The Criminal Alphabet (21 page)

The Hate Factory
is what prisoners call HMP Wandsworth, which at one time was considered the most brutal jail in the British prison system. Wandsworth screws seemed to take some sort of twisted pride in their reputation for giving prisoners the bare minimum in terms of everything from rations to clean clothing, and for brutalizing prisoners daily. HMP Wandsworth is also sometimes called ‘Wanno' by prisoners. It was the prison from which in 1965 Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs made his escape from a thirty-year sentence by scaling the wall of an
exercise yard
and dropping into a roofless furniture van. Even throughout the 1990s HMP Wandsworth had an unparalleled reputation for having brutal and violent prison staff. It was one of the last Category B prisons to allow prisoners to wear their own clothes.

See
HMP Wandsworth

To
have it
with someone means to be friends or crime partners with them and to spend time together for a common purpose.When you enter a prison, other prisoners will partly base their judgement of your character on who you have it with, or were having it with on
The Out
or in your previous prison.

A
hermit
is a prisoner who rarely ventures out of his cell, either through fear or mental illness. There will be at least one hermit on every prison wing.

Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons
(
HMCIP
) is a post created and established by the Criminal Justice Act 1982. Appointed by the Justice Secretary, from outside of the prison service, the Chief Inspector provides independent scrutiny of detention in England and Wales by carrying out announced and unannounced inspections of detention facilities. They cover prisons, young offender institutions, police cells and immigration detention centres. Both the prison system and the Ministry of Justice have been heavily criticized in HMCIP reports in recent years by successive inspectors. The inspectorate is invaluable at pointing out the flaws, mistakes and deliberate negligence that are rife in prisons.

HMDC
is an abbreviation of Her Majesty's Detention Centre. Detention centres (
DCs
) were places of incarceration for juvenile and young offenders where the emphasis was on what politicians and tabloid editors used to call the ‘short sharp shock'. They were designed to brutalize youngsters into giving up crime. Detention centres ran very harsh regimes, with plenty of physical exercise and back-breaking work, such as digging holes and filling them back in, and running around in circles for hours on end. It was believed that if you took a load of young offenders, locked them up together and treated them badly, they would soon see the error of their ways and give up their lives of crime. Unfortunately, all it did was to show them they were not alone in their criminality and give them a common enemy – society – to fight and rebel against. In HMDC a juvenile's head would be shaved on reception, he would be beaten and verbally abused by the screws and forced to run everywhere at the double.
Some youngsters died in detention centres because of the harsh regimes, and by the
1990s they had been closed down and replaced with
HMYOI
(Her Majesty's Young Offender Institution).

HMP
stands for Her Majesty's Prison. This is the prefix to the name of every prison, and even applies to the privatized prisons that in fact belong to huge European and American conglomerates. Every item of uniform or equipment found in prisons will be stamped with the crown and the letters ‘HMP'. As Oscar Wilde once said, ‘If this is the way Her Majesty treats her prisoners, then she doesn't deserve to have any.'

HMP
, or to be detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure, is the official name for the life sentence given to juveniles on conviction for murder. It's an open-ended sentence with no fixed release date and can only end when the Parole Board, acting on behalf of Her Majesty, decides to release the prisoner. HMPs start their sentence in the
HMYOI
(Her Majesty's Young Offender Institute) system and are then transferred to an adult prison at the age of twenty-one. Quite often, HMPs will spend decades in prison before release.

This was the name given to HMP High Down in Surrey by prisoners incarcerated there. The name refers to the dire quality of the food that was served up. The ‘cooks' believed they could get away with serving any old
jank
as long as they put a pastry crust on it. Pie was on the menu almost every day, and it wasn't advisable to look too closely at the contents while you were attempting to eat it. The food was supplied by an outside catering company, as opposed to being sourced by HMP, and this led to claims by prisoners that they were being given the cheapest and most rotten, out-of-date food so the private caterers could pocket a profit. HMP Highdown was opened in 1992
(officially 1993) and was built on the site of the old Banstead Lunatic Asylum,
which had been there since 1877. Within its first three months as an operational prison, two prisoners managed to force their way into the healthcare centre and launch a six-hour siege. They helped themselves to various drugs from the ‘secure'
cabinets and one of them later died in mysterious circumstances – supposedly while being
shipped out on a sweatbox on its way to HMP Wandsworth. HMP Highdown is one of the new-build prisons, based on a Canadian design, and is supposedly riot-proof and escape-proof, although at different times in its short history the prison has been downgraded from holding Category A prisoners (due to poor security) and then upgraded again as security improves. At the time of writing,
HMP Highdown is designated as a Category B adult male jail. In 2008 a new chef took over the kitchens and pretty soon HMP High Down was serving up some of the best food in the British prison system. The prison now has its own working restaurant within the grounds.

See
Clink

From the 1940s right up until the turn of the twenty-first century the prison most hated by prisoners in the southern part of England was HMP Wandsworth, also known as the
Hate Factory
or Wanno. Most regions had a harsh
local prison
with a terrible reputation for the treatment of prisoners – HMP Durham in the North-east, HMP Winson Green in the Midlands, HM Remand Centre Risley in Cheshire, HMP Walton in Liverpool,
HMP Armley in Leeds and HMP Dartmoor in the extreme southwest – but none was more feared and hated than HMP Wandsworth.

Built in 1851, it was known as the Surrey House of Correction (back in the days when the area of Wandsworth was still in Surrey) and was designed according to the ‘separate system', in which a number of corridors radiate from a central hub in what was called a ‘panopticon'. This meant that staff could stand in the centre of the prison and see every cell from that one spot. Each prisoner had toilet facilities in their single-cell accommodation. The
toilets were later removed in order to pack more prisoners into the cells and the single cells now house up to three prisoners each. The practice of slopping out was ended at HMP Wandsworth only in 1996.

The punishments at HMP Wandsworth were varied, cruel and given out for the slightest infractions of the rules, from being given only bread and water in solitary confinement to floggings with the birch and cat o' nine tails. In 1930 a prisoner called James Spiers, who was serving a ten-year sentence for armed robbery, committed suicide in front of a group of Justices of the Peace who were there to witness him receiving fifteen lashes of the
cat
. In 1951 HMP Wandsworth was chosen as the site for keeping a national stock of two implements used for serious corporal punishment inflicted in prison under magistrates' orders. The birch and the cat were used on prisoners either as part of their original sentence or as a disciplinary punishment under prison rules.

The most famous escape from HMP Wandsworth was by Ronnie Biggs, one of the Great Train Robbers. In 1963 the Glasgow to London mail train was robbed of £2.6 million in used banknotes by a South London gang. Most of the robbers were captured and jailed for up to thirty years apiece.
Ronnie Biggs was held at HMP Wandsworth while awaiting
allocation
to HMP Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight. While there, he devised a plan to escape. On
8 July 1965, having served just under nineteen months, Ronnie Biggs and three other prisoners used rope ladders that had been thrown over by outside accomplices to scale the wall. Outside the prison was a high-topped roofless Luton van, and the escapees dropped into this before jumping into a Ford Zephyr MKII and leaving the prison in a trail of exhaust fumes. Biggs was on the run for 13,068 days before giving himself up in 2001, when he became
seriously ill. In the reception of Wandsworth Prison the screws put on display the mailbag Ronnie Biggs had been sewing on the day of his escape, with a note to other prisoners that, no matter where he went in the world, one day Ronnie Biggs would be back to finish his mailbag and the rest of his sentence. Ronnie Biggs never went back to HMP Wandsworth, his mailbag remained unfinished and he was released on compassionate grounds in August 2009.

Almost twenty-five years to the day of the Biggs escape, I and several of my confederates were involved in an escape attempt that made the national newspapers. In July 1990, during the one-hour exercise period on D-wing yard at HMP Wandsworth, seven of us (all long-term prisoners) assaulted several prison officers and tried to hijack a JCB that was being used by civilian contractors to repair the concrete path in the ‘sterile area'
(the gap between the inner fence and the outer wall which prisoners are not allowed to approach). The plan was to use the JCB to smash down the wall and fence, allowing up to 150 long-term prisoners to escape, but things went wrong when the prisoner charged with driving the JCB couldn't get it off its hydraulic stands. The alarms were raised and scores of prison officers rushed to the sterile area and fought with the prisoners, eventually using the broken rubble from the path as missiles to pelt those taking refuge on the JCB. As punishment, we were all severely beaten by prison staff and thrown into the punishment block.

HMYOI
stands for Her Majesty's Young Offender Institution – prisons for those under the age of twenty-one.
These prisons are, on the whole, more volatile and violent than most adult prisons.

See
Borstal
,
DC
,
Gladiator school
,
HMDC
,
HMP (2)

A
hobbit hole
is any place that any prisoner classed as a
hobbit
lives or spends the majority of their time. This could be their cell, the wing office or even the communal television rooms, where hobbits gather in numbers to watch soap operas.

See
Vegetable Patch

Almost every prison has a
hobbit shop
– a workshop where mind-numbing, repetitive work, such as putting washers on bolts or making prison brooms, can be undertaken, for a wage of around ten pence a day. Any prisoner with an ounce of self-respect will try to avoid being allocated to the hobbit shop; only
hobbits
are happy to work there.

See
Noddy shop

Very serious sex offenders and child killers who have been imprisoned in a blaze of publicity are usually put on to
Home Office
numbers
, which means they don't have to make the usual request for protection from other prisoners under Rule 45 (formerly Rule 43); the Home Office automatically orders the prison governor to put them on protection. Even if the prisoner wants to go on to normal location, they will not be permitted to do so.

See
43OP
,
86
,
Cab caller
,
Cucumber
,
Nonce

Hooch
is prison-brewed alcohol, usually made from anything that can be stolen from the central prison kitchen – fruit, potatoes, rice. Bread can be used as the fermenting agent, as it contains small amounts of unfermented yeast. The prisoner will usually use plastic juice bottles or gallon floor-polish containers to make the brew. Here's how to do it. First, chop up the fruit then put it in the container with two kilos of sugar,
several slices of bread (or just yeast if you have it), pour in a large amount of boiling water and mix thoroughly. Seal the container and put it somewhere warm, near the heating pipe in your cell, for example. About every six hours, make sure to undo the lid, because the fermentation process makes the ingredients swell with gases.
This is the most dangerous part of making hooch because it will release a very strong smell of alcohol, and prison staff are always on the sniff for that. Making hooch is against prison rules and can be punishable by up to twenty-eight days' loss of remission or fourteen days' solitary confinement. Once the mixture has been
‘down' for at least three days it can be drunk and will produce a mild alcoholic effect. The longer you leave it, the more potent it will be. Once the hooch is ready to be decanted, open the container and strain the liquid through a prison-issue vest or T-shirt. Then a good time can be had by all. Of course, if you leave it too long,
the risk of it being found by prison staff is greater, and all your effort will have been for nothing. In some top-security prisons making hooch is something of a challenge and the determination of the staff to find it turns the situation into a war of attrition. Most prisons will have a master brewer, someone who makes quantities of good hooch and sells it to other prisoners for tobacco or drugs.