Thameside Prison lies in south-east London, in the same part of the city where Lee Rigby was killed. It forms part of a complex, along with HMP & YOI (Young Offenders Institution) Isis and the infamous HMP Belmarsh, which at the time was home to alleged terrorist mastermind and all round troublemaker, Abu Qatada. Prisons in the UK are grouped into four categories:
- Category A and Double-A are maximum security prisons, reserved for the worst of the worst. Belmarsh is a Category A prison.
- B-Cats are holding joints, holding people who are waiting for trial or recently sentenced.
- C-Cat is common-or-garden, medium level security.
- D-Cat prisons don’t even hang a sign up saying ‘Please do not escape’; they actually allow you to leave. This is the kind of nick MP Chris Huhne was sent to after he was convicted of perverting the course of justice.
Thameside is a B-Cat prison, which basically meant they were going to keep me there until they worked out what to do with me. And you know what… it wasn’t bad!!! We had a phone in our cell, shower in our cell (so there was no risk of anal intruders), and a full selection of 80+ channels on Freeview, including that most important channel, Babestation, aka the ‘alone time’ channel 😉 Man were actually getting the Babestation line on their list of approved numbers and calling the girls up to talk dirty. If you ever wondered who the hell still does this stuff in the era of MyFreeCams.com, now you know. There was guaranteed gym three times a week, and we each got a loaf of bread to take back to ours cells every day at dinner. We even had little computers in our cells where we could put in requests or order stuff from the prison shop (canteen).
And before you ask, no there was no internet. I managed to post a couple of things on Facebook while I was inside but this was accomplished through… ‘other means‘. Had I been allowed to use the internet, it would have gone a great way to ease the feelings of isolation, paranoia and despondency that would later make me lose my mind. The only country I can think of which does this this is Norway, whose prisons are considered to be the best in the world and incidentally also have the lowest reoffending rates of any country, something our politicians would do well to remember next time they talk about ‘getting tough on crime.’.
The people were alright as well. There was a Sicilian Mafioso as well as a Colombian money launderer for the Cali Cartel, both of whom I got along with. There was an ex-marine held on remand accused of stabbing his girlfriend and setting fire to her house (he was later absolved) who simultaneously practiced Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and Buddhism. I’m not sure how compatible they are, but I know that whatever happens in the afterlife he’s got his bases covered. There was a Latvian methhead (but confusingly, everyone called us both ‘Russia’) who was missing most of his teeth and a geeza who looked and dressed exactly like Nigel Thornberry. And then there was the guy who stabbed Professor Green, along with his brother (but his brother was in for something else – I have more details on this case but I’m not sure I can go into too much detail on here).
But despite all this, it was still prison, and the reality of my position dawned as soon as I heard that loud metallic bang as the guard locked the cell’s door behind me. This was it, I thought, my life was essentially over. I panicked and paced up and down, but there was nothing I could do to get out of my new, personal hell. In an effort to keep my mind busy, or more likely because a few of my screws had come loose, I sat down and worked out the length of my sentence to the second (for the record, it was 457 days, 658,080 minutes and 39,484,800 seconds). Failing to find anything interesting on TV, I started counting down but stopped when I got past a few thousand after I realised this was retarded and not making time go any faster.
I was also struck by the unfairness of it all; I hadn’t hurt anyone or taken anything that wasn’t mine. I wasn’t exploiting any addicts; my market was primarily well-to-do university students, yuppies and hipsters, all of whom paid willingly for their gear. And while I did think a few people were smoking a bit too much weed, no one offered to suck me off for a ten-bag, d’ya know what I mean?!
Add to that, the Rita situation was still unresolved. I hadn’t yet gotten over her; when you’ve never had anyone, rejection becomes a lot harder to take. Her breaking up with her boyfriend just before I went in really fucked me up and got into my head the idea that maybe, just maybe, when I got out, she would still be single and I’d have a chance with her. It was a stupid thing to hope for, pretty girls like her don’t stay single for long, but when you’re in a situation like mine where you’re facing an uncertain future, when you don’t know if anyone’s going to employ you or if how it will be with your family you reach out for something, anything to hold on to.
How many man did I see in there saying shit like, “when I get out, I’m gonna marry my girl, she’s my rock!”, etc. That’s jail talk fam!! Them man are deluded. Call me cynical, but you think your woman’s gonna wait for their jailbird, deadbeat better half to come home, or is she gonna be getting the D from someone else? But it’s perfectly natural to cling on to your significant other in times like this. Unfortunately I didn’t have a significant other, all I had was a crush I could do nothing about. As you can tell, this is not going to end well.
For the first week in Thameside I was alone. Then I was moved into a cell with a good-natured but fucking annoying Bangladeshi guy serving a three-month stint for using a fake ID but under his own name, so he wasn’t pretending to be anyone else. He was in the UK on a student visa but really he was working, and when he tried to open a bank account he was instantly reported and the prosecutor claimed he was undermining British values to their core. He was an alright guy but sounded exactly like ‘Internet Providings’ from Fonejacker and kept the radio permanently tuned to BBC Asian Network, singing along to all the latest (or not the latest, I don’t know) Bollywood hits and asking me stupid questions all day long. One time we were watching Lord of the Rings on Film4 and when he turned to me and said, “where is this happening, Italy???”. I had to explain to him that Lord of the Rings wasn’t real, and that there are no Orcs in Italy, not even in the south. Like I said, a nice guy, but thankfully he got let out early on because if I heard “Say Shava Shava” one more time I would have smothered him in his sleep.
After he was released I moved into a cell with a newfound buddy of mine, a BBC Poetry Slam-winning rapper called Brotherman who got caught up in a drugs sting (check out his story here). In Thameside we all had a little mugshot next to our door, but when he was having his picture taken as he was came in one of the guards cracked a joke. So you walk past the cells, everyone’s doing their best to look hard as nails, and then you see this cat cracking up like he’s the only motherfucker happy to be here! Me and him had a lot of things in common: we were both educated to a university level, had a similar charge, similar sentence and similar sort of interests. We were both big movie fans, and many a night was spent watching or quoting lines from Eighties classics.
Surprisingly, my ploy to convince my parents I was going to live in the badlands of Cambodia didn’t work. Two weeks in, I got a letter from my mum. She’d been worried sick! Turns out my friends had fucked up and misunderstood my instructions and basically just ended up telling her the whole thing. She seemed to be cool, more concerned than angry, although I can’t imagine any parent taking that their child’s been locked up as good news. I didn’t know how to deal with it, or anything else that was going on really, so I’m ashamed to say I basically told her to fuck off. But she kept writing. Even behind barbed wire and reinforced concrete there was no escaping my mother.
Meanwhile, the helpful Sicilian man running the education department managed to get in touch with my uni where I had to apply for ‘extenuating circumstances’. Boy, that was an awkward letter to write. But I was granted permission to resume my course in 2014, provided I could make it out early for exams. To get out early I had to be eligible for HDC (Home Detention Curfew), which means you get let out with an electronic tag up to four-and-a-half months before your actual release date so every day you have to be home before a certain time, and to be eligible you had to fit a certain criteria i.e. good behavior, no violent or sexual crimes, etc. You also had to have an address you could be tagged to. I was given a lifeline and a goal: from that moment on, everything would be streamed towards getting my HDC.
If I had to compare prison to a film, it wouldn’t be the unrelenting bleakness of Oz nor the ultimate test of a man’s spirit that is The Shawshank Redemption, although there’s elements of both. It’s more like the first 20 minutes of Oldboy (original Korean version not the Hollywood remake): just sitting in a room all day, watching TV, slowly going insane. Every second that you spend in there takes a toll on your mind. To escape this tedium and add some spice to my life I pretended to to have a crack addiction so I could join the Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous groups. Sitting in on the meetings was fun; you got some free orange juice and sat in a circle listening in to people’s stories about how they drank, smoked, snorted and injected their lives away. OK so it wasn’t exactly a trip to the cinema but anything was better than being stuck in a cell and wanking yourself raw to The Jeremy Kyle Show.
But alas, it wasn’t to last. Six weeks into my glorious time at Her Majesty’s Palace in Thameside the screws abruptly opened my door one morning and told me to pack my bags. I was getting transferred.
“Where to?”, I asked.
“Isis”, came the reply.
“What the hell is Isis?”, I turned to my neighbor Liam, a 24-year old car thief serving his third conviction.
“It’s a shithole, mate, don’t go.”
“I have to”, I shrugged.
So I packed my things and said goodbye to Brotherman. On my last day on the wing, someone got stabbed. But compared to the place I was being sent to, Thameside was like Disneyland.
Warning: Here Be Dragons 
