Muslamic Ray Gun by Shaun Stafford

Author:Shaun Stafford [Stafford, Shaun]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: New England Books
Published: 2017-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-EIGHT

Of course, the fight with Boyce was mentioned at my parole board hearing, and of course my parole was denied, even though violence was not part of the offending behaviour in my index offence. My brief told me I could try again in a year, but the board’s recommendation was that I undertake cognitive behavioural therapy to deal with my violent tendencies.

The waiting list for the CBT course, according to the psychologist I spoke to – when I finally managed to get my personal officer to set up an appointment, which took three months – was basically a year and a half. I complained, but she was unsympathetic. I submitted a governor’s app, but when that came back it just stated that the waiting list could not be jumped.

I remember speaking to Sophie on the phone after the parole hearing. I’d already written to her explaining the reasons why my parole had been denied. She wasn’t happy. How can you explain to your sixteen-year-old daughter why you’d been involved in a juvenile fight over something which, in the real world, simply would not have resulted in such violence? She probably saw young guys at school behaving more mature than I had.

The conversation ended when Sophie said, “I can’t deal with this. You’ve let me down. I’ll speak to you later.” The phone went dead and I returned to my pad to ruminate over the long wait before I’d be able to engage in cognitive behavioural therapy with some prison psychologist.

They call in a ‘knock-back’, and during this time the screws and psychologists are watching you to see how you cope with it. I’m presuming that in the very least they’d expect you to exhibit some signs of disappointment.

I was on a new wing and I could instantly sense that the demographics of the prison population had changed. There were just as many blacks, just as many Pakistanis, but there seemed to be more whites. Only, these whites spoke English with strong accents, if they spoke English at all. Mostly, they spoke a foreign language. Eastern Europeans from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia. Huge beasts of men, at least six feet tall. Even I felt uncertain around them, mainly because when they were in a group you had no idea what the fuck they were saying.

I met Johnny Brooker on this wing. He was an ex-squaddie, a former skinhead who’d fallen foul of the law after burning a Pakistani man to death. A racist murder. It couldn’t be described as anything else, in all honesty.

He’d been inside for nine years and, like me, had now been categorized as C – essentially, we couldn’t be trusted in open conditions, but we weren’t considered to be an escape risk. People have this misconception about prisons, that the only cons in Category C prisons are non-violent, low-risk offenders. The reality is that there are just as many murderers in Cat C establishments as there are in Cat A and Cat B prisons, perhaps more. And trust me, when a killer in a Cat C prison kicks off, he really goes for it.

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