapped twice. When I heard the cell door being opened, I would tap on the floor or wall next to him and he’d be off scurrying in to his hole. It took a little while; I’d first set out by tapping and then pushing him in the direction of the hole. The pushing made him fear for his safety so he would be off and, eventually, to avoid being pushed, he would be off as soon as he heard those two taps.

I even trained cockroaches to follow a pre-defined path I’d marked out. The secret is to know how a cockroach thinks. He thinks in terms of safety; he knows that if he’s on a light-coloured surface that he’s going to be found, so he stays on the dark-coloured surface, whenever he can. So if you mark out a dark-coloured road for him on a shiny surface then he sticks to the dark road. I’d create a dark road by dragging the heal of my boot over the ground, causing a black, dull trail. At mealtimes, I’d put morsels of food down at the end of the black trail and watch them follow the leader to the food. I guess that’s enough spider and cockroach training – just because it helped keep me sane, I don’t expect you to do it.

Wakefield Prison holds 700 lifers, and it is heaving full to the rafters with sex cases and killers of kids. So, in a sense, it is good I am in a cage and no part of that place. You know when you were a child and, maybe, you believed that monsters existed and lurked about waiting to jump out of the dark and get you, well … monsters do exist. As they live in Monster Mansion.

The mansion houses the likes of Robert Black, Michael Stone (not the former UFF hitman from Ireland), Howard Hughes (you all remember that bastard with the little girl in Rhyl, he took her out of a tent and killed her), and Duffy the Railway Rapist killer. They are all up there, you can smell the beasts, it reeks of monsters.

Serial sex attackers, old lady rapists and child-killers, they are all there. All under one evil roof. Victor Miller. This piece of shit raped and killed a boy and sexually assaulted twenty-eight others. He has got a colour remote-control TV in his cell. Oh yes, only the best for the worst.

I get a piss pot, and they get spoilt silly. Wakefield is always known as a Monsters’ Paradise. Hundreds of them. The prison is also giving out condoms to homosexuals. Can you make this shit up? It is for health and safety, to stop the spread of AIDS. When I took Phil Danielson hostage in Hull Prison, he had previously criticised my art as targeting gays. Well, if that is to be taken in context, then maybe Phil should have a word with Wakefield Prison bosses over this, as they are perpetuating the fact that gays are spreading AIDS. I’ve got nothing against gays, but when they try and force me to be part of their world then they had better watch out. Just as if a man forces himself on to a woman then he, too, should watch out.

So all these sex killers are humping each other and having a bloody party, while Bronson rots in a cage and is fed under the door as though I am the mad dog with rabies. Somebody tell me I am dreaming it.

Wakefield has had its fair share of murders – Bob Maudsley killed two cons in one day; Tony McUlloch killed a con; John Patton killed a second con. All in all, I would say there have been a good ten murders in the last 30 years there.

I remember when Colin Robinson steamed into a paedophile with a blade, that was in the 1970s. Fuck me, he cut him to bits. The guy lost five pints of blood before they got him sewn up. His face was like King’s Cross Station. Awesome! A screw saved him by holding his neck together.

Only recently, the monster who killed little Sarah Payne got stabbed up. That was nice. Let us hope he gets some more of that. Next it will be someone doing his eyes like the ripper had his done.

That was funny when fat Joe Purkuss took a monster hostage. He demanded a six-pack of beer and a box of crisps or he would cut his throat. True to his word, he cut the throat! Ha.

Another time, big Steve Lannigan, a Manchester lad serving life, took a work screw hostage. For that, he got sent to Broadmoor. That was twenty-five years ago. Steve is still inside.

There used to be some sensible screws in Wakefield. Nowadays, they are mostly hobbits. Over-paid and under-worked. But who knows, the odd good one might be lurking about waiting to give Bronco an easy time.

I personally feel the place is now a joke, and giving condoms to sex monsters is like giving me a shotgun. I am a robber; I use a shotgun as a weapon of my trade. They are sex cases. Work it out; what do they use to help them commit a crime?

It is fucking sick and a disgrace. And, you, the taxpayers are buying them condoms, and their TV sets and their nice gyms and nice cosy cells with carpets and curtains.

Who is fucking mad now? And you let me rot in a cage with sod all. But the bigger joke is, they are never to be freed, but I am. So shouldn’t I be getting the soft touch, a taste of the rehabilitation? Look, face facts, what good are they? Why not just exterminate the filth?

One sure fact is … I am no danger to your kids or your old grandmother. And I am not going to climb in your house and nick your TV set or mug your old mam. But it is me who they call a danger to society. I had reports that people were slagging me off on a website guest book, saying they wouldn’t want me as a neighbour. Well, I just hope they don’t have kids and end up with a sex monster living next-door to them ’cos they’ll wish they had me on the other side of them, but maybe when it’s too late!

Wakefield is a joke, with double standards. Stuff your condoms up your arses. I mean, this story may help you understand my anger. A screw from Wakefield Prison was jailed in April 2003 for twenty-eight days after he sent sexually explicit material to the husband of his former lover.

The screw, Terry Armstrong, from Monk Bertton near Barnsley, admitted breaching a court order restraining him from contacting the woman or her family. Armstrong scrawled graffiti on walls and a motorway bridge at Higham, near Barnsley after the five-year affair ended, but just over a month after that court appearance, Armstrong sent a sex-aid catalogue to the woman’s husband. Wonder if it had any blowup dolls in it?

I will give HM Prison Wakefield 0/10.

PS. It wasn’t like that when Principal Officer O’Hagan was up there. He would have told the Governor what to do with his condoms. Nowadays, screws will lick arse to get up the ladder of success.

 
LOCATION: Walton, Liverpool.
CAPACITY: 1,600 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Local and Remand – Male.
OPENED: 1855.
HISTORY: Replaced an even older prison in Liverpool. During World War II, Hitler saw fit to bomb the prison; pity he didn’t destroy it all. The aerial shot shows the extensive buildings within the grounds.

It was back in 1974 I first landed here. Well, I tell a lie. I actually first went there in 1970, but that was to visit a friend. This is another prison that has had its name bastardised by the cons. Officially the place is called ‘HM Prison Liverpool’, but us cons have worked for many years at giving it its real name of ‘Walton’.

When I hit there in 1974, the Christmas Number One single was Mudd’s ‘Lonely This Christmas’ … and by God was it!

This is another big old Victorian prison; in fact, it shares the last execution with Strangeways. They hanged two on the same day simultaneously at Strangeways and at Walton, and after that, hanging was abolished. The Moors Monsters, Brady and Hindley, just missed out! Although I think Hindley went the best way possible, nice and slow and done to a crisp … anyone for toast?

The prison was infested with rats and cockroaches. It’s also one of the old jails that has got five landings, so it is quite tall. I should know better than most how tall it is, as in the summer of 1985, I spent a glorious week up on their roof.

It’s a tough old place with old-time rules and a strict regime. But the Scousers are a good-humoured bunch so they just laugh if off. They’re just old characters in Walton.

Some of the old screws are a funny lot, witty and jokers. I recall one old screw used to keep a bag of hard-boiled sweets under his hat. He often used to give the cons one.

Another one, they used to call ‘Mr G’ – I don’t know why – but he had been there forty years and in all that time he had never once kicked any con. He used to tell all the old stories of days gone by. I used to tell him, ‘Write a fucking book, it would be a number-one bestseller.’

But, sadly, in all jails there are the Gestapo rats with the sliced peak hats and studded boots and Walton was no exception. And that is why I tore their lovely roof off.

The bashing they gave me! My tearaway exploits cost prison HQ a quarter of a million pounds. It cost me more time but it was worth it just to look back on such a victory.

The food in Walton is shit; total and utter shit. Even the drinking water tastes like river filth. The cells are spacious, the good old type of cells. Long and roomy. I believe now they have got toilets and sinks in, but not in my time they didn’t. It was all piss pots and slopping out. And jugs and bowls of water. One bath a week.

I remember one morning, I slung a pot of shit all over two screws. Why? Well why not? I just felt like it. They were two dogs anyway. Always making trouble for us cons. So I shut them up. All the cons cheered. I got a bloody good doing over for that. Yeah, good old days.

Liverpool Prison still speaks of when the cat went missing. It was a big chubby brown cat that all the cons loved to watch through their cell bars when it pounced on rats. The cat was the best rat-catcher in any prison. Cons idolised that cat and some would even give it their rations of milk. Then, mysteriously, the cat disappeared and nobody saw it for ages.

Word went around that a big fat rat had killed it. Rumours had it that a screw’s dog killed it or even old age had crept upon it. But nobody knew the real truth until the boxer Paul Sykes walked out of his cell with a Davey Crocket hat on! I don’t know if he’d killed and skinned it, but he had it on his head. This story is still being told now.

There was an old picture house in one of the old workshops where they used to show films. It even had an upstairs balcony. We got a film once a week in those days. There was no TV then. It was a movie projector on a big screen. I saw the film The Magnificent Seven there, it was brilliant.

During weekdays, we would wear overalls and T-shirts. At weekends we wore what were called ‘Greys’ – jacket, grey itchy trousers and a cotton striped shirt. You had to wear them, otherwise you were nicked!

There was no gym either. I hear Walton has all changed now. Not before time. But to me, it will always be a shit life. But I will say this much, I really have no bitterness. I actually had some laughs in that place. And let’s be truthful, I did have the last laugh when I ripped the place apart.

I will give HM Prison Walton 5/10. Not bad, eh?

 
LOCATION: Wandsworth, London.
CAPACITY: 1,400 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Local – Male.
OPENED: 1851.
HISTORY: Originally the County Jail, look at the aerial shot and study the typical radial design; see the wings looking like the arms of a giant windmill. You can also see some separate buildings that were once used to house females; they now house what are called VPs – Vulnerable Prisoners – who are at risk of violence from other prisoners.

When Wandsworth Prison opened in 1851, it was called ‘The Surrey House of Correction’. It was another one built on the panopticon design, which allowed for 700 prisoners to have a cell of their own and a toilet of their own, yet all that vanished and it reverted to slopping out piss pots.

The slopping out started in 1870 when the toilets were removed from the cells to make room for extra prisoners. Slopping out came in and stayed until 1996. All for the sake of cramming in more prisoners!

The execution duties were transferred to Wandsworth Prison when Horsemonger Lane Gaol closed in 1878. And again, like all hanging prisons, an execution shed was built in one of the yards and it housed the hanging tackle. From 1878 to 1961, 135 prisoners were to be put to death by hanging. 134 men and one woman.

The hanging shed was dubbed ‘The Cold Meat Shed’, which remained until 1916, when, like all hanging prisons, the facilities were moved indoors into the cell area where a new facility was constructed within the prison.

Would you believe that this evil lot of bastards kept the gallows there until 1992 just because the death penalty was still a theoretical possibility for the crimes of treason, piracy with violence, mutiny in the armed forces and arson in a naval shipyard. They even tested the gallows every six months, probably with ‘Old Bill’ right up until 1992. Finally, the gallows were dismantled and transferred to the Prison Service Museum at Rugby. They just can’t lay off it, can they? And the old execution chamber … it’s used by cons as a TV room!

William Marwood carried out the first execution at Wandsworth on 8 October 1878 when he hanged Thomas Smithers, 31, for the murder of his wife.

The first woman, and only woman, to be hanged at Wandsworth Prison was Kate Webster in 1879 for the brutal murder of her mistress.

The introduction of the Treachery Act of 1945 stated that: ‘If, with intent to help the enemy, any person does, or attempts or conspires with any other person to do any act which is designed or likely to give assistance to the naval, military or air operations of the enemy, to impede such operations of His Majesty’s forces, or to endanger life, shall be guilty of felony and shall on conviction suffer death.’

This Act was responsible for the hangings of nine men at Wandsworth. But one of the more bizarre Acts brought into play was the Treason Act of 1351, which was responsible for John Amery facing treason charges. He was hanged on Wednesday, 19 December 1945.

One of the more infamous characters of the Second World War was the man dubbed ‘Lord Haw Haw’. The owner of the voice that became so familiar was William Joyce (1906–1946), a Native American, brought up in Galway, Eire, who had taken up German citizenship during the Second World War before leaving England with a fraudulently obtained passport.

Joyce was born of an Irish father and an English mother in the United States in 1906. He went to Ireland with his parents in 1909, was educated at Catholic schools, and was brought up in a household that was fervently loyal to the British Crown.

For his pro-British stance, his father suffered having much of his property burned in the Irish rebellion of 1916. Maybe this is what gave William the impetus to go against these ideologies.

As the situation in Ireland worsened, young William sought revenge by becoming a youthful informer for the paramilitary auxiliaries, the hated ‘Black and Tans’.

By 1921, Michael Joyce took his family to England. William, although not yet 16, joined the regular Army; he gave his age as 18, explaining that he had never been issued with a birth certificate. His army career, however, was short-lived; his real age was discovered when he was admitted to hospital with rheumatic fever and he was discharged after serving only four months. Joyce, being a fighter, made his way back and, in 1923, he entered London University, where he joined the

Officer Training Corps. A year later, he became involved in the embryonic British Fascist movement. In October 1924, during a scuffle with what he later called ‘Jewish Communists’ at the Lambeth Baths Hall in south-east London, someone tried to cut his throat with a razor. The woollen scarf around Joyce’s neck saved his life, but he was slashed across the right cheek from the corner of his mouth to behind his ear, leaving a scar that marred his once handsome features and gave him a rather sinister appearance that enhanced his tough reputation on the political platform.

By the early 1930s, Joyce was heavily involved with the British Union of Fascists, led by Sir Oswald Mosley. But the Fascist cause made little headway in Great Britain and, in 1939, as the clouds of war gathered, Joyce and his second wife, Margaret, emigrated to Germany.

Out of admiration for Hitler, Joyce founded the British National Socialist Party. He fled to Germany before the start of the war in August 1939 and was eventually employed by the Nazi regime in their propaganda war on Britain. The Joyces arrived in Berlin, with British passports, on 27 August 1939. Four days later, Germany invaded Poland. It was then that Joyce received a shock. A friend told him that if war broke out between Great Britain and Germany, he and his wife would be separated and interned!

Joyce tried to leave Germany but a bizarre set of circumstances meant he couldn’t use German currency to buy tickets for travelling outside Germany – the Joyces stayed in Germany and eventually William and Margaret Joyce worked for the German Radio Corporation.

Lord Haw-Haw was the name given to Joyce by the Daily Express newspaper when referring to a journalist that had written: ‘A gent I’d like to meet is moaning periodically from Zeesen [one of the main German transmitters]. He speaks English of the haw-haw, dammit-get-out-of-my-way variety, and his strong suit is gentlemanly indignation.’

And so Lord Haw-Haw he became to the millions of Britons who, anxious for news of the war, tuned in to German radio broadcasts. The voice of Haw-Haw became the most hated voice to come out of Germany, but his was also one of the most fascinating. The legacy of a broken nose, as the result of a childhood fight in Eire, gave him a unique twang. He would pronounce the word Germany with a peculiar intonation so that it sounded more like ‘Jairmany’ – this became the identifying trademark of his upper-class drawl.

The British authorities became worried about Joyce’s contribution to the German propaganda effort. He was clever; often enquiring about the welfare of British personalities. Lord Haw-Haw made his last broadcast to Britain on 30 April 1945, the day Hitler is alleged to have committed suicide. ‘Britain’s victories are barren. They leave her poor and they leave her people hungry. They leave her bereft of the markets and the wealth that she possessed six years ago. But, above all, they leave her with an immensely greater problem than she had then. We are nearing the end of one phase in Europe’s history, but the next will be no happier. It will be grimmer, harder and perhaps bloodier. And now I ask you earnestly, can Britain survive? I am profoundly convinced that without German help she cannot.’

Tentative plans had been laid to smuggle the Joyces out of Germany by Josef Goebbels, the German Propaganda Minister, but Goebbels died in Berlin and the plans came to nothing. They tried to escape to Sweden via Denmark, but Allied forces had landed ahead of them and they were forced to turn back. The end of the war found them in the village of Kupfermuhle, near the Danish border. Their apartment was visited several times by British soldiers, who took them for an ordinary German couple and showed no interest in them.

Joyce was out walking one morning, soon after Germany’s capitulation, in the woods. He stumbled upon two British officers who were gathering wood for a fire. He spoke to them in French and walked on. Their suspicions aroused, the officers followed him. One of them, Lieutenant Perry, an interpreter, called out, ‘You wouldn’t happen to be William Joyce, would you?’ Reaching into an inside pocket for his German passport, Joyce looked to be reaching for a weapon. Perry fired his revolver. The bullet passed through both of Joyce’s thighs and he fell to the ground.

He was taken to Luneburg, where he spent time in hospital recovering from his wounds, and then to Brussels, where he was detained while the British Parliament hurriedly passed the The Treason Act 1945, which made treachery a capital offence. This was obviously done in readiness for Joyce’s trial.

On 16 June, he was flown to London and taken to Brixton Prison. His trial began at the Old Bailey on 17 September 1945. It was a complex business; much hinged on Joyce’s possession of a British passport, which as you will recall was obtained by fraudulent means, and his allegiance to the Crown.

His defence argued that, as an American citizen, he owed no allegiance to the Crown and therefore was not guilty of treason. The prosecution’s argument was that, as a British passport-holder, he did owe this allegiance. The outcome was never seriously in doubt, and no one showed much surprise when the jury, after only twenty-three minutes, found him guilty of high treason.

His appeal was dismissed on 1 November 1945 and Albert Pierrepoint hanged him at Wandsworth Prison on Thursday, 3 January 1946. The following day, the last execution for treason in the UK took place at Pentonville Prison, that of Theodore Schurch.

To the end, Joyce remained unrepentant. After the execution, Margaret Joyce was interned in Germany while her status was debated. She died in London in 1972, having regained her British nationality.

Even though there was solid evidence against Margaret (Lady Haw-Haw) to convict her of High Treason by virtue of the fact that she had acted as assistant treasurer to her husband’s National Socialist League, in reality, she, too, was a German citizen. Although born in Manchester, England, she relinquished her British citizenship when moving to Germany.

Joyce’s daughter, Mrs Heather Iandolo, a schoolteacher from Gillingham, England, fought successfully to have her father’s body exhumed from the cemetery at Wandsworth Prison and buried in Eire.

The conclusion to this story could be that argued that because Joyce was not a legitimate British subject, he could therefore not have been tried for treason. If the trial were to have taken place today, maybe the outcome would have been ‘not guilty’.

There have been many killers dubbed ‘The Acid Bath Murderer’, but the original was John George Haigh, 39. Haigh shot three men and three women to death between 1944 and 1949, all for financial gain, disposing of the bodies by dissolving them in sulphuric acid which quite quickly reduced them to a liquid sludge that he could pour down the drain.

Another famous name was hanged at Wandsworth Prison by Albert Pierrepoint – Derek Bentley, who was hanged on Wednesday, 28 January 1953 for his part in the well documented armed robbery which resulted in the shooting dead of PC Sidney Miles.

Eventually, Derek Bentley was finally granted a well-deserved posthumous pardon in 1998.

The only other teenager to be hanged at Wandsworth was Francis ‘Flossy’ Forsyth who was dispatched through the gallows trapdoor by Harry Allen on 10 November 1960. You hear about gangs of youths running around assaulting people today; well, it happened just as often back in the 1960s. This is how Forsyth came to be hanged, having been part of a gang that attacked and kicked a twenty-three-year-old man to death in a motiveless and vicious attack. One of the other gang members, Norman James Harris, was also convicted of capital murder and, while hangman Robert Stewart hanged Harris at Pentonville, simultaneously, Forsyth was being executed at Wandsworth.

The last man to be hanged at Wandsworth on 8 September 1961 was Hendrick Neimasz, 49, who had been convicted at Lewes Assizes of a double murder.

This is only one of only a few prisons in the English penal system that uses a PO Box address, and are you aware that cons are not supposed to write to PO Box addresses … not allowed. Yet if you write to a fellow con, which you are allowed, and you write to Wandsworth, then you are breaching prison rules! What a backward system.

I first hit Wandsworth back in 1975. And make no bones about it, it was the toughest jail in Britain. Hard and ruthless, just like the screws. All these hanging prisons seemed to have the same case-hardened screws working in them. The day after I arrived there, I attacked three screws, so my start there was a bad one. A week later, I dived on the Governor and tried to rip his throat out. I just never liked him.

The prison was the last one to remove its gallows, and it was fortunate for one of the prison officers that it was removed and the death penalty for murder abolished. It would have been handy for a prison officer from Crystal Palace who was found guilty of killing a homosexual man by kicking his head in and then, just to make sure he was dead, he put a plastic bag over the victim’s head.

The screw, Francis Kavanagh, had been out for the night with other warders from Wandsworth Prison on the night of the killing, four days before Christmas of 2001. Kavanagh was found guilty of murder when the court heard how he flew into a rage after heavily-built homosexual Michael Smith tried to ‘touch him up’ in a bar near Wandsworth Prison.

But, sometimes, I wonder if he didn’t bring it on himself … Kavanagh had planned to go to a ‘school disco’ themed night in the West End dressed as a schoolboy! But he violently kicked his fifty-eight-year-old victim with heavy work boots after having an encounter with him.

Kavanagh left the County Arms pub to go to a nearby friend’s house to change into shorts for the disco. This is when the victim was seen leaving the pub at 8.30pm to go to his nearby home, and this is when two of Kavanagh’s work pals then saw the defendant run towards the block of flats, shortly after that the touchy-feely encounter took place between Kavanagh and Keith Smith. Half-an-hour later, Kavanagh turned up at the pub and continued drinking like a fish.

Wandsworth hanged more murderers than any other jail in Britain. Some should never have swung. The likes of Derek Bentley – that was a disgrace. A public shame. They murdered that boy for nothing. And Craig, the lad who shot the copper dead, he served just ten years and was freed. It shows what a fucking bunch of slags the whole system is. It is so corrupt, it is insane.

The big house, this cesspit of a place, once housed up to 2,000 cons under one roof – awesome … amazing … fucking electrifying.

It was 1990, I almost tore that roof off but I got stuck in the wire. What a disaster! What started it off was my Uncle Jack Cronin’s funeral in Luton. And the pigs stopped me from going to it. So I made a vow to myself, ‘You’ll pay for that insult.’ I made the climb up … and got trapped. Such is life. Back in the box. Back to darkness.

Wandsworth is the jail Ronnie Biggs escaped from all those years ago. And what an escape it was, they never did forgive him for that, even now in his old age and close to death, they punish him for it, and show him no respect or compassion as he lies in desperate hope. There’s a fight on by Ronnie’s son, Michael, to get him released early. I mean, you don’t need him banged up the way he is. He’s s sick man, but the Home Office holds him as a trophy. This is how heartless they are, a wicked bunch of bastards!

In the last three decades, I have been back there about twenty times. Each stay is short, and I am kept in solitary. I have not actually been back since 1994, as for a time it stopped accepting Cat ‘A’s. But I believe they do now, so no doubt, in time, I will pass through again; I can’t wait. Wandsworth is what it is – a prison. All the screws are what they are – screws. And everybody knows where they are. There is no shit, no falseness; it is a man’s jail.

But the seg block has always been hard. More punishments have been dished out there than in any block in the county. The worst I had was back in 1977, and believe me, that was some set to between us. My body was black and blue from head to toe.

I lost over two years’ remission in that place in the 1970s. That’s the equivalent of a five-year sentence with a bit of parole.

That place cost me a lot of years; it also pushed me over the edge. I even attacked a doctor. Take my advice, never do this; it is like attacking a god. You will suffer afterwards, believe me. And in the seventies, it meant injections.

You can’t beat tranquillisers, they can knock an elephant out, they can put a tiger on its knees, so we have no chance.

Violence in this place was a regular issue. Plenty of it. I punched my way through that place. I got so bad, I enjoyed it. And I can hit so hard with a table leg, I swear I thought I killed him. It was the way he fell. His eyes. The way his body landed. I must admit, I panicked, as it was bang on top.

I also had a pop at escaping, but I have been so unlucky at that. I am just not meant to go over the wall; if I had, I would have gone a long time ago.

I met some great guys in this place, ‘proper’ cons, such as Frank Fraser. I first met Frank in 1975; what a legend. A top man in my book. I also met George Wilkinson there. Who? Yeah, you may well ask. George (RIP) was a giant of man, a Geordie from up north. I rate this man as the most dangerous man ever to walk the prison yard. Forget your Frank Mitchell look-a-likes.

The screws feared George so much that they used to panic and steam into him first. There were always ten on him and with sticks. George took the screws hostage; he also used a lot of violence.

It was 1979 when they drove him out of Strangeways on a journey to Walton. He was, mysteriously, dead on arrival. One of prison’s mystery deaths. Read a book called Frightened for My Life by Geoff Cugan, it will explain about George’s death.

I admired George, as he was fearless, a big man, over 6ft and 19st, a natural strong man. I once met his mother, a small, brave lady. George idolised her and she loved him, too. A bloody sad end.

It was in this jail I cut John Fielding right down his ugly boat. Dirty fucking rat! It was this piece of shit who grassed my escape up to the screws. You won’t miss him if you face him. He’s got a Mars Bar (scar) from his right eye all the way to his neck. I am just sorry I never ripped his eyes out. I could have gone over the wall if it hadn’t been for him. Slag!

Wandsworth is an institution. It’s the flagship of all prisons. It will never change its image, too much has gone on there over the last 100 years for it to ever be forgotten. Executions of innocent men, escapes, murders, violence, corruption, brutality, hunger-strikes.

I remember back in 1977, three cons raped one con, a gang-bang in a cell. The poor chap had to have stitches in his arse; he later had a breakdown and tried to end it all. That is Wandsworth in a nutshell – brutal.

It was there I dived on a guard dog just for the fun of it … that dog bottled it. So did the dog-handler.

It was also there I nicked a big urn of porridge and barricaded up with it … so the cons couldn’t have any. Great days. Funny. Crazy memories. Legendary!

But through all the hell, there were also decent screws like Mr Wells, a PO down on E Wing seg unit. He was a gentleman, a very fair man, a rare breed in that place. I would say to anybody, when you meet a decent screw, ‘Respect,’ because it is in your favour. One day, he may stop you falling into the bottomless hole of emptiness, or from being pushed in.

I will give HM Prison Wandsworth 5/10, just for the sake of Mr Wells. Not bad for such a hell-hole.

 
LOCATION: Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.
CAPACITY: 110 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Closed YOI (Young Offenders Institution) – Male.
OPENED: 1895.
HISTORY: Werrington House originally started out as an Industrial School and then, in 1955, it became part of the big system when the Prison Commissioners took it over. In 1957, it became a DT (Detention Centre) and then, in 1985, it became a Youth Custody Centre and changed to a YOI in 1988.

I landed at Werrington back in 1970 with my best pal John Bristow. It’s a detention centre that I was in thirty-four years ago … it sort of makes me look an old git. All our yesterdays …

Anyway, John and I were sent there for three months. This gaff was run like a military jail. Hard … spit and polish … but it was fair.

We all knew where we stood. Step out of line and it was a war zone. The routine was a strict regime with plenty of discipline, plenty of gym, plenty of hard work and plenty of hard whacks. And the food was brilliant. And lots of it. We were all in bed by 8.00pm! And up at 6.00am to the shout of, ‘Hands off cocks, on with socks.’

Those were the places you went in as boys and come out as men. You walked in and marched out.

I have got some good memories of Werrington House. But as hard as it was, it did nothing to deter me from a life of crime. It just made me a stronger man. More determined. It was called a ‘short, sharp shock’, but it just didn’t work. The only thing it shocked was your senses; it exploded any grasp of what good order and discipline was all about. It showed that you got what you wanted by violent means.

There was a screw in Werrington House called Mr King; he was a right bastard. A big man, a hard man. I believe he was ex-Forces. For three months, he really put me through it.

But on my day of freedom, he stuck his hand out and said, ‘Good luck.’ He meant it, too! I shook his hand and said, ‘You old bastard.’

I now look back on those three months, and screws like Mr King, and feel a bit proud of that time. But believe me now, it can never work. How can it work? But I had some lovely memories. Hell, I had one of my best ever fights there. It was in the boot room, a proper fist fight – toe to toe! This fight went on for half-an-hour. It was with a Taffy. Could he hit! If that Malcolm Price from Wales was bit younger, then I’d swear it was him, but he didn’t go to prison until he was in his twenties, so it must have been someone else.

We were young, and full of it. At that age, we were invincible, or so we thought. It is only with time that those sorts of fights take their toll. Ask Ali how he felt over his classic three fights with Joe Frazier.

Werrington House for me played a big part in my strict self-discipline that has pushed me through such bad times in my life. I really do believe that.

I will give HMYOI and Juvenile Detention Centre Werrington House 8/10. That isn’t bad, is it, for a short, sharp shock that was supposed to cure me? It fucking turned me into a raving lunatic!

 
LOCATION: March, Cambridgeshire.
CAPACITY: 600 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: High-Security – Male.
OPENED: 1991.
HISTORY: This prison occupies a massive site of 90 acres and is state-of-the-art max-secure. All the top geezers have been here, the majority being mandatory lifers with tariffs of over twenty-five years and even up to thirty years. In 1994, a mass breakout resulted in a prison officer being shot.

This is another of the maximum-secure jails and, believe me, one of the maddest places ever. It is so mad, it is unreal.

I first went in there in the 1990s. But it was the first of many times I had landed, each time only to be dragged into the madness.

Whitemoor takes a lot of the Cat ‘A’ and the high-risk prisoners. I suppose it became infamous over its IRA breakout when five members of the IRA and one Londoner had it over the wall, only to be caught in the area.

Strangely enough, one of the IRA men, Liam McOtter, I smashed over the head some years earlier in Brixton Prison, but it turned out he was a diamond.

Whitemoor must have had more riots than Alcatraz. After the Parkhurst escape in the early 1990s when three cons had it away, but couldn’t get off the island, Parkhurst closed down on taking any more Category ‘A’ and it became a Category ‘B’ jail.

So all of us Category ‘A’ cons were shipped to Whitemoor and, believe me, it was Bedlam.

Whitemoor had to handle a lot of frustrated men, as they were happy being at Parkhurst. Now they had to start afresh there … so it often blew up. Jails often have new ideas. Silly rules. And men are not machines.

We all have a routine, and when routines are smashed – trouble starts. Riots were on the cards. I would say the assaults on screws had to be the highest total of any jail.

Big Ferdi Lieveld was sent to trial over throwing a bucket of cooking oil all down a screw. The screw lost his ears and his face peeled off. Ferdi got a ‘not guilty’. The screw was ex-Parkhurst.

Another time, Parnell stabbed three screws; he, too, got a ‘not guilty’. Then Charlie McGee stabbed a couple of screws; it was like a war zone. Screws were getting cut up regularly. There were that many shit-ups that the place looked like a sewer. Ronnie Easterbrook was on a dirty protest for two solid years! Phew, where’s the air freshener? Then Frank Quinn almost escaped again like he’d done up in Frankland.

I went on a hunger-strike over my art materials being taken away from me. I lasted for forty days, and almost lost 4st. That was long before this David Blaine guy went on TV to do his forty-four-day stint in a box over the Thames. Fuck me, that would have been a pleasure for me, just to see the sights, it would be worth going on hunger-strike again. And while I was doing it, I was in a set to with screws. Throw that into the pot, Blaine, and let a real man show you how to do it. I bet Blaine couldn’t do a Bobby Sands.

All I lived on was water, tea and sugar for forty days. The same as Jesus did out in the wilderness. But I bet he had the odd rabbit. I had sweet FA while on the hunger protest; I was rushed twice by the MUFTI (riot squad) and smashed up.

On one of these incidents, when I was thirty days into the hunger-strike, I could barely stand up, I was so weak, and the cowardly scum had a go at me!

That sums those dogs up. It was stated later that I had attacked them! In the weak state I was in, I couldn’t attack a bag of crisps properly.

While I was attacked, they left me in the box. My pal, Tony Crabb, climbed up a wall to protest about my treatment, and he, too, was punished for that!

It was a sad day when Dessy Cunningham hanged himself. That upset a lot of people. It was a great day when (Catweasel) Bailey got killed in his cell by two cons. He was a member of the paedophile gang who raped and killed Jason Swift, a young boy from London, along with his cronies, Sidney Cook and Smith.

The two cons who killed Catweasel strangled the fucker. They both, sadly, got life for it. They should have got a medal.

The food at HMP Shitemoor – er, sorry, HMP Whitemoor – is not bad. But it’s filth in the seg block; they serve it up cold and it is a fact the screws take the best for themselves; they steal all the cakes and biscuits. You don’t have to go on a hunger-strike here, you are starved anyway with the portions they give you.

Yeah, it has all happened in this place, I could write a book on it all. Female screws having sex with the cons! Screws bringing in drugs. Screws using steroids. You don’t believe it? Check it out! Go to your library, dig out the stats! Why else are they sacked?

In March 2002, a screw, Andrew Hubbard, 39, from HM Prison Lewes in East Sussex, was jailed for seven years for operating a mini drugs supermarket behind bars. Doesn’t that tell you enough? Complaints at Lewes Prison in 2001 led to eight warders being suspended, although they were brought back when assault allegations collapsed.

There are also screws bringing in porn. Some of these screws are sicker than the cons. They have a licence to do it. They hide behind the walls of shame. In all walks of life, there are those who weaken. And screws are no different. If you wipe a bundle of notes in their face … two out of ten will snap it up.

Why do you think they are any different? Next, you would be saying there are no bent cops, or psychotic soldiers, or alcoholic royalty, or no perverts in religion. Prison is no different to any other way of life. It has got all the pressures and problems of any other walk of life, and there are more bullies than in any other form of life I know of. The Army has its fair share of bullies. Well, remember, a lot of screws are ex-Army, and many have been chucked out of the Army. I rest my case. That is why we know Whitemoor as ‘Shitemoor.’

My forty-day hunger strike nearly killed me, so I will give HM Prison Whitemoor 0/10. Sorry, but it is a fair judgement.

 
LOCATION: Romsey Road, Winchester.
CAPACITY: 425 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Local – Male and Female Annexe.
OPENED: 1846.
HISTORY: Originally the County Jail. In 1964, a YO Remand Centre was built and, in 1992, it was changed for use by Category ‘C’ prisoners. In 1994, the Remand Centre became a unit for sentenced female prisoners.

I have landed at this prison a good eight to ten times from the 1970s to the 1980s. Only ever been here for short spells, a month at the most, and always in their seg block below A Wing.

To be fair, I only ever got one kicking here, but I have no complaint over that, as I gave as good as I got.

Basically, it is a good old jail; I had very few problems there. Once, I attempted to do a roof protest, but it was quickly stopped.

Another time, I attempted to grab a screw hostage and he broke free. So I barricaded up in the office, where I read my file. You should see the bloody damn lies they’ve written about me. After I read it, I even thought I was a nasty bastard. I actually thought, ‘Is this really me? Or have they got me mixed up with Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs.’ On paper, I was a monster; in reality, I am just a cuddly bear.

Another time, they rushed me and injected me; I never did find out why. They must have just thought I was about to explode.

In those days, in the 1970s, it was legal to inject us violent cons. I was injected that many times that my arse was starting to resemble a pin cushion.

But I have some lovely memories of Winchester and I met some decent old screws in that place. I also loved their cells. They always put me in the same cell, Number 3. It was just opposite the steps that lead up to the wing. My cell was a big one, with a high window, which only opened half-an-inch; it used to have dozens of pigeons roosting on my sill. Rats with wings, I call them.

That cell was my gym! My bed frame was my weights. My mattress was my punch bag. My table was for my dips. I’d get library books for my press-ups. Fuck me, did I train in that Number 3 cell. Sweat – buckets of it. Afterwards, I would just bang on my door ’til they let me out for a shower.

Every time I landed there, they gave me a brand-new piss pot, mug and jug. Most nights, about 10.00pm, I would sit on my potty in the back and have a lovely private crap. Just like a little boy on his pot. In the morning, I would march to the recess and shout out, ‘Turds away,’ and slop out down the sluice. Crazy days, but I enjoyed it all.

I would have a strip wash two or three times a day, plus a shower. I would brush my teeth ten times a day. Clean my boots. Anything to kill the boredom. Read, write, exercise. My life was for ever on the move to just another seg block. I saw nobody. Few ever saw me. But I enjoyed it.

Winchester, in a way, was a part of my making. It made me what I am today with its old regime and harsh ways but, truly, it beat all the soppy jails of today. Winchester was a proper man’s jail. It smelt of man.

It smelt of brotherhood. The noise was prison. Everything about it was jail. Not like the namby-pamby new jails of today. Give me a piss pot and a jug of water any day, with my overalls, T-shirt and boots. Fuck all this Mothercare shit of today. Yeah, Winchester brings back some sweet memories, three decades of them. Oh yeah, the good old days. Hard, but sweet.

I will give HM Prison Winchester 8/10, just for old time’s sake.

 
LOCATION: Winson Green Road, Birmingham.
CAPACITY: 1,200 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Local and Training – Male.
OPENED: 1848.
HISTORY: As with most of these Victorian prisons, it is located not too far away from the city centre (3 miles). During the course of this prison’s operation, it has maintained a steady role in serving the locality and receiving prisoners from two Crown Courts and, occasionally, from other prisons.

Here’s another jail that us cons have bastardised the name of. Officially, it is called ‘HM Prison Birmingham’, but we call it the ‘Green’, thus Winson Green. One of the all-time hard jails. A tough city centre jail, full up with all sorts of felons from shoplifting to mass killers.

Talking of mass killers, I was two cells away from one of the murdering duo of Fred and Rose West. As many of you all know, Fred topped himself before he could be tried for the Cromwell Street murders.

It was really fate that he topped himself, because in time someone would have done it for him. Fucking beast. I don’t want to rattle on too much about it as I’ve already covered him in other books, but suffice to say I never gave him a minute of peace.

I never actually hit the Green until the mid-1980s; since then, I have passed through the prison half-a-dozen times. Each time, I have had some fun. One time, I grabbed a doctor hostage; now that was funny. Well, not for him.

I was then assaulted by some sixty screws who were all caught on prison CCTV; this footage was included in my video documentary Sincerely Yours, but the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, threw a wobbler and had it pulled by order of the High Court. Thus any evidence of these nice prison officers assaulting me with two-handed punches and kicks to my body are well hidden away from the Human Rights lobbyists. Just keep on fighting for the likes of Sutcliffe and Brady … what do I care?

But my best time there was when I nicked the murderer and hostage-taker Michael Sam’s leg. Now that was funny.

The Green is a place of evil, make no mistake about it. And like all big jails, there are bad screws mixed with the decent screws. And I met them all there.

The best screw I ever met there was SO (Senior Officer) Woodhouse, an old chap in his late fifties, a big old bruiser. He had hands like shovels. He was just what he was. No shit with him. You got what you were entitled to and he made sure you got it. If you had an hour’s visit due, you would get it. If you were due to get a boiled egg, you got it. If a tray of spuds were not cooked, he would send it back to the kitchen. By now he must be seventy years old and retired, but I respect screws like him – hard but fair.

When I first arrived there, they wanted me to wear some nonsense clothes. I ripped the lot up. So we did a deal; if I boxed it clever and got my head down, then they would not antagonise me. So we all made it work.

Sure, I had my ups and downs – who doesn’t? – but if you were prepared to work on it, there was a solution. The Green, though, has been a bastard to many cons –Johnny Bowden got bashed to a pulp there; Barry Prosser was killed there. Loads got a good kicking there; it was part and parcel of the Green.

Look what they did to the Birmingham Six. Those six Irishmen were battered senseless by screws; even the cons were told to bash them up. But it turned out they were six innocent men! So how do you feel now, bashing them up? Fuck me, that was thirty years ago. Seems like last year to me. I knew them all. Two of the Birmingham Six, Paddy Hill and Johnny Walker, were good pals of mine. Proper nice chaps. It was insane even to think they could plant bombs and kill twenty-one people and injure scores more. It was fucking madness out of control. But the Green tortured them lads, beat them senseless.

There had been acts of evil behind those walls, and you don’t know it ’til you have smelt it. But I have this strange belief you have to fight evil with evil to overcome it. You can bend it. Turn it around. I do … and I enjoy it.

The Green, to me, was a process, a part of the journey. Fuck me, it is not nice to hear it, or see it. Like cons jumping off the top landing and dying, and they do that in the Green. There were a lot of sad endings there.

My pal’s brother died there. My pal, Pat McCarthy, loved his brother, but he died in that Green. So did many decent lads. Some through depression and some mysteriously, to say the least.

But that’s Winson Green – a hard prison. We are not sent there for a holiday. At least, not back then. Now it is a holiday. TV in your cell is supposed to be a punishment! I think they force you to watch three episodes of EastEnders! Personally, I would sooner be flogged than watch three episodes of that dross.

I suppose, if I add my stays up there, I must have spent a good eight to ten months of my life under that roof. And I did get to peep through Fred West’s spy hole – or ‘Judas hole’, if we are to use the proper name. West looked like Benny out of the old Crossroads TV series.

And I did get to kick Sam’s leg. And I did grab the doctor, if only for a few seconds. OK, and I did use a paedophile as a punch bag in the recess. I caught the fucker by accident as I was slopping out. He should never have even seen all my laundry, let alone been in the recess.

He was in such shock, his mouth dropped open but nothing came out. I suppose a bit like the three kids that he attacked; what goes around comes around, I guess. But it’s a fucking liberty bruising your fists on scum like that. We should at least be supplied with prison-issue baseball bats. What are the European Human Rights for anyway?

I will give HM Prison Green 7/10. I just felt happy remembering that paedophile, I suppose.

 
LOCATION: Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire.
CAPACITY: 600 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Local, Remand and Category ‘A’ (SSU Unit) – Male.
OPENED: 1992.
HISTORY: Constantly in the news relating to the poor regime. The Close Supervision Centre was opened in 1998 at a cost of £3m along with special units at HM Prisons Hull, Wakefield and Durham to hold about fifty of Britain’s most potentially disruptive inmates, accused or convicted. With the upgrading of Wakefield’s cages at a cost of many millions, this has resulted in some prisons’ Secure Units closing down or becoming under-used.

What can I say about this place in the land of the concrete cows – Milton Keynes? This place has been both lucky and unlucky for me. I can go on and on about the bad times. The unit I was on is the most infamous of all the special units.

I spent three years there sleeping on a concrete slab, with no window to open and no fresh air. Even Lord Longford (bless his soul) raised a question in the House of Lords over my cell not having a window. What he meant to say was that my window didn’t open. His questions got nowhere and my ‘window’ remained firmly closed … summer and winter.

Woodhill Prison has been described as the British answer to Alcatraz Prison in the USA because of its austere conditions and strict code of discipline. Just like Alcatraz, it has a high-security jail within a jail, the SSU, and continues to house many violent and infamous prisoners, many of whom I’ve met or heard screaming.

The inmates kept in solitary confinement have their cells furnished with cardboard furniture and concrete beds, but if you’re clever, like the prisoner Michael Sams who was jailed in 1993 for murder and kidnap, you can make money from the way prison loses your belongings. Sams was going to sue the prison for losing his paintings, which he said were worth £4,000, and for being placed in segregation. He was offered £3,500 to settle both claims.

Incidentally, I think my hostage-taking rubbed off on old Sams, as the one-legged prisoner had a further eight years added to his four life sentences for taking a probation officer hostage at Woodhill.

When you think about how little a screw earns, then it’s no surprise to find most of them going on the sick; at times we were left neglected because of staff shortages due to them being off sick. If the screws don’t want to work there, then think of us cons … what is our life like then?

Some of the cells have CCTV cameras, and Ian Huntley, guilty of the Soham murders, had such a cell. The exercise yard is caged and topped with razor wire. When Category ‘A’ cons are housed in a prison, then you can guarantee that the court facilities in nearby towns and cities are upgraded to accommodate us in case we ever appear there. The courts in Milton Keynes now have bullet-proof glass installed … I wonder why?

There are three units at Woodhill, all barren areas devoid of any sensory stimulation. Things like plants, pictures, murals or music are conspicuous by their absence. The normal exercise yard is a tarmac-covered bare cage. If you want to sit down, then you have to use the ground. Even the birds avoid this sterile place.

The experimental unit in D Wing closed down when the overly restrictive regime failed. Anyone kicking off with ‘dirty protests’ were slung into the ‘pink room’, which had under-floor drainage. The place was like any Nazi concentration camp – evil.

Even the Chief Inspector of Prisons condemned the prolonged isolation of inmates as posing a risk to their mental health. These cells were only unlocked in the presence of six screws in full riot gear, called a ‘riot unlock’.

My time at Alcatraz – er, sorry … Woodhill – was spent there in what is called ‘basic’ level. A Wing has cells furnished with a sink and toilet, a concrete plinth for a mattress, a cardboard table and chair, and a fixed mirror made of plastic – that’s your lot. Mind you, they did allow you up to twelve photographs, and up to six library books a week. And, my, oh my, a dustpan and brush is issued on request.

For the normal cons, life begins in B Wing, which has sixteen cells on two landings, with a shower room and toilets on each level. The regime is supposed to allow about seventeen hours of what is called ‘constructive activity’, which for those lucky enough to mix with other cons includes time in an association room with a television, a table tennis table and cardboard and plastic tables and chairs.

Now if you are a real arse-licker then you can progress to the third unit, C Wing! This wing provides what is called an ‘intervention programme’ for a minimum of twenty hours a week. After that, if you survived being nice to the screws, you are supposed to be transferred to Monster Mansion (HMP Wakefield). Now can you see why I don’t comply? And then if you lick some more arses, you are considered tame enough to be returned to the ordinary prison system.

A High Court ruling was responsible for D Wing closing down. After the then Home Secretary Michael Howard was responsible for the Special Therapeutic wing in Parkhurst Prison closing down, it was then that the special unit in HMP Woodhill opened. They hoped to be able to use a pioneering therapeutic approach to dealing with the most potentially disruptive prisoners. How the fuck they could think this, I just don’t know.

The Special Therapeutic wing in Parkhurst was run by Dr Bob Johnson and, in the time he ran the place, violence had dropped by 90 per cent and the use of tranquillisers had dropped by the same. Then they go and close it and kick Dr Bob in the teeth!

So it was no surprise to find that in the first year of this unit at Woodhill opening, that there was a desperate need for the ‘pink room’ due to so many cons going on a dirty protest and refusing to co-operate. Since then, the regime at Woodhill has been the subject of repeated human rights challenges.

It was then decided that ‘control and containment’ should be the first priority of the Woodhill units, and it was even considered necessary to discuss whether guard dogs should be introduced.

Once, I managed to rush out of my cell and I smashed the unit up. The MUFTI squad, sixty riot screws, were called in to restrain me. Yes, sixty. I have had the riot screws come and get me off the yard after I was involved in a five-hour standoff in July 2000. I can go on and on about it all. But I am choosing to do the good thing because, you see, Woodhill helped me find my angels. Two beautiful angels came into my life from nowhere. It just came to me in January 2001, a brand-new year.

A mystery letter arrived from Saira Rehman. She wrote to me. Who was she? What was she? Who was little Sami? Then my brother John died, and it ripped me up. I was so low and depressed. Days later, Saira completed all the formalities and paperwork and eventually visited me. Then she brought her ten-year-old daughter, Sami, on a visit. Then, on 1 June 2001, on Saira’s birthday, we married. It all happened in a few months. Now Sami is our girl. She is special to me, and calls me ‘Dad’ too! It is a love and joy that I long forgot about, it is a truly beautiful feeling to possess.

Then my wife Saira … she just takes away all my pain and fills me with so much love. I am now full of love and faith. My wife has hair like black silk; her eyes are so deep I can swim inside them; her skin glows with love. Her smile lights up the sky and from her toes to her head is the body of an angel. Her movement is graceful. Her aroma is that of a flower. She is so gentle and loving. Her life, her journey has not been an easy ride. It has been full of pain and despair. But what we have is a true love that I have never experienced in my fifty-one years of being alive.

My whole life has changed for the better, I feel good inside, I even like myself better, my heart feels fresh, my dreams are alive. I have responsibilities, they both need me. Now I think more, I am more in control; I am a proper man, like any dad and husband out there.

So, some good does come out of prison, after all. It really is a miracle how it happened. One day I am in a hole grieving my brother John’s death, and then I am on top of the mountains grabbing a rainbow.

Sure, it is fate telling me to be thoughtful and to slow down. It is now nearly three years since we have been married and my violence is coming to a stop. I no longer get urges to hurt people, neither do I dream of robbing banks.

Woodhill unit is no Butlin’s holiday camp. It can be as cruel and lonely as the rest of the jails. But it sure saved my ass. Because I was on a journey to hell. Now I am first-class all the way to paradise. Singing all the way.

Only love can change a man’s direction, nothing else. I mean, look at how Jimmy Boyle turned his life around, all because of a woman! Only love can cure a broken heart and fill you with hope. It is a miracle. But until the prison HQ can accept it and believe it, I remain in solitary confinement. I remain the label, the Bronson myth, the double danger man, your very own Hannibal the Cannibal. But it is all behind me. ‘Pass the cucumber sandwich … two sugars in my china cup, please.’

I will give HM Prison Woodhill 10/10, just for sending me my two angels.

 
LOCATION: Du Cane Road, London.
CAPACITY: 1,400 beds.
CATEGORY AT PRESENT: Local and Lifer Centre – Male.
OPENED: 1890.
HISTORY: Inmate labour was used to construct this memorial to prisoners’ suffering. Note the design from the aerial photo; it broke away from the radial arm design. Looks like a battery hen farm and was often as overcrowded as a tin of sardines. In 1998, allegations of prison officer brutality against inmates resulted in over twenty prison officers being brought before the courts; some were given prison sentences.

This place to me is just evil. Always has been. Always will be. I call it the bullyboy outfit.

When I first hit time in the 1970s, it was a hole then. My last spell here was in 1994, and it was no different to the way it was in the 1970s. I have never been up on the main prison wings. They just kept me hidden away in the seg block.

There, they are big old cells, 14ft long and 10ft wide. There are cages on the windows. It was all slopping out back then. You became potty-trained in these old jails. But those cells are the best for a workout, plenty of room. Why can’t they make the modern jails like those old ones? Have they got no sense at all? You would think that they had to pay a land tax per square foot the way they make prisons these days!

The Scrubs, as we called it, has been around for years. It is capable of holding a good 1,500 cons. So it is a big place that is run by fear. They try to intimidate the cons. But it has the opposite affect on me. It doesn’t work. It never will. Like I say, all they can do to me is kill me, and they haven’t done it in thirty years. So why now?

They don’t scare me with their show of force, opening my cell door fifteen-handed, all glaring at me, some with shields, some with sticks. I’m not in the urban theatre; I’m in the urban jungle! It becomes a fucking joke; it is basically a waste of time. Because one decent screw could open my door and I will be polite and respectful. But if fifteen open my door, I will just abuse the cowards, because there is no sense in it. And I don’t play games like that. That is all it is, one big game.

It was 1985; I almost lost my arm in the Scrubs. I smashed up a recess and started throwing sinks and toilets about. Then I punched through an ‘unbreakable’ glass window. My fist went right through it … then it happened. Blood was squirting out like a fountain. I panicked, and started to chase the screws. But the blood was coming out so fast that I just collapsed.

Someone must have taken pity on me, because I actually awoke in hospital. But that was only the start of it. My injury went bad and, eventually, a big lump of puss grew in my wrist. Anyway, I had to be operated on; it was touch and go whether I would lose my arm. I was very lucky, but I broke the glass. It took me years to build the power up in that fist. But I overcame it.

It was also in the 1980s that I tried to kill the Governor by strangling him. Fortunately, the screws were on me and I spent all my time in restraint over that. Wherever I went, I had to be put in a body belt. It was at this period of my life I was at my most dangerous and unpredictable.

I would dive at a screw for just looking at me and they would dive at me if they thought I was getting bad. They, in fact, had a licence to attack me on any day they felt like it. Many times, that is just what they did … if they felt like a fight, then it was that day I would get served up.

My life, my world, was now a war zone. If I got through a day without an incident, I would pray to God and say ‘Thank you’. But in the morning, it would be a new struggle. The struggle was now my sanity.

It was in 1974 when the Scrubs really took a liberty with me, at a time when I was on my knees. My dad had just died. I was devastated. I was in a daze, lost, empty. Tearful. My whole life was in shock. And I just felt hopeless.

All I really needed was a friendly talk, some sort of compassion. A cup of tea and a nice chat. And all I got was a bashing. They brutalised me. It was an act of evil. I have always been able to shake it off, and get on with it, but this beating was totally unjust and unnecessary. There was just no sense in it. I was smashed with sticks; stomped on, and even had my ’tash ripped out of my lip. I was stripped naked and secured in a body belt. And left.

Days later, I was picked up and put in a van. I could barely walk as my toes were all bruised and bent, even the nails had been ripped off. I left the Scrubs like my dad … dead. They had killed my heart. It did not matter to me where I went. I just felt I was buried.

A few years later, a lot of Scrubs screws were sacked. Some were sent to jail over the brutality there. So don’t tell me it doesn’t happen. It does. But with Bronson, there is a licence kill. It is all part of my journey.

Obviously, you get over a beating, it is just physical – it is like a bad head or a storm, it clears up and the sun shines. But mentally, it stays. You have nightmares, you lose trust. You lose faith in humanity and it rips up your soul. I think it does make you a stronger person. A more determined person. But you are never the same, as you become ‘cold’.

I will give HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs 0/10. Fuck ’em! It is all you deserve.

No hard feelings to any of the decent screws there, as I am sure that there are lots. And it may well be a better jail now that the scum have been sacked. But the stigma never dies, too much shit has gone on there. It needs pulling down and rebuilding. A new plan, a new regime, a new bunch of staff. To me, it is the same as it always was.