The Criminal Alphabet (25 page)

In prison parlance, a
one-up
is a cell for single occupancy. In police slang, it's a single person in a car and is used mainly by surveillance squads, as in ‘Yeah, I've got a Jag coupé with one-up heading down the A3.'

To go
on the bingo
is to ask the prison authorities for protection from other prisoners. It's called this because the prisoner has to request protection under Rule 45 (formerly Rule 43).
It's also called going ‘on the numbers'. (What not to say: Two fat rapists,
clicketty click.)

See
Home Office numbers
,
430P
,
Cab caller

Being
on the book
is to be a special-watch prisoner whose every movement and word must be marked down in a
small, blue, passport-sized book kept by the screws. Category A and Category
E men
are all on the book and are watched and escorted everywhere by at least three screws, one of whom will be in physical possession of the book. These prisoners are considered to be dangerous and escape risks and must wear high-visibility clothing at all times. They can't leave a prison wing, or sometimes their cell, without being
double cuffed
and escorted by at least one prison dog and three screws. All their clothing and possessions are removed from their cell at night and a red light is left on throughout to make it easier for the
night clockey
to see them during his thirty-minute spyhole checks.

See
Banana suit
,
E men
,
Night clockey
,
Night light

To be
on the earhole
is to be looking for something for nothing. Somebody who is always on the cadge or looking to borrow things is on the earhole. It comes from the time when there was a strict
rule of silence
in UK prisons, and prisoners weren't allowed to speak to each other. They developed a sign language in order to communicate and touching your ear meant that you wanted to borrow something, so to this day someone who is on the ponce is said to be on the earhole.

See
Rule of silence

The Out
is how prisoners refer to the big world outside of the prison walls and fences, as in ‘I knew him on The Out'. The Out is where all prisoners long to be. And, yes, it should always have capital letters.

In northern prisons a cell is known as a
pad
, from the swinging 60s word for a flat.

See
Pad Spin

A
pad spin
is a cell search, usually carried out by the prison's Designated Search Team
(
DST
).

See
DST
,
Spin

A
pad thief
is a prisoner who will steal personal items from fellow prisoners' cells or
pads
. They are held in great contempt by most prisoners (with no sense of irony whatsoever). A typical punishment for pad thieving is to hold the fingers of the culprit in the cell door and slam the heavy door on them, breaking the fingers.

If you are unknown in prison,
particularly in the top-security system, you will be asked to provide
paperwork
as proof that you are not a ‘wrong un'. Your paperwork is your charge sheet (the document outlining the details of the charges laid against you, a copy of which will be handed to you at the police station) and your deposition bundle (the statements of all witnesses against you, including any photographs that are used in evidence, and your own statement; by law, these have to be supplied to all defendants before trial). If you can't produce this paperwork and have no other prisoner to vouch for you,
you must either brazen it out on the wing or seek protection. Top-security prisons are violent and paranoid places where dangerous men spend years, sometimes decades, in relative isolation and with little to do other than to try to smash the sameness of every day. ‘Witch hunts' against sex offenders or informers are to long-term prisoners as bread and circuses were to the ancient Romans. Someone with no paperwork will be a prime target for organized violence, as there's no good reason for a prisoner not to have it – unless, that is, they have committed a crime they don't want people to know about, i.e. a sex offence, or have grassed on others.

See
Deps
,
Laminated Pages

Patches
is a prison uniform with prominent yellow panels worn by prisoners who have been captured after an escape or attempted escape.

See
Banana suit
,
E men

Prison
phone cards
were sold in prison canteens when inmate phones were introduced into the British prison system in 1992. The minimum cost of a card was £2, the maximum was £4, and a maximum purchase of £20 worth of cards was allowed to convicted prisoners. The cards were issued by British Telecom but were stamped with ‘HMP' and were green and white in colour. The cards became handy as prison currency and it became an offence against prison rules punishable by up to fourteen days' loss of remission to be caught in possession of more than the maximum allowance. Five £2 prison phone cards became the going rate for
a £10 bag of heroin. Some prisoners found ways to cheat the phone-card system, for example by smuggling in a 200or 400-unit public card and then chopping the cards in half and matching them up. The first part of the prison-issue code on the card would activate the phone but the credits would be clocked up on the public-card half.

Another useful way of cheating the system and making the cards last longer was ‘shaving'. Prisoners would rub the edge of the card against concrete until it had worn the edges and affected the chip. A shaved empty card would sometimes fool the phone computer into thinking there was still credit left on it. Some people would also shave cards in order to use them as a sharp-edged weapon that could pass through a metal detector. Several prisoners and a few prison staff ended up being seriously slashed with prison-issue phone cards.

Some enterprising prisoners collected empty cards and smuggled them out. Each card had a small strip on the back on which the prisoner's name and number was written, but most of the canteen staff who sold them wouldn't bother filling them in so it would be left blank for the prisoner to put in their own details. Once the used cards had been smuggled out, the ex-prisoner would fill in the strip on the back with the names and numbers of infamous prisoners
– Reggie Kray being the most sought after – and then sell the cards as genuinely having belonged to that prisoner. At £2 per card, some people were on to a nice little earner.

Another lucrative scam was to shrink the cards in an oven, drill a hole through one corner of the card and sell them as a novelty key-ring at £1.50 a go. A nice few quid was earned by selling these at car-boot fairs, market stalls and on eBay. However, by 2004, most prisons had phased out the prison-issue phone card in favour of the
PIN
system,
whereby a
prisoner will pay for phone units at the canteen and have them transferred electronically on to their personal PIN. Prison-issue phone cards are now a thing of the past.

See
PIN Number

Pie and liquor
is rhyming slang for vicar. The only time you will see a vicar or any kind of priest on prison landings is when there is bad news to be given to a prisoner. News of family deaths and serious illness outside is always delivered by the chaplaincy team, so whenever a religious representative appears prisoners get nervous that he may be coming to see them.

A
PIN number
(Prisoner Identification Number) is the unique code a prisoner is given so that they can access prison phones that are covered by the PIN system. The PIN system has been phased in to cover all prison pay phones so that conversations can be automatically recorded by a computer system at a central point rather than by staff inside each individual prison. Plus, prisoners have to sign a form when purchasing their phone time, in order to discourage misuse. (Prisoners had started to use
phone cards
as currency.) Prisoners are allowed a maximum of twenty phone numbers on their ‘approved' list and the people they belong to have to be security vetted and give their permission to receive phone calls from the prisoner. PIN phones are charged at a higher rate than any other payphone, and prisoners pay ten pence a minute for their phone calls. The profits are split between BT and the prison system.

See
Phone Cards

The
piss bucket
is very similar to the
pisspot
but takes the form of a brown plastic bucket. They were issued from the late 1970s in an effort to encourage prisoners to defecate in them rather than throw ‘shit parcels' out of the windows.The majority of prisoners would not defecate in the original pisspots because they were see-through plastic and the contents would be on show when they walked along the landings to slop out. The authorities failed to take into account that another reason for throwing shit parcels out of the cell window was because nobody wanted to spend up to twenty-three hours a day in a tiny cell with a loose-lidded container of excrement very close by! Not to mention the fact that you'd have to take the lid off the pot every time you wished to urinate during that time.

See
Bomb Squad
,
Pisspot

A
pisspot
is a see-through plastic chamber pot issued in prison before the partial introduction of in-cell sanitation. Prisoners had to use them as toilets during the hours of
bang-up
and empty them into a communal sluice at ‘slop out'
every morning. If you were in a single cell, you would have your own pisspot, but those prisoners who were crammed two or three to a one-man cell had to share one between them. These pots are still in use in over twenty British prisons today.

See
Bang-up
,
Piss bucket

A
PMI
is a Prisoner Maintaining Innocence. According to the figures for overturned convictions reported by the Appeal Court since 1991, up to 14 per cent of people in British prisons are innocent of the crimes for which they have been convicted and imprisoned. Prisoners who refuse to accept their guilt are sometimes known as ‘deniers' but the official term is PMIs. The catch-22 for PMIs is that in order to progress and be released from prison every prisoner must do at least one OBC (Offending Behaviour Course),
and this means admitting and officially acknowledging their guilt and contrition for their
index offence
. If they are maintaining their innocence, they cannot do the OBCs and therefore (in the case of a life or determinate sentence)
cannot be considered for release.

See
In denial

A
quack
, probably from the Afrikaans
kwaksalwer
, meaning a ‘hawker of salve', or somebody who sells medicines, is a prison doctor. Prison doctors are usually not the sort of people you'd want to find in a doctor's surgery or healthcare centre in the outside world. They
are
doctors, but not as you know them. Though it doesn't apply to every prison doctor, in my own personal experience of over three decades of imprisonment, the majority of prison doctors don't really prioritize their bedside manner and are more interested in pleasing the governor and the authorities than in easing pain or healing the sick in prison. Two paracetamol seems to be the standard cure-all. In British prisons Mandatory Drug Testing is in force, which has led to a national policy of refusing opiates or strong painkillers
to prisoners in case they interfere with the results of this drug testing and lead to prisoners being able to disguise the fact they are taking illegal opiates. Most prison ‘doctors' are prison officers who have taken a first-aid course which entitles them to wear a white coat and work in the prison hospital dispensing
aspirin water
and plasters. They are not to be confused with real doctors.

A
rat
is a prisoner or criminal who has informed or
grassed
on his fellows in order to save his own skin or gain a more comfortable existence, and is so called because rats will do anything in order to preserve their own lives and safety, even turn on other rats.

To make a
ricket
is to make a serious mistake or error of judgement, as in ‘I think I've made a serious ricket by not paying Charlie what I owe him; he's put a contract out on me'.

In the early twentieth century there was a
rule of silence
operating in British prisons, i.e. prisoners were not permitted to communicate with each other verbally. It was thought the silence would stop the spread of criminal influence and knowledge within prisons and bring the inmates closer to God. But prisoners quickly devised a system that would allow them to communicate without words, a form of sign language. Touching your left ear meant that you wanted something, so, for example, doing
this and then touching your nose meant you wanted some tobacco (your nose being your
‘snout'). Only a few of these ‘sign words' have lasted into modern prison usage,
‘earhole' being one of them.

See
On the Earhole

If someone tells you they've been in jail for a
shit and a shave
or a
shit and a shower
, it means they have served a very short prison sentence. It refers to the amount of time you would need to perform these
ablutions
.