A Prison Diary Read online

  Enter the Secretary of State for Health.

  William looks around the room at the fifty or so workers packing their little plastic bags. ‘I can tell you every one in this room who’s on drugs, even the gear they’re on, and it often only takes a glance. And you’d be surprised how many of your friends “on the out”, even one or two of those who have been condemning you recently, are among them.’

  ‘Taking cannabis can hardly be described as a major crime,’ I suggest. ‘My bet is it will be decriminalized in the not too distant future.’

  ‘I’m not talking about cannabis, Jeffrey. The biggest crisis the government is facing today is the rapid growth of heroin addicts. I can name three lords, two Members of Parliament, and two television personalities who are on Class A drugs. I know because a member of my family has been supplying them for years.’ He names all of them. Two I already knew about, but the other five come as a surprise. ‘In theory they should all be in jail along with you,’ he adds. Check on all the young criminals coming into prison and you’ll begin to understand it’s a problem that few people, especially the politicians, seem willing to face up to. ‘On your own spur alone,’ he continues, ‘five of the lifers are on heroin, and still getting the skag delivered to them every week.’

  ‘How do they manage that?’ I ask.

  ‘Mainly during visits,’ he says, ‘mouth, backside, ears, even secreted in a woman’s hair. Because of the Human Rights Act, prison searches are fairly cursory.’

  ‘But this is a Double A Category high-security prison,’ I remind him.

  ‘That’s not a problem if you’re desperate enough, and there’s nothing more desperate than a heroin addict, even when he’s locked up in the segregation block.’

  ‘But how?’ I press him.

  ‘Don’t forget that most A-cats are also remand prisons, and so have prisoners coming in and out every day. If the new young criminals didn’t already know, it wouldn’t take them long to discover the economics of supply and demand, especially when such large sums of money are involved. A gram of heroin [a joey] may be worth forty pounds on the street, but in here it can be split up into five bags and sold for a couple of hundred. At those prices, some prisoners are willing to risk swallowing a bag of heroin just before they’re taken down; then they simply have to wait to retrieve it; after all, there’s a toilet in every cell. And,’ he adds, ‘my brother Rory can swallow a lump of heroin the size of a small eraser – five hundred pounds in value – hold it in his throat and still carry on a conversation. As soon as he’s safely back in his cell, he coughs it up.’

  ‘But despite your brother’s unusual skill,’ I point out, ‘if, as you suggest, sixty per cent of inmates are on drugs, you’ll need more than the odd prisoner who’s willing to swallow a packet of heroin to satisfy the demand.’

  ‘True,’ said William, ‘so stay alert during visits, Jeffrey, and you’ll notice how much transferring of drugs is done by kissing. And whenever you see a baby dangling on its mother’s knee, you can be sure the little offspring’s nappy will be full of drugs. That’s how the visitor gets it into prison. The kissing is how it’s transferred from visitor to inmate. And there are still a dozen or more ways of getting the gear in, depending on which prison you’re sent to. If you ever spot someone coming into jail wearing an Adidas tracksuit, look carefully at the three stripes. If you unstitch just one of them, you can fill it with five hundred pounds’ worth of heroin.’

  My only thought is that I have an Adidas tracksuit in my cell.

  ‘My brother Michael,’ continues William, ‘discovered that in some prisons Waterstone’s have the book franchise, so a friend of his would select an obscure title, fill the spine with drugs, and then ask Waterstone’s to donate the book to the prison library. Once it had been placed on the shelf, Michael would take it out. Amazing how much heroin you can get into the spine of James Joyce’s Ulysses. But in my last nick,’ William continues, ‘the Sun’s page-three girl was the most popular method of getting the skag in, until the screws caught on.’

  ‘The page-three girl?’

  ‘You do know what a page-three girl is, don’t you, Jeffrey?’ I nod. ‘Most A- and B-cat prisons allow an inmate to order a morning paper from the local newsagent,’ continues William, ‘and because you’re locked up for twenty-two hours a day, they even deliver them to your cell. One enterprising dealer “on the out” supplied the entire prison’s needs, by sprinkling any orders all over the page-three girl in the Sun. He would then cut out another copy of the same photograph and seal it carefully over her twin, making a thin bag of heroin. He ended up supplying a grand’s worth of heroin a day to one prison, with an officer unwittingly delivering his wares to the customer direct. He was making far more with his built-in customers than he could ever hope to make “on the out”.’

  ‘But how did he get paid?’

  ‘Oh, Jeffrey, you’re so green. On every spur, on every block, in every prison, you’ll find a dealer who has a supplier on the outside and he’ll know your needs within hours of your being locked up.’

  ‘But that doesn’t answer my question.’

  ‘You make an order with your spur dealer,’ continues William, ‘say a gram of heroin a day. He then tells you the name and address of his supplier, and you select someone “on the out” to handle the payments. No standing orders, you understand, just cash. In your case you could have your supply delivered under the Scarfe cartoon in the Sunday Times.’ I laugh. ‘Or under the stamps on one of those large brown envelopes you receive every day. You’d be surprised how much cocaine you can deposit under four postage stamps. You watch the screws when the post arrives in the morning. They always run a thumb over the stamps, but you can get a lot more in via the envelope.’

  ‘But they always slit the envelopes open and look inside.’

  ‘I didn’t say inside,’ said William. ‘You may have noticed that down the right-hand side of most brown envelopes there’s a flap, which, if you lift carefully, you can fill with heroin and then seal back down again. I know a man who has Motor Magazine sent in every week, but it’s under the flap of the brown envelope that he’s getting his weekly fix.’

  ‘As soon as the buzzer goes, I’m going to have to run back to my cell and write all this down,’ I tell him.

  ‘How do you write your books?’ William enquires.

  ‘With a felt-tip pen.’

  ‘Lift the cap off the bottom and you can get about fifty pounds’ worth of crack cocaine stuffed in there, which is why the screws make you buy any writing implements direct from the canteen.’

  ‘Keep going,’ I say, having long ago given up sealing any plastic bags, but somehow William manages to do that job for me as well.

  ‘The most outrageous transfer I’ve ever seen was a twenty-seven-stone con who hid the drugs under the folds of his skin, because he knew no officer would want to check.’

  ‘But they must have machines to do the checking for them?’

  ‘Yes, they do, in fact vast sums have been spent on the most sophisticated machinery, but they only identify razor blades, guns, knives, even ammunition, but not organic substances. For that, they have to rely on dogs, and a nappy full of urine will put even the keenest bloodhound off the scent.’

  ‘So visits are the most common way of bringing in drugs?’

  ‘Yes, but don’t assume that lawyers, priests or prison officers are above being carriers, because when they turn up for legal and religious visits, or in the case of officers, for work, they are rarely searched. In some cases lawyers are paid their fees from drugs delivered to their clients. And when it comes to letters, if they’re legal documents, the envelope has to be opened in front of you, and the screws are not allowed to read the contents. And while you’re standing in front of a screw, he’s less likely to check under the stamps or the side flaps. By the way, there’s a legal shop in Fleet Street that is innocently supplying envelopes with the words LEGAL DOCUMENT, Strictly Private and Confidential printed on the to