17

Goddamn Democracy!

MY new-found passion for fitness gave me a new outlet. For the first time, in winning the competition, I was able to think positively about myself in ways unrelated to crime. As a diversion it was only temporary, though.

With Roger I could speak about most things and our conversations often spread to topics far beyond the mundanities of prison life. We talked politics or war, economics, social issues even, but in many ways, he was an exception. Other than Roger most dialogue around the prison was either crime-related, drug-related or connected to some perceived slight endured by one of the prisoners.

‘I don’t like the way so-and-so looked at me. I reckon he’s planning something with that kid from Hull. I’m going to have to do something about it.’

When that constitutes 99 per cent of what you hear around you, it worms inside your head and stays there. The ever-present threat of violence, who did what to whom, obtaining spliffs or smack, these are the dominant themes of prison conversation. When you’re inside, to a large degree they are your world. My overriding focus was still on organising my activities for when I got out. The way I saw it, I had a minimum of 18 months left to serve. The first chance I got, I would escape then be straight back into the game and making money.

A few months after my arrival, early in the new year, we were informed that every Friday the prison would have to shut earlier as government cuts affected staffing. This entailed a change to our routine. We would remain on lock-up throughout the morning, get three hours out of cell from 12 until three, including lunch, then be banged up again for the rest of the day.

At first inmates were unconcerned, until it became clear that it also meant that Monday to Thursday their work shifts would be 15 minutes longer to compensate for the lost time on Friday. To me, it was no big deal, but for men who had been there for decades and were thoroughly institutionalised, this kind of disruption to their routine was intolerable.

Shortly after the news was announced, I was sitting in the TV room with Roger on association, when a couple of the old-timers came to confer with him.

‘We’re not happy about this Roger,’ they said.

‘I thought you wouldn’t be.’

‘We want to have a sit-out.’

He sighed. A sit-out is a well-known form of prison protest, in which inmates refuse to return to their cells after association. It is regarded as a very serious contravention of prison rules and can lead to major disturbance.

‘Is it really worth the aggro?’ Roger asked. He tried to dissuade them, but they were adamant. Soon the wing was abuzz. Mutiny was in the air.

Everyone sought affirmation from everyone else. Boys egged each other on. A sit-out will not work if only some prisoners do it. To be effective, the whole wing had to unite against the screws.

That put me in a very awkward situation. If, like Roger, you were serving a long sentence anyway, or like Mickey Boyle you had mitigating circumstances which meant potential consequences were limited, you could participate with little fear. I was only looking at another two years by then. The last thing I needed was added time. It became clear the consensus was to go ahead so, reluctantly, I agreed. It was either that or become a pariah on the wing. The day was set for Saturday.

On Saturday afternoon everyone assembled in the association area. Some sat on seats while some absent-mindedly played pool or stared at the TV. The tannoy system came to life – bing bong!

‘Ten minutes remaining of association.’

There were a few exchanged glances before everyone resumed what they had been doing.

Bing bong! ‘Five minutes.’

The atmosphere became more tense. Usually prisoners began moving at that point. By the final set of chimes, when prisoners were meant to be in their cells, no one had left.

Within a minute the SO and the PO came to the association area and asked what was going on. We all sat in silence. No one wanted to assume responsibility and be earmarked as the ringleader.

‘Okay,’ the SO tried again. ‘I’m giving you a lawful order. Are you going to bang up?’

No one replied.

‘This is your final warning,’ he said. ‘Are you going to obey a lawful order and return to your cells or are you refusing?’

Again, no one spoke. They left, locking the door behind them.

At first the mood was jubilant. Throughout UK prison history these sorts of events had demonstrated a tendency to spiral out of control, but at that point no one was hurt and we felt we had got one over the screws. Everyone relaxed, cracked a few jokes and waited to see what would happen next.

Within a quarter of an hour the door locks clicked again and all the prison officers filed in, every last one of them. Inmates immediately tensed up. What was this, a face-off? The screws lined up along one wall and the SO stepped forward and spoke again.

‘Okay lads,’ he said. ‘As I’m sure you know if this situation continues the governor will have to take action. We’re still hoping it doesn’t come to that. Can one of you please tell me what this is all about?’

This time, an American drug smuggler called Jimmy stepped forward. Jimmy was not one of the leading inmates in the jail but he was well enough liked, a long-haired Californian pot-smoking hippy, who had been nicked for sailing a boat from the States right up the Thames with a ton and a half of cocaine on it. We all loved that. Jimmy was not one of us, but he had a set of balls. He walked into the no-man’s land between us and them and began to speak.

‘Look man, it’s very simple. We are not banging up because we’re not going to do this 15 minutes extra work thing. This isn’t a labour camp man. This isn’t Soviet Russia. I mean what the hell. This is the UK, am I right? We have rights here don’t we?’

‘It’s the only way we could work it,’ the SO said. ‘Government cuts have meant…’

‘…government cuts, government shmuts! Come on man. It’s 15 minutes. It doesn’t mean much to you but it does to us. We’re living in this place, this is home to us. There was no consultation here, no due process, no recognition of our status as human beings.’

Jimmy warmed up to the situation and started to really enjoy himself. As he spoke, cheers and shouts came from the other inmates. He was inspiring them, riling them up and loving it. The atmosphere grew more rowdy and the screws grew more uncomfortable.

‘Goddamnit motherfucker!’ Jimmy shouted, the veins on his neck standing out. ‘This is a goddamn democracy! We’re gonna fight for our rights man!’

A group of young black inmates shouted ‘brap, brap’ and pointed their fingers in the air pretending they had guns. Even some of the old lags were getting carried away. I turned to Roger.

‘Fucking hell mate,’ I said. ‘This is gonna go tits up.’

Roger nodded, ‘It’s not looking good.’

Sensing there might be trouble if they remained, the screws began to sidle out. Once again, we were left alone, the lunatics running the asylum. From there most of us knew which way it would go. In those circumstances the governor will call in a special tactical unit assembled by the wider prison authorities. The squad would simply bide their time, wait for the right moment, probably throw in a few pepper spray canisters to soften us up, then charge in, armed to the teeth and absolutely hammer us.

Hours ticked by and some of the youngsters pushed the fridge-freezers and the pool table against the door to act as a barricade. They opened up the ice boxes and started pulling out home-made prison knives they had stashed in there.

‘Fuck this shit!’ one was saying. ‘I ain’t got nothing to lose, let’s do these battymen!’

If officers had arrived at that point, a small-scale war would have ensued. There was no doubt about it, but by then we had been in there for six or seven hours and a couple of the older, non-violent inmates, fearful of what was coming, came and spoke to Roger. Roger sympathised and took it upon himself to assuage disaster, going over to the kids brandishing weapons.

‘Look boys,’ he said. ‘We’re all in this together and if it’s on, it’s on, but you have to appreciate that if you take it to that level, you’re bringing in others who never really wanted that. There are guys here who don’t want the shit kicked out of them or to be slung in the block and if you start going at screws with shanks, that’s what it’ll mean.’

Roger took the one he assumed to be the top boy to one side, a kid from Birmingham with baleful eyes and big, bony hands.

‘You have to understand,’ Roger said. ‘If one of those bastards gets cut, or worse, if you rub out a screw, we will all get fucked for it. Some of your lads don’t care, they’re never getting out anyway, but there are guys due to be released soon. They didn’t sign up for this. They were happy to stand up for our rights, but not to see someone get murdered.’

Roger’s powers of communication rarely let him down and after a good 20 minutes of speaking sense, he somehow managed to calm the hot-heads. Eventually he got them to move the freezers back and put away their knives. Then he banged on one of the doors. When a voice came from outside, he called, ‘We’re going to bang up now.’

About an hour later, the SO returned. With the atmosphere still tense and delicate, he called us one by one to return to our cells.

‘Open your mouth,’ the SO said when my turn came. ‘Now put your hands by your sides.’

Two officers gave me a thorough body search and showed me out of the door on to the corridor to the cell block which was lined with officers on either side. I walked between them, hands above my head, fully expecting fists or feet to come flying my way at any time. It didn’t happen.

It was a relief to get to my cell unharmed but we still faced a torrid night. All through the hours of darkness you could hear the bang, bang of cell doors opening and closing as they came for the ones they believed to be the organisers. Jimmy, the American hippy, was ghosted out, as were eight or nine others. He only had a year of his sentence left at that point too. That’s what you get for trying to step up. In total 200 prisoners had refused bang-up that night and while it lasted it had been the biggest protest in Full Sutton’s history. The snatch squads had assembled and were waiting outside for the order to hit us. At the point when everything calmed down, we were literally minutes away from gas canisters, anti-riot shields and batons. Anything could have happened. Roger’s intervention saved us all from a battle we could not have won.

The following day the wing was placed on lockdown and each of us was charged. The screws marched us down to see the SO, one by one. He sat in his office scowling, flanked by officers, a proper kangaroo court.

‘McAvoy, you’re charged with refusing a lawful order, how do you plead?’

‘Not guilty.’

‘Not guilty! What do you mean not guilty?’

‘I mean not guilty.’

‘Explain yourself.’

‘I was under duress,’ I said. ‘I was under serious threat to my life. I had to join the protest or the others would have killed me.’

He gave a little laugh.

‘Would they now? Let me tell you something McAvoy, everybody who walks through my door today is going to tell me they were under duress, every last bastard one of them. But you can rest assured that there is not one inmate on this wing who will be found not guilty.’

‘It’s nice to know I’m involved in such a fair-minded legal process,’ I replied.

He fixed me in the eye.

‘Guilty!’

In the aftermath they began applying traction to some of the inmates they thought they could pacify and offered me a job as the wing cleaner, in exchange for extra exercise sessions. The lure of added gym time pulled at me and I accepted. Fitness was the only thing keeping me sane.

Not long after that they downgraded me from category A to category B. Things were moving in the right direction.

Attending the gym daily saw my stamina continue to improve and during my two and a half years at Full Sutton I won the Christmas fitness competition all three times I entered it. They even made me compete with a handicap, to make it fairer. I still won. The time passed slowly, but steadily.

I knew that playing the game would help my case for early release, so I attended rehabilitation classes and courses. Advanced Thinking Skills, Victim Awareness and Anger Management, most of the sessions were an absolute joke. We would go down to the chapel and sit with the vicar in a little circle of hardened criminals. There were guys there for killing policewomen, rape and murder, drug trafficking, armed robbery, all the worst crimes on the book. Some of them were multi-millionaires and every single one of them was gaming the system.

‘So,’ the vicar would say. ‘You’ve had some time to reflect. What do you think about your crime now, John?’

‘Oh I’m really terribly sorry. I should never have done it.’

‘Do you feel any shame?’

‘Oh, yes. I’m very ashamed about what I’ve done, Reverend. If I could turn back the clock, I would.’

It became a competition among the prisoners to try to out-do each other with fake sincerity, sharing smirks and winks, but the old boy never got the joke. To us it was obvious, we were just spinning lines to get boxes ticked on the paperwork, but he fell for it. Sometimes they made us do role-plays.

‘Now John,’ the vicar would say, ‘you pretend to be a shopkeeper. And Danny has been stealing from your shop. What would you like to say to him?’

The whole thing was absurd, stemming from the authorities’ need to be seen to make an effort to rehabilitate. I can appreciate it’s not an easy task, but in my view there’s an inherent contradiction which those in the system never saw. If rehabilitation means to prepare someone to re-enter society, you cannot achieve that while locking a man in a small room for 22 hours a day and denying him basic freedoms. It’s impossible.

The biggest sticking point for many guys is that although the courses stand you in good stead at parole hearings, by agreeing to do them, you tacitly admit your guilt. You cannot apologise for your crimes and empathise with your victims while maintaining innocence. That can mean a catch-22 situation for anyone hoping to lodge an appeal. As far as prison authorities are concerned, you have been convicted by a judge. It doesn’t matter what you say. If you will not admit guilt, you are ‘in denial’.

After completing the courses, I attended a sentence planning hearing where they confirmed I had taken advantage of everything that the prison could offer and would soon move on. My tariff was virtually spent and I could begin to move down through the security categories.

Before that could be ratified I had one last Full Sutton hoop to jump through – the ‘kinetic self-change programme’, a really stressful series of sessions often forced upon inmates imprisoned for crimes of violence. A psychologist was brought in for one-on-one consultation to see if I met the criteria to be classified as a psychopath.

While I had always treated prison courses light-heartedly, that one was nerve-wracking. Being diagnosed as a psycho would have a detrimental effect not only on my chances of release from prison, but for the rest of my life. There was a danger of having years added to my sentence, or being assigned to the mental health system and ending up somewhere like Broadmoor. With the door possibly opening up before me toward eventual release, the psychologist would have the power to either push me through it or slam it in my face.

I was surprised in our first meeting to see the guy was no more than about 23 years old. I guessed he was just out of university and he feigned an awkward friendliness which came across as nervous. We spoke about my life up to that point in general terms, before he began asking specific questions.

He wanted to know if I used to wet the bed, how I felt about fire, if I had ever enjoyed hurting animals, all that sort of thing. I answered honestly, but most of the questions made it obvious what he was looking for. If you are put in that situation and you say, ‘Yes, when I was a kid I used to disembowel hedgehogs for a laugh,’ you know what result you are likely to get.

At the end of it all, his report stated I had demonstrated an instrumental use of violence as an armed robber, which in some cases was an indicator for a positive diagnosis. Fortunately, the responses I gave were enough to convince him otherwise. The sigh of relief I breathed when the confirmation came through was genuine. He had given me the green light to move on.

What he did say was that he thought I lacked ‘consequential thinking skills’ and was lucky that during my criminal career I never actually had to physically hurt anyone. I suppose that was true. I had threatened people with harm and brandished weapons capable of deadly force, but never had to use them.

He stressed that I had been in situations with firearms where one wrong move could have led to chaos and it was difficult to argue with that. Maybe if I had shot someone, at some stage, it would have changed me as a person. That can only be speculation.

He also talked a lot about the mental harm I had caused my victims. How a security guard doing his job, who suddenly finds himself threatened with a gun and fearing for his life would be traumatised by the fear and shock. I had to admit it was something I had not spent too much time considering and as I pondered it, I did feel genuine remorse.

In our world we dehumanised the men doing those jobs. We only saw companies, who we thought of as targets. We would call a Securicor van a ‘blue’, a Post Office one a ‘red’, a Securitas a ‘white’. When we talked about smacking a blue for £150,000, the concept that the men operating that van were human beings and might have families did not really play a part. We glossed over it. When I acknowledged that as the reality it troubled me and still does, even now.

With all that out of the way I was placed on the transfer list. The SO asked if I wanted to go to Lowdham Grange, a cat B prison near Nottingham. It was privately run and had a reputation as being one of the best equipped cat Bs in the country, so I accepted the offer.

The move excited me. After five years in maximum security I finally felt I was moving forward and packed my stuff eagerly. The only negative was saying goodbye to Roger. We had spent a great deal of time together and become close.

Regardless of what he had been convicted of, to my eyes he will always be one of the most honourable men I have ever met. The sadness shone out of his face as I shook his hand. Both of us knew it was unlikely we would meet again.