Bennett Loses Plot, Causes Disaster

Doing porridge: Ex-con reveals what looters can expect in prison



19 August 2011
Charlie Gilmour is serving his sentence for violent disorder in Wandsworth and post-riots he will be joined by many of the looters. One ex-con from the jail tells Nick Curtis what it's like inside...

In my twenties, I served two years of a four-year sentence in prisons around the country for conspiracy to steal high-value items. Wandsworth, where I spent eight weeks on remand, was the worst.

It's notorious because it's old - a very dark, scary Victorian building like something out of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - understaffed and overcrowded. As a category B jail, it's full of very dangerous criminals, but because prisoner levels are so high, there are lots of people convicted of less serious offences, like me, circulating through. I arrive in an armoured van known as the "Sweatbox" with six other prisoners picked up from different courts. We go through two enormous, intimidating dark-stained oak gates - they've changed them now - and we're within the prison walls, looking up at rows of tiny cell windows. Some of us are chatting, trying to act like jack-the-lads. I just feel numb. It's a defence mechanism. Your body just shuts down.
In the holding room, your personal details and medical issues are noted down. You're photographed and given a prison ID card. They take away your clothes and give you two grey jumpers, one pair of grey trousers, and four or five pairs of prison socks and underwear. They might let you keep a book, or your watch, but you're warned a watch will probably get stolen. Smokers are given half an ounce of unrecognisable tobacco, a prison issue lighter and cigarette papers.

They take the laces out of my trainers: others get prison plimsolls with Velcro fixings. I'm patted down and asked to lift my testicles but not given a cavity search: the level of the security check depends on your offence. The screws are businesslike: not aggressive, but not exactly friendly.

The induction wing is a long, pale-blue corridor, very modern and clean and not too high, with a series of heavy metal doors along two landings. The induction orderly gets you a sandwich before bed, and issues you with a plastic plate, bowl, cup, cutlery, teabags, sugar and a breakfast of cereal and UHT milk. You're given two postage-paid prison-issue letters, and a PIN code for £1 credit on the phones on the wings.

We're locked down at 7.30pm, in a very cold, 10ft by 6ft graffiti-free cell. Everything is made out of moulded plastic so you can't break or throw it. The toilet has a curtain round it, a travel kettle and a small TV showing four channels. I bunk with a heroin addict who's been in and out of prison for years. There's no ashtray so he eats his cereal and uses the milk carton to put out cigarettes. It's my first bit of prison advice: you get given so little, you hang onto everything you can. In prison, everyone leaves the TV on all night because there's so little to do, and everyone watches the Jeremy Kyle Show in the mornings, which is arguably the worst punishment.

At 8am they tell us to bundle our kit into our bedsheets and send us to different wings. On the main wing - where the looters will be held - the illusion that prison isn't so bad dissolves. It's much older, with higher ceilings and discoloured yellow-white walls, three or four landings of people all looking down at you and noise everywhere. It's like a microcosm of a council estate. Everyone's shouting - "All right mate, nice here, innit?" - trying to get a read on you. You have to not show any sign of weakness.

I'm put in with a guy who's in for his third drugs offence. The metal bunks are chipped and flaky, the tiny window opens six or seven inches but has bars behind it and looks onto a brick wall. Heat comes from the hot-water pipe that runs through all the cells. The furniture is wooden, the walls covered with dark poetry and bleak graffiti: "I came here a man, I'll go out an animal." The toilet is in a separate cubicle but there's no seat and no door. The mattresses have been cleaned, but you can see the stains on them - blood and other things. The whole place is filthy: an old cell is much harder to keep clean than a modern one.

THERE'S some mouldy bread and used razors left by the previous occupant. The TV wire is exposed because he'd been charging a mobile phone from it. Because of what we call "the churn", the constant movement of prisoners due to overcrowding, stuff often gets left behind. My new mate came to Wandsworth because someone was moved into his cell in Brixton while he was in court. Twenty minutes after the doors close, the screws walk the wing, opening the door flaps to do the roll count.

We're locked down until lunch at 11am. No one tells you what to do so you follow the herd. The wing canteen is packed, overwhelming. There's a couple of hundred people there, about 60 per cent of them black or mixed race. Some guys are huge: they're on long sentences and spend all their time weight training. I keep my eyes forward. Lunch is a jacket potato with nothing on it or a sandwich, which you take back to your cell. There's no pudding. You drink water or awful tea. Then it's bang-up time and roll check again. It's a huge relief when that door shuts, to be locked away from it all.

About 1pm it's "Sosh" - association time, a chance to mingle. The most intimidating moment in the first days. A friend of my cellmate comes in and offers me two mobiles, a wrap of speed, or the heroin substitute Subutex, trying his best to get me into debt. A sixteenth of an ounce of marijuana costs two ounces of tobacco. You carry your tobacco in your sock, so it's easy to hide drugs there because the screws are used to seeing bulges, and they don't have time or manpower to search everyone. Mobile phones, people hide in their arses. God knows how they do it.

My cellmate heads off and two more guys come in, say, "Just give us your f**king baccy", and attack me. One stays on the landing, nodding and smiling to make things look normal, but also keeping me away from the emergency alarm by the door. His mate gives me a few heavy punches and knocks me into the sink, but I fight back and then the lookout shouts "Screw! Screw!" and they waltz off. I know I had to have this fight: bullies only pick on you if it's an easy job.
You get this sort of violence in any prison of this category. While I was in Wandsworth a guy was stabbed with a sharpened toilet brush. You can dismantle a disposable razor, use your lighter to melt it onto a toothpaste brush, and you've got a knife. If people want to hurt you, they will. It's not the officers' fault. Given the levels of understaffing and overcrowding, they do a remarkable job of keeping violence to a minimum. They're brave people.

Sosh is the time you can use the showers, but I decided to just wash at my sink. Rape happens a lot, not just in Wandsworth. People who won't put up a fight are liable to be sexually abused: they're usually psychologically abused first to make them compliant. But if you fight back at that first beating, people leave you alone.

Mid-afternoon we're let out for 30 minutes' exercise in the concrete yard edged with cage fencing. Some guys do yoga or press-ups but most just walk around in a big circle. The ethnic groups mix here because they're doing business. I see the guys who attacked me but I just sit on the ground, nursing my wounds and smoking.
At 5pm, we're let out again to collect our dinner - shepherd's pie with gravy and carrots, with one other option, plus sponge pudding and custard, a piece of fruit and two slices of bread. Banged up again by 5.30, we've spent just two hours out of our cells the whole day.

At 8pm my cellmate goes to the toilet, pulls the phone out of his arse, rolls a spliff, and lies on his bed whispering to his girlfriend. You have to be quick because the screws patrol the landings, scanning for phones. You get used to going to the toilet with someone else in the room, and that's where you masturbate too, although lifers sharing a cell sometimes start sexual relationships. At night you might hear people shouting, screaming or kicking doors, screws rushing to stop someone hurting himself. One fellow hanged himself while I was in Wandsworth.

After only two days in prison my personality's changed. I'm not a violent man, but whenever I see someone I calculate how I'll respond if he attacks me. I have one other fight. I catch a guy going into my pad - cell - and hit him six or seven times. Not in the face because you don't want a bruise. I'm left alone after that but there's always the threat of violence because new tough guys are always circling through. Brixton is rumoured to be worse for organised gangs.

EVERYTHING becomes routine. Your clothes are changed once a week and your bedding once every two weeks. You go on the canteen rota so you can choose your meals. You can book time in the gym or library. In theory, everyone in prison is in full-time employment, either work or education. In practice, because of overcrowding and understaffing, it's two or three hours a day, which might clash with your gym time.

In the prison gardens, you might earn £9 a week. You can buy stuff - sweets, freeze-dried noodles, weight-training supplements - but it takes ages to save up. The myth about all prisoners getting PlayStations is nonsense.

I expect Charlie Gilmour will go onto a vulnerable persons' wing, for people who might be attacked. It's where high-profile prisoners such as George Michael are sent, but also paedophiles, rapists and people who have incurred a debt. He may be away from violent prisoners who will treat him as a money bag, but he'll be bunking down with some of the sickest people in prison. The best advice I can give him is not to hide in his cell. Not necessarily mingle with people, just show he's not scared.

I coped by shutting everyone out. I was single when I went in, and I stopped myself thinking about or even writing to my parents. For a month after release I was very emotional - weepy and angry and indignant and confused. In some ways I haven't fully readjusted. I work as a mentor for ex-offenders but it's hard for most ex-convicts to get work, and hard to start relationships. If I pass a group of people on the street, I'm still working out what I'm gonna do if they attack me. The sense of knowing what people are capable of never leaves you.

The former prisoner telling this story wanted to remain anonymous.

bb1 wrote:deborah butler ‏@IWILLNOTGOAWAY
@realDonaldTrump what do you make of the #McCann s trying to jail an OAP. For asking questions http://mccannfiles.com

bb1 wrote:Yes, she's been creosoting herself specially for the occasion....

bb1 wrote:Well, no-one is that color naturally.....



Who can forget how excited the hounders were - until the show aired.

Worth re-watching, if only for the reaction of the local people to the Rothley Stalking.

bb1 wrote:What, no mods to run crying to? No brown-nosers to call people trolls?

Jean-Pierre.t50 wrote:He will be fine, MF.

Because there is absolutely no evidence that Bennett is or was or ever has been a solicitor.

How many necks has she got on there?

bb1 wrote:Tony Bennett Today

Received earlier this morning:

Tony,

You don't know me from Adam, but I have for a long time followed the case, your case, and all information on the Jill Havern forum & elswhere on the internet.

What you are doing is commendable, and I personally wish you all the best whatever happens next week.

I know you have many well wishers on the forums, but also rememeber there is many more anonymous/unregistered viewers who have the utmost respect for your hard work, endeavours & taken stance.

I pray for justice, I pray for the little girl & I will be praying for you next week.

Best wishes,

[name withheld]