The Criminal Alphabet (17 page)

See
Brixton Gunshots
,
Jafaken

The
borstal
system originated in 1902 and was named after the first juvenile prison of this kind, which was situated next to the village of Borstal in Kent. This prison became His Majesty's Borstal Institution Rochester. By the 1920s there were borstal institutions in many parts of the country. Borstals took boys between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one and subjected them to military-style training – lots of physical work, exercise and kit polishing. The original borstal sentence was called a ‘nine to three', meaning you could serve as little as nine months or as much as three years, and borstal trainees were able to earn maximum remission for good
behaviour and compliance with the regime. This changed at the end of the 1960s, when the sentence became a minimum of six months and a maximum of two years – a ‘six to two'. Closed borstals (as opposed to open borstals, which were for non-violent, low-risk petty offenders) were no more than
gladiator schools
for young offenders and universities of crime for up-and-coming young criminals, and many graduates of the borstal system went on to become worse criminals in adult life. The most realistic, and perhaps only, depiction of the borstal system on film was the 1979 movie
Scum
starring Ray Winstone, among many other young British actors who went on to become familiar faces on the Brit Flick scene in the 1980s and '90s. It was Ray Winstone's first film. Originally commissioned as a television drama, the resulting film was deemed too brutal and violent to show without an X certificate and so went into cinemas. There was also a borstal system which took violent and recalcitrant girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, and a film was made about this too,
Scrubbers
(1982). The borstal system was abolished in 1983.

See
DC
,
HMDC
,
HMYOI

A
borstal dot
is a spot tattooed in blue ink, usually on the face, that indicates that the person sporting it has been to
borstal
. It was very popular amongst young tearaways in the 1970s. The borstal dot can also be tattooed on the hand, between the index finger and thumb. Another version tattooed on the hand is four dots in a square with one in the middle, which is meant to indicate the four walls of prison and the prisoner inside.

See
ACAB
,
Borstal

Boss
is an informal and indiscriminate form of address used by prisoners to prison officers, mainly in prisons in the Midlands and the North. (Southern prisoners tend to use ‘guv'.) Some northerners also use ‘boss' as an exclamation of admiration and surprise, as in
‘That phone is fucking boss!'.

The
BOV
(Board Of Visitors) was a supposedly independent body which regularly visited prisons in order to make sure no liberties were being taken with prisoners. Widely detested by the prisoners themselves, however, the BOV mainly consisted of middle-class ‘worthies'
with plenty of time on their otherwise idle hands, and had a lot more in common with the governor than it did with the wretches whose interests they were supposed to be safeguarding. The independence of the BOV was questionable, as those on it were
‘vetted' by the Home Office and directly appointed by the Home Secretary. Until the
1990s the BOV also chaired
adjudications
against prisoners for breaches of prison rules that were considered too serious for the prison governor to deal with. For certain charges – Gross Personal Violence to a Prison Officer, Mutiny and Incitement to Riot – the BOV could take unlimited remission from a prisoner's sentence. This endeared them even less to the prison population they were supposed to be looking after. It has to be said that some BOV members took their hobby seriously, and did on occasion highlight faults within the prison service. In 2001
the name Board Of Visitors was changed to Independent Monitoring Board (IMB), but it will take a
lot more than a change of letters before most prisoners will ever fully trust it.

See
Batter squad

A
breakfast pack
will contain a small box of cereal, a carton containing one-third of a pint of milk, a bread roll, a pat of margarine and a sachet of ‘sweet spread'. These packs are distributed every evening in most prisons for the following morning's breakfast, but the food rations are so meagre in most prisons that the breakfast pack is eaten as soon as it's handed out.

HMP Brixton, in South London, has long been known as
Bricko
by its inhabitants. Built in 1820 and originally called the Surrey House of Correction, HMP Brixton was intended to house
175 prisoners. It had a reputation as ‘the worst prison in London' in the 1840s
(some feat, when you consider that there were seventeen prisons in London at that time), and this reputation became even worse when HMP Brixton became one of the first prisons to introduce the treadwheel. The treadwheel was hard labour, but at least it wasn't pointless ‘make-work', as the wheel was used to mill corn.

HMP Brixton was expanded and was housing over 800 prisoners by the 1850s. In 1853 the decsision was made to convert it into a female prison. Later in the mid-nineteenth century a nursery was opened inside for children up to the age of four, and by 1860 the prisoners were allowed to keep their children under sixteen years of age with them in the prison until the end of their sentence.

Between 1882 and 1898
HMP Brixton became a military prison for men and, to this day, it remains a male prison and remand centre. HMP Brixton has provided accommodation for many famous prisoners over the years, including Rolling Stone Mick Jagger (convicted of drug possession), philosopher and activist Bertrand Russell (jailed for pacifism under the Defence of the Realm Act in 1918), disc jockey and presenter Simon Dee (jailed for vandalizing a toilet seat with singer Petula Clark's face painted on it) and James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King. James Earl Ray escaped to England after the assassination and was arrested in London and remanded to HMP Brixton to await extradition.

Bricko also has a long history of escapes and other scandals. In 1980 three Category A prisoners tunnelled through the walls of their cells on the segregation unit and got clean away. In the early 1970s there was an attempt at mass escape from the prison's C wing, when members of the notorious bank-robbing Wembley Mob hijacked a bin lorry and tried to crash it through the gates. The lorry got jammed and the escape was foiled. Then, in 1974,
several prisoners tied up members of staff and escaped from B wing on a Sunday evening when staff numbers were low. They got to the perimeter wall and prison staff released several German Shepherds on them; however, the prisoners had taken fire extinguishers from the wing and fired them at the guard dogs. The powder from them frightened the dogs and drove them back, allowing the prisoners to scale the wall.
Once outside the prison, several prisoners hijacked passing vehicles and managed to escape.

See
AFCs

The
bridge
is the connecting walkway between prison landings, and is often used by the screws as a vantage point from which they can survey the wing.

Brixton gunshots
is what white prisoners call the often heard noisy exclamations of excitement issued by a minority of young black and wannabe-black prisoners.

See
Boo yakka
!

Bucketing
was quite common in UK prisons during the 1980s and '90s. It was (and, in some cases, still is) another weapon in the arsenal of the rebellious and violent prisoners of the top-security-prison estate. Bucketing is normally reserved for a screw or governor who is particularly despised and hated by the prisoner population. It involves several prisoners defecating and urinating into a plastic bucket which is then thrown over a particular member of staff. Sometimes prisoners cut cards or draw straws to choose who does the actual throwing of the bucket, as the authorities class bucketing as a serious assault on staff and will punish accordingly. If you bucket staff in most nicks, you can expect a serious beating by the screws and loss of remission and privileges.

On every prison wing there is a
bug hatch
of some description. It's usually a window in the
‘medical room' through
which medication is dispensed to prisoners.
It has been estimated that over 70 per cent of UK prisoners are suffering from two or more mental conditions; add to this the fact that over 80 per cent of the prison population are addicted to drugs or alcohol (according to HMP's own statistics on the introduction of Mandatory Drug Testing in prisons) and also the increasing number of elderly prisoners, and you begin to get an idea of just how much medication is passed out daily in prison. The bug hatch is where the prisoners queue to get their meds and takes its name from the behaviour of mentally ill, the ‘bugs'
(old American slang for somebody who is not quite right, acting as though they have bugs in their heads; a few American gangsters of the Prohibition era had ‘Bugs' as their nickname because of their crazy behaviour – Bugs Moran, Bugsy Siegel, etc.) in the queues.

See
Fraggle

In prison the
burglars
are not, as you might expect, inmates who are in for burglary. In prison slang, burglars are Security or the
DST
(Designated Search Team).
They are known as burglars because they can descend on a prisoner's cell any time,
day or night, and take anything they want from the cell, anything they consider to be contraband or against prison rules.

See
DST
,
Spin

A
cab caller
is someone who needs to get off a wing or out of a prison very quickly as their life or wellbeing is in danger – either because of debt or because they've been
‘sussed' as a ‘wrong un'. The means of ‘calling a cab' differs from person to person. Some prisoners will simply pack their property and go to the safety of the wing office and ask to be placed on protection in the segregation unit. Others, those with a shred of pride left (usually those in debt), will ‘kick off', either smashing their cell up or going ‘on one' in order to make the screws drag them to the
block
. Once in relative privacy there they will either request protection or simply refuse to go back on to normal location.
Refusing to return to a wing will result in a
nicking
under prison rules for disobeying a lawful order, but this does at least give the cab caller the sparse comfort of a nicking to cover their embarrassment at having to run. It's also known as ‘gangster's numbers', as the recipient will be housed in the safety of the block yet still be able to keep their pride intact by putting their situation down to the authorities.

See
43OP
,
Nicking
,
Home Office numbers

A
carpet
is a three-month sentence. Up until the 1960s short-term prisoners generally worked in their cells, and one of the jobs they were given was weaving carpets or mats. It took three months to produce one carpet and so a prison sentence of that duration became known as a carpet.

See
Bit

Up until the 1960s prisoners could still be sentenced to corporal punishment in prison by a visiting magistrate. Serious breaches of prison rules, such as rioting or assaulting
prison staff, were punishable by official beatings. If you were sentenced to the
cat
, or
pussy
, you would be beaten on the bare back with a cat o' nine tails, a leather whip with nine separate strands, sometimes weighted. The pussy could draw blood and was a very painful experience. Prisoners were also given strokes with the birch.

This term was in widespread use up until the abolition of the
borstal
system in 1983. Your
china
is your best mate (rhyming slang: china plate = mate). It was the done thing in juvenile borstals for kids from the same manor (geographical area) to ‘go chinas'. This meant that they would watch each other's back and share whatever they had for the duration of their sentences. The word suddenly went out of vogue when the borstal system was abolished, although it is still used by some London villains of a certain age.

The
chip net
is the metal mesh safety net strung between each prison landing; it's also known as the suicide net. A lot of the older prisons are up to five levels high and there is always the danger of prisoners falling, being thrown or jumping over the landings.
The high-tension metal net is there to make sure that, if this happens, then at least the person will not be killed outright.That said, landing on a metal net from five floors up will still do a lot of damage.

Chokey
usually refers to the punishment block of a prison where prisoners are held in isolation, as in
‘Freddie just
got fourteen days' chokey for chinning a screw'. It comes from the Hindi
cauki
, a lock-up.

See
Block

In prison parlance a
civvy
can be a
tailor-made
(real, manufactured cigarette), as opposed to a hand-rolled smoke, but it can also describe anyone in the prison who is not part of the staff or prison population – a civilian worker,
for example.