The Criminal Alphabet (27 page)

In the criminal and prison world many
extremely offensive and often racist insults are thrown around. You have to remember
that criminals and prisoners generally do not class themselves as part of
conventional society; for them, rules are made to be ignored or smashed to pieces.
Whereas in straight society there are boundaries around the sort of things you can
say (and rightly so), in the criminal world those boundaries are either very
different or do not exist. A straight-goer might worry about causing offence or
hurting somebody's feelings by using certain words or phrases but, most of the time,
a criminal will only worry about a physical comeback. When it comes to insults and
racial epithets, the slang of the criminal world is a law unto itself. There are
very few polite criminals and, though the denizens of this world are not all
die-hard racists and forever insulting each other (although a lot of that does go
on), they are very casual about what most people would call offensive language.

British adult prisons and juvenile jails
(in the male estate) are, as one might expect, extremely macho environments.
Politeness, political correctness and decency hold no sway. It's all about showing
how tough you are through the way you speak as well as the way you act, and if this
means you have to use offensive and insulting language, then that's the law of the
jungle. There is an official prison rule against prisoners using offensive words and
behaviour, but if prison staff were to nick everyone eligible for a
nicking
under this rule, they'd have no time for anything else
and the queue of prisoners waiting to receive
adjudication
would
take longer than most prison sentences! The only time prison staff nick a prisoner
under this rule is if the offence has been directed at them –
though sometimes this doesn't work out as the officer might have planned.

Some years ago a pal of mine was nicked
for calling a screw a ‘big fairy'; he was a tall, skinny officer, quite effeminate,
and he spoke with a lisp. The governor heard the evidence from his officer, then
turned to my pal and asked, ‘Why did you call this officer a big fairy?' To which my
pal replied, ‘Well, look at him, Governor; what would you call him?' The governor
glanced at the officer, then lowered his head over the paperwork, trying to hide a
grin. He found my pal guilty but gave him a suspended sentence instead of seven
days' solitary confinement.

It must also be noted, for the sake of
balance and honesty, that a majority of prison staff are not shy about using
offensive and abusive words and phrases themselves. As for racism, it has been well
documented (the Woolf Report;
Loose Screw
by Jim Dawkins,
Screwed
by Ronnie Thompson, numerous news reports, among others) that a culture of racism
certainly existed up until the 1990s amongst prison staff. Personally, I can
remember certain prison officers wearing National Front pins in their ties, or
‘gollywog' badges, quite openly in the 1980s.

You do hear some pretty entertaining
insults in the world of crime and punishment; I've used some of them in my short
stories. Some of the bon mots I've heard border on the surreal: ‘When she smiled her
teeth looked like a bowl of Sugar Puffs!'; ‘If I had a face like that, I'd shave my
dog's arse and teach him to walk backwards!'; ‘She looked a bit like Winston
Churchill licking week-old Nazi piss off a broken bottle!'; ‘If he'd had one white
tooth in his mouth, he'd have had the full snooker set!'. These are just some of the
things I've heard over the years, and most of them in all seriousness. When it comes
to slagging people off, you can't beat the criminal world for
offensiveness.

Some insulting words and phrases fall
out of use with time, and others become popular. For example, nowadays, you rarely
hear a lot of the racist expressions of the 1960s and '70s – words such as ‘wog',
‘sambo', ‘jigaboo', ‘spade' and ‘darkie'. You might think this is because criminals,
along with people in general, are more enlightened and less racist than they were in
the past, but this, in my experience, is sadly not the case. Criminals come from
every race, country and cultural background, but I would say they are usually more
casually racist than the general population. Many criminals of different racial
origin will work together to commit crime, sometimes out of necessity. Different
races in the criminal world tend to specialize in different crimes, though there is
a large crossover. For example, if a criminal is dealing in heroin, they will as a
matter of course have to deal with criminals from Turkey, Afghanistan or China.
Heroin comes into the UK from these three countries and the trade is all but
controlled by criminals who come from there. Pickpocketing, once the preserve of UK
criminals, is now almost completely in the hands (no pun intended) of Eastern
Europeans. Drug smuggling has broadened the horizons of some UK criminals, who now
deal with the Dutch, the Germans, the Iranians and Afghans (or ‘cheese-eaters',
‘krauts' and ‘rag-heads', to give them their racist alternative names). I'm quite
sure that people from these countries also have offensive names for the UK criminals
they deal with. It's the way of the criminal world and, as far as the criminals are
concerned, as long as the cash flows in, it's nothing to lose sleep over. So, to
make it quite clear: if you look at the language of insults in the criminal world,
you have to be prepared to be offended.

Adidas sex-case
refers
to prison-issue plimsolls: blue, with a thick sole, a white stripe and white laces,
primarily for wearing in the gym but often worn by some undiscerning prisoners as
everyday footwear. There are many names for this footwear and all are derogatory. A
lot of sex offenders and weirdoes will wear them, but most self-respecting prisoners
would rather go barefoot. The use of ‘Adidas' is ironic because Adidas make real
training shoes.

See
Baccy tins
,
Fila c***s
,
Jack the Ripper
,
Nigerian Nikes

To West Indians,
Babylon
can be anything they don't like or consider ungodly. So England itself can
be Babylon, or the police, or prisons. The term was brought into use in prison by
Rastafarians, who consider Babylon to be their great enemy. To some Rastafarians,
white people are Babylon.

Bacon
is offensive slang
for a sex offender. It comes via a pretty convoluted phrase of rhyming slang (bacon
bonce = nonce = sex offender). The thinking behind this is that a good and nasty
name to call sex offenders is ‘bacon bonce', which translates to pig's head (‘bonce'
being slang for ‘head') and rhymes with ‘nonce'.

See
86
,
Beast
,
Biff/Biffa
,
Nonce

In Scottish prisons a
balloon
is a very stupid person, someone whose head is full of
nothing but air, as in ‘Get te fuck, ye fuckin' balloon'.

Bam pot
is Scottish
slang for a complete idiot or imbecile, as in ‘Get te fuck, ye bam pot!'.

It has found its way into common
criminal usage due to the amount of Scottish prisoners in English prisons.

A
bandit
is a criminal
who will try their hand at most crimes: ‘anything to earn a pound note,' as the old
criminal adage goes. Bandits are serious criminals, in that they commit crime for a
living rather than as a one-off or a hobby. It seems they just love to commit crime
and usually have long criminal records and numerous prison sentences behind them.
But ‘bandit' is also an offensive term meaning a homosexual (
bum bandit
), or just a dishonest person who will try to rip you off.

If someone tells you to ‘stop giving it
the Barry
', they mean for you to stop acting so flash or cocky
(rhyming slang: Barry McGuigan = big un). Barry McGuigan was a World Boxing
Association featherweight champion. To give it the ‘big un' means to act in a flash
or cocky way.

Batty man
is an insult
much used by young men of West Indian origin to denote a homosexual. ‘Batty' is a
patois version of ‘bottom', so a batty man is a homosexual who enjoys buggery.

See
Bumba Claat
,
Raas
Claat

Beast
is usually
reserved for those who commit crimes against children. To be labelled a beast means
that, wherever you go in prison, you have to keep looking over your shoulder in case
of attack. Beasts are detested by ODCs (Ordinary Decent Criminals) and even by other
sex offenders who may feel their crimes are not as bad as those of a beast.

See
Beast man

Beast man
is a West
Indian slang term for the police, as in ‘Man was strapped but when the beast man
rushed him he couldn't get his ting out in time'. It can also be used to describe a
sex offender.

See
Beast

There are many
Billy Bullshitters
in our prisons – prisoners who can't tell the difference between reality
and their own outrageous fantasies and spend their time spinning stories, usually
about how many Ferraris they have, or how they were in the SAS but were thrown out
for being so
vicious. One particular Billy Bullshitter who comes
to mind from my own time in prison was always banging on about his time in the
Parachute Regiment and the great battles he'd fought in. Eventually, I grew tired of
listening to his fantasies and told him to prove he'd been in the Paras or not talk
to me again. A few days later he turned up with a book about the history of the
Parachute Regiment and pointed to a picture in it of a heavily equipped and masked
parachutist freefalling from a plane. ‘There you go!' he said triumphantly. I
pointed out that the caption gave the name of the parachutist, and it definitely
wasn't his name. Quick as a flash, he smiled craftily and said, ‘Yeah. But who do
you think took the picture!?' What can you say to bullshit like that?

See
Jackanory

Joe Bloggs has long been a pseudonym for
the ‘man in the street', or the ‘man on the Clapham omnibus', or any man whose name
is unknown to the speaker, but in the 1990s a special unit was set up in HMP
Parkhurst in order to hold supergrasses away from the rest of the prison population,
who, for obvious reasons, would be intent on doing them harm. Each of the prisoners
on this unit was given a number, preceded by the name Bloggs, for example, Bloggs 1,
Bloggs 2, etc. So now, if someone in prison calls you a
Bloggs,
it
means they suspect you of being an informer.

A
boo-boo
is a
derogatory term for an African, usually used by young West Indians. West Indians
think that Africans are stupid and not very streetwise and,
particularly in prison, class them as inferior. The term is a play on how the
conversations of Africans (though mainly Nigerians) sound when they talk in their
own languages, as in ‘They're talking that fucking boo-boo shit again'.

To
boy
someone
off
– that is, to call them a boy or treat them as if you think
they are less than a man, to challenge their manhood – is a bad insult, and is seen
as very disrespectful, particularly among the young. Much of the violence in young
offender institutions results from someone being boyed off: it denotes a lack of
respect, which is bound to trigger it. ‘Boy', when used as an insult, has
connotations of slavery; in the American Deep South, even old men (if they are
black) are still referred to as boys. In prison the word is used only by someone
prepared to act with violence.

However, in another context, it has less
potency and is used almost as a term of endearment. For example, if someone were to
say, ‘Clean my cell, you fucking boy,' this would be very insulting, but if they
said, ‘Me and you is
bredrins
, you're my boy,' it wouldn't be a
put-down. As with a lot of slang, context is everything.

To be described as a
bread
in prison or criminal circles means that you are a bit of
a violent maniac (rhyming slang: bread and butter = nutter.) If a prisoner is having
trouble getting their money or drugs from debtors, or someone is threatening them,
it's handy to have a friend or associate who is ‘a bit of bread' to call in to help
them out.

See
Crank
,
Radio
Rental

Anyone who hangs around the screws or
works for them as a tea boy is known as a
brown tongue
, which means
that they have been metaphorically licking the system's arse. Brown tongues are
usually ostracized by the rest of the prison population and can become targets of
violence for fraternizing with the enemy. Sucking up can also be known as
‘brown-nosing', as the nose of the toady will be stuck firmly into the backside of
the authorities.

A
bubble
is a Greek
person or person of Greek origin (rhyming slang: bubble and squeak = Greek), as in
‘I sold it to some bubble firm over in North London'. Bubble and squeak is a dish
made with leftover potatoes and cabbage, which are fried up, and is often served as
breakfast; the name comes from the noises the ingredients make when they are put
into a hot pan.