Throughout my 20s, I’ve spent time in prison for guns,
drugs, and cannabis cultivation.
I’ve been to HMP Birmingham,
HMP Ranby,
HMP Dovegate,
HMP Sudbury,
HMP Hewell.
Prison is everything bad that you think it is and more.
So if you’re wondering, “Is it really that bad?” Yes, it is.
“Can I really get my face slashed?” Yes, you can.
Nothing can prepare you for how bad prison will be.
And my only advice is you avoid that place at every cost.
Prison officers are one of
the main lines of getting stuff into prison.
Prison officers will bring heroin into the prison,
mobile phones,
even weapons.
[Informer]
[Ex-Con]
What you’ll do is you’ll buy a kilo of spice
and then get it compressed
so that each ounce is probably the size of a Kinder Egg.
Then you’ll put 10 or 12 of them together,
and then you’ll get a prison officer to bring that in for you.
So that’s a quick way to make maybe 10,000 pounds, 12,000 pounds.
Some prison officers, I know for a fact are making five grand a month.
It depends on whatever partnership they’ve got with the prisoner.
Most of the time,
it was the inmates putting pressure on the prison officers.
So a prison officer might give in, if you like, after three months
or six months of being groomed.
But then once they bring one parcel in,
they’ve got to bring another and another and another.
Most of the time, the disputes between prisoners and prison officers
will be prison officers saying, “Please, please time out.”
And the prisoners say, “No, no, no, no, no.”
A couple of years ago, I was in HMP Birmingham,
and at about 8 o’clock, 9 o’clock at night,
I heard this whistling noise, like--
I couldn’t believe my ears. I was thinking, “What’s that noise?”
There was a drone bringing drugs to a prison window.
So the windows were plexiglass,
but in somebody’s cell they had cut the plexiglass out, a square,
and they fished the lining off the drone.
And the drone had ten ounces of cannabis, phones, spice.
In HMP Birmingham,
it’s split into two sections:
you’ve got the old side and the new side.
When you're inducted into the prison,
you start on the old side, where the cockroaches are.
I don't think nothing could prepare you for living with cockroaches
and insects in your room.
I remember one time in HMP Hewell,
there was a disagreement over an illegal mobile phone.
One of the people who was involved in the argument went into
the other person’s cell and started bludgeoning them in the head
with a tin of tuna in a sock.
I looked through the cell observation slot,
and there was blood everywhere,
all over the ceilings, the floor, the sink.
It looked like someone had been squirting ketchup everywhere.
There wasn’t an intensive investigation
after acts of violence in prison.
The typical consensus is:
people don’t care if it doesn’t affect them directly.
I think that the general public should know
that prison is a business.
And if you are involved in crime,
you are susceptible to be an integral part of someone’s business,
which is prison.
I saw companies that were operating within the prison grounds
employing prisoners to further their business.
Prisoners were being paid ten pounds a week
to work five days a week in these workshops.
It was beyond belief to me that these businesses
were allowed to operate on the prison grounds,
and then paid as cheap slave labor, if you like.
This is a level of corruption.
The prison establishments are not geared to help prisoners to succeed
upon their release or during their time in prison.
I definitely think that people of African descent
and minority backgrounds,
I think that they’re dealt with harsher.
I was reading yesterday on the news,
somebody who got prosecuted for third strike burglary
received under four years in prison.
I received five years in prison for growing 88 cannabis plants.
The justice system, it kind of doesn’t make sense sometimes.
I think in order to improve the prison system,
the prison system needs to be more focused on rehabilitation.
And less focused on human deprivation
and providing cheap labor.
So, I mean that there should be a lot more reading done in prison,
there should be a lot more reform education.
So empowering people’s minds,
giving people an alternative way to earn money,
allowing people to gain qualifications
and documentation that will allow them to succeed upon their release.
Anything that could result in my imprisonment
isn’t worth my while.