Authors: Robert Jeffrey
The evidence in general confirmed the petitioner’s description of the process as a “free-for-all.” Queues built up to use the various facilities, particularly the sluices and the showers, since there were only two and three respectively. An officer was on duty to take bookings for telephone calls, issue razor blades, take letters, note requests to attend the nurse, social worker or dentist, and note requests to attend PT, for which there was a very limited number of places. Bonomy said, “I was left with the clear impression that everything was done in a rush and under pressure.”
And he went on: “Although the petitioner [Napier] never had to empty a chamber pot, it was plain, from his evidence and the evidence of other prisoners and prison staff, that on a daily basis a significant number of chamber pots were emptied as each group of prisoners went to the arches. Each of the other prisoners who gave evidence used his chamber pot and also had a cell mate who did. Most prisoners also had urine bottles to empty. There was a practice among prisoners of putting faeces into plastic bags with a view to minimising the smell in the cell. In the past these had been thrown from cell windows to improve the atmosphere within the cells. By May 2001 a mesh covering had been placed outside each cell window to prevent this practice. [
In Peterhead where the bags were
also hurled out of the windows the practice was known as “
bombing
.
”
] With the option of throwing the bags out the window removed, prisoners would instead attempt to flush these bags down the lavatories. As a result, lavatories would become blocked and overflow.
“Not every prisoner would flush the sluice after depositing material there, resulting in an accumulation which was slow to clear and could cause a blockage and overflow. Although the petitioner did not mention such overflows occurring, there was other evidence from prisoners and staff which led me to conclude that blockages and the resultant overflow were a problem throughout the Hall. A strong, foul smell of a mixture of urine and excrement permeated the arches. The hot water taps were often left running into the sluices and the heat and steam appeared to exacerbate the smell. The petitioner described the arches as ‘stinking’ and the smell as ‘strong, not gut-wrenching but not far off.’ As a result of the number of prisoners carrying several items converging on and leaving the ablutions area simultaneously, there were often collisions and spillages which might contaminate the shoes, clothing or skin of a passing prisoner.”
Prisoners who gave evidence described the atmosphere at slopping out as “stinking” and the smell as “awful” and “incredible.” Bonomy said, “These descriptions were not challenged. Indeed they were confirmed by the evidence of staff.”
These were the sort of appalling conditions endured by prisoners and staff in Scotland’s jails before, finally, slopping out became just a bitter memory. The installation of proper toilets and washing facilities in cells took many years and in 2004 prisoners in five of Scotland’s sixteen jails were still slopping out. Budget cuts and the physical difficulties in putting plumbing into small cells contributed to the delays. When slopping out ended in HM Young Offenders Institution in Polmont in 2007, it left Peterhead as the only jail where prisoners did not have access to decent sanitation. The old granite fortress beside the North Sea was in an unenviable position of having hundreds of men using chemical toilets after lock-up.
Largely to blame for pushing PHead to the bottom of the sanitary league was the fact that it had been constructed out of the world-famous local granite and that made it well-nigh impossible to drill through walls and partitions to install decent plumbing. Not so, of course, in the new prison rising up next door, where the design grows from a blank page. This will make it a huge improvement for the current staff who work in poor, cramped conditions. Many told me they can hardly wait till the new place opens. Having witnessed the cramped reception and educational area I am not surprised. But when HMP Grampian does finally open there will undoubtedly be an outcry in the media and sarcastic remarks about HMP Hilton when the public are introduced to the new place by feature writers and TV cameramen.
Indeed, a taste of what was to come arrived many months before the opening of the new prison, when it was disclosed that it would have under-floor heating. The prison service spokeswoman making the announcement said, “The selection of an under-floor heating system to provide all the cells in the accommodation blocks with heat was proposed to allow the best use of renewable heat energy.” Sounds sensible but only hours after the statement was issued headlines like “Toastie Toes” were rolling off the presses. Maybe some of the accusations will be justified, but surely no one can mourn the passing of scenes like those above so eloquently described by Lord Bonomy in his judgement in the game-changing case brought to the Court of Session by prisoner Robert Napier.
Slopping out was far from the only – to coin a phrase – torture by toilet in Peterhead. Since the early 1980s the so-called dirty protests filled the pages of newspapers with accounts of prisoners smearing themselves and the walls of their cells with excrement and urinating everywhere and anywhere. At its height you could almost smell the stench and feel the creeping dampness in the newspaper in your hands. When much of what happened in its 125-year history is long forgotten the memory of the dirty protests will still attract comment.
Newspapers are a natural target for accusations of exaggeration. And often the charge can be sustained. Not, however, in the case of dirty protest, a phrase that somehow vaguely sanitises what it was actually like. However vivid the second-hand stories of the dirty protests in the late 1960s, ’70s and ’80s were, they could not fully convey the horror of what was going on in the cells that held the dangerous Category A prisoners, around twenty of them at one time.
Now empty and waiting for demolition, these cells held the most dangerous and desperate men in the jail. Looking at them today in disrepair and abandoned to history it is hard not to resort to the old cliché “if stones could speak.” The men caged here were the haters supreme in The Hate Factory. Some had an admitted ambition – to kill a prison officer. Or maybe two. An unguarded moment could produce an attack or hostage taking from the men held for years behind these bars without hope of release. As an officer you could not take your eyes off them for a minute. There was no time to relax when on duty in and around the cells of these particular cons. They were not there to do the time and keep their heads down or form cosy, chatty relationships with their jailers. They were out to fight, determined to kill if possible and, if not, to inflict the most violence they could.
The sentences being served by most of these guys were so long that an extra year or two for attacking an officer was of little consequence. Revenge and hatred were their motivation. Vile crimes when they were free to roam the streets of the worst areas in Scotland’s great cities had put them away for years. They really had nothing to lose. The routine used by the warders in this area of the prison shows the depth of the hatred involved. Several times a day the cells had to be opened to allow the inmates to slop out. On each occasion the door was only opened when there were three officers in full riot gear there to make sure that if the caged and “animalised,” as they would have it, occupant leapt at his captors in a crazed outburst of violence he would be subdued by force. On some occasions the warders, apart from face helmets and the other paraphernalia of riot gear, also had shields and staves. And they could be armed.
This was serious stuff. Many a prison officer in any jail in the country will tell you of regular “roll overs” in prisons – occasions when an inmate takes a casual swing at a screw who he has a grudge with or some kind of issue and it all ends in a wrestling match. But roll overs did not last long and they were a million miles away from the hatred of those considered dangerous enough to be held under Rule 36, which allows the separation and different regime for prisoners deemed to be difficult. It should also be remembered that prisoners have a knack at making potentially dangerous weapons out of almost anything that comes to hand. Open the door of a cell in the toughest part of The Hate Factory and you could face a wild man with a makeshift knife, or someone intent on urinating all over you, spitting at you and attempting to prod you in the eye with a broomstick. Or make you handle his body, which he had covered in excrement, in order to restrain him.
Much has been made of so-called “batter squads” in Peterhead and there is no doubt in my mind that some did exist. But the provocation was enormous. That said, I was told by one long-serving and competent officer recently that in his career he never saw a prisoner battered.
One provocation that is seldom mentioned in all the tales of violence on both sides in the war in The Hate Factory and that only eased in its final years was the constant feeling of fear felt by the staff. Officers feared attack at every minute of their working lives. And there was the worse fear of being taken hostage. As we have seen, this was a not infrequent happening in HMP Peterhead down the years.
I listened to one officer with many years of service under his belt and he told me of his early days as the youngest officer in the prison. He knew the history of hostage taking and attacks against warders and it seemed to him that many of them were on young officers. The reason was simple: the most inexperienced were the most vulnerable. He spent some months worrying as the youngest officer in the place that he was top of the prison hit list. Then another new boy arrived and he felt almost guilty at the feeling of relief that he himself had moved a little way down the target list. It is remarkable that the simple act of unlocking a cell to let an inmate out for any purpose at all was so regimented and so dangerous. That this was so, however, is testified by the fact that practice simulations of dealing with this situation were a regular part of the officer training regime. But a simulation is a simulation and real urine and excrement is another matter. The dirty protesters did not simply take action when someone came knocking on the cell door. Left alone, they urinated and defected on the floor and the walls, smearing their own naked bodies.
One veteran officer told me that, quite naturally, you have a higher tolerance to the stench of your own waste. Someone else’s is another matter altogether. And even if the culprit is removed from a dirty protest cell the trauma for officers is not over. Someone has to don a protective suit and hose the place down – not work much reported in the press, which at times seemed obsessed by any incidents of warders allegedly attacking cons. Provocation by piss and shit. It happened. And the reality of it underlined the sad fact that crime-fighting, or containing criminals, is not the glamorous occupation portrayed in countless lightweight TV series.
Jimmy Boyle is one of the most infamous of all Peterhead prisoners who is associated with the era of dirty protests. He has taken a lot of stick in the press and in books – some of it from me – on a perceived reluctance to apologise for his actions earlier in his life. The actions that put him into The Hate Factory, and what he did there. He does not deny crime has many victims but the suggestion is teased into his story that he, too, is somehow a victim. It is all discussed in depth in his remarkable book,
A Sense of Freedom
. There is irony in the title Boyle chose – there was no freedom and there never will be for his victim. There is irony, too, in his comfortable existence as a much-vaunted sculptor.
In addition to his Peterhead experiences he spent many months naked in a tiny cell four feet by four feet by seven in Inverness before these inhuman “cages” were finally banned by authorities, sadly seemingly reluctantly and at the last possible moment, bowing rightfully to public opinion and common humanity. Now he can conduct interviews on a balcony under an African sun in Morocco with the Atlas Mountains in the skyline. It is a long way from the Gorbals, Porterfield and Peterhead and a long way from the life of his contemporaries in crime. Or indeed those who suffered from his days as a criminal. While, as we will see in more detail later, he suffered terribly in Peterhead and Inverness and many wrong things were done to him and others in the jails years ago, there are disturbing moments in his book as the one-time hard man of the Gorbals recounts his youthful life of crime. His home life and the trouble he gave his mother is described in almost touching detail and with real tenderness, contrasting sharply with his actions on the street. There is no tenderness or compassion in throwaway lines about taking an eye out of a rival in a gang fight. Or “cutting” rival gangsters. In particular a description of the first time he slashed anyone is deeply unsettling.
Apart from his book, Boyle also collaborated with playwright Tom McGrath on a play called
The Hard Man
. It was a fictionalised account of his early life. He had been convicted of murder in 1967 – a charge he still denies – and his story told on stage had considerable critical success. A revival was directed by Phillip Breen, who travelled to Africa to interview Boyle on his new home turf. He gave
The
Scotsman
a fascinating account of their meeting. Boyle talked of warders and their charges locked in a cycle of violence and retribution. The discussion touched on the belief that if you treat prisoners like animals, as noted before, they tend to act like animals. In this scenario his own violence is seen as a survival strategy.
In their chat Boyle has much good to say about the Barlinnie Special Unit and its ethos, which meant there was intellectual engagement with even the most vile murderers and violent criminals and a search to find any redeeming talent as well as simply stopping them reoffending. Clearly he is a different man now from the one who entered Peterhead and from day one felt what he describes as the hatred on both sides. That hatred is still there to some extent.