Our therapeutic community inside Her Majesty's Prison Channings Wood is having a rough ride indeed. Opposition to any sort of change is pandemic in a prison service for the most part still staffed by grey, uninterested men with resentful attitudes derived from the prison philosophies of the 19th century.
This morning there was a prime example of the ongoing battle between thuggery and therapy. Saturdays are always short days for prisoners (or "residents" as the therapy staff now refer to us). Come 4pm, the corned beef and greasy chips have already been served and hungrily devoured, and the community is locked, barred and bolted into cells until the following morning. The few hours we do spend out of our cells are treasured.
But today, five minutes after unlock, sour-faced non-therapy screws began to put the word around that we were to be "banged up" immediately after breakfast. Apparently, a dangerous weapon had been smuggled in and so it had been deemed necessary to lock down the whole prison while a comprehensive search was made. The community was not happy, but as is usual in cases like this, after half-hearted moans and groans, most people took themselves off to their cells, obligingly locking their own doors to save the screws the pleasure.
Most people, but not all. There has recently arrived within our therapeutic midst a contingent of four streetwise Mancunian "badboys," ("hoodlums," Derek Lewis would have called them) who already had an axe to grind because the day after their arrival they had been told they were to be put on closed visits (behind glass) for no other reason than that their emaciated faces did not fit. It is not uncommon for the boys from big cities to be given a hard time in the backwoods. But this being a therapeutic community (and they being volunteers) one might have supposed a little bit more tolerance. They were still seated at the breakfast table, disgusted from Cheetham Hill and Longsight.
"We ain't goin' nowhere. Fuck off!" they chorused in united defiance of a couple of screws.
"You've bin stichin' us up from the minute we got 'ere," the one with four front teeth missing said.
Other cons, hearing the heated exchange, began to hang back. A principal officer was summoned to calm the troubled waters. "Now come on lads," he began in conciliatory fashion. "If there's a weapon in the prison it's got to be found for everybody's safety." He was coming across as a reasonable fellow, but little did the lads know that a silent alarm bell had already been activated. At that very moment, a team of "control and restraint" specialists were racing over from the "block" to subdue the insurrection. They need not have bothered, because point now made, the Manchester crew were on their way to their cells.
Coops was not though. He is a local boy, inside for growing his own cannabis, a member of the British Angora Goat Society who would not hurt a fly, let alone a screw.
"I might have known you'd be involved Cooperman," one of the "control and restraint" screws snapped. Coops replied that he was of the opinion that it would take "more than you lot" to sort out this particular problem and wandered off, dreamily bemused by the whole business. Two hours later, when the fuss was all over (they found a homemade catapult and a stash of ball bearings on another side of the wing), poor old Coops and one of the Manchester lads were served notice that they were to be charged under prison discipline rules with inciting a riot. This is a true story of ordinary people living in an extraordinary place.
Meanwhile, I had been forced to cancel a rehearsal of Robert Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin, which I have adapted for performance by 25 members of our community (including Coops and the Manchester crew). We are expecting a visit next month from a band of VIPs (good job they found the catapult), including our Home Secretary's wife Sandra. Perhaps she still believes the results of the election will vindicate all the harm her husband's policies have inflicted on the prison population, but I must choose my words carefully. The play must obviously be the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king (or queen), and I want to make sure we produce a work of unparalleled excellence. Not since the authorities laid on cars to pick up judges at the Old Bailey to attend that glorious convict production of Hamlet two years ago in Brixton prison will so much have been done by so many to entertain so few.
Your columnist will be reporting on the big day as it happens. All this is, of course, assuming that Coops and my four Mancunian Hamelin rats have not in the meantime been tied to the mainmast and cat-o'-nine-tailed for mutiny. The prison population of the UK are Blairites to a man. Is it any wonder that the present government prefer to leave us with the lords and the lunatics, disenchanted, disheartened and, of course, disenfranchised?
