The Criminal Alphabet (19 page)
Read The Criminal Alphabet Online
Authors: Noel "Razor" Smith
Diesel
is slang for prison tea. Made with one huge netting teabag in a copper boiler the size of the average family bath, weaker than a knock-kneed sparrow with emphysema and more bitter than a miser who has lost a penny down a bottomless well, prison tea is not for the faint-hearted. Sans sugar and served by surly-faced warders and their brown-nosed convict serfs from dirty steel buckets, it's called diesel because it invariably has a rainbow-hued film of scum on the top, much like spilt diesel in a rain puddle.Fortunately, the word, and the form of tea it described, are not so widespread these days, since the advent of tea packs in most prisons.
Digger
is yet another word for a prison punishment block, and is particularly popular in the nicks of the South-west, such as HMP Exeter, HMP Dorchester and HMP Dartmoor. It's said to date from a time when prisoners had to work while they were in solitary confinement,
usually âmake-work' like digging holes, then filling them back in again.
A
dip test
is a form of drug testing carried out in prisons. Unlike MDT (Mandatory Drug Testing), which is expensive and requires laboratory testing outside the prison, the dip test can be carried out on the spot and is relatively cheap. Compliance tests and VDTs
(Voluntary Drug Tests) are both forms of dip test. The prisoner provides a sample of urine in a disposable beaker, then the drug-testing staff dip a pre-prepared plastic wand into the sample and wait for a reaction (a bit like a home pregnancy test). If the indicator shows two unbroken lines, then the sample is clear of drugs. One line,
or any break in the lines, indicates that drugs are present. A âreasonable suspicion MDT' will then be called for, before the prisoner can be charged with breaching prison rules. Dip tests can be used to test for specific types of drug, such as opiates, amphetamines or cannabinoids, but there is also a multi-test which can test for the presence of any drug (although this is expensive compared to the standard dip test). If a prisoner proves positive for drugs, he will be charged and adjudicated upon, possibly having days added on to his sentence.
The
dirty protest
, made popular by IRA prisoners, is hated by the prison authorities and therefore a legitimate weapon in the arsenal of any unruly or disruptive prisoner who can stand to do it. It involves smearing your own waste (shit, piss, vomit) on every part of your cell and on yourself and then refusing to leave the cell. The smell alone can shut down an entire cell block and force the screws to evacuate prisoners from the cells on either side of the
prisoner protesting. The screws have to kit themselves out in biohazard suits and tape off every crack around the door of the dirty cell. They'll still, however, have to open the door of the dirty cell several times a day in order to deliver meals, etc. Although the screws get a special bonus for doing this work, they still hate and fear it. Some prisoners go on a dirty protest in order to draw attention to a specific complaint or the general conditions they are held in. Other prisoners will smear themselves with shit and other waste out of fear of being assaulted by the screws: they know that the screws are loathe to mix it with a prisoner when there's a danger they'll come into contact with bodily waste. Some dirty protests last for months. Ronnie Easterbrook, a South Londoner convicted of armed robbery, holds the record for the longest dirty protest
â eighteen months, in the punishment block at HMP Whitemoor.
See
Hang One Up
Every convicted prisoner who is in the last couple of weeks of a custodial sentence is supposed to appear before a
discharge board
. The board, which should include senior prison staff, probation staff and a doctor, assesses the prisoner's fitness for release and deals with any queries or problems they might have around their imminent release. In reality, the prison system has neither the time nor the manpower to convene a discharge board for every prisoner being released, particularly with prisons as overcrowded as they are. Prisoners these days think themselves lucky if they get to see a doctor before release.
A
discharge grant
(at the time of writing) is the one-off payment of £46 (apparently representing one week's benefits) given to prisoners when leaving prison. It's only paid to prisoners who have been convicted and completed a custodial sentence. Remand prisoners (those in custody but yet to be convicted), though they may sometimes spend up to three years in prison awaiting trial, are not entitled to a discharge grant, and neither are civil prisoners or recalls. The meagreness of the discharge grant is in great part responsible for the massive reconviction rates in this country, as has been revealed by the Howard League for Penal Reform and the Prison Reform Trust in many of their reports. The grant is supposed to cover the expenses â rent, food and transport â of the newly released prisoner for their first seven days, until they find a job or finalize a claim with the DSS (Department of Social Security). In reality, it can take six weeks or longer to sort out a claim with the DSS and, if a newly released prisoner is lucky enough to get a job on release from prison, they will more than likely have to work a week or month in hand. This £46 may be the only money they have, and a lot of prisoners lose their homes as a consequence of being in prison and so have nowhere to live on their release. If the authorities were to sort out a realistic plan to help newly released prisoners into housing and work,
instead of turfing them out of the gates of prison with a measly £46 and their belongings in a plastic bag, then maybe we would have much lower reconviction rates in this country.
Dispersal
prisons were one of the measures implemented after Lord Mountbatten's 1966 inquiry into prison security. A small number of top-security prisons were designated as dispersal prisons, into which high-risk, subversive or âproblem' prisoners could be dispersed at short notice. It was a means of having the most violent and dangerous prisoners in the system in a few prisons rather than spread throughout the system. If a designated top-security prison suffers an escape, serious unrest or fails its security audit, it's immediately removed from the dispersal system. In recent memory, both HMP Parkhurst and HMP Gartree have been removed from the dispersal system following high-profile escapes: three prisoners scaled the wall at HMP Parkhurst and two were lifted off the yard at HMP Gartree by helicopter. The only dispersal prison not to lose its status after an escape is HMP Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire. Five IRA men and a London robber (in fact he was serving time for hijacking the helicopter that lifted the two prisoners from HMP Gartree) broke out of the SSU (Special Security Unit; basically, a prison within a prison), scaled fences and walls and shot two prison officers. At the time of writing, the dispersal prisons of England are HMP Frankland (North-east), HMP Full Sutton (Yorkshire), HMP Long Lartin (Worcester), HMP Whitemoor (Cambridgeshire) and HMP Wakefield
(Yorkshire). HMP Belmarsh (London) is a provisional dispersal prison, due to the fact that it has an SSU.
A
DLP
(Discretionary Lifer Panel) is the board set up to deal with sentence progression for prisoners who have
been sentenced to life imprisonment at the judge's discretion. This means that their crime or crimes would not normally attract a life sentence but the trial or sentencing judge feels that one would be appropriate,
given the circumstances of the case.
To
do a runner
is to escape, usually from prison, as in âI hear John managed to do a runner from the unit at HMP Durham'.
A
dog box
is a tiny cell, about the size of a dog kennel, normally found in prison reception areas, for holding vulnerable or dangerous prisoners. In most prison reception areas there will be at least three dog boxes so that prisoners who may be attacked by other prisoners
(for being informers or sex offenders or because they owe money to other prisoners,
and so on) or prisoners who are volatile and violent can be segregated while they go through the reception routine.
A
dog screw
is a prison officer who hates all prisoners and uses every bit of his power to make life as hard as possible for them. Every prison in the UK has its share of dog screws, though some prisons have more than others. Some pretty damaged people are attracted to the job of prison officer, which requires no qualifications and has no real vetting process. Like any other job, the prison service
attracts a mix of characters â some good, some bad â but, unlike most other jobs, the twisted,
spiteful and damaged in the prison service have control over the daily lives of a disenfranchised and sometimes vulnerable minority.
See
Batter squad Block
,
Care bear
,
DST
,
Extraction team
,
MUFTI
Some prisons, usually those with the lower security category of C or D, house prisoners in dormitories. In some prisons the
dorms
hold only six or eight prisoners, but many of the lower-security-category prisons have huge dorms holding up to eighty. In recent years these huge dorms have been partitioned off and each prisoner now has their own cubicle of private space. Dorms are generally hated by prisoners because of the lack of privacy. They were the standard form of accommodation for most of the old
DC
and
borstal
institutions.
A
double A man
is a Category A prisoner who is deemed so high risk that he is afforded even more scrutiny and security precautions than a standard Category A prisoner. They are usually kept in one of a handful of
dispersal prisons
or
SSUs
. Every transfer or court appearance involves armed police escorts and a helicopter guard.
If you borrow anything in prison, you will usually have to pay
double bubble
.This means that whatever you borrow
you have to return with 100 per cent interest, so, for example, a loan of one ounce of tobacco means a return payment of two ounces. Some prisoners make a living in prison by loan-sharking at these extortionate rates.
See
Baron
To be
double-cuffed
is to be secured for transport in two pairs of prison-issue handcuffs. First, your wrists are cuffed together in the conventional way, then one cuff from the second pair of handcuffs is fastened around your wrist above the first shackle and the second cuff is attached securely to the wrist of another prisoner, who is double-cuffed to a prison officer. This is very uncomfortable, as prison-issue handcuffs are heavy, weighing in at about two pounds a set. Sometimes prisoners travel for hours trussed up in this way. When crossing the Solent â to any of the three prisons on the Isle of Wight â prisoners are kept handcuffed and chained to the floor of the prison transport in the hold. If the ferry happens to sink, then the shackled prisoners will be going with it. Prison staff on these escorts will usually be found upstairs in the bar enjoying a quick drink.
A
dry bath
is a strip search, usually carried out by police or prison officers searching for contraband.
It's called a dry bath because you have to take all your clothes off and then put them back on again when the search is finished. Police officers have the power to take you under arrest to the nearest police station, or sometimes just into the back of a police van on the side of the street, and demand that you
strip if they suspect you may be concealing drugs or weapons.
A
dry cell
is a punishment-block cell in which there's a drainage hole in the middle of the floor and the floor slopes gently towards it. These cells are used to house prisoners who are on long-term
dirty protests
, as the sloping floor and drain make it easier to hose the cell down.
The
DSPDU
, or Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder Unit, operates as a separate unit within a couple of
dispersal
prisons, at the time of writing HMP Whitemoor and HMP Frankland. It attempts to treat violent, high-risk prisoners by means of therapy and one-on-one work. So far, the DSPDU is in its infancy, so there are few figures on whether this approach works with the mad, bad and dangerous, but it is the only therapeutic treatment available for Category A prisoners outside the special secure hospitals such as Broadmoor, Rampton and Ashworth.
The
DST
, or Designated Search Team, is a unit of prison officers who have been specifically trained in the
âart' of searching prisons and cells for contraband. Most prisons have a DST, and the officers on it are almost universally hated and despised by prisoners for their intrusive and
heavy-handed tactics â like stripping prisoners and forcing them to squat over mirrors, and leaving cells in a terrible state. The DST wear a black, paramilitary uniform with their trousers tucked into their boots â
it's as if they're on jungle exercises with the SAS â and carry aluminium briefcases that contain tools to help them dismantle prison furniture in their search for contraband. It's a common rumour amongst prisoners that all the officers on the DST are military fantasists who read Andy McNab books and like to feel that they are a special elite, rather than just a bunch of prison officers who have been trained to search. Prisoners contemptuously call the DST
burglars
.
