The Criminal Alphabet (13 page)

See
Fit-up
,
Noble Cause
Corruption

Wasps
is modern slang
for uniformed police officers in high-visibility vests, and is meant to denote that
they can be a nuisance, dangerous and that, if there is trouble, they will
swarm.

Back in the 1980s there was a strange
tale going around about
the White Rabbit
in Wembley police station.
Prisoners who had become a bit stroppy told of late-night visits to the cells by a
big white rabbit that gave them a good kicking. Of course, when they complained to
magistrates or their solicitors their claims sounded ridiculous. Imagine turning up
at court, covered in bruises, and telling the magistrate that a big white rabbit
entered your cell in the middle of the night and gave you a good kicking! Anyway,
the white rabbit of Wembley became a sort of urban legend. Just recently, I was told
by a serving police officer that when they were refurbishing the police station a
locked cupboard on the top floor was forced open and, inside, they found a
fancy-dress white rabbit suit complete with bloodstains.

Woodentops
is a
now-dated derogatory term, taken from the children's television puppet show
The
Woodentops
, for uniformed police, usually used by members of the CID.

A
zombie
is what the
police call a police officer close to retirement and now merely going through the
motions. It can also mean a lazy police officer who does the bare minimum, shuffling
from one job to another with no enthusiasm. Most police officers hate zombies with a
passion, as they tend to make everyone else's job harder as others have to pick up
the slack.

Let's face it, we're living in very troubled times. These days, you don't have to be a serious criminal in order to attract the attention of the police and find yourself on the wrong side of the law. In fact, you don't have to be any kind of criminal at all. In some cases, all you need is a brown face, a beard and an opinion and you can find yourself pacing an eight-by-ten cell inside a Special Security Unit before you can say ‘God is good'. And even if you're a white-faced, beardless atheist, prison is still only an unpaid television licence away. Britain jails more men, women and children per capita than anywhere else in Europe. When it comes to dishing out the porridge, we're right up there with those other models of liberality and tolerance Russia, China and the USA.
Heady company indeed. It is estimated that by 2017 the British prison population will hit the 100,000 mark, and this won't include people who are on parole or the large proportion of citizens who will have served a prison sentence but aren't in prison at that moment. In its first decade in power, the New Labour government introduced into British law twenty-four new Criminal Justice Bills – over 3,000 new offences and 115,000 pages of legislation. When you consider that before 1997 one Criminal Justice Bill was introduced, on average, every ten years, it's clear what an effect this statute frenzy has had in criminalizing large sections of the population and leaving them eligible for imprisonment. To put it simply, in the not-too-distant future a substantial chunk of the British population will have had some experience of imprisonment, if not personally, then through family or friends.
And yet, to the vast majority of people, the reality of prison remains a mystery.

In this section I will talk about prisons: their slang names, a bit of their history and a smattering of the language used within their walls. There are a lot of stories to be told. For example, not a lot of people know that HMP Brixton in South London was once a female prison. It only started taking male prisoners when HMP Holloway, a mixed prison since it opened in 1852, was designated female-only in 1903. Or that HMP Belmarsh was built on marshland and is sinking into the marsh at the rate of an inch per year. The state-of-the-art underground ‘security tunnel' there, built in order to deliver high-security prisoners to nearby Woolwich Crown Court without motorized transport, has been closed most of the time the prison has been in operation because leaks regularly cause floods in the tunnel. To paraphrase a former Home Secretary,
it's all very well having innovative security ideas but they must at least be ‘fit for purpose'.

Of course prisoners use slang, but so do prison officials. It's known as ‘screw-speak' and often involves abbreviations and acronyms. The ordinary man on the street would be hard pressed to understand one word in every five spoken by a prisoner, but he might struggle to understand one word in every three uttered by prison officials. For example, screws in different prisons address their charges differently, so you might be called ‘blue', ‘bud',
‘fella' or
scrote
,
depending on which prison and which part of the country you are in. In London and southern prisons, ‘fella' is the most common form,
as in ‘Get behind your door, fella' or ‘What's your number, fella?'. ‘Bud' is big in Welsh prisons and is short for ‘buddy', which might seem a jolly, friendly way of addressing prisoners but only means that, on the whole, prison officers cannot be bothered learning the prisoner's name. ‘Scrote' is the rudest and is mainly used by security and punishment-block screws, as well as
a lot of landing screws. It's short for ‘scrotum' and a term of abuse used heavily by the armed forces and the police as well, as in ‘Get behind your door, you horrible little scrote!'. To a lot of people in uniform, the non-uniformed population are nothing more than scrotes. Let's face it, your outlook on life has to be tinged with more than a touch of bitterness when you resort to describing those around you as nothing more than flesh bags full of bollocks! Prison officers have a motto, ‘Happiness is door-shaped', which means they are happy when every prisoner in the jail is locked behind their cell door. A typical exchange between a screw and a con in prison may sound something like this:

Con: Oi, guv, what's the apple with my peter? I'm feeling tom and need to get in my flowery but there's a gang of kangas giving me a
spin
. [Excuse me, officer, what's going on in my cell? I'm feeling quite ill and need to get in but there are several officers searching it.]

Screw: Wind yer neck in, fella.
The
DST
are doing LBBs in there, so stop being a
numpty
or I'll stick the red pen on your page 16 and get you put on
Basic
. [Stop bothering me. The Dedicated Search Team are checking Locks, Bolts and Bars, so be patient or I'll write you up and have you put on the Basic regime.]

‘Peter' in criminal and prison slang dates back to the Victorian era, when it was used as a word for anything that was bound by heavy locks, so, for example, a safe, as well as a prison cell. The reasoning was that in paintings and statues Saint Peter is depicted holding a large bunch of keys – to heaven – so anything that could be opened with a key was named after him. The con also uses ‘spin' for a search by police, customs or prison officers. The word
comes from the fact that they tend to move everything and never clean up the mess they make, so the place looks as though it has been spun around at top speed.

The most common word for a prison officer is ‘screw', from the days of the ‘separate system', when prisoners were forced to carry out hard labour in prisons, such as walking the treadmill or picking oakum from rope, and most of the labour was done behind the cell door or in specially built compartments so that prisoners couldn't see each other. One hard-labour punishment was known as ‘the crank': a large wooden crank handle inside the cell was attached to a counter outside it. Prisoners were told to turn the crank a certain number of times each day (sometimes it could take fourteen hours to achieve this) and each turn would be registered on the counter. A screw on the outside of the door could be used to adjust the amount of effort needed to turn the crank. Some jailors, or turnkeys, would delight in turning the screw to make the work that much harder for the prisoner, and these turnkeys became known as screws.

‘Screw' remains the slang template for prison officers, but endless variations have evolved over the years, most of them revolving around rhyming slang popular at the time. For example, in the 1970s
Scooby Doo
was a popular children's television cartoon, so screws became known as ‘scoobies' (Scooby Doo = screw), as in ‘Oi, Knuckles, call that scooby and get him to un-Chubb my peter, will you?' Other variations are ‘fourbe'
(four-by-two, a carpenter's measure of wood), ‘penny' (penny chew) and the ubiquitous ‘kanga' (kangaroo), which is very much in vogue at the moment. (‘Fourbe'
and ‘penny' are also used as rhyming slang for ‘Jew'.)

Different regions of the country have different slang terms for prison officers. In prisons in the north-east
they're known as ‘long-tails' (rats), in Liverpool as ‘the Germans' (an allusion, of course, to the most hated enemy in two world wars and many international football matches), and in the south they are sometimes called
‘roaches'. I think we can safely assume that there's no love lost between the prison guard and their charges. A lot of the general public have no experience of prisons other than what they read in the tabloids or see on the telly.
Porridge
,
the 1970s sitcom, is usually their first port of call. There are often stories in the red tops about ‘holiday camp' jails in which smug cons are served smoked salmon and quince by servile warders as they lie in luxury watching Sky TV … or something like that. Well, let's scotch that one right here: prisons, in reality,
are brutal cesspits where the murder rate is seven times higher than it is
‘outside'. Lots of people die in our prisons, and still more become insane and are quietly sectioned under the Mental Health Act. On the whole, the atmosphere is one of despair.

At the turn of the twenty-first century the prison system began to introduce
ICE
(in-cell electricity),
which led to in-cell television being standard in most prisons. Prisoners can ‘hire'
a small-screen portable TV for between £1 and £1.50 per week and, considering the average prison wage is £7 per week, that's a sizable chunk of their income, when they must also purchase phone credits, toiletries, smoking requisites, stationery,
stamps and tinned food in order to supplement the meagre prison diet. The televisions were bought in bulk by the prison system at around £25 each, so the money accrued from the rentals represents a very profitable return for the Ministry of Justice. In-cell television has been responsible for a decrease in violence in prisons, and the reason is simple: before this, prisoners could be locked in their cells for up to twenty-three hours a day. They could read (according to official statistics from
the Bromley Briefings and the Howard League for Penal Reform, up to two-thirds of prisoners have the reading and writing skills of children under the age of ten) or listen to the radio, if they had one (although,
for some unfathomable reason, only mediumor long-wave radios were allowed, not FM).
If neither of these appealed – and, even if they did – prisoners spent a lot of their time shouting insults at each other through the cell windows. This would inevitably, in some cases, lead to violence as soon as the prisoners were let out of their cells and able to get at each other. In prison parlance, the prisoners who shout abuse and threats from their cell windows are known as
window warriors
and are mostly held in contempt by other prisoners. In my own experience, window warriors were responsible for around 30 per cent of violence in local prisons before the introduction of in-cell TV in the late
1990s. Nowadays, when cells are unlocked prisoners are eager to converse about programmes they may have seen on the telly during
bang-up
(any period spent locked in a cell). As a result, there's certainly less early-morning violence in prisons. Before televisions were introduced to the prison system there was a roaring trade in hand-held, battery-operated tellies which would sometimes be smuggled in by prison staff for a price. The slang word for a telly in those days was ‘custard' (custard and jelly = telly), as in ‘'Ere, any chance of a go on your custard during bang-up?'. Some people earned a lucrative penny by renting out their illegal custard. The going rate was either three joints (cannabis cigarettes) or half an ounce of tobacco to use someone's custard for a night.

You can get almost anything on the prison black market as long as you have the financial wherewithal. Some people – in some cases, prison staff – can earn a small fortune supplying things which prisoners would find hard to get
their hands on otherwise. For example, a throwaway mobile phone that costs less than a ‘cockle' (corrupted rhyming slang:
cock and hen = ten) on
The Out
(the world outside prison) can fetch up to £300 once it's been smuggled on to the prison landings. Such a phone is often called a ‘dog' (dog and bone = phone) or a ‘moby' (short for ‘mobile'), and smuggling them into prison is a growing business. Being in possession of a mobile phone inside has recently been made a criminal offence punishable by up to two years. I can understand some of the reasons behind HMP not wanting prisoners to have access to unregistered phones – i.e. intimidating witnesses, running a criminal business, etc. … – but these things can be achieved by any prisoner who has visits from friends and acquaintances. Banning things that allow the prisoner not to use the overpriced services offered by the prisons seem to be the Prison Service's default setting. Some prisoners, believe it or not, use illegal mobile phones to keep in touch with their families. Use of a prison phone can be charged at more than ten pence a minute. Also, there is a limit to how much a prisoner can spend on phone units per week, usually around £20 (which doesn't last long if you have to phone a mobile outside). The Ministry of Justice and the Prison Service pay great lip-service to their claim of wanting prisoners to maintain family ties, but at the same time you could say they're cashing in by overcharging. Plus – and it's a big plus – conversations held on prison phones are recorded and may be analysed by security officers and the prison's police liaison officer. Think about it: how would you feel knowing that every word you said to your loved ones – children, parents,
friends – was potentially going to be scrutinized by uniformed officials? It's natural for prisoners to want to use a phone where they don't feel they have to watch every word.

So, what are the various prisons in this country really like? Well, as an ex-‘guest' for over three decades, I wouldn't give you ten bob (that's fifty pence in today's money) for the lot of them. That said, some of them are interesting to read about, if not to live in, so let's take a look behind the high walls and razor-wired fences of HMP.

43OP
is the prison rule by which a prisoner may request to be segregated from the rest of the prison population for their own safety. The initials ‘OP' stand for ‘Own Protection', which denotes that the prisoner has requested protection rather than the authorities segregating them against their will. In recent years, Rule 43 has been replaced by Rule 45, but most prisoners still refer to the old rule in conversation. Since the change, it's also known as being ‘on the numbers'.

See
Cab caller

86
is prison slang for a sex offender whose crimes are so horrific that he deserves to be ‘on the numbers'
twice. It comes from the old Prison Rule 43 which was used to segregate sex offenders from other prisoners: 2 × 43 = 86. Prisoners such as paedophiles and child killers will all be classed as 86s by the majority of the prison population. The Prison Rule 45OP (‘OP' stands for ‘Own Protection') has replaced the old Rule 43, so I suppose a modern-day 86 would now be upgraded to a 90.