The Good Prison Guide - I've done more Porridge than Goldilocks - and now I'm going to tell you all about it. Charles Bronson
if you were living in a town with 74,000 other occupants, the size of the current prison population? You can’t tell me that there wouldn’t be some sort of crime committed against some individuals, yet in prison all these crimes against individuals are overlooked or brushed under the carpet. Police should be brought in to man the prisons and you should outlaw drug-users by pulling them out and putting them into drying-out institutions on an island somewhere where they can’t get drugs.
The whole prison system has gone tits up and needs an overhaul, just as the prison system was shaken up in the early 1800s when over 50 new prisons were built in England The same should happen now … a shake-up! New systems need to be brought in; the old regime has to go.
The rehabilitative process in our so-called modern-day penal system is a complete failure. Until you know what the real deal is in prison then you cannot begin to understand how it is failing every citizen in this country. Forget the humiliation of prison, forget about the stigma of having your name in the newspapers, start to think about how a whole community has to start surviving the new-found agony of isolation and brutality of prison life.
The Good Prison Guide is about surviving in prison. Just as there are rules in every society, there are written and unwritten rules in any prison. Just as stable behaviour is expected of your peers out there in Civvy Street, so it is expected of prison inmates; even though we are in an unstable and volatile environment, we are expected to remain stable. One minute you can be standing waiting in the dinner queue, and the next minute someone has the top of their head sliced off with a steel dinner tray! In prison, that’s normal and no one would bat an eyelid. Out in ‘civilised’ society where you are, it would involve trauma teams being sent out to help everyone get over the shock! In prison, when that happens, you are banged up in your cell.
What is and what is not acceptable behaviour? I define acceptable behaviour as that which is deemed acceptable by the majority. A tribe of cannibals finds it easy to indulge in the consumption of human flesh, but when those who are revolted by such acts outnumber the rest of the tribe, then it becomes unacceptable. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to eat human flesh. Look at those people who survived that plane crash; they survived for months by eating the flesh of their dead fellow travellers. Suddenly, the rules had changed, and suddenly the survival instinct kicked in and suddenly it was all right to do what was once considered taboo.
Just as the survivors of the plane crash broke the rules that control society, so the public breaks rules every day. So long as you see it as a means of survival, then you will do it; you will break the speed limit while driving your car if you’re late for an appointment, and just as you are not perfect then it also applies to everyone else. Yet you want everyone else to be perfect and adhere to the rules. A speeding motorist doesn’t care about others, yet if anyone was to go speeding along the road they live on … see what I mean? There is not a person living who can say that they have never done or thought about doing something that breaks the rules of society.
The consequence of breaching these rules means someone wants retribution. In a modern society, the way to exact retribution is to have someone sit in judgment and/or mediate. Before the government came along and appointed judges it was up to the village elders or the tribal council to resolve such matters. Their decision was final – no appeals, no nothing.
In 1215, King John introduced the Magna Carta, paving the way as a sort of Bill of Rights for everyone. You had the right to remain silent, and it couldn’t be held against you, but now that right has been changed. Now, if you remain silent and don’t say anything that you later rely on in an open court, then it can harm your defence.
Courts were set up to dispense justice without fear or favour; equal rights for all. No matter who you were, there was a prison just for you. A nice warm dungeon, a homely little fortress beneath the ground or a nice big tower for the well-to-do. Whatever your station in life, there was some place exclusively to lock you up in. And if that wasn’t enough, then they could have you breaking up rocks or pushing a giant grinding wheel around all day long.
Prisons were never designed to assert a rehabilitative influence; this came about when prison reformists meddled and tinkered with the inner machinations of prison life. In order for reform to work, you need commitment from those involved. The system is failing miserably!
Tell me this – how can someone be diagnosed as being mentally ill just because they are a paedophile or sex attacker? What about speeding motorists, drink-drivers, litter louts, burglars and the like? Why is it that people working within the professions have a soft spot for convicted paedophiles and rapists? Suddenly, these academics are all experts in how to treat a convicted sex attacker, but what about the lowly burglar who has been reduced to the status of a convicted crook?
You don’t find many burglars in Broadmoor or Ashworth, I can tell you. The wards are full of sexual deviants, very few are like me. That is why prison cannot work; already, as a prisoner, you are discriminated against. You get out of prison and anyone can call you an ex-con, but dare to call someone a ‘Paki’ and you’re in for it. ‘Paki’ used to be the shortened word for anyone from Pakistan, but it became bastardised by academics and was turned into something derogatory.
It’s the same with the prison stigma; society has been brainwashed into thinking that ex-cons have a disease. The only difference between ex-cons and most of the population is that ex-cons have been caught and convicted! So why should they be discriminated against?
We’ve moved on from prisons being places of incarceration to being places of pain and suffering. In medieval times, such places could be handled by most who were thrown into them. A warm place to sleep and be shielded from the elements was often considered to be a sanctuary. You could even have your own servants at your beck and call as well as having your family stay with you. But look at prison now. You’ve got to be doing life just to qualify to have a budgie in your cell! Things have gone from bad to worse. Why shouldn’t a prisoner be allowed conjugal visits or have a family house within the confines of a prison wall? They allowed it in this country hundreds of years ago. The charter for Human Rights states that a man is allowed to found (start) a family … you cannot found a family from behind bars!
People are used to the home comforts of TV and video, dishwashers, mobile phones, video links, soft furnishings, Playstations, DVD players and the like. Take all of that away from them and sling them into a concrete cell and see how easy it is to break a man’s resolve.
Modern man is supposed to have found himself, found his femininity, as the namby-pamby brigade would have you believe. Should that be the case then you will understand how such an austere place as Strangeways Prison can cause such an extreme state of mental turmoil. Yet people are expected to get through it all and come out as reformed characters after guarding their arses for two or three years or having to suck dick to feed their addictions in order to earn a £5 bag of smack.
Prisons are awash with pretenders, full of what I call ‘charvas’ and wannabes! But when they are alone in their cells and they’ve just had a ‘Fuck off out of my life’ letter from their missus, well … that’s when you can see what prison does to a man.
I am for making prisons obsolete … easy for me to say, but I bet a lot of free people would say that, too. I know what a lot of others in the ‘hang ’em’ brigade would say, too – they say that you can’t have lethal criminals walking the streets and that society needs protecting from them. This is true, people do need protecting from all these mentally ill people, and why can’t they be regarded as mentally ill, I ask?
Perhaps not in my lifetime, but eventually, there will be fewer and fewer prisons with more and more centres for the therapeutic treatment of offenders. Offending, you see, is a state of mind … an illness. Prisons are no answer to what is needed but, in the meantime, we have to tolerate such places and, while we have to, we may as well make them into better places.
I hope that this book goes some way to helping reform how prisons are run and how they are set out and how they treat people. Oh, I forgot to say that the cure for paedophiles is to hang them up by their balls for an hour and then see if the re-offend. Rapists would have the same punishment and on a second conviction would have surgical removal of their tackle … without anaesthetic!