None Shall Divide Us by Michael Stone

Author:Michael Stone [Stone, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Political Science, True Crime, Biography & Autobiography, Criminals & Outlaws, Historical, Terrorism, International Relations
ISBN: 9781904034513
Publisher: John Blake
Published: 2003-05-01T05:00:00+00:00

17

PRISONER A385

CRUMLIN ROAD JAIL:A RAT-AND COCKROACH-INFESTED VICTORIAN DUMP. IT WAS NOT FIT TO HOUSE HUMAN BEINGS, BUT THEN TO THE AUTHORITIES WE WEREN’T HUMAN BEINGS. We were the lowest forms of life, no better than the cockroaches and rats that shared our cells.

I had been in prison before and knew the introductory procedures, which included the strip-search and the medical on arrival. Prisoners are always given a grubby towel measuring just twelve by twelve inches to wear after showering and before the search. I didn’t see the point of it. The towel barely covered my private parts, so I slung it over my shoulder and limped around naked. The prison doctor gave me a medical and put on his notes that there wasn’t a piece of white skin on my body, which was still recovering from the motorway beating. I wasn’t surprised to find out I was spending my first week in the prison’s hospital ward.

In that week I had just one visitor: my mother. With us throughout her visit was a prison officer, and when I asked him to leave he refused. He hovered at my shoulder listening to every word we spoke. My mother cried. She hugged me and whispered in my ear that she understood, she loved me and I would always be her son, no matter what happened. It would be a full year before I saw her again.

After a week I was released from the prison hospital fully expecting to go on the wings. The Governor came to see me. He was carrying a clipboard and on it was an order, signed by the Secretary of State that said I couldn’t enter the general prison population and would be held for an indefinite period on the Prisoner Segregation Unit. I was told that the Secretary of State would sign the order papers every twenty-four hours until a decision had been made to move me back into the general prison population. I asked him whether I was spending my remand on ‘the boards’ and he said yes. I limped, accompanied by four prison officers, past the noisy heart of the prison and then down below ground. I was destined for the bowels of Crumlin Road jail. ‘The boards’ is solitary confinement, and being on the boards means being locked up twenty-three hours a day in the PSU. Inmates who have broken prison rules or misbehaved by fighting one another or assaulting a prison officer are sent there as punishment. The internal system that decides how much time in the PSU a misbehaving prisoner should get is called ‘adjudication’.

The cells in the PSU were six-by-ten-foot units of hell. They had a tiny, narrow bed along one wall and along the other wall two bits of wood sticking out pretending to be a table and chair. It was dark and dingy, with no natural light except a small slit covered with Perspex which was so badly scratched and so dirty that it may as well have been boarded up.

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