INSIDE OUT: GERRY WALLACE TALKS ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES INSIDE THE UK PRISON SYSTEM BY JULIA O’SHAUGHNESSY copyright: tribaljournalist@ymail.com
THE INSIDE OUT
Attracting passionate debate from the government and public alike are the conditions, culture and effectiveness of UK Prisons. Ex-offender Gerry Wallace has just finished two prison sentences for violence and explains why the Prisons don’t work or do they?
first night they’ll throw you in a cell with a big gay black rapist.
The conditions and culture of offender management in this country is always a hot topic for debate or TV dramas.
One night around 10pm there was a horrible smell of fire. A kid had wrapped himself in sheets, set fire to himself and killed himself. For weeks all you could smell was burning skin. I couldn’t eat anything, the smell put you off”.
Gerry described the first few hours in prison as the most dangerous hours of a prisoner’s whole sentence. “The first moment they put their foot in jail, they’re in danger. People often try killing themselves on the first night. You couldn’t be honest at the interview and say you were racist, homophobic or something else or on the
Gerry worked as a door supervisor and was unable to be placed in his local prison due to friendships with prison staff. He was placed in HMP Dartmoor first. “Dartmoor, gets prisoners from all over the country. They take the prisoners no-one else will take. It’s a punishment prison. I went to use the phone on my first day
and a huge guy was waiting for me to get off. I started talking to my son and he came back. He said, ‘It’s my phone, get off it’. I went to hit him in the face with the phone, but missed because the cable was too short. We started fighting and it got split up when I started biting his face. After that, he spoke to me, but he was a bully and used to go take stuff off the other prisoners. He tried bullying a scouse kid. He hit him in the head with a plate. Somehow, his arms ended up through the stairs and I booted him. It broke his arm”. Although Gerry appears to be able to handle and defend himself there were times he felt vulnerable. “There’s hun-
A Wing, Wakefield Prison.
dreds of people, but prison’s the loneliest place on earth. I’ve got tattoos of my favourite football team, Leeds United, all over me. When I got put in Salford for a few days I didn’t come out of my cell. On association I just stood at my cell door I didn’t go to the showers and I washed in my cell. Some prisoners thought another one was a rapist. They got him in the shower and a group of them slashed him everywhere, and I mean EVERYWHERE. I saw him come stumbling out of the showers, all open. The blood was horrific. It ended up the guy wasn’t a rapist”. Nine stone, 5ft 2” Gerry was placed in HMP Bristol for the
tion and saw a bloke in his mid first eight weeks of his second sentence. “They were psycho’s twenties getting raped. Two and lifers. One guy I shared were holding this guy down and another ‘bumming’ him. with was really posh; he killed his Mum and Dad for wantThe prison officers weren’t walking on the landings. They ing to take him to America. He stayed in the office”. The rapist killed them and chopped them into bits. In was later Violent behaviour is reported the cell next to me was a increased in prison and arrested. member of the Russian MaAfter being put in prison for a fia. He was one of the biggest violent offence it seemed unbeblokes I’d ever seen; 7ft tall lievable that Gerry’s violence and built like a brick WC. He was inside for torturing people. has increased and not deHe used to walk into the dinner creased. hall in leopard-skinned thongs. “It’s survival of the fittest. I felt No-one ever said anything to at any time my time could be his face”. up? Someone tried to use boil“One night, I heard a commo-
ing water and sugar on me. He was used to self-harming him-
self everywhere, so he wasn’t bothered if people cut him in a fight, even his face. If you don’t like to be made a **** then you have to fight. Prison makes some people more violent. It’s the bullying, which is why most people are there in the first place. To survive you have to fight, you have to let other prisoners know you’re not a mug, otherwise word will get round and it’s ‘Merry Christmas’, everyone will have go”. Gerry had been convicted twice of violent offences against women, both occasions he was drunk and high on drugs. He said, “I’m only violent when I’m drunk, when I’m sober I’m a nice guy. That makes it hard to follow through when someone tries to take you for a mug. When you’ve got to do something horrible, you can’t think about it, you’ve just got to do it. There’s a minority like me who stand up for themselves, but most don’t come out of their cells and they don’t borrow stuff”. ‘Borrowing stuff ‘ appears to be the cause of a lot of infighting in prison. ‘Being mugged off’, as they call it, and doing noth-
“Like the Shawshank Redemption, “First you hate the walls and then you rely on them”. Dartmoor, they didn’t really ing about it, encourages other search them properly or check inmates to consider the victim fair game. “Phil was in for dan- they had proper ID. Birds would hide it in their knickers gerous driving, he killed three and bra. One bloke had loads people in a car accident and of smack up his bum and he got five years. He appealed overdosed. Prisoners found and another two years were him and robbed added to his senPrison seems to his bum when tence. Other than that he’d never reduce inmates they found he was dead and took been in trouble to the level of a his stuff. I wasn’t and never committed a crime. pack of gorillas shocked they’re not in prison for He was always being nice people having his bacci after all”. stolen or being bullied. Sometimes the things that are stolen or borrowed are worth more than a pack of tobacco and have far more serious consequences. “It was easy to get smack in
Prison seems to reduce the inmates to the level of a pack of gorillas. Interviewing Gerry is similar to a wildlife documentary. Studying the habits of the greater spotted criminal. What leads everyday people to act this way? “I’ve been away for five years, lost everything, I had a nice house and nice things, a nice job, a family, my son to go to jail. Who do you blame, how can I blame anybody, but myself?“ Then his tone took a subtle shift from using I to you. A distancing technique, which also showed how Gerry had coped, and perhaps how/why he did some of the terrible things on
the inside he then described. “You’ve got to make best of it – it’s your home. You’re in there, you know what’s good/ bad. You’ve got your meals, don’t have to do anything for yourself. You don’t get in debt, it can be a good laugh. It’s like the film, Shawshank Redemption, talking about the walls, ‘first you hate them and then you rely on them’.
they don’t work they’re given £2.50 a week. The prisons say this is to ensure equality amongst the prisoners. If all the inmates are earning a similar wage it prevents bullying or an ‘us and them’ culture between those with more and those with less. Gerry explained how he feels prisoners are coping with the increases in food, toiletries and tobacco products.
A large problem in the prisons is contraband, drugs, alcohol, mobiles, but some feel the low wages are to blame. At HMP Kirk Levington the average prisoner gets £10 a week. If
Cleaning duty is from 7.30am till 7pm for £1.43 a day”. At Doncaster I worked on light assembly. We made security lights. They sell for £9.99, but we got £10 a week, working 8 hours a day. If you don’t work, they nick you. Then they put you on basic – you’re in a cell, no T.V., no kettle, you get out for a shower, but the other 23hrs you’re on lock up. You can be on basic for months”. A representative from Exeter Prison confirmed, “If a prisoner refuses to work privileges are removed for a maximum of 28 days, but it is mainly used for 14 days as after 28 days it’s been proved to have no effect. After 28 days if a prisoner’s behaviour warrants continuation then the prisoner would be put on a Governor’s Review for further consideration and decision”.
‘Inmates have more in here than they do on the outside’ You don’t want to know anything about outside world. You’re watching Eastenders or the news and life outside goes on, but your life’s stopped. Birthdays don’t matter, Christmas don’t matter. You’re counting years/months and days and that’s all you do is count. Life’s just stopped. You don’t feel like you’re getting anywhere”.
work you hard.
“There’s nothing to do. You tend to just sit and smoke all day. DHL have got the food contract for the canteen and toiletries, but the government [the National Offender’s Management service] controls the pricing. There’s been a 150% increase. For example Imperial roll on deodorant went from 30p – 80p. Everyone has to rely on his or her families for money. If you’ve got a job they
To ‘get by’ inmates make Hooch. Gerry described how he made the extra money he felt he needed, “You buy a litre of orange, put loads of bread in it, put it in hot water all night. It ferments, and then you can distill it and make moonshine. In a five-litre container, you put in four litres of fruit juice. Get loads of bread; make it wet and squeeze in marmite. Put sugar in, leave it, the more sugar the better. Leave it for 5 days or so. I was thinking of
drink all the time, but hooch is disgusting. Once you’ve got the cartons of fruit juice you have to distil. A cut off stereo lead a pair of tweezers fastened to the lead heats the alcohol and boils. It tastes like paint stripper. You can always tell who’s got hooch on the go, in the mornings, there’s condensation all over the cell. I saw some right punch ups on that stuff”. He laughs. “You can sell Hooch for £10 a litre. You find a ‘divvy’ to keep it in their cell, so they get the blame if they’re caught. Then you can smoke, buy toiletries or get a mobile”.
Prison Hooch sells for £10 a litre.
Drugs trade of £100m every year
According to the Daily Mail, ‘A former head of drug treatment policy at NOMS said drugs worth over £100million are traded inside UK prisons each year’. Gerry confirmed some inmates prefer to deal in drugs, “There are more drugs in there than out here. You can tell the Dr, I’m taking this, this and this and they give you the methodone or an alternative. They’ve got a duty of care to give it to you. People sue for having to go cold turkey or not getting looked after. Although surviving eight prisons and two sentences Gerry doesn’t want to go back inside and described why. “If I do anything now it’ll be hard to get out, with my history I’ll get an IPP or a life sentence”. Currently 6,500 prisoners are serving an Indeterminate Sentence for Public Protection or IPP. Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke acknowledged recently that only 6% of that figure has ever been released. Gerry admitted he was scared of being given an IPP, “They’re
being given out for charges including GBH [grevious bodily harm], weapons or extreme violence and threats to kill. aren’t enough Probation Officer to do the courses and you can’t get out until you have done the courses. So they end up serving much longer than they should. It’s a good sentence for some. If they’re bad then they’re just bad. One guy I knew, Ryan, got a three year IPP sentence when he was 17 years old. He was in HMP Moorelands, had been in four years with still no clue when he was getting out. He ended up using drugs in prison and owed a lot of money. Moorelands is open at night, so he broke into a local shop and ended up beating the shopkeeper half to death. He’ll end up doing 10-15 years. None of the courses have worked to stop him reoffending. The courses offered are being reduced in frequency and time. The Enhanced Thinking Skills course had been four days a week for three months, but is now ful-time for three weeks. CALM, Controlling Anger and Learning to Manage is reduced to a 3-6 week course. They mostly involve role play about football violence. They make you think at the time, but it’s rubbish. In the long-term it doesn’t work at all. Gerry says although he has been convicted of violent offences he feels he’s, “Not really like that”. When asked what he feels would stop people reoffending he said, “Lots of people get silly little sentences which they would do often. Make the sentences longer, make them harder. No T.V’s, work them hard everyday, no table tennis or pool tables. The only contact with the outside world would be through letters and occasional phonecalls. Now they get their own pillow, playstation and DVD player. They’ve got more in prison than they have on the outside”.
The public are generally under the impression that rehabilitation is part of the role prison should play. Gerry disagree’s, “Kirk Levington’s an open prison. Some prisoners were doing armed robberies in post offices on their town visits. On community work, one lad ripped off a lot of old people. They put him working on shop mobility and he robbed loads of the old people who were too embarrassed to come forward and report him. P He was a smack head and nothing but a scum bag. He pretended to help old people with their cash cards and then robbed them. Some of the Category D prisons are open prisons which means inmates are given short periods of unsupervised time in the community. “Prisoners used to run off to commit crime. First they get
escorted and then they’re off on their own. A murderer from HMP Armley legged it, he was away for 15 hours. God knows what he got up to”.
gonna get recalled for being late to an appointment? I don’t feel rehabilitated the five years have just killed me off. I can’t do it again, not another day locked up. Talking to lads, saying ‘You’re forty and you’re in jail how In every jail we’ve got to do ed- sad’s that’. ucation, but it’s a joke. Maths and English level 1 or 2 is com- You’re in with twenty year olds that pulsory and the qualifications keep getting short sentences, they’re don’t mean anything when you in and out all the time. The place is come out. You can’t go to a job full of lunatics that don’t give a ***. interview saying you passed Having to ask your friends and family English in jail! Whetherby offor money, you can’t provide for your fers a qualification for a fork lift son, the way the screws talk to you, licence, but everyone locally the food, it’s the worst experience knows it’s a jail qualification as ever and if you’ve got six months to they don’t train civilians there. die, you’ll just rot in jail. Coming out is scary; starting You’ve got to want to again, being out in the big wide change. If you’re not world. You’ve got to retrain yourself to think about cars sick of going to jail then or dog muck. You walk along you’re not going to stop and step right in it, because you’re not used to seeing it. offending. There’s always questions Following these interviews Gerry going through your mind. Am Wallace disappeared. I gonna do it this time? Am I