The Loose Screw Read online

  Thankfully this stand-off didn't last for long. Both men soon realized that the screws were deliberately antagonizing the situation, as not many had any love for either Charlie or Dave. In fact the two men became firm friends and have remained so to this day, so once again the system failed to break two of the highest-risk inmates they had had in the unit at any one time.

  The truth about why Dave had arrived on the unit wearing two gold Rolexes was far less sinister than the authorities would have liked. He had been asked by a friend, who needed to raise a bit of cash, if he could sell the watch legitimately and he still had it in his possession at the time of his arrest. Of course the authorities didn't have any of that story, so they confiscated the watches with the intention of proving they were in fact the proceeds of some dodgy drug deal or robbery, as if they didn't have enough on Dave as it was. They were obviously worried about the fragile charges they already had him on, so felt they should formulate a plan B. Nevertheless, despite an extremely conscious effort to prove the watch was not legitimate, all their investigations proved futile and once again the authorities had to eat humble pie and were forced to return the watch eventually.

  Dave quickly settled into his own unique way of handling the monotonous routine on the unit with his own brand of humour. He quickly realized that everything that had to be done for the inmates on the unit involved a great deal of effort from various members of staff. One exercise, which you may think is a simple one but for a Cat A prisoner is in fact one of the most drawn-out processes, is a simple trip to the prison hospital.

  Whilst still in solitary, Dave made a basic request one morning to see a prison doctor. The officer was persistent in his demands to know the reason for this request, and Dave insisted that it was personal and he would rather just tell the doctor. However, when the officer eventually said he could not authorize the appointment unless he knew what was the problem, Dave told him that he just needed a doctor to look up his arse.

  Well, you can imagine how the rumour that Dave Courtney had piles spread through the ranks of the officers -everyone thought it was hilarious. A few days later the day of the appointment arrived and preparations began to move Dave from the unit across the three-hundredyard sterile area from the unit to the main prison building and into the hospital wing.

  I had been attached to the six-strong team of officers detailed to accompany Dave to the hospital. Now, to move a Cat A inmate from the unit is no mean feat. They were deemed such a risk that before any move could take place the rest of the unit and the main prison had to be locked down and secured. We then had to ensure we had two dog handlers to accompany us across the sterile area from the unit to the hospital, as well as notify the control room by radio exactly when we were leaving the unit and when we had arrived and were secure in the hospital wing. All the way across to the hospital, during the visit and until we were securely back on the unit, Dave was to be handcuffed to an officer and the control room would track our every movement through the dozens of closed-circuit television cameras that covered every square inch of the unit and prison grounds.

  Well, after all these preparations we finally began to move out of the unit and across the open space between the unit and the main prison. As I said, it was only about three hundred yards or so, but to Dave, who had not focused on anything further than about four feet away or seen any greenery for the past six weeks, it was like crossing Siberia. He played along with the novelty of it all the way across, performing his 'kid in a sweetshop' routine and staring at the trees and the sky.

  We made our way into the main prison and up the stairs to the hospital and then secured ourselves in the examination room, which was located at the front of the prison and overlooked the road towards Thamesmead. When the doc arrived he asked Dave to bend over and drop his trousers so he could carry out his examination. Dave obliged, propping himself up on the window sill and looking out of the window whilst pulling his arse cheeks apart to assist the doc. Whilst in this position he kept commenting on the cars and people he could see through the window -a sight he had not seen for some time. In no time at all a bewildered doctor commented from the rear that he could see nothing wrong with Dave's behind and asked again what the problem was.

  "Problem?" Dave replied. "There is no problem, doc. I just said I wanted someone to look up my arse and, now that you have, I will be off, thank you very much."

  Well I nearly pissed myself there and then at the comment and also the sight of the senior officer, who had taken the original request from Dave to see a doctor and whose face had gone purple and looked as though it was going to explode.

  "You fucking told me you had piles, Courtney, you twat! Do you think I am some sort of mug or something?"

  "Gov, I never told you I had piles -you came to that conclusion all by yourself. I just told you I wanted a doctor to look up my arse and now he has done we can go, thank you very much."

  The senior officer was fuming and, had he not been such a spineless twat, he would likely have jumped all over Dave there and then. I was too busy laughing to have been of any help if it had all kicked off, so I was glad when we got clearance to make the move back to the unit. All the way back the senior officer was having a dig at Dave, telling him how he thought he was the daddy of the unit, that no one had ever left the unit with less than eighteen years served in the four years it had been open, and that he would go all out to have him at every opportunity.

  Of course these were just idle threats in Dave's case, but that's not to say that these threats were not carried out on other, shall we say, less well-connected prisoners, even in the unit where it appeared that every inch of floor space and every blind spot was covered by closed-circuit television cameras.

  I witnessed countless attacks by staff on inmates for no apparent reason other than that they could and had been getting away with it for years. Don't forget that we knew the position of every camera, we had seen the monitors in the control room and we had been told where the blind spots were and who to contact if we wanted a certain camera to 'malfunction' for a few minutes. Believe me, this went on day in, day out, and all the stories you have read from people's accounts of the time they spent as an inmate in one of our prisons and having suffered brutality or psychological torture at the hands of power-crazy screws are true. I can confirm that, as I saw it with my own eyes, and it was witnessing on a daily basis this behaviour by my fellow prison officers that disgusted me so much that I felt I had no choice but to turn my back on the Service. I was ashamed to be associated with such cowards. I detest people with no backbone who hide behind authority in order to inflict such pain and suffering on others.

  One such incident, which occurred whilst Dave and Charlie were with us on the unit, was the particularly vicious attack on an older prisoner we had on the unit at the time. This guy had never been in prison before and was a fruit and vegetable stall owner in his fifties, who somehow had ended up on remand in the max secure unit because of some people he knew outside. Guilty or not, the guy was like a fish out of water. He didn't have a clue and was obviously terrified and extremely intimidated by the surroundings in which he now found himself. All that apart, he was a genuinely nice man; well spoken, polite and seemed to get on well with the other inmates on the unit, who realized he was out of his depth and took him under their wings.

  However, the fact that he was obviously totally inexperienced in the art of 'doing bird', coupled with the fact that he was an educated man who thought that the screws were there to look after the inmates and provide them with advice and support whenever they needed it (which of course was exactly our job description but was not recognized by most members of staff), made him a 'pain in the arse' and a definite victim for the bully squads.

  For weeks this man was ridiculed and tormented by a number of officers in an attempt to goad him into even the slightest sign of aggression towards them, but he never rose to it. You could see the frustratio
n rising in the faces of these officers and around the tea-room table during lunch they made no effort to disguise their hatred for this man. One thing I was certain of was that it was not so much IF this man would be attacked by staff, but WHEN.

  From the main unit leading out onto the exercise yard there was a corridor, which was about twenty foot long and at each end was closed off by means of an iron wicket gate and a further electronically operated, reinforced door, which was controlled via a buzzer and intercom by the main control room. This corridor was known by both staff and inmates as 'muggers ally'. One Saturday afternoon two northern officers, who liked to think they were the ultimate law on the unit and who had been the main characters in the conspiracy to target the fruit and veg man, were bringing in the members of spur three, including Dave and Joe Pyle, from the yard.

  In a carefully pre-planned move, they had arranged for another two officers to meet them and assist in bringing the inmates back onto the unit. They remained on the yard as the inmates filed off and passed through the first door to wait in the corridor. Both doors could not be opened at the same time unless there was a serious incident either on the exercise yard, the seg unit or on visits, or indeed inside the corridor. The two officers on the yard had deliberately arranged for their target to be the last prisoner to come off the yard and, as the three of them approached the first gate, one of the officers in the corridor closed it in their faces, leaving them alone in the sterile area between the corridor and the exercise yard.

  Due to the nature of the timing mechanisms on the doors, before they could reopen the first door the second door had to be opened to allow those waiting in the corridor to get back onto the unit. This in itself is bollocks, as all they had to do was override the system, but this just confirms that the staff in the main prison control room were in on what was about to happen too. Once the inmates and staff had passed through the second door and it had been closed behind them, they opened the first door to allow the two northerners and the old boy into 'muggers ally'.

  Once inside, and with the doors locked again, the two officers without warning set upon the prisoner and subjected him to a vicious and unprovoked attack, all because they had taken a dislike to him and they could get away with it. After a few minutes, as planned, one of the officers pressed the green alarm bell situated on the wall in the corridor and continued to beat the prisoner until some other staff responded to the bell and gained access.

  Of course all the staff knew what had actually happened, but they just reacted as if the inmate had assaulted the officers first, and so he would be subjected to a bit more pain by the adrenalin-pumped officers arriving at the scene. Once he was relocated in the unit's segregation area and the staff had allowed themselves a period of celebration, he would be required to be seen by a medical officer to check for injuries.

  This particular incident, as with so many others carried out on a daily basis in our prisons, left the inmate in question with some pretty serious injuries. He was found to have two broken ribs and serious bruising to his face and body. The problem was, however, that the medical staff were all in on the cover-up too. You hear the authorities all the time going on about the criminal code, whereby one criminal will never grass up another one. Well, let me tell you, the authorities also abide by this same code and use it far more than those in the criminal world and to cover up far more heinous crimes.

  For what those officers did to that man you would be looking at a custodial sentence on the outside, but because it was carried out in prison on people that the public don't know or care about by staff who are expert at making up false statements and getting them endorsed by however many other members of staff that are needed, the incident goes unnoticed and the inmate in fact receives further punishment for breaking the worst rule of our prisons by assaulting an officer.

  This particular inmate did attempt to contest the allegations made against him and his solicitor made an attempt to view the video taken that day through the twenty-four hour closed-circuit television camera located in the corridor. He was told by the senior staff at the prison, and also had it confirmed by the Home Office, that unfortunately that particular camera was offline on the day of the assault as it was experiencing technical difficulties -yeah, right, course it was.

  This may be a good time to mention a particular inconsistency that I began to notice relating to certain prisoners and members of staff. It is common knowledge that many members of the Prison Service and the Police, as well as many others that hold very senior positions in our society, are also members of the Masons. Funnily enough I have never been invited to join and as a result have no knowledge of the inner workings of the Masonic movement other than the well-known fact that they are all duty-bound to look out for one another.

  Although a secretive sect, it soon became obvious which members of staff were either fully fledged or trainee members, and the more I observed the daily regime in the places I worked the more apparent, if not blatantly obvious, it became that some members of staff were giving certain prisoners preferential treatment. The type of additional privileges a Masonic prisoner would receive ranged from extra time allowed on visits or exercise to the smuggling in for them of various items of contraband by Masonic prison officers. I often wondered, if this sort of 'favouritism' could be demanded for relatively minor rewards in prison, what types of mutual favours were being done at the higher levels of government or within the judicial system. I used to hear rumours, for example, as I am sure many of you have, that certain high-ranking police officers or members of parliament would 'get off' charges such as drink-driving or various other such allegations and that they had done so because they were members of their local Lodge, and I believe even more strongly now that such things do go on after witnessing the events I have described above with my own eyes.

  Every movement and activity was videoed in that unit, and I know for a fact that not only were those tapes passed on to the police and other criminal investigation departments but also they were used by psychologists who analyzed them in an attempt to gain further understanding of the criminal mind. It fascinates them how a criminal ticks and they would analyze everything from what they ate to how many times they had a wank a day. Good job there were no cameras in the cells, as Dave was constantly getting caught in this act by the same officer, an old bird who we called Zelda from a children's show called Terror Hawks that was popular at that time. If you remember the show you will understand why we gave this officer the Zelda nickname. I am sure that she quite enjoyed catching Dave in the act of daily relief.

  For all these reasons the mood amongst the prisoners on that unit was not a good one. There was a real feeling of 'them and us', as most members of staff felt unable to build any type of relationship with the inmates due to the paranoia that had been built up by the reprisals briefings I spoke about earlier. Also, as the senior officer explained to Dave during that hilarious hospital trip, during the four years the unit had been opened I think there had only been two inmates who had served sentences of less than ten years. Such was the hype at the time about the category of prisoner held on that unit that the judge only needed to hear that an inmate standing before him was residing there and he would usually award the maximum sentence. So it was little wonder that morale was at an all-time low. It really was a case of ABANDON ALL HOPE ALL WHO ENTER.

  Dave quickly realized this and, as he was more than confident that he would be found not guilty of the charges against him (he was, I believe, the first inmate to be released from the unit with a 'not guilty' verdict at that time), he made it his mission to try to boost morale amongst the other residents. Obviously his pranks, such as the hospital outing, had people talking for months afterwards when word spread, but he was constantly playing the joker in an attempt to raise a few laughs.

  One particular caper I witnessed while I was working on spur four one Saturday morning was his 'Groutie' impression. We had unlocked the spur as nor
mal for the inmates to collect their breakfasts and make their morning applications, which most were doing when this classical regal piece of music burst through the air. As we looked around, bewildered, for the source of this music, we saw Dave strutting out of his cell with his nose up in the air. He was dressed in a prison-issue dressing gown and had fashioned a cravat around his neck using one of the legs he had torn off his prison pyjamas, and he was sucking on what looked like a giant spliff, which he had inserted into the outer shell of half a Bic biro to look like a cigarette holder.

  He glided over to our desk in his prison-issue slippers with a copy of a rolled-up newspaper under his arm and said, "Morning, gentlemen. Has my post arrived? I think I will take my breakfast in my room this morning. Please let me know when my Racing Post arrives, there's good chaps. Do carry on."

  It was just this sort of spontaneous prank that kept us all laughing, cons and screws alike; well, some of us screws anyway. There were one or two that really took a dislike to Dave's brand of humour and extended their animosity towards him far beyond the usual hatred that most screws are encouraged to develop early on in their careers towards all inmates. This vindictiveness was apparent each and every day when these members of staff came into contact with Dave, but there is one incident I recall that in my opinion highlights the mentality of most of my colleagues at the time.

  We had a prisoner called Ronnie Fields on the unit at the time, who to the inmates was an icon and to the officers a pain in the arse. He didn't give a fuck and absolutely hated screws and wasn't shy of letting them know this. He was, however, a gentleman and, so long as you didn't try any of the usual mind tricks or attempt to fuck up his routine, he just got on with his bird with dignity. He was a great friend of Dave's, but once again was hated by the bad element of staff. He could, however, handle himself very well and had demonstrated this by knocking out a good few screws and cons in his time. So, although he was the centre of most ego-boosting conversations in the officers' tea room, no one would ever have had the bottle to take him out in the way they did other less hardy prisoners.