Sometimes you says things in anger that later you regret. Well I was angry when I wrote the last post about my pal Big Rinty – and I apologise to anyone who was offended by my language. But sometimes you need to just say how you feel and tell it like it is and to hell what anybody thinks.

In prison I worked in health care centres a couple of times as an orderly and I saw first hand how those places operate. Some of the staff I encountered were first class carers – really good people who were doing their best in often the most challenging circumstances. But others were not so disposed. I saw how many of the latter treated prisoners like lumps of animated meat. Patronising, insulting, neglecting – I suppose they are only human – but too often they would forget that prisoners are human too. And those who go to healthcare for treatment are usually among the most vulnerable in the prisoner population. Of course plenty of people in prison “swing the lead” – the stresses and strains of prison life affect people differently. Some just want attention – many have mental health issues - but the problems arise when staff become weary of the people they have to deal with – when cynicism sets in. And that is when really serious medical conditions like Rinty has now do not get taken seriously until it is too late. 

Anyway, Rinty called me yesterday and put me right on a couple of things. Somebody told him how scathing I had been in the blog about the health care staff who initially did not take his complaints of being unwell too seriously. ”You were a bit hard on them,” he said. “They have actually been quite good and done as much as they could for me.” Fair enough – but the cancer should have been diagnosed a long time ago. Anyone on the outside would have been able to undertake the appropriate tests sooner. He told me that he has now been told that the grapefruit-sized lump that appeared attached to his pancreas last year has no bearing on the pancreatic cancer that he is now dying from. Although when I worked in the prison healthcare centres I helped to dress the wounds of “jugging” victims, (those who had been scalded with jugs of boiling water for spurious reasons) and stabbing victims – and once I bandaged the arms of a man who was HIV positive who had slashed himself with a razor and then helped him to the ambulance because none of the prison staff would go near him – even with all that medical experience I am still not an expert – but Rinty’s cancer not being connected to that, (sorry, I almost swore again) grapefruit thing, just does not ring true to me somehow. 

However, I apologise to any of the staff at Rinty’s prison who have been kind to him and who may have been insulted by my rhetoric – but not to anyone who has not been kind to him. Right now he needs kindness by the bucketload.

The news did not exactly come out of the blue. During a visit over a year ago I could see my big friend was not looking good. There was a greyness about him and he hardly smiled for the whole two hours. ”I don’t know what is wrong with me,” he said, “I’m tired all the time.” He’d gone to the “health care” centre and explained that he wasn’t well. “Take two of these,” said somebody in a white coat pretending to have some medical knowledge. (I know what you are thinking – yes, spot on – it was the old aspirin gag.) “Medical staff” love playing that one on the cons. You can just imagine their giggles in the staff room as they slurp their tea and take an hour to fill in the The Sun’s coffee time crossword. “Another twat fell for it,” they must chortle, every time some sad looking bastard in a striped shirt turns up at the hatch looking for some health enhancing treatment and they manage to fob him off with a couple the little white pills.

I remember once sitting next to a man in a prison workshop when suddenly he burst into tears. He had been looking particularly pasty for weeks. When I asked him what was up he said, “I’ve got leukaemia.” Over the previous six months he had been visiting the wing “happy hatch” from where all manner of dubious pills and potions were dispensed and getting a regular supply of, you’ve guessed it – aspirin. When finally he collapsed in the meal queue one evening they rushed him to an outside hospital where long overdue tests revealed his true condition. It was too far gone for any remedial treatment, so he opted to go back on the wing to live as “normal” a life as possible until it was all over. Three months after his teary revelation they released him to his family all nicely packaged in box. Christ they must have howled in the staff room at that one – aspirin - ha fucking ha.

The next time I saw him Rinty had a great lump sticking out of his stomach. He sat opposite me hunched in an effort to conceal it, but it was impossible to hide. And anyway he’d mentioned it briefly during a phone call. “What the fuck is that?” I asked him. “I don’t know,” he said, “and neither do health care.” Oh they looked at it, but nobody, not a single one of them would touch him. Nobody would put a hand on him, just to feel if it was hard, or if it was soft. “Is it painful?” I said. “Not really,” he said, “it’s just uncomfortable.” Now this thing was the size of big grapefruit. It screamed cancer at me. But all he had been getting was, tee hee, aspirin. Eventually, after some weeks, a specialist came into the prison to see him and wasted no time in touching the skin of my convict friend. Not that it did anybody any good. “Hmm,” she said, “it’s a puzzle.” A fucking puzzle? Give me strength. But at least they stopped the aspirin gags. After some more weeks they took my friend out to the outside hospital and some genuinely serious medical people performed a superb operation on him, cutting this and tying that, snipping that and sewing this – and after a couple of hours on the operating table the lump was no more. 

I went to see him at the time in the hospital where they had put him in his own little room. He was a pathetic sight. He was laid on his back with tubes in his mouth and up his nose attached to bags of liquid hanging from a frame above his bed. Most pathetic of all was the chain attaching his wrist to the wrist of the prison officer who was sat next to him engrossed in a dog-eared copy of Hello! magazine. Another prison officer sat on the other side of the bed twiddling his thumbs and thinking about the overtime money this extra guard duty was earning him. The Gambler was already there when I arrived. We shook hands and then I leaned over and held my poorly friend’s hand tight. He smiled a painful smile and said, “For fuck’s sake don’t make me laugh…” I think he thought I was smiling, but I turned away and looked at the Gambler – we had both welled up. ”Hey,” Rinty said, “it’s me that should be crying.” The Gambler and me pulled ourselves together and did the best we could to have a three way conversation. I’d brought a dressing gown for this very unusually patient patient. ”He can’t have that,” said overtime screw, on secondment we learned from Bristol prison, “It’s got a hood.” I looked at him and I swear for a fleeting second I felt like picking my friend up out of that bed and marching out with him over my shoulder. The officer to whom the Rint was shackled and who was from the big man’s prison spoke up. “He can have it,” he said to his colleague and turning to me he nodded and said, “We don’t have a problem with hoods at our place.” Fair play to him, I thought. After the visit the Gambler and me shared a quiet drive home.

Since then we have been to see Rinty a number of times. We try to get over at least every couple of months. He’s been looking better of late, although he has never been the same since that operation. A few weeks ago he was taken out to the outside hospital again for “tests.” He calls me once a week. The past couple of calls started with the same question. “Any news on the test results?” The medics seemed to be taking their time. Yesterday I had a message on my answer machine. “Rinty here, just checking in. I need to speak to you.” The tone of his voice was ominous. I phoned the prison and asked the chaplain to go and tell Rinty I was waiting for his call. Half an hour later the phone rang. “It’s not good mate,” he said. “I’ve got pancreatic cancer – inoperable.”

“A lifetime of discrimination and welfare benefits: when has an ex-offender really served their sentence?”

Working Links, the company that works in some of the most deprived areas of the UK with a focus on getting long term unemployed back into work partnered by the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion, have invited me on to their panels at fringe events at all three party conferences this year. The Working Links report, Prejudged: Tagged for Life, (available as a free download from the WL website) is a research paper into the attitudes of emloyers towards ex-offenders and has just been published. It is a sobering document and well worth a read. Alongside Baroness Scotland, shadow attorney general and Maria Eagle MP, shadow justice minister, I will be discussing the report at tomorrow’s fringe event: Employing ex-offenders: Who made the employer judge and jury? I often recieve emails from people who have been through the courts, then been to prison or undertaken community service asking for advice about getting into work. My response is usually, just keep trying, keep applying – let people see who you are beyond something you may have done wrong.

Village Hall Book Signing

A recent visit to Sandbach to speak to the women of the Warmingham Womens Institute brought me into the company of an organisation I have admired for a long time, ever since the “slow handclap” incident ten years ago when a WI audience showed their contempt for an overly long and political speech by then prime minister Tony Blair. My admiration was further bolstered two years ago when the national WI passed a motion calling for the imprisonment of fewer people with mental health problems. That motion has now evolved into the current WI “Care not Custody” campaign in partnership with the Prison Reform Trust. Let’s hear it for the WI! Despite the warmth and hospitality I was shown by my hosts for the event however, I was never sure what reception I was going to recieve once the event was underway in the packed Warmingham Village Hall. Some of those present had travelled from miles away in cars and minibuses to attend – I knew  that these were good, decent people, with the best interests of their communities at heart. I knew there were magistrates present and other community stalwarts. Rarely would any of them have come into contact with someone with my life experiences to share. But I was sure that if I could just grab their attention for long enough what I had to say would go a long way in fashioning their attitudes towards crime and punishment and especially towards what it is that we as a society should be expecting from our criminal justice system.  As I spoke I could see a number of sceptical faces - some present were sure to have been victims of crime at some stage in their lives – perhaps loved ones had been harmed by the likes of the person I once was. If I didn’t beleive for sure that had my life not been so damaging in my early years I would never have grown up to be someone who would harm others I could not stand up and speak openly and honestly to such a discerning group of people. But I have to say that on the whole I was made very welcome and treated with with hospitable courtesy and respect. After a lively Q&A session during which it became clear that I had made people think hard about the issues I spoke about, I was asked to judge a competition and then sign a few of my books. As I helped to stack the chairs at the end of the night a number of people came up to me to thank me for coming and to share their thoughts and views. It was a privilege to be in their company.

Hard Handshake

Had a great meeting with Shaun Attwood recently – a very nice lunch in my garden. Shaun almost ate all the potatoes from the three raised beds in the vegetable patch – clearly he is still recovering from the green baloney diet he was fed by Sheriff Joe Arpaio during his spell in Arpaio’s jail system in Maricopa County, Arizona a few years ago. Shaun’s book, Hard Time, (pictured,) covers his time in Arpaio’s custody when he started the world’s first blog by a prisoner. It’s a great read and a worthy first effort, well worth buying here for special fast delivery. I liked Shaun – an inveterate smiler who is campaigning hard through his book and his continued writing to bring to light the inhumanities of Joe Arpaio’s prisoner abuses. Good luck Shaun – it was a pleasure to shake your hand…

Sion Jenkins

The only person who really knows the answer to that question is Sion Jenkins himself. But the man was subjected to three trials, pursued by the state with unlimited resources at a cost of tens of millions of pounds, yet still a jury could not be persuaded to convict him of murdering his foster daughter Billie Jo. The evidence that did convict him at the end of his first trial, the microscopic blood spots found on his fleece jacket, was quickly undermined by the time of his second trial. Given that the patio where Billie jo was beaten to death with a metal tent peg was splattered with blood and tissue from her injuries it was unlikely that the only forensic evidence on her assailant would be such a fine microscopic spray. ”To put the 158 microscopic bloodspots into proportion, a vigorous sneeze will normally generate 20,000 tiny droplets of mucus, saliva and phlegm – that is, about 100 times as many as the number found on Sion’s clothing. ” (From The Murder of Billie Jo by Sion Jenkins and Bob Woffindon.) Close scrutiny of this evidence by experienced Canadian policeman Joseph Slemko among others, an internationally known expert in the field of bloodstain evidence, led him to conclude that for the pattern on Jenkins’ fleece jacket to have been created, Jenkins, “…would have to be in a crouching semi-kneeling postion, with the right side and right outer lower trouser leg exposed to the blood source and whith his torso twisted right and lowered to expose the outer chest area – a position not consistent with being an assailant, but consistent with him positioning himself to examine her.”  Slemko called the prosecution theory, that the pattern on the fleece had been created by “impact splatter” - ”highly improbable.” The only evidence left against him was “bad character” evidence, which hadn’t been admissable at his first trial. In this respect much was made of the fact that Jenkins had fabricated large parts of his CV when he applied for and secured the post of deputy head at William Parker school in Hastings. It made him look “dodgy” for sure. But it is a huge leap from fabricating a CV to bludgeoning a thirteen year old girl, for whom you hold parental responsiblity, to death. Jenkins held the post of deputy head for five years and on the strength of what he had achieved was invited to apply for the post of Head. Sexing up his CV was a stupid unnecessary thing to do. He did have a teaching certificate. He did have a masters degree in educational management – but to get out of London he invented a history of bonafides that prompted East Sussex County Council to state after his fraud was uncovered, ”He did not attend the University of Kent and has not obtained a BA (hons) degree, a Post Graduate Certificate in Education, an Advanced Diploma from the Open University or an Msc in Education Management from Kings College London. He did not attend Gordonstoun School. This is the information contained in his application for deputy headmaster.”  Mortifying stuff – but not evidence that he murdered anyone.

Ken Clarke, a "Progressive."

“I think it is too simple to argue about tougher sentencing or softer sentencing, although it makes for good headlines,” said Justice Minister Ken Clarke yesterday in his speech to the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies. How true. How honest.  (I describe him as a “Progressive” in my Guardian piece on his speech to the CCJS yesterday.) A more appropriate term would be “effective.” Effective sentencing not only means reserving prison for those who have caused serious harm to others, but ensuring that while they are there, if they want to change and work towards living crime free lives they should be offered every opportunity to do so. Not, you understand, for reasons of compassion and understanding and kindness – but to maximise the likelihood that they will not re-offend and hurt someone else once they have been released. Everyone in prison, bar the thirty or so highest profile murderers in the system, will be released one day and they will end up being somebody’s neighbour. My view is that we, as a society, should be doing all we can to ensure that once they are out they become good neighbours. I’m also with Clarke as far as short sentences are concerned. For every sentence under twelve months that scares a perpetrator into “going straight” – nine others will only serve to condition the offender into the prisoner/convict/criminal identity. The majority of long term prisoners have at least a couple of short sentences somewhere in their history. Effective community sentencing is the way forward for less serious offenders – failure to comply should result in a custodial sentence of at least two years – not to be spent in a traditional, invariably overcrowded  and underresourced long term prison, but in a facility designed specifically to get them to address why they are failing.  These are challenging ideas, but necesarry if we really want fewer people to become victims of re-offenders.

It is no surprise to me that many people on death row in the US “volunteer” to be executed after suffering years in limbo – neither alive or dead – just waiting for the needle -  or the firing squad. In Utah last month, when Ronnie Lee Gardner was asked how he would like to be executed after 25 years on death row he said, “I would like the firing squad please.” Bless him. You’d have to have done a few years as a lifer to really appreciate the humour in that request.

Lifers are the highest suicide risk in UK prisons, especially in the months after conviction and sentence – or during the first twelve months of release. Lifers in the UK have become the forgotten few – other than those close to them few outside care if they live or die – in the system they are treated with contempt and disdain – most of them are murderers, so why not? Except the sentencing procedure operates with an assumption that almost all “life sentence” prisoners will one day be released – once the “tariff” has been served for the purpose of “retribution and deterrence” - the only reason they should be kept in is if they present an ongoing risk to the public. How do the professionals figure out the risk? Educated guesses is the the answer – for nobody can see inside anyone’s head, not even prison psychologists…. though how they would love to.

Instead of working to get lifers out and functioning properly in the community, they keep them in, by default – playing them along, do this course or that course, then do them again and again and again – nobody outside cares that these forgotten men and women are being subjected to distressing and damaging mental pressure – they are murderers or rapists, paedophiles or arsonists – they deserve all they get. That’s how the system gets away with abusing them. Victims, I guess, wouldn’t care too much how the perpetrators suffer, just so long as they do which is completely understandable.

But I think it is about time we had some honesty in the life sentence – either let lifers out with a realistic chance of living again and attempting to make some ammends; keep them all in until they die – or bring back the death penalty and publicly execute as many capital convicts as the viewers can stomach. The latter would be an undisguised blessing for many more than you might imagine.

Da'rryl Durr

What happened to sixteen year old Angel Vincent was heinous and grotesque. That she was murdered is beyond any doubt. Whoever did it behaved in the worst possible manner towards a fellow human being. That she was so young and had her whole life before her exacerbates the crime that was committed against her. She and her family had an absolute right to demand and expect justice towards whoever killed her. The pain that her murder left behind must have been unbearable and everlasting. As anyone would, now that I know about the case I feel deeply for Angel Vincent and her family. And I wish them peace.

 Da’rryl Durr was convicted unanimously by a jury of Angel Vincent’s murder. He was also convicted of kidnapping her, robbing her and raping her. But there was no physical evidence against him – the tests on Angel Vincent’s remains for evidence of rape were inconclusive. Durr was convicted on the sole testimony of his former girlfriend Deborah Mullins. He may indeed have been guilty as charged. But though Mullins’ testimony was strong and her recollections feasible – should that have been enough to warrant the state extinguishing Durr’s life?

 In news reports about his case Durr is invariably described as a, “serial rapist and murderer.” He was initially arrested on suspicion of committing two rapes – only then did Deborah Mullins come forward and tell the police that Durr had murdered Angel Vincent, almost nine months after Vincent disappeared and five months after Vincent’s remains were discovered in a park. On the advice of his lawyers Durr pled guilty to the rapes – but later denied that he had ever raped anyone. He continued to deny that he had murdered Angel Vincent for the whole of the twenty one years and three months he was on death row. Right until the end – he said he was innocent.

 In such cases, where the original evidence has an element of vagueness and there has been such a long passage of time, the only people who can ever really know the truth are the people involved. In this case that means Durr and Mullins. But when I spoke to Durr on Saturday 17^th April and then again on Tuesday 20^th April three and a half hours before he was executed, though I felt obliged to ask him, his innocence or guilt did not seem relevant. It was clear to me that whoever Da’rryl Durr had been in 1988 when Angel Vincent was murdered, this was a different man. We were almost four thousand miles apart and our conversations were brief. But there was enough information in our exchanges to convince me that the Da’rryl Durr who was executed on that Lucasville gurney at 10.36 local time was a man of dignity and courage.

When it comes to prison barbarism by far the most popular personal weapon of choice in the UK is the old favourite and perpetually reliable, “battery in a sock.” Wielded like a battle flail, a simple sock loaded with a PP9 can swiftly and effectively incapacitate even the most robust enemy with just a few swings to the temple, so long as a solid connection is made from the off. For that to happen, better that the strike is made when the target least expects it: in the communal toilets perhaps when heads are down and trousers are around ankles, or in the showers – for nobody in prison is more vulnerable than a naked prisoner with eyes closed under flowing water – and the more cowardly the attack, the greater the likelihood of success. (Pusillanimity is almost always a key characteristic among jail assailants.) Other weapons are popular too of course. The jug of, “napalm,” – boiling water taken from the landing urn mixed with sugar to ensure the hot liquid sticks and inflicts maximum scarring is another favourite. A good “jugging” will soon rid the wing of any persona non grata. More vicious and risky to employ are home made bladed instruments known as “chibs” or “shivs,” (though there is now a fashion for calling such tools after their American equivalents: “shanks.” In-cell television and access to programmes like America’s Toughest Jails, has introduced much US prison slang terminology to UK prisoners which helps to give the largely depressing British prison experience yet another distorted shade of the exotic.)

 Blades can be fashioned from a positive plethora of items available on a prison wing. Most convenient to hand are prison issue knives, forks and spoons made from hardened plastic which are easy to hone on any abrasive surface. Perspex rulers stolen from the education department, sharpened and shaped by the same method also make fearsome stabbing implements. The classic prison shiv however is the type that Damien Fowkes allegedly used on Huntley – the toothbrush with a razorblade melded into the end. According to various reports Fowkes allegedly managed to cut a seven-inch gash Huntley’s throat that may have been as much as an inch deep, missing his jugular by a matter of millimetres.

No glory for Fowkes however. My guess is that the lack of precision in his  lunge and slice will haunt the convicted robber for the rest of his criminal career. Huntley will now undoubtedly be generously compensated for the prison service’s alleged negligence in allowing the circumstances in which the assault took place to occur. And instead of becoming known as the man who killed Huntley, Fowkes will be forever known as the man who won a cash bonus of thousands for a childkiller. If the whole sorry episode was not so damned tragic – it would be a struggle not to split your sides laughing.