Episode 28 - Psychos + Powercuts

It's the Wild West of mayhem, crammed in cells are lunatics and psychos, paedophiles and rapists, murderers, drug addicts and violent men.

During the three and a half years I was in prison I wrote over a million words by hand. Tales From The Jails is a contemporaneous account of my life, and attempts to thrive rather than merely survive, whilst incarcerated.

Most names have been changed. The events have not.

This is a Jekyll & Pride production.

Producer: Trevessa Newton

Title Music taken from The Confession, on the album Crimes Against Poetry (written and performed by The Shadow Poet, produced by Lance Thomas)

Copyright Jekyll & Pride Ltd 2025

@jekyllandpride2023
@theshadowpoettsp

Transcript

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Episode 28 Psychos Powercuts. One has to get used to the culture of nothing gets done, nothing is fair and almost everything is too much trouble for the staff. Ironically, the old adage applies, he who shouts loudest stands more chance of receiving some form of favour. However, if your face does not fit, you're not one of the faves or popular, or you're intimidating with a reputation, then you're punished at best and shipped out at worst. Rehabilitation does not exist. And anybody peddling it is being disingenuous. Many inmates are locked behind the door for an average of 23 hours a day, and worse, few have any contact with the outside world. Joe Wicks would have trouble keeping motivated under these conditions. Here, and in most prisons across the country, it's lawless, unsafe, and the prison and the service providers unfortunately are not fit for purpose. Many of us have to navigate our way through and around a jungle full of vicious wild animals. Think or compare it to snakes, crocodiles, lions, tigers, and hyenas. There's lots of hyenas. There's vultures, rats, wild cats, and wolves. There's as many steel doors and steel bars as there are trees in an acre of forest, and the concrete is akin to the dense undergrowth that you cannot hack through. The mood of any officers is varying as the weather on any given day, and you can never predict it. Yesterday, Sunday, was one of those days. The officer's mood dictates whether I or any of us will be released from our cell for what could be considered fair, healthy, and normal recreation, or just to use the telephone. If our lifeline to the outside world is usually our loved ones, then why would you make matters worse? Or inflame our problems and heartaches? Imagine the importance of keeping in contact regularly if you have children or elderly parents. On Saturday, our power went off again. Big Reeve and I are losing count, it's so regular. Work today didn't finish until 2.45, although I was off for a visit for a couple of hours in the afternoon. I landed back on the wing at 4.30, on a high, but a tailspin from seeing T to being one of the last lads to be locked up. Every weekend I say goodnight to T at 4.30 in the afternoon. Evening meal is usually about 4:00 PM and lads are unlocked for that, a landing at a time, although it's straight back to your pad to eat on your bunk. I swerve the food, but use the phone instead. Big Reeve and I were just settling down like the odd couple to watch the big movie on the little monitor, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It sounds ridiculous, but the options were limited, when pop, or should I say click, the power went. It was 7.43. Everything blew in the cell and across the wing. It's normally as a result of one of the lads hot wiring to charge a mobile phone. No electricity, no lights, no TV, and no kettle. And if that wasn't bad enough, I'd left my wind up radio in work. The wing kicked off and mayhem became the soundtrack from that point on. It was still light outside so I could read and write for a couple of hours, but then it's darkness and only listening. Sunday morning, I was awoken at 4.30 by the squalling seagulls in a frenzy. We were up at dawn and couldn't make a hot drink. I had to pester an officer who was on landing patrol to be unlocked for my over 45's gym. It is difficult to stand at the slit in the door, trying to get unlocked. I'm 51, no trouble, polite. And all I wanted to do was go to the gym and ring T and my daughter. It's a big week, they're off, all the family is off to London for my daughter's graduation. It's frustrating and everything is made more difficult for us. It's a humiliating experience trying to be unlocked. Some officers, especially on the Sunday, love to make us squirm and suffer. Playing with us by ignoring us or lame shouts like, maybe later. I fear some officers enjoy the power and control. I remind myself in these moments to be grateful for what I do have and not what I do not. It wasn't so long ago I was writing letters on prison paper and phone calls with the odd two minutes every couple of days. Men have walked the same steps as me for over 150 years in here. I'm lucky I can drift away on top bunk with thoughts of T. I cannot imagine my life without her, without the love we share for each other. Love nourishes me as much as it feels like a comfort blanket at times. The 27th of the seventh, 2016. Sometimes it is easy to describe prison life, especially the brutality or the lip service the prison service churns out. An easy analogy of prison would be, it's like a spaghetti western, and good people are bullied, intimidated, or killed more than the bad guys. With time on my hands and a pen to write, I capture, experience and observe. Today, I wonder what is the profile of a general or normal inmate. I often think, what are the similarities between the pack or a large group compared to my own team of one? Swathes of the prison population are career criminals, the type who don't know or consider anything differently. The number one crime, bearing in mind it's Liverpool, is drugs and trials can include as many as 20 to 30 people all scattered around the country on varying charges, from courier roles to trustee lieutenants and enforcers to number one. An observation is that many guys have limited education. They can barely read or write, although they are much better with numbers and weights. Not the gym sort, but grams, ounces, kilos, and tonnes of class A or Class B drugs. Drugs' smaller sibling, smuggling people, tobacco and booze, that's growing too, from the amount on remand, trials or already convicted. Guys are receiving 10 years for smuggling in lorry loads of tobacco and cigarettes. Customs, ie VAT, they play hardball with these guys and they receive a POCA too. That's another book I've read from cover to cover. Jeremy, my solicitor laughed. I told him it was the latest version to which he commented, it's already out of date. Most inmates have never held down a regular job. Sadly, stability is not high on these lad's CVs. Most are from broken homes, have broken lives and indulged too much or addicted to drink and drugs and greed. I heard a guy boasting the other day outside the window where I ironed the court shirts. He was sat amongst his pack and thought nothing of relaying the job he used to do. Break-ins with tie ups. Threatening rich people with severe violence in front of their children. They were rich and I was poor. I wanted what they had,or some of it, and I couldn't earn that type of money any other way. There was no hint of regret or remorse in his voice. It was bragging rights rather than regrets. Ironically, here I was ironing a shirt for a guy who was probably guilty but was hoping for a right result. It does blur the mind, these blurred lines I experience daily. I find I'm in a unique position somehow trying desperately to blend into the background, but finding I'm regularly in the foreground. My independence stands out, my voice, my teeth, and my general idiosyncrasies, all of which have the habits of drawing attention to myself. Last week in the gym, this small out of shape guy casually came over to me and P. Before we knew it, he was telling us that he was in for a 14. Break-ins again, jewellers this time. Next thing, he's blurting out as we train, I was only using the knife to scare her, but she put her hands up to protect herself. I cut the artery, I couldn't help it. She got loads of sympathy for that on the trial. She said she was terrified to work again. What a fucking slut. Inside, I wanted to say fuck off. But I've learned to be more savvy and move away politely. However, he decided to follow us. Yeah, we did a string of them across the region, used hot irons on their backs to force them to tell us where the gear was. We were doing fucking great until we got caught, fucking DNA on a cigarette butt. 14 years for a bit of fucking DNA. A complete psycho and the type you try to avoid in prison, let alone outside in the real world. A proper nasty piece of work and representative of the guys in here who don't flinch at resorting to extreme violence to acquire the result they burst through your doors for. The phrase that the lads use regularly is thrown under the bus. It's used a lot. Fellow inmates live by this old school jail term that underpins no snitching and I have written numerous times, that is the number one rule not to break. However, it seems I also have a tendency to highlight the hypocrisy that surrounds it. I've witnessed first hand the times certain undesirables cross that line and it goes unpunished. It's hypocritically acceptable. It's almost certainly unchallenged. Well, that's if you're one of the boys. Inmates will blow you up or throw a fellow inmate under the bus for the most trivial of things. From winning favour to removing somebody who is popular or a threat. The horrible snide ones think nothing of undermining or discrediting a person if they think it makes them look better. I'm surmising, this is all stuff that links back to the childhood years. Life in the outside world is often termed as the rat race, but in here it's that, but on steroids. Selfishness runs through almost every single person within the grounds of the prison walls. Never a day goes by when I am not considerate, polite, normally in good, positive spirits. In the real world those qualities you would like to think would be well received. However, in here at best, it's a lukewarm reception. Happiness is not welcomed either. Pain and suffering is enjoyed more. Guys cannot resist prodding for responses and reactions, and never a day goes by when I do not dance that tango. Without trying, I've been the topic of the workplace, the wing and the rest of the prison, on frequent occasions. From my dramatic entrance with big time headlines to the kitchen episode and saga, to the five thousand pound order I put into the bedding stores to replenish my workstation. The feedback range from who the fuck, to is he having a laugh? He's not back in business. He's in prison. It spread through the whole place like a bushfire fuelled with accelerant, staff and inmates. I find it amusing how doing my job right ends up being ridiculed. The easiest way to deal with it is to roll with the laughs. Hands open like a numpty, rather than dig in trying to justify it. When in doubt, wear the numpty hat. Although I did find myself saying a number of times, that was only for the first half of the order. The lads loved that shout, especially when it rolled off my tongue. I find the longer I'm here, the more topics to observe and write about appear. Some reappear too. I write to T almost every day. Pages at a time that reflect my love for her. I keep myself super busy and that keeps me distracted from dwelling on the cruel separation from her and my family. Two of the topics that never ceased to provide eye watering content on a regular basis are M and M. The first group are feared and loathed in society and carry the heaviest of sentences. Two inmates I see and talk to daily also happen to be two of the nicest guys in here. Both committed horrific crimes that would shock the toughest. Interestingly, both said the same thing. Two minutes of madness. I find them both caring and pleasant individuals, easy to talk to and never displaying any sense of violence other than their own reference to the two minutes of madness. However, I've highlighted previously on the topic of M number two. I was caught up in the middle of a bunch of guys, kitchen talk when everyone is bored. I was making a coffee, not even in the conversation. Guys between 26 and 50, talking about getting off to a whole variety of stimulating factors and methods of enjoying a good wank in prison. A sort of top 10, best off sort of thing. It was crude, base and weird, and I was the only one squirming and not laughing. For me, I keep it simple. Keep your personal stuff private or your private stuff personal. The guys not for the first time seem to have no problem asking their wives or partners to send them porn films or mags if that's not successful. Worse than that, they have no off switch when it comes to revealing intimate details about their partner. I'm not a prude, but I don't get it. Why would you, how could you? How would their partner feel about prisoners, fellas in Walton hearing about their most personal and intimate details from the bathroom to the bedroom. They covered a lot of unpleasant ground in the space of making a coffee, and when I'm around, they can't resist trying to draw me in. My squirm face was an easy target and another one of those long tangos. Each prisoner, more than anywhere else I've experienced, wants to be right, and they often don't have any off switch in trying to prove it. Proving yourself amongst the rest of the lads is high on the list of reoccurring topics too. It's unavoidable. If you're not defending yourself, then you're being bullied. The posters and leaflets scattered around the prison on bullying and decency and rehabilitation, are just government and quangos, delivering policies, printing words, and ticking boxes on an official level. Whilst in reality it's the Wild West of mayhem, crammed in cells are lunatics and psychos, paedophiles and rapists, murderers, drug dealers, and violent men, who ejaculate during and after inflicting pain and horror. Next time it's sex in prison.