Heaven: A Prison Diary (27 page)

Mr Hocking
(head of security) tells me that this young man has a long way to go before he
can beat Greville the cat burglar, who left NSC last year at the age of
sixty-three, declaring he now had enough to retire on.

During a
full-time career of crime, Greville was sentenced on thirty-one occasions (not
a record) and preferred NSC, where he was always appointed as reception orderly
within days of checking back in. So professional was he at his chosen
occupation that if there was a burglary in his area, with absolutely no trace
of entry, fingerprints or any other clues, the local police immediately paid a
visit to Greville’s home. Greville has since retired to a seaside bungalow to
live off his profits, and tend his garden. And thereby hangs another tale,
which Mr Hocking swears is true.

Greville was
the prime suspect when some valuable coins went missing from a local museum. A
few days later, the police received an anonymous tip-off reporting that
Greville had been seen burying something in the garden. A team of police
arrived within the hour and started digging; they were there for five days, but
found nothing.

Greville later
wrote and thanked the chief constable for the excellent job his men had done in
turning over his soil, particularly for the way they’d left everything so neat
and tidy.

I have my hair
cut by the excellent prison barber, Gary (half a phonecard). I want to look
smart for my visitors on Sunday.

Friday is kit
change day for every inmate.

The hospital
has its own allocated time because we require twenty new towels, six sheets,
twelve pillowcases and several different items of cleaning equipment every
week.

While the chief
orderly, Mark (armed robbery, ten years), selects a better class of towel for
the hospital, he tells me about an inmate who has just come in for his weekly
change of clothes.

This particular
prisoner works on the farm, and never takes his clothes off from one week to
the next, not even when he goes to bed. He has a double room to himself
because, surprise, surprise, no one is willing to share a pad with him. Mark
wonders if he does it just to make sure he ends up with a single room. I find
it hard to believe anyone would be willing to suffer that amount of discomfort
just to ensure they were left alone.

Before you ask,
because I did, the Prison Service cannot force him to wash or shave. It would violate
his human rights.

Mr Berlyn drops
by. He’s agreed to Linda’s suggestion that a drug specialist visit the prison
to give me an insight into the problems currently faced by young children in
schools. But Mr Berlyn goes one step further and tells me about an officer from
Stocken Prison who regularly visits schools in East Anglia to tell
schoolchildren why they wouldn’t want to end up in prison, and it may be
possible for me, once I’ve passed my FLED, to accompany him and learn about
drugs first-hand. If my sentence is cut, I would be allowed to visit schools
immediately, rather than going through the whole learning process after my
appeal.

Sister is just
about to close surgery, when a very depressed-looking inmate hobbles in.

‘I’ve caught
the crabs,’ he says, his hand cupped around the top of his trousers.

Sister unlocks
the door to the surgery and lets him in. He looks anxious, and Linda appears
concerned. He slowly unzips his jeans, in obvious pain, and places his hands
inside.

Linda and I
stare as he slowly uncups his hands to reveal two small, live crabs, which he
passes across to Linda. She recoils, while I burst out laughing, aware that we
will be the butt of prison humour for some weeks to come.

‘Oh my God,’
says Linda, as she stares down at his unzipped jeans, ‘I don’t like the look of
that. I think I’ll have to take a blood sample.’

The inmate
rushes out of the door, his jeans falling around his knees. Honour restored,
except that he has the last laugh, because it’s the hospital orderly (me) who
ends up taking the two crabs back down to the sea.

An inmate was
caught in the visitors’ car park in possession of two grammes of heroin. On the
outside, two grammes of heroin have a street value of £80. Inside prison, each
gramme will be converted into ten points, and each point will be made into
three sales. Each sale will be one-third heroin and two-thirds crushed
paracetamol, which can be picked up any day from the hospital by a prisoner
simply claiming to have a headache. Each sale is worth £5, so the dealer ends
up with £300 for two grammes, almost four times the market price.

Some dealers
are happy to remain in prison because they can make more money inside than they
do ‘on the out’. The inmate concerned claims a man who was visiting another
prisoner handed him a packet in the car park. The head of security is aware who
the visitor was, but can’t charge him because he wasn’t caught in the act. He
also knows which prisoner the heroin was destined for, but he’s also in the
clear because he never received it.

I rise early
and write for two hours.

My visitors
today are my son Will and Chris Beetles. Will takes me through the preparations
for my appeal on sentence, which are almost complete as both pieces of research
on perjury and an attempt to pervert the course of justice show that eighteen
months would historically be a high tariff for a first offender. Chris brings
me up to date on everything that’s happening in the art world.

At Club
Hospital’s Sunday afternoon tea party, David (fraud, schoolmaster) reveals that
Brian (ostrich farm fraud) and John (fraud) are both having trouble since being
released. Brian is waking in the middle of the night, sweating because he’s
frightened he won’t make it back in time for the 7 pm check-in and John is
stressed because he hasn’t been able to find a job.

Once the club
members have left, I settle down to make myself some supper. In a large soup
bowl (a gift from William), I place the contents of a tin of Princes ham, two
packets of Walkers crisps and an Oxo cube; hot water is then poured on top.
What a combination. I eat while reading Street Drugs by Andrew Tyler, which is
my set text for the week.

The food is
wonderful, the
book
harrowing.

A young lad
from the north block, who only has two weeks to serve of a three-month
sentence, has been found in his room with his head in a noose made from a sheet
hanging from the end of his bed. The slightly built lad, who must be about
twenty-one, reminds me of the boy having sand kicked into his face in those
Charles Atlas advertisements I saw when I was a child. He is taken to the
hospital to be interviewed by Mr Berlyn, Dr Harris and sister behind closed
doors. He’s certain to be placed on red suicide watch, with an officer checking
on him every thirty minutes.

Mr Berlyn tells
me that they’ve never had a suicide at NSC because if a prisoner is that
desperate, he usually absconds. The real problem arises in closed prisons from
which there is no escape. There were seventy-three suicides in prisons last
year and not one of them was at a D-cat.

Just as Mr
Berlyn leaves, the lad who wets his bed reappears with a black bag containing
two more sheets. I supply him with two clean sheets and he leaves looking even
more helpless than the suicide case; you’d never think this was a men’s prison.

I watch four
videos on the subject of heroin.

I’m slowly
gaining more knowledge about drugs through reading, videos and my dayto-day
work as hospital orderly, but I still have no first-hand experience. I go over
to see David in the CARAT (Counselling, Assessment, Referral, Advice,
Through-care) office. He is willing to let me attend one of his
drug
counselling sessions, as long as the other participants
agree, because I’ll be the only one who isn’t currently, and never has been, an
addict.

I attend the
drug rehab discussion in the CARAT office. David asks the five other inmates if
any of them object to my presence.

They all seem
pleased that I’ve taken the trouble to attend.

David opens the
discussion by asking if they feel that once they are released they’ll be able
to resist going back on drugs, and in particular heroin. One of them is adamant
that he will never touch a drug again. His relationship with those he loves has
been ruined, and he wonders if anyone will ever be willing to employ him. He
tells the group that he had reached the stage where he would steal from anyone,
including his own family, to make sure he got his fix, and just before he was
arrested, he needed four fixes a day to satisfy his addiction.

The next
participant says that his only thought on waking was how to get his first fix.
Once he’d begged, borrowed or stolen the £20 needed, he’d go in search of a
dealer. As soon as he’d got his half gramme of heroin, he’d run back to his
house and, often with his wife and two children in the next room, he would
place the powder in a large tablespoon, to which he would add water and the
juice from any citrus fruit. He would then stir the mixture until he had a
thick brown liquid, which he would pour onto a piece of aluminium foil and then
warm it with a match. He would then sniff it up through a straw. One of the
inmates butts in and adds that he preferred to smoke it. However, all of them
agree that the biggest kick came when you injected it. The lad from Scarborough
then lifts the sleeve of his denim jacket and his trouser leg, and declares,
‘That gets difficult when there are no veins left to inject.’

The one who so
far hasn’t said a word chips in for the first time. He tells us that he’s been
off heroin for five weeks and still can’t sleep, and what makes it worse is
that his room-mate snores all through the night.

The dealer
jumps in. ‘You’ll start getting to sleep after about eight weeks, and then it
gets better and better each day until you’re back to normal.’

I ask what he
means by that.

‘Once you’re an
addict, you don’t need a fix to make you feel good, you need one just so you
can return to normal. That’s when you become a “smack head″ – in between
fixes you start shaking, and the worse you are the more desperate you become to
return to normal. And, Jeff,’ he adds, ‘if you’re planning to talk about the
problem in schools, you should start with the eleven year olds, because by
fourteen, it’s too late.

In Scarborough,
good-looking, well-broughtup, well-educated fourteen-year-old girls approach me
all the time for their daily fix.’

The last person
to participate is another dealer, who claims he only dealt because the profits
allowed him to finance his own drug addiction. From eight in the morning to ten
at night, his mobile would ring with a nonstop flow of requests from customers.
He assures me that he’s never needed to solicit anyone. He tells the groups
that he’s been off heroin for nearly seven months, and will never deal in, or
take drugs, again. I don’t feel that confident after he adds that he can earn
£1,000 a day as a seller. He ends the session with a statement that takes me –
but no one else in the room – by surprise.

‘Nearly all my
friends are in jail or dead.’

He’s thirty-one
years old.

I put my pen
down after a couple of hours of writing to switch on the
Today
programme.

Britain is in
the middle of a rail strike.

There’s no
station at North Sea Camp.

Two of the
inmates who attended last night’s drugs counselling meeting are up on a
‘nicking’. Once the doctor has pronounced them fit, they will attend an
adjudication chaired by Governor Leighton. One of them tested positive for
cannabis on his latest MDT, and adds ruefully that he expects to be shipped out
to a B-cat prison later today. Now I know why he hardly spoke at yesterday’s
meeting.

He also looks
as if he didn’t sleep last night.

The newspapers
are full of stories about David Blunkett’s proposed prison reforms, which seem
no more than common sense.

Anyone with a
non-custodial sentence for a non-violent first offence will be placed on
immediate tagging, with weekend custody, and possibly having to report to a
police station every evening. For lesser offences, they would be tagged
immediately, with a curfew of 7 pm to 7 am. A second offence and they would be
sent to prison.

As of 1
February, the prison population stood at 67,978 and the prediction is that
already overcrowded prisons will be under additional pressure following Lord
Chief Justice Woolf’s recent pronouncement on mobile phone muggers.

Three more
manuscripts arrive in the post today with letters asking if I could critique
them. Four publishers have turned one down; another says his wife, who is his
sternest critic, thinks
it’s
first class, and the
final one seeks my advice on vanity publishers.
21

One of today’s
inductees is a Mr T. Blair. He has been sentenced to six months for disturbing
the peace, but with remission and tagging, expects to be released after only
eight weeks. The other Mr T. Blair looks set to serve at least eight years.

I still marvel
at what prisoners will have the nerve to ask sister for. Today, one inmate has
demanded a bottle of aftershave because he has a skin problem. I’m about to
burst out laughing, when Linda hands him a bottle and he leaves without another
word.