A Rusty Gun

NOEL ‘RAZOR’ SMITH

VIKING
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

Preface: The Rise and Fall of the Grendon Experiment?

  1. Getting There

  2. Second Thoughts

  3. In the Hot Seat

  4. House of Pain

  5. A Different Planet

  6. Bug-eyed Bob

  7. The Vote

  8. Carrot Top

  9. Assessment

10. The Fight

11. Lights Out

12. Leah

13. Kevin the Nazi

14. Bad Memories

15. Hate-’em-all Harry

16. Family Day

17. Scaredy Cat

18. The Wall

19. Addiction

20. Vice-chair

21. Working for the Man

22. Expectations

23. Work

24. A Loaded Question

25. Trouble in Paradise

26. Puce Papers

27. Big Don

28. The Other Side

29. Biff and the Escape That Never Was

30. Diamond Geezers

31. Kicking Off!

32. Last Knockings

33. Last Group

34. The Final Sorry Chapter

Grendon Glossary A Guide to Therapese (and some other stuff)

After Grendon

By the same author

A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun

Raiders

Warrior Kings

This book is dedicated to my son – Joseph Stephen Smith.
May you always walk in sunshine.

And for my parents –
Noel Stephen and Bernadette Mary Smith.
Thank you.

‘I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world.’

Richard II, Act V, William Shakespeare

‘If you ever have occasion to chop a body up in the bath, never saw the arms off first, otherwise the torso will keep spinning as you cut the rest. It makes it awkward.’

Advice from Brian, a Grendon inmate

You can’t con a con.

Prison proverb

A Rusty Gun is based on true events, but all persons appearing in the book have had their names and identifying characteristics changed to protect their privacy.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my friend and agent Will Self for all his hard work on my behalf. Also, my editor, Tony Lacey, for having the patience of a saint. I first signed the contract to supply this book in late 2004, but due to the contents being somewhat ‘controversial’, at least as far as HM Prison System is concerned, I have been unable to complete the manuscript until quite recently. Let’s hope it is worth the wait! So a big thank you for all at Penguin. As usual I would like to thank my family for their support and love during some very trying decades.

And finally, to everyone, inmates and staff, who have shared the Grendon experience since 1962. It’s not something you forget.

Author’s Note

Much has been written and recorded about HMP Grendon in its two-score plus years of existence. There have been various newspaper and magazine articles, half a dozen television documentaries, numerous official reports and pamphlets on the workings of this unique prison, and fourteen published books. Former governors have explained their approach to running Grendon from the top, HM Chief Inspectors of Prisons have reported on the conditions and regime they found there, criminologists and psychiatrists have pontificated on the treatment available to the inmate volunteers, and a German ex-bunny girl with a degree in criminology was given access to the prison for a year in order to produce a book about it. And, while each one of these publications no doubt adds something to the constant and ongoing debate about criminal rehabilitation and the psychology of persistent offenders, there seem to have been very few words written by the men who have passed through the Grendon experiment themselves. As far as I can ascertain, not one word about Grendon has ever been commercially published by an ex-inmate. Governors, therapists, screws, facilitators, psychiatrists and criminologists can come and go at Grendon, but the prisoners themselves are a constant. The prisoners who volunteer for Grendon live the regime twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and their lives, problems, phobias and offending history make up the fuel that drives the engine of this therapeutic machine. For the professionals HMP Grendon is work, but for us, the people down at the sharp end with a desire to change our lives and a long history of failing, Grendon is usually our final shot of red-eye in the last-chance saloon. So, with A Rusty Gun, I hope to redress the balance slightly.

Over a period of almost five years I witnessed first-hand and participated in the therapeutic regime at Grendon. As a Grendon volunteer I was one of the men of violence, with a long criminal record, looking for answers and possibly a way to change my entrenched criminal thinking and behaviours. At daily group therapy sessions and in psychodrama I heard the oft-times horrific life stories of my fellow offenders. I have been a violent criminal for most of my life but even I was shocked by some of the things I heard. I have come to realize that the world can be a cruel and terrifying place for some people. For this reason I have changed the names of the people featured in this book. Regrettably, all of the case details are as accurate as I heard them.

Preface: The Rise and Fall of the Grendon Experiment?

Her Majesty’s Prison Grendon is a category B male prison near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire which holds up to 244 prisoners. The prisoners are, on the whole, long-term violent recidivists who have volunteered to enter the jail’s therapeutic regime and take part in daily group therapy sessions with the aim of searching for genuine rehabilitation. Grendon volunteers have all been diagnosed as suffering from various anti-social personality disorders, or psychopathy. To put it simply, an anti-social personality disorder can be described as a set of behaviours that, when repeated, will harm the perpetrator and others – i.e. serious criminal acts. Before volunteering for Grendon, prisoners must be prepared to sign an agreement to refrain from violence, drug-taking and sex, and forgo any chance of parole or early release for the duration of their therapy. The therapy at Grendon is based on the neo-Freudian concept of group therapy developed in Britain in the 1930s and now used widely around the world. Grendon operates in a social-democratic framework unheard of in the mainstream prison system, by giving prisoners responsibility for themselves and their actions and a chance to vote on matters that may affect their daily lives. The prison was opened as an experiment over four decades ago and the fact that it is still open and running, despite the many recent changes in penal policy and prison regimes, is a testament to the fact that Grendon actually works. HMP Grendon has the lowest reconviction rates of any comparable category B prison with a largely violent recidivist population.

The ‘Grendon experiment’ is ongoing, but with the tide of public opinion turning towards more punishment for prisoners and less rehabilitation, who knows how much longer it may last? I spent nearly five years at HMP Grendon, from July 2003 until May 2008, and the prison I entered was almost unrecognizable from the prison I left. Prison overcrowding, a Home Office in serious disarray and being spooked and steered by the media, the opening of other, less committed therapeutic units within the prison system, and a governing team with a greater interest in budgets and avoiding publicity than in therapy and rehabilitation, have all combined to drag Grendon back into the mainstream prison system from which it once stood proud and separate. There are plans to build a 600-bed category B prison within the grounds of HMP Grendon, and many believe this will be the death knell of the Grendon experiment. For some in the Home Office and Prison Service this is a prospect to relish because, despite doing exactly what it says on the tin for the past forty-eight years, Grendon has never been everyone’s cup of Darjeeling.

It is an interesting fact that when HMP Grendon opened, in 1962, it was the first jail where inmates were allowed to wear wristwatches. Letting prisoners wear watches was seen as ‘mollycoddling’ by the rest of the prison system and some prison staff and governors believed that this could be setting a ‘dangerous precedent’. Over the next four decades the regime at Grendon was to set many more ‘dangerous precedents’, none of which turned out to be dangerous at all. In 1965 Grendon became the first category B jail to host a football match against a team from outside: a mixed team of Grendon staff and inmates thrashed a team from Stoke Mandeville Hospital, cheered on by a mix of inmates, staff and civilians. In 1969 a pre-release hostel was set up at the prison, which allowed men coming to the end of their sentences to go out to work in the local community. In 1972 staff at Grendon began to use the word ‘Mister’ to promote equality among staff and inmates. In 1990 the practice of issuing psychotropic drugs and night sedation, customary in most prisons, was ended at Grendon. Also in 1990 the whole population of the prison was relocated temporarily to other prisons for six months while electrical repairs were carried out, and then returned to the jail, having been kept together and committed to their therapeutic regime. In 1992 in-cell electricity and televisions were allowed and Family Day visits were initiated for the whole prison, Grendon being the first jail to do so. The central kitchen, standard in every other jail, was scrapped in 1994 in favour of an individual cooking area for each wing, meaning meals are fresh and served hot. Also in 1994 Robert Kilroy-Silk hosted a television debate live from the gymnasium inside the jail, in which thirty Grendon inmates and thirty victims of crime took part, the first live broadcast from a British prison. So HMP Grendon was very much a beacon of innovation among British category B prisons. Add to this the low reconviction rates, and to say that Grendon’s ‘maverick’ reputation irked prison hard-liners in the rest of the prison system would be putting it mildly.

The reason for some prison and Home Office staff’s dislike for Grendon was simple. For decades the majority of British jails operated very harsh and brutal regimes, some even up to the present day. The policy was ‘Stick-’em-and-nick-’em’: if prisoners step out of line give them a good beating and charge them with breaking any prison rule. The dinosaurs among prison staff, some of whom obviously progressed through the ranks to Prison Service HQ, and even the lower reaches of the Home Office, were great believers in heavy discipline when it came to dealing with prisoners. When Grendon opened, the hard-liners predicted that treating convicted criminals with respect and giving them any sort of responsibility would inevitably lead to a breakdown in order and discipline that would end in disaster. They chuckled at the very idea that prisoners would be capable of understanding even the concept of trust. So when Grendon actually started working, on men who, in a lot of cases, the conventional prison system had discarded as violent subversive no-hopers, they began to get a bit worried. It soon became apparent that the rehabilitation of criminal recidivists, that long sought-after holy grail of liberal prison campaigners to which the conventional prison system had been paying no more than lip-service for many decades, was actually viable under the Grendon regime. Not only did Grendon have low reconviction rates but it also had the lowest rate of incident reports. At Grendon there were no riots, stabbings, scaldings, persecution of sex offenders or assaults on staff or inmates – in fact, the prison does not even have a punishment block! So the obvious implication was that the Grendon way might actually be the right way, and the rest of the system was stumbling around in the dark making bad people worse. Of course that was not what the dinosaurs wanted or expected. It is much easier to punch someone in the face and lock them in solitary than it is to sit down with them and try to help sort out their problems. But the staff and inmates at Grendon were a pretty dedicated bunch.

The trouble for the hard-liners was that very early on in its life some important people started to notice that Grendon was working and became interested. In 1963 a Dr Snell presented the first paper on Grendon to the Medico-Legal Society, and in 1970 the first book about the prison – The Frying Pan by Tony Parker – was published to much interest and acclaim. The Grendon Experiment was soon being talked about wherever prison campaigners, criminologists, psychologists, therapists, lawyers, judges, penologists, and anyone interested in the rehabilitation of prisoners, gathered. To this day HMP Grendon plays host to groups of visitors from many countries every year. Law students from America, penologists from Russia, psychologists from Japan, criminologists from Australia – it seems everybody wants to come and study Grendon. So, as Grendon became known worldwide, the British prison system was lumbered with it – a unique prison that actually did the job that every other prison was supposed to do but couldn’t. How bad did that make the rest of our system look? The answer to that question is – pretty bad. You might suppose that the most logical solution to this dilemma would be to go with the model that has been proven to work. To look at the majority of prisons, with their harsh inhumane regimes and their incredibly high rates of violent incidents and reconviction, and then look at Grendon, with the exact opposite, and ask yourself: which is better for society as a whole? Do we want more criminals or fewer? More victims or fewer? It’s obvious, isn’t it? Well, apparently not to those who make prison policy in Britain. It took four decades for the Home Office finally to decide to use what they had witnessed at Grendon in the rest of the system, and even today the process has only just started.

Obviously no prison can be perfect. In 1982 Grendon had its first escape: an A-wing man who was the store’s red-band (trusty) scaled the wall and was at large for five days. And then in 2002, the year before I arrived, Grendon suffered its worst catastrophe: three prisoners from D-wing, two lifers and a determinate (with a fixed release date), cut their way through the fence on the sports field during an exercise period and escaped. They were all recaptured within eighteen hours, but a multiple breakout from a category B prison is about as serious as it can get. Those who had been waiting for Grendon to fail had their patience rewarded. This was the perfect opportunity for the hard-liners to drag this prison, which had been embarrassing them for nearly forty years, back into the fold. Within a few short months of the escape, only the second in Grendon’s history, a new governor, who would change the fabric, regime and part of the ethos of Grendon during his tenure, was installed. It was my misfortune to be at Grendon as most of the things that had made the prison work since its inception were systematically dismantled.

The week the new governor arrived, Grendon was ripped apart in the most destructive search the jail had ever seen. Staff were told to remove every piece of ‘unauthorized’ furniture from the cells, search every inch of the prison for contraband, and send a message to the prisoners that things were going to change from then on. After locking all the inmates in their community rooms, they set to work. When I arrived at Grendon, ‘the Big Search’, as it has become known, was still being talked about by staff and prisoners who witnessed it.

At Grendon inmates had been allowed to decorate and customize their own cells by painting, putting down scraps of carpet and rugs bought cheaply from catalogues. Some men were skilled in woodwork and would make their own cell furnishings – wooden tables, chairs, chess boards, pelmets for their curtains and shelves – out of scrap wood. During the search all of these things were deliberately ripped from the cells and smashed. Under the guise of ‘security’ the wings were stripped of everything that made daily life in Grendon that bit different from other prisons. On each landing there was a decorative tile with the landing’s number embossed on the surface which had been in place since the prison was built, but some bright security screw took a crowbar to these tiles and smashed them out ‘just in case anything was hidden behind them’. So much furniture was broken and so many belongings ruined that the prison had to pay for ten industrial skips to remove the wreckage over the next several weeks. Many old hands, both prisoners and staff, believe that it was after the Big Search that the life started to go out of Grendon, that it started on a downhill slope that could only end in disaster.

Over the next four years the wall came down and dozens of security fences went up, dividing what was once an open-plan prison with a feeling of freedom into a series of gated cages. Prisoners no longer had free access inside the main buildings either. Whereas before you could just ask and be let off your wing to visit other wings or go to the library or education, now prisoners were not allowed to leave the wing without permission from ‘control’. Everybody had to carry photo ID cards and, if they were not prominently displayed, you could get a nicking. Therapy visits, where prisoners could be escorted to see their families in times of emergency, were cancelled, as was ‘The Grendon Roadshow’. The Grendon Roadshow involved a group of prisoners and staff visiting other prisons for a day and explaining what went on inside Grendon and having a Q&A session. These roadshows helped to recruit many men to try the Grendon experience. And while the roadshow did make a brief comeback in 2005, it was short-lived.

During the new regime almost the whole governing team were replaced with more hard-line staff, many recruited from young offenders’ institutes and Special Security Units in other jails where discipline and tight security were the bywords. The governors who came from youth prisons seemed obsessed with petty rules and wanted to run Grendon as though it were a borstal, and those who came from the units brought an obsession with security. In my five years at Grendon I had many dealings with these men, both as part of my various rep jobs and sometimes on a more personal level whenever I was in trouble for my journalism work. Though they pretended that therapy was still at the forefront of the Grendon ethos, I sincerely believe that most of them didn’t give a fuck about it.

When it came right down to it though, the governing team were just civil servants under orders from the Home Office, who seemed to follow the whims of tabloid editors. Or so it appeared to us at the sharp end. As successive New Labour home secretaries jerked their knees and turned prisons and prisoners into a political football that could safely be kicked in any direction that took their fancy and might please the public, Grendon suffered the backlash. The public, or so the headlines would have us believe, didn’t want convicted criminals to be treated with respect or compassion. Human rights? How dare we demand such things! They wanted us hanged, right now! And if not hanged, then certainly locked into cells for the rest of our lives with no hope of ever seeing daylight. In this climate of tabloid-whipped punishment frenzy a prison like Grendon, which openly treated convicted criminals with respect and tried to rehabilitate them through the carrot rather than the stick, could be a massive embarrassment for the Home Office. All it needed was the press to point an accusing finger in Grendon’s direction, maybe a headline about ‘murderers, rapists and robbers’ living it up in a ‘holiday camp jail’, and jobs could easily be lost in the ensuing panic and arse-covering exercise that would inevitably follow – governors’ jobs. So the governing team at Grendon tried to make sure that there were no obvious benefits for inmates that the press could point that finger at. In the process they succeeded in dismantling a good part of what had made Grendon work in the first place. Grendon inmates were no longer given any trust or responsibility. For a prison whose uniqueness was based on precisely that trust and responsibility this was a major shift in policy. We were just category B prisoners in a category B prison. The only difference between Grendon and the dozens of other category B prisons was that we were participating in voluntary therapy. But soon even this distinction was to become blurred.

Another thing that had a major impact on Grendon was the spreading of the therapy ethos to other jails, which should have been a positive move, and would have been if handled right. But the government treated it like another Band-Aid they could stick over the festering wounds of a failing prison system. Many of these therapeutic units in other jails were abused by prisoners who saw them as no more than a stepping stone to recategorization, days out and parole. The units were springing up everywhere and those who ran them knew that, in order to survive, they had to be filled with inmates. So the selection process, which had been such a huge part of keeping the Grendon population stable and going in the right direction, became the first casualty in the rush to get bodies on seats. Instead of a prisoner having to sit several interviews, including one with a psychiatrist, and completing an IQ test to ascertain if he was intelligent enough and genuinely committed to benefit from therapy, entrance to these units became as simple as sticking your name down on an application form. Everyone was welcomed with open arms and this meant that manipulators easily slipped in under the radar. A therapeutic community can only really operate if the environment is safe enough for honesty and challenge, and if the majority of the community commit themselves to change; it needs only a hard-core minority to upset the balance and subvert the process. On occasion this happened on various wings at Grendon, usually around illegal drugs. If a couple of the more dominant characters in a community became compromised, then a percentage of weaker characters would follow, until, pretty soon, there would be safety in numbers and open challenge of the culture would become dangerous – which is exactly how other jails were happy to operate. Luckily, at Grendon, the therapeutic dynamic was so strongly and historically ingrained in the volunteers that it seemed to inspire moral courage in many of the men, and compromise could not go unchallenged for long. The newer therapeutic units had no such history nor a stringent selection process, so they suffered a surfeit of fakers, spoofers and predators, who had no real interest in changing their lives through therapy but only in reefing the system for whatever they could get out of it.

Inevitably, this sudden proliferation of therapeutic units led to a kind of aggressive marketing strategy designed to entice prisoners into therapy, and this was bound to have a knock-on effect on Grendon. In 2001 HMP Dovegate, a privately run category B prison in Staffordshire, opened with space for 200 inmates in its therapeutic units. At that time the number of prisoners who had applied for Grendon and were on the waiting list stood at just under 200, and these men were encouraged to go to Dovegate, which was being touted as the ‘new Grendon’ and had no waiting list. Most of them took up the offer. If Grendon was to survive then it too would have to lower its strict criteria for acceptance of inmates, and by 2005 this is exactly what had happened. In order to compete with other therapeutic units and keep its numbers up, the Grendon entry process was quietly dumbed-down. Gone were the numerous interviews by professionals, the IQ test, and the six-month drug-free period – getting to Grendon was now as simple as expressing a mild interest. Men began arriving at the prison still under the influence of drugs and carrying them secreted about their person and this was no longer cause for them to be refused entry and returned to the sending establishment. Other men arrived with no interest or inclination for therapy but because they had been told by staff in the sending establishment that Grendon was an easy ride to recategorization and parole. Still more came looking for a safe hideout, men who would be seriously assaulted in other prisons for their crimes or for informing on other inmates or running up debts, and Grendon, with its no-violence rule, gave them sanctuary without the shame of going on to a VP (vulnerable prisoners) wing. Some of these men did eventually become interested in the therapeutic process and engaged in changing their lives while they were at Grendon, but many just played along with the process in public and took whatever advantage they could get from the regime. Inevitably, all this had the effect of diluting the ethos of Grendon, which was keenly felt by me and others, including some staff, who had witnessed first-hand the real work that could be done without these distractions.

HMP Grendon has, since its inception, been a prison dedicated to change – change for the better in the worst and most sickeningly unattractive characters imaginable – and at the same time the prison itself has been constantly evolving. Since 2002 this evolution has been shaped by interference from outside influences and subversive elements within. Almost everything that made this prison a success story when compared to the other 140-odd jails in Britain is now being eroded and dismantled. Yet it struggles on, a shadow of what it once was, but still clinging to its original brief to rehabilitate through therapy some of the most dangerous and violent criminal predators society has produced. And despite the many changes that were imposed on Grendon during my time there, there always remained a hard-core of inmates, staff and civilian professionals who firmly believed in the power of the therapeutic process to effect change and genuine rehabilitation in men who had previously been judged untreatable lost causes.

I am proud to say that I was one of the men who benefited from the Grendon experiment. I started my journey as a violent, ignorant man, severely damaged by almost three decades of brutality, perpetrated by me and on me, both inside and outside the prison system, and the story of this journey and how it ended is documented in this book. Is there a future for Grendon? That is debatable. But one thing I do know – there is now a future for me, and many others like me, and Grendon has played a huge part in that.

1. Getting There

HMP Whitemoor

A-wing, Red spur

6 July 2003

HMP Whitemoor is a top-security dispersal jail that holds some of the most dangerous and notorious prisoners in Britain. Murderers, terrorists, robbers, drug barons, rapists and cut-throats of every hue and creed have stalked its unhallowed halls. Though it is the newest of the dispersal prisons, its electronic gates having opened for the first van-load of desperate convicts in 1991, the jail has a reputation for prisoner violence that is unsurpassed in the British prison system. Its short but bloody history is littered with deaths, maimings and serious ‘unrest’ (which is official-speak for rioting). In its first year of operation there were several mini-riots, the first one being over the use of CCTV cameras in the visiting hall. In 1992 a notorious child-killer, whom the press had nicknamed ‘Catweazle’, was murdered by fellow prisoners, choked to death in his cell. In 1994 five IRA prisoners and a well-known London robber escaped from the so-called ‘escape-proof’ Special Security Unit, shooting two prison officers in the process. In 1996 two prisoners stormed the central control centre on D-wing and assaulted several prison officers. They caused thousands of pounds of damage to computers and alarm systems during the eight-hour siege that followed. In 1997 a prisoner, already serving life for murder, retired two prison officers by throwing a pot of boiling fat over them. Add to this the almost daily round of prisoner-on-prisoner stabbings, coshings and beatings, and you can hand-on-heart say that HMP Whitemoor was not a place for the faint-hearted.

By the time I reached Whitemoor, on 4 July 2000, it had quietened down a bit. Many of the prisoners were of a more mature nature and all were serving very long sentences. The average on A-wing was twenty-five years, and most of us were serious and persistent violent offenders who had terrible prison records but were now content to just get on with our bit of bird with minimum fuss. That’s not to say that the prison had become a retirement home for old cons, far from it. Except at this time the stabbings and coshings were more for special occasions rather than daily events.

In July 2003 I was just over four years into a life sentence. I had received my ‘L plates’ (con-speak for a life sentence) not for murder, but for eight counts of bank robbery. The sentence had been automatic as I had fallen foul of the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997, or the ‘two-strike Act’ as it became known, which meant a life sentence for anyone convicted of a second violent offence. I couldn’t really complain as I had a history of violent offences dating back to 1975. Though it did rankle that I had actually been sentenced on my past record, for which I had already served my time once, rather than my present crimes. I had been expecting the judge to throw the book at me. After all, I was a prolific robber who had committed my crimes while on parole from a previous nineteen-year sentence imposed for almost identical offences, but I had been expecting something more along the lines of a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book, not the complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Still, as an old fence of mine used to say, ‘You’ve got to take the shit with the cream’ – and I’d certainly had the cream.

My record, both in and out of prison, is pretty bad. I have fifty-eight previous criminal convictions for armed robbery, possession of firearms, GBH, prison escape, theft, burglary, fraud and deception, car theft, criminal damage and possession of offensive weapons. I started my criminal career at the age of fourteen, and I was then forty-two. My disciplinary record while serving my sentences also left a lot to be desired. I had been done for causing gross personal violence to prison officers, escape, attempted escape, inciting others to riot, assault, being in possession of unauthorized articles and weapons. It would be fair to say that I was not a well-balanced individual. I had become entrenched in a cycle of crime and imprisonment.

Whitemoor was easy for me. The screws rarely gave me any trouble and, due to my previous prison sentences and past deeds, I was one of the boys, a ‘face’. I spent three years just marking time. I no longer involved myself in prison politics, and as I was not a drug user I had no need to get involved in all the bollocks that goes along with that culture. A lot of the violence that occurs in prison is over heroin: either people get themselves into debt and have to be given a beating or a slashing, or dealers fall out with each other and violence is the result of the ensuing power struggle. I have never used heroin, and everyone knew my views on it. I believe heroin did, in less than a decade, what the prison system couldn’t do in 150 years: it destroyed the solidarity among prisoners.

Many of my friends in prison are heroin users. I don’t judge them for it; they made their choice and they live with it. Some of them I would trust with my life. But I wouldn’t trust a single one of them around a bag of tackle.

In con-speak ‘having it’ means being in someone’s company. The people I was having it with in Whitemoor were some of the most infamous prisoners in the system. Men whose crimes and deeds are legendary behind the high walls and razor-wire fences of the British penal system. You have to bear in mind that prison is a completely different world from that in which the straight-goer lives. We have our own language, customs and history. You may remember the year 1987 for the massive storms that swept the country, or for the horrific fire that claimed so many innocent lives at King’s Cross tube station, but in prison history it is remembered as the year that Andy Russell landed a hijacked helicopter on the yard at Gartree top-security prison and flew off with Johnny Kendall and Sid Draper. Perhaps, for you, the abiding memories of 1989 are the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism, but for the denizens of prison it was the fire-bomb exploding in the TV room on A-wing at HMP Albany, causing major damage and almost burning sixty prisoners to death in their cells. Different worlds, different history.

So, though the majority of the straight-going world may not have heard the names or legends of men such as John ‘Shotgun’ Shelley, Greg ‘Houdini’ Crabtree, Vinnie Bradish, Johnny Kendall, Frannie Pope, Charlie Tozer or Staggsy, in the world of prison they are faces. And these, and a few others, were the people I was having it with at Whitemoor. On the whole we were all experienced career criminals who had spent many years making our presence felt, both in and out of prison. In our world there were rules that had to be followed and a code that had to be adhered to. We would not suffer a grass or a nonce to live on the same spur as us, and if one were to slip on undercover, and be found out, he would be ‘tea-bagged’ (left with many perforations) in short order. If the screws tried taking too many liberties they knew we would fight back, either all-out physically or in a war of attrition.

I had lived in this world and followed the code for nearly three decades. But now I was about to take a step that would radically alter my life and make me question and eventually abandon all that I had held as truth. The seed of my search for change had started to germinate during my last period of freedom – 5 August 1997 to 7 August 1998. Though I had been hard at it in my chosen criminal profession of armed robbery, I began to have doubts about my lifestyle. I loved being a criminal, it was a buzz being out there on the sharp end, gun in hand, masked and taking the prize. But suddenly robbing banks was no longer the great game I had once thought it. This feeling didn’t arrive full-blown, but crept up on me insidiously when I wasn’t looking. I was waking up on the morning of a planned robbery feeling anxious and edgy, whereas, in the past, I would have been jumping out of bed with excitement and anticipation. We always referred to our criminal activities as ‘work’, and that’s exactly what it was starting to become for me – a dead-end job. And when you are putting your life and liberty on offer every time you punch in, these kinds of feelings are not good. Robbing banks calls for 100 per cent concentration.

When I was finally arrested in a Flying Squad ambush I guessed that my life might effectively be over and that I should have listened to those nagging doubts. On 24 July 1999 in Court 2 at the Old Bailey, I was sentenced to eight life sentences, plus eighty years concurrent. My tariff was a minimum of eleven years to serve. Three years later my minimum was reduced to eight years by the Court of Appeal. I had always abided by the old adage ‘If you can’t do the time then don’t do the crime’, so I took it on the chin. What other choice did I have? I spent the first two years at HMP Belmarsh as a category A prisoner. And then, once I was downgraded to category B, I was shipped to HMP Whitemoor – a category A prison!

It was while I was at Whitemoor that I received the most devastating news of my life. On 24 October 2001 my youngest son, Joe, was found dead in suspicious circumstances. He was nineteen years old. For a long time I was in free fall, my emotions ranging from grief and black despair to rage and even temporary madness. Joe’s death had a profound effect on me. The security governor at Whitemoor refused me permission to attend my son’s funeral. I was told that he could not ‘risk’ the safety of his staff to escort me outside the prison. Ironically though, he allowed me to go to the Chapel of Rest – double-cuffed, with a four-screw escort and shadowed by the police. I found out later I was allowed that only because it was the minimum required by law. In the aftermath of Joe’s death I thought a lot about my own wasted life. Uncomfortably, I began to recognize the victims I had left in my destructive wake. Not least of which were my children. It was time for me to grow up. Six months after my beautiful son was laid to rest I applied for Grendon.

HMP Grendon, set in the gently rolling landscape of Buckinghamshire, is unique among the 149 prisons in Britain. Its regime is therapy-based, and it has the lowest reconviction rate of any British prison. Opened in 1962, Grendon sprang from an experiment in ‘democratic living’ called Q Camp. In 1936 Q Camp in Essex opened for a small group of male offenders aged between sixteen and twenty-five, who had moderate behavioural problems. The camp aimed to study and treat their anti-social behaviour using a range of techniques, including psychotherapy. Each member of the camp had a role in its government. Q Camp closed in 1940, but this idea of shared responsibility is still a major feature of the community at Grendon today.

I read all the official bumf on Grendon that I could get my hands on, but I also sought the unofficial skinny on the place from men who had been there. Before I committed myself to such a life-altering step I wanted to be sure I was doing the right thing. I remembered I had first heard of Grendon while serving my previous sentence. My brother-in-law, Tony, a mandatory lifer who has now served over eighteen years for murder, had told me of his experiences at Grendon. Tony had been there three times, failing each time, and his views on the gaff were mixed. He said the regime was more relaxed than at other jails, and that the therapy was easy, but the real test was in having to mix with ‘wrong-uns’: kiddy-fiddlers, granny-bashers and blatant grasses. This information was of no help to me as what I really wanted to know was whether the place actually worked or not. Judging by Tony’s continued unrepentant incarceration, it would seem the answer to that question was a resounding no.

On my spur at Whitemoor was a well-known villain, whom I shall call ‘Giggsy’, who, it was rumoured, had spent some time at Grendon. Over a cup of sticky he told me his views. In his opinion Grendon was definitely the place to aim for if I genuinely wanted to change my life. He told me that though on the surface Grendon might appear as a ‘doss’ (con-speak for something easy), it was actually the hardest bit of bird he had ever done. The reason he had failed to capitalize on his time at Grendon was because he was a heroin addict who was still too much in love with the brown powder to give it up. At Grendon there are three strict rules: no drugs, no violence, no sex. I was pleased with what Giggsy had to tell me, and the rules did not bother me. I had given up smoking cannabis three years before, I was mature enough to no longer feel the need to express myself through violence, and, unless some of the prisoners were nubile young females, I was definitely off sex for the duration of my sentence.

I filled in the initial application form with a feeling of decisive optimism. The truth was that I believed I was already rehabilitated. I had made the decision to put my long life of crime and punishment behind me. Grendon would be a consolidation of this decision, and a tangible piece of evidence to offer to the system as proof of my intention. The hardest part of Grendon for me, I believed, would be having to mix with the kind of men I had spent the most part of my previous incarcerations hunting down and trying to kill. I would have to swallow my ingrained disgust and revulsion and keep my mind focused on my own addictions rather than other people’s.

The road to Grendon was long and mined with all sorts of tests and interviews. First I had to see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist was a caricature of how I imagined someone of his profession to be. He was mostly bald, but with tufts of white hair over his ears, and wore small, round glasses. His dark, three-piece pinstripe suit looked to be circa 1930, and he even had a gold chain looping from the fob-pocket of his tightly buttoned waistcoat. When he spoke I somehow expected to hear a trace of an Austrian accent, and I was slightly disappointed when I recognized the flat vowels of Birmingham. More Black Country than Black Forest. He looked at my breeze-block-thick prison file and hmphed a lot before asking me if I had ever wet the bed. It was not a question I had been expecting, but I gave it some thought before answering. ‘I assume that I must have done when I was a baby. But the only time I can remember doing it was after a particularly bad three-day bender, which ended with me knocking back a litre of Fine Fare gin.’

He hmphed again and scribbled something in my file. ‘Why do you want to go to Grendon?’ he asked. ‘Is it to deal with your alcoholism?’ I sighed. I could spend half an hour explaining that I was not an alcoholic as such, just a geezer who sometimes liked to push the boundaries a bit. But I thought, Fuck it, I wanted to get back to the wing, I was cooking a spaghetti bolognese for my food-boat and I needed to book space on the wing cooker. So I nodded. He seemed satisfied. He scribbled in my file again, then closed it. ‘Send the next one in, please,’ he said, without looking up.

My next interview was with a trainee psychologist. She was quite an attractive woman in her mid-twenties, with long chestnut hair and luminous green eyes. I sat in the chair across from her and waited. Her first question was about my alcoholism. I was quite enjoying looking at her and I had no other pressing engagements, so I explained that I was not an alcoholic, and the main reason I wanted to go to Grendon was to deal with issues surrounding my offending behaviour. She was very interested in what had happened to all the money I had stolen during my life of crime, and seemed inordinately disappointed when I told her it was all spent. She brightened up somewhat when I told her about my son’s death as the reason for my change of heart about crime and prison. ‘That’s something we can get our teeth into,’ she said, almost gleefully. Suddenly I didn’t find her quite so attractive. I endured the rest of the interview with gritted teeth.

My next step was an interview with my ‘personal officer’. The personal officer scheme was brought in so that the prison system could save a few quid by not employing welfare officers as a separate job. In the old days prisoners would go to the welfare officer if they had family, or other, problems. Prisoners’ welfare was a full-time job, and, on the whole, the WO did a very good job, sorting out extra visits, phone calls, letters and counselling prisoners in times of family illness and bereavement. You were always guaranteed a kindly face and a sympathetic ear from the WO. So the prison system scrapped it, and gave each landing screw the responsibility instead. This meant that the same person who was screaming abuse and rushing to lock you in your cell every day, would be the person you would have to approach if you had a personal problem.