Inside Broadmoor by Jonathan Levi

Author:Jonathan Levi
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Blink Publishing
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Lockdown

Broadmoor could not function for a single day without the rigid security procedures and secure spaces within it, which are taken with deadly seriousness. There are 900 staff at Broadmoor and 200 patients, and the staff really know their patients, to the extent that they can do so, they know the risks that they present.

Broadmoor has the security status of a Category B prison. A Category A prison houses male criminals who are perceived to pose the greatest threat to the police, public or national security, were they to escape. Category B prisons are either local prisons housing prisoners who came straight from a local court either on remand or having received a sentence, or training prisons with long-term and high security prisoners. Category C prisons are for those who cannot be trusted in the outside world but are unlikely to attempt an escape, and Category D are open prisons. Clearly, Broadmoor is none of the above but purely from a security status point of view it is characterised as Cat B.

The first line of defence, as we have seen, is the biometric tests, airport-style security scans and a physical search, or ‘pat-down’. Once through these barriers, a central control room strictly monitors and controls all movement. This means that the head of security and his team will know exactly where every patient is, all the time.

Broadmoor has a secure perimeter (two fences, anti-climb measures, supported by over 300 cameras, with a fence that is alarmed around the entire perimeter). The inner perimeter is marked by a very high, very high-tech, and highly intimidating steel fence running inside the hospital’s brick outer walls. At points all around the hospital grounds, access is controlled by a set of seemingly impenetrable electronic gates.

Movement around the hospital ‘campus’ is strictly controlled. At various times of the day, a series of gates are opened and manned to allow freer flow of patients as they go to work or to therapy sessions. This is known as ‘supervised movement’. It is a sobering reminder of how rare it is for the men to walk from one place to another without having to stop for doors and gates to be unlocked and relocked behind them, and it gives the place the feeling of a ghost town.

One of the clever and invisible tricks that the hospital plays on patients is a solution to what they call ‘non-compatibility’. Often a patient will brag or threaten violence towards a ‘celebrity’ patient. As we have seen, Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was a particularly popular target as his assailants hoped they would gain points with their peers if they manage to inflict an assault. No matter what the patient has done in the outside world, it’s vital that they are kept safe inside Broadmoor’s walls.

To control these issues, Broadmoor changes the movement patterns. That way, they can make sure that the threatening patient simply never comes across, or is ever in the same room as the other patient. Movement is so strictly policed and choreographed that this is possible.

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