The Men Behind the Wire

Note from The Editor
This is the first report filed for The Rusty Wire Service, thanks for reading. Please feel free to contribute; criticism, comments and suggestions are always gratefully received.


We aim to cover a wide range of topics here but underpinning it all, we hope, will be a necessarily deep scepticism about established 'truths' and orthodoxies. 


First principles like liberty and legitimacy should never be taken for granted. As part of our enquiries into liberty and contemporary culture, we will return regularly to prison and the nature of incarceration.


It is therefore appropriate that we start with a look at the lives of some of those 'behind the wire'.

The following is an excerpt from an eyewitness account of a visit to one of the UK’s top security prisons.

HMP Long Lartin, Evesham, Worcestershire

"This is the most escape-proof prison in Europe," the chaplain announced brightly as he talked me through the morning routine of boots off, bag search, fingerprint scan, picture taken and then a little stroll past the sniffer dogs. Compared to Scrubs and Wandsworth this was tight and not unexpected. Long Lartin houses some very dangerous people after all. I can’t afford to think about that too much, I’d never be able to do the job otherwise.

On some prison visits, my contact with prisoners takes place in the chapel where I would address them as a group and then speak more privately with whoever needed more attention. In Long Lartin however, I had the good fortune of being able to follow the RC Chaplain around the wings as he did his daily rounds.

The Chaplain gossiped as we darted about the jail. He had a resigned, seen-it-all-before chuckle about the Muslim prisoners who were quietly taking over wings and running them like an earlier generation of men behind a different wire. He even blithely asserted that Catholic gangs were being set up in response to the rise of Islam within the prison system.

It was a hectic morning, grabbing prisoners as we went, stopping on landings and taking notes on the hoof. By the time I got to the segregation block, I must have spoken to about twenty prisoners, some born in Ireland, some born in Britain, some settled some Travellers. Sex offenders, bank-robbers, rapists, brawlers and murderers but each of them was still a person for all of that, Each still brightened at human contact; a rare thing in this house of suffering. Anybody who tells you prison’s a holiday camp is an idiot and more than that, an ignoramus; this is a place seething with mental illness and barely suppressed violence. This is a lifer’s prison and too many people here really don’t have much to lose.

One of the unfortunate reasons for my visit was to secure an old prisoner’s permission for an Irish Government organisation to take his body back to be buried in Ireland when he died; which would almost certainly be in prison.

He was also the reason I was visiting the segregation block. It turned out the prisoner (a frail little man in his late 70s) had suffered some kind of violent outburst on the wing which resulted in him throwing a television down a stairs from the ‘threes’ (3^rd floor landing of residential wing). The old man was clearly suffering from the onset of dementia and yet the only way I was allowed to speak to him was through a locked steel door.

Through the spy-hole, I could see him lying on the floor on top of a rubber mattress, his scrawny white ankles poking out from under his blanket. I called to him through the crack between door and jamb and the little man struggled to his feet and laboured to hear me above the clang and clamour of the wing. Everywhere was a cacophony: shouts and key jangles; fat prisoner officers tramping up and down steel staircases and the occasional lunatic whoops from the other cells on the seg block. The old man shook his head sadly at me through the little reinforced glass window, made a weary ‘I can’t hear you’ cup with his hand to his shaking head. And then he turned around slowly and lay back down under his blanket."