Authors: Robert Jeffrey
Some of this is clearly predictable pleading, but some of it contains confirmation that around twenty-five years ago Peterhead was not in the van of any movement to turn lives around rather than simply punish the guilty. Indeed the happenings inside Peterhead had long been a driving force for those who wanted a new approach to dealing with long-term prisoners. For years, even back in the 1970s, trouble in Peterhead had helped to lead to the founding of the Barlinnie Special Unit, where the emphasis was on releasing any internal creativity to be found in a hardened criminal. Sadly, as we know, that admirable experiment in prison reform foundered precisely because it went too far too fast in the opposite direction to the public’s perception of what prison life should be. But “up north” The Hate Factory was churning out haters and those labelled animals did indeed behave like animals.
All that was many years ago but it is dispiriting to find that today not all that much has changed. Of course there are now peaceful ways for prisoners to air grievances, and training for release has increased and conditions inside are more carefully monitored. Prison officers too are now well trained in rehabilitation. But there are still massive differences in the way some British prisons operate compared to what goes on elsewhere.
In the spring of 2013 Erwin James, an ex-con turned perceptive commentator on prison affairs for
The Guardian
, visited an Oslo fjord to report on life on the Norwegian prison island of Bastoy. This is a place to give Britain’s massive army of hangers and floggers, the lock ’em up and throw away the key brigade, apoplexy. The prisoners include murderers and drug smugglers who live with a degree of freedom on the island, growing their own food, running a stable and a bicycle repair shop (many of the cons have their own bikes). There are no drugs, no booze, and no women – except for a few uniformed prison officers – and no children. And no escape from the island, though the cons even run the ferry to and from the mainland. It is a life of training for re-entry into the community. Compared with life even today in British prisons it is hard to avoid the word “cushy.” However, Erwin James spoke to the governor who told him – surprise, surprise – that if you treated people like animals they behaved like animals. They don’t do that on Bastoy. But the most remarkable fact about Bastoy is that it has the lowest reoffending rate of any prison in Europe. Something to think about?
That Scottish prison riot back in 1986 at least had the effect of turning the spotlight on the prisoners’ grievances, something eloquently highlighted by Ballantyne’s QC, the redoubtable Ian Hamilton. He said the riot had started from a long series of grievances, real or imagined, and in his opinion there were insufficient channels for these grievances to be aired: “It seems to be the case at Peterhead prison the method for the ventilation of grievances was, and perhaps still is, insufficient and as a result of this they festered on until they resulted in the action and crimes on which your lordship has to pass sentence.” He said he believed there existed adequate means of protecting officers and that since the riot his client has been confined in a cage in Porterfield Prison, Inverness, for twenty-four hours a day. He said Ballantyne expected that after being sentenced he would spend at least another six months but probably two years in one of the cages.
Ian Hamilton went on to describe the cage in the following terms: “The cage consists of a concrete box seven paces by five paces. The front of the box has iron bars, hence the name. On the ‘public’ side is a passage about a pace wide. The inmate is left there twenty-four hours a day. Since November [
it was now March
] the prisoner has not left the cage for exercise or ablutions. Excretion is into a chamber pot left in the cage and only slopped out once a day. The light is on twenty-four hours a day.” Ian Hamilton went on to say that no one could face with equanimity what his client expected was going to happen to him for at least six months. He added: “However low these people may be and however necessary it may be to ostracise them from the intercourse and company of us, they are not animals. They should not have cried for help the way they did. But one question is left – what other way did they have to cry for help?”
Dr Kathy Charles of Edinburgh Napier University, a highly respected psychologist in the field of forensic psychology, told me: “The cage and regime described by Ian Hamilton is an environment that many people would feel unsuitable for animals, never mind human prisoners. Hearing such a description from a comfortable and unbiased position will almost always provoke shock and disdain. However, when John Smith asked if ‘anyone could ever understand the horrors of prison without being part of it,’ two kinds of insight can emerge. I’m sure he intended people to ponder what it is like to be a prisoner feeling powerless and desperate, but one could also consider what it might feel like in prison for staff who have to face the most dangerous and challenging people in society – every day and all in one place. Dreadful though the cage is, it is possible to imagine how such a hateful environment could have caused prison staff to come to believe that this extreme form of detention and deprivation was suitable. At their wits end and confronted with unpredictable barbarity and violence, complete restriction of freedom and expression must have seemed a very attractive solution.
“Psychology is full of examples of how groups of individuals can lose perspective and make extreme choices when their reference to the wider environment is closed off. This is the case for both prisoners and prison staff. The prison, especially Peterhead and especially in years gone by, is so different to everyday life that normal standards of behaviour, reasoning and decision-making change. Coupled with the very obvious power disparity between a prisoner and a jailor, this unnatural environment is bound to result in extreme deviation from what would be considered as normal by most people. Treating people like animals in a cage seems barbaric by our calm and reasoned standards but would it still feel so distasteful if we’d been in the same pressure cooker that led to its creation?
“I imagine very few, if any, psychologists would be able to justify the kind of environment described and experienced in 1980s Peterhead prison. I can certainly offer no argument for it. It is impossible to see how any person could emerge from such an environment as a reformed character better equipped to live a productive and law abiding life. Nevertheless, it is quite uncomfortable for many people to accept that ‘nicer’ prisons actually result in lower rates of reoffending. When asked if prisons should rehabilitate offenders most people answer yes, yet if they hear about what that entails (often being ‘nice’ and giving people chances to demonstrate change and creativity), they often don’t like it at all. Simultaneously punishing and rehabilitating someone is a difficult task. The loss of liberty is supposed to be the punishment, what happens inside the prison is supposed to rehabilitate not further punish and humiliate.
“Certain types of offender are undoubtedly regarded as animals by the media and many members of the public. This belief can seem like a good justification for treating them like animals. In many cases the offender has already been treated like an animal in his home or community. It is true that not every offender has had a terrible life, some offenders commit crime simply because they find it exciting and a good source of income, but the high percentage of the prison population who have been physically, emotionally and sexually abused as children and adolescents can’t be ignored. Somebody has to break the cycle of treating a person like an animal and then punishing their animal-like responses. If you pack men into cages with no form of expression, no facility to change, and no feeling of safety they will indeed behave like animals.”
There are no easy answers to an issue that our society has been arguing over both before and since Peterhead prison was built in the nineteenth century. However, most civilised people will be thankful that the cages, like iron shackles, are now consigned to history along with other barbaric practices of the past.
As the very early history of the construction of Peterhead shows, some thought was given to saving building costs by the use of dry toilets rather than installing half-decent plumbing. I use the phrase “half-decent” with care since from day one toilet facilities in the jail have been less than adequate and you wonder what it would have been like if the bean counters of the 1880s had their way. However, even the primitive sanitation provided was only available during the times prisoners were not locked in the cells. At night there were no in-cell toilets or indeed washing facilities. The convicts sat on buckets or chamber pots and the malodorous mixture lay untouched till the morning and the unpleasant business of “slopping out.” This was a procedure involving the warders supervising the emptying of the containers into sluicing drains. No wonder it has been often remarked that you could tell a prison warder from the marks of a clothes peg on the nose.
When the planners were considering the provision of toilets in Peterhead they should have looked across the Irish Sea for inspiration. When it opened in 1850, almost forty years before Peterhead was built, Mountjoy Prison in Dublin had a flushing toilet in each cell. This, however, is remarkable considering that the Irish penal system had some establishments still slopping out as late as 2009. In England and Wales slopping out was abolished in 1996 in all but a few establishments. In Scotland the process of removing this degrading process began as far back as 1994 when the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture condemned slopping out in Barlinnie – and it also criticised overcrowding and the long hours some prisoners were incarcerated in their cells. The committee published many opinions about the “unacceptable” conditions in Scottish prisons. Not surprisingly, they also criticised the use of the tiny dogbox cells described earlier, now confined to history, where prisoners were held as they were processed for admission to the prison.
In prisons time passes slowly and the authorities in general and the law in particular also move at a snail’s pace. So not much happened between 1994 and 2001. The real catalyst for change was a petition in that year by a prisoner called Robert Napier, who claimed in essence that slopping out breached his human rights. It is interesting that even today “human rights” for prisoners is still highly controversial. Particularly with the current controversy on whether or not they should be allowed the vote. Napier’s case was heard by Lord Bonomy and it was an eye-opener for those in the public unaware just how primitive prison sanitation could be.
In support of Napier, international experts in prisons were brought before the Court of Session in Edinburgh. Medical experts, nutritionists, psychologists and psychiatrists gave the court the benefit of their views. Lord Bonomy found that the “triple vices” of a poor regime, overcrowding and slopping out did breach the prisoner’s rights. Napier was awarded damages. This was the case that really started the ball rolling and for years after it there was claim and counter-claim and many lawyers made a good living representing hundreds of avaricious prisoners trying to claw their way onto a fast-moving cash bandwagon.
Lord Bonomy’s judgement spelled out just how barbaric slopping out was and its effect on prisoners. It seemed less concerned about the effect on the prison officers who, with some logic, could have pointed out that the practice could also be said to have infringed their human rights. The Court of Session case was concerned with what was going on in Barlinnie but the deeply unpleasant facts it exposed applied equally to other jails such as Peterhead. Perhaps more so in Peterhead, where toilet facilities were way behind the norm acceptable in the prison service. Bonomy wrote that “the core element of slopping out – emptying the containers – was a chaotic event, particularly in the morning.” He mentioned that at the end of each flat in the prison halls there were three showers, four lavatories, six urinals and fourteen wash hand basins, for the use of up to eighty prisoners on the flat. There were also two ceramic sluices in which prisoners could dispose of the contents of their chamber pots and urine bottles; they could also use the lavatories for that purpose. Each sluice had hot and cold running water taps and a flush mechanism. Next to each of the sluices was a ceramic Belfast sink, the waste from which also ran into the sluice. The pots and bottles could be rinsed in either. In June 2001 a tank had been installed to provide disinfectant solution for the sluice, but was not in use. Disinfectant tablets were issued to prisoners when they were first admitted to C Hall. Though there was some dispute on how readily available they were.
Bonomy painted a detailed and horrific picture of the process: the Hall began to come to life at about 6.30am. “The first task for officers was to establish that all prisoners were still present and relay that information to a central control. It was only once every prisoner in the prison had been accounted for that cells began to be unlocked. Those who had to attend court were released first. Thereafter the cells generally were unlocked, about a quarter at a time. The order in which they were unlocked was rotated so that every four days each prisoner would be in the first batch. There was some overlap, but generally speaking the next quarter were released after most of the previous quarter had been locked up again. Prisoners had about fifteen to twenty minutes, and sometimes less, to slop out and use the facilities at the arches.
“The whole process was intended to be completed at about 8am. As a result, between fifteen and twenty prisoners would descend upon the ablutions area together, all carrying a number of items: their urine bottles and chamber pots, where appropriate, to be emptied; cutlery and plates to be rinsed, either at the Belfast sink or the sluice; a water bottle to be filled with drinking water from a tap adjacent to the wash hand basins; possibly a rubbish basket to be emptied; and a towel and personal toiletry items. This was the only occasion on which a prisoner was permitted to take a towel to the ablutions. Each prisoner had a basin and a jug which he could also take to the arches and fill with water to use in his cell for washing later. The last prisoners from the previous group might also still be there. Each had then to slop out, wash/shower, shave and go to the lavatory as necessary.”