12 November 1998 Edition
Turning the screws
By Eoghan MacCormaic
Plus ça change, plus the même chose. Twenty two years ago, back in the bad old days of 1976, the papers were full of advertisements looking for Prison warders. Screws to you and me. Screws for you and me, come to think of it. The British were locking us up in droves, and before us lay the conveyor belt of arrest, confession, conviction and.... well, anything from five to thirty five or forty years, really. Screws were needed to fill the jobs, smart boys need not apply.
The adverts on the TV were classic stuff. Unemployed Joe sits poring over the Jobs Vacant section of the paper, wife prepares dinner bemoaning the fact that he's out of work, cut to Joe with a neat rectangle cut from the paper, application form for a job in The Service, and happy wife chuckles `Och, Joe...!'
Och Joe indeed. And there were a lot of Joes, as the high wages - and the chance to beat, bully and starve prisoners - beckoned.
Recruitment was at an all time high; wages were generous; incentives included security money, danger money, dirty money. Yes indeed folks, it was money, money, money for a while and as each successive shipyard or engineering firm laid workers off, the number of screws increased.
I got to know a few screws over the years and I thought of them this week, as Finlay Spratt, Chairperson of the Prison Officers Association, asked the pertinent question as to who would want the `skills' of a prison warder. I thought of Pinochet, Suharto, and a host of other ex-dictators who, a few years ago, would have been glad of their services.
Now, however, the glory days are ending and in the civilised world the trade of a political screw is becoming a thing of the past. It's a costly business, mind you, disposing of the excess. All those attractive incentives back in the seventies have to be matched now by even more attractive farewells and some screws are set for payoffs of up to £230 000. Not bad for unskilled work.
I tried to conjure a memory of a few of the more deserving screws when I heard about the Golden Handshakes, although some of those on my list might no longer be eligible for the rewards of more than twenty years of cruelty. Familiar names like The Red Rat, The Bigot, The Screaming Skull, The Pervert, The Preacher, The Black Rat came flooding back. Some of these are now in that great big Punishment Block in the Sky; for others their day has yet to come.
You'd nearly fall into the trap of giving real names, but that would feed the ego of those who starved the Blanketmen, or those who led the attack on the Armagh Women and carried out thousands of strip searches. I tried to imagine what `service' they had done to deserve such Lotto money.
Take Fat Harry. Harry, like so many of his erstwhile colleagues, enjoyed nothing better than tucking into prison food. Our prison food. Maybe they thought we were being fed too much, but as we grew gaunt, Harry grew proportionally heavier. He'd have thought nothing of sitting happily with a dixie can full of porridge of a morning, or a tray of spuds come lunch time. Just how many screws will miss the free food, the pilfered snacks, the unofficial perks is hard to quantify but for years the theft of prisoners' meals was commonplace and tolerated. Perhaps Finlay could arrange some re-skilling as food tasters?
Other soon to be beneficiaries of the Good Friday Agreement were more physical. For five years, between September 1976 and October 1981, and at various intervals since, including the post escape period, the screws enjoyed the freedom to beat and torture POWs, often causing serious injury, never being called to task.
Courts accepted that brutality was widespread, compensation was paid out in several instances, extraditions were refused, but nary a screw was charged.
Could there be an opening out there for sadists? Could the POA define exactly what skills are involved in cruelty, mirror searches, dragging prisoners through a gauntlet of dogs and other screws, taunting dying hunger strikers, stealing and destroying prisoners' property during searches, terminating and refusing visits, strip searching prisoners' elderly relatives on Christmas Eve, withholding letters, cards, parcels, merrily breaking the news of death in the family by singing the news through a prisoner's door.
Finlay Spratt was right. Who would want a Prison Officers' skills? They have a whingeing cheek to demand more money in the final pay-off but the British Government needn't worry. If my memory of the calibre of screw in the H Blocks is anything to go by there'll be no shortage of greedy selfish individuals who'll break ranks and take the money and run. Twenty years ago money brought them in and now money will shift them out. It's not so much a question of which of them will grab the redundancies, the real question is, `who won't?'
Plus ça change, plus the même chose. Twenty two years ago, back in the bad old days of 1976, the papers were full of advertisements looking for Prison warders. Screws to you and me. Screws for you and me, come to think of it. The British were locking us up in droves, and before us lay the conveyor belt of arrest, confession, conviction and.... well, anything from five to thirty five or forty years, really. Screws were needed to fill the jobs, smart boys need not apply.
The adverts on the TV were classic stuff. Unemployed Joe sits poring over the Jobs Vacant section of the paper, wife prepares dinner bemoaning the fact that he's out of work, cut to Joe with a neat rectangle cut from the paper, application form for a job in The Service, and happy wife chuckles `Och, Joe...!'
Och Joe indeed. And there were a lot of Joes, as the high wages - and the chance to beat, bully and starve prisoners - beckoned.
Recruitment was at an all time high; wages were generous; incentives included security money, danger money, dirty money. Yes indeed folks, it was money, money, money for a while and as each successive shipyard or engineering firm laid workers off, the number of screws increased.
I got to know a few screws over the years and I thought of them this week, as Finlay Spratt, Chairperson of the Prison Officers Association, asked the pertinent question as to who would want the `skills' of a prison warder. I thought of Pinochet, Suharto, and a host of other ex-dictators who, a few years ago, would have been glad of their services.
Now, however, the glory days are ending and in the civilised world the trade of a political screw is becoming a thing of the past. It's a costly business, mind you, disposing of the excess. All those attractive incentives back in the seventies have to be matched now by even more attractive farewells and some screws are set for payoffs of up to £230 000. Not bad for unskilled work.
I tried to conjure a memory of a few of the more deserving screws when I heard about the Golden Handshakes, although some of those on my list might no longer be eligible for the rewards of more than twenty years of cruelty. Familiar names like The Red Rat, The Bigot, The Screaming Skull, The Pervert, The Preacher, The Black Rat came flooding back. Some of these are now in that great big Punishment Block in the Sky; for others their day has yet to come.
You'd nearly fall into the trap of giving real names, but that would feed the ego of those who starved the Blanketmen, or those who led the attack on the Armagh Women and carried out thousands of strip searches. I tried to imagine what `service' they had done to deserve such Lotto money.
Take Fat Harry. Harry, like so many of his erstwhile colleagues, enjoyed nothing better than tucking into prison food. Our prison food. Maybe they thought we were being fed too much, but as we grew gaunt, Harry grew proportionally heavier. He'd have thought nothing of sitting happily with a dixie can full of porridge of a morning, or a tray of spuds come lunch time. Just how many screws will miss the free food, the pilfered snacks, the unofficial perks is hard to quantify but for years the theft of prisoners' meals was commonplace and tolerated. Perhaps Finlay could arrange some re-skilling as food tasters?
Other soon to be beneficiaries of the Good Friday Agreement were more physical. For five years, between September 1976 and October 1981, and at various intervals since, including the post escape period, the screws enjoyed the freedom to beat and torture POWs, often causing serious injury, never being called to task.
Courts accepted that brutality was widespread, compensation was paid out in several instances, extraditions were refused, but nary a screw was charged.
Could there be an opening out there for sadists? Could the POA define exactly what skills are involved in cruelty, mirror searches, dragging prisoners through a gauntlet of dogs and other screws, taunting dying hunger strikers, stealing and destroying prisoners' property during searches, terminating and refusing visits, strip searching prisoners' elderly relatives on Christmas Eve, withholding letters, cards, parcels, merrily breaking the news of death in the family by singing the news through a prisoner's door.
Finlay Spratt was right. Who would want a Prison Officers' skills? They have a whingeing cheek to demand more money in the final pay-off but the British Government needn't worry. If my memory of the calibre of screw in the H Blocks is anything to go by there'll be no shortage of greedy selfish individuals who'll break ranks and take the money and run. Twenty years ago money brought them in and now money will shift them out. It's not so much a question of which of them will grab the redundancies, the real question is, `who won't?'