Written on: Friday 27th February 2009

I wrote this piece in the style of a serious journalistic article, so if it reads more like something out of The Guardian than The Trash Whore Diaries, you'll know why. Don't worry, normal puerile service will be resumed with my next update.

‘Who’s got a blade?’ The inquisitor glares accusingly at the men gathered around him. They look at each other nervously. No one answers. ‘Who’s got a blade?’ he repeats, the inflection rising angrily this time. He eyeballs each one in turn, silently demanding that his request be met. Eventually, the awkward silence is broken and a blade is produced, a disposable plastic razor. For the next 60 seconds, the aggressor is placated. That is how long it takes him to wrap the implement into the folds of his t-shirt and expertly snap off the plastic casing, exposing its razor sharp workings. Suitably tooled-up, he promptly sets about finding an unwilling recipient upon whom to model his makeshift shank. The first man to look at him the wrong way or say the wrong word will be swift to feel his wrath. ‘If I don’t get my meth now I’m gonna do someone!’ he screams. His colleagues stare awkwardly at their feet, not daring to make eye contact with the agitated complainant. No one doubts that he is deadly serious about making good on his threat. The deep scar etched into his left cheek is testament that he is accustomed to getting just as good as he gives. ‘C’mon then,’ he spits, his knuckles tightening on the plastic handle. ‘Who wants some?’
It could be a scene from any troubled housing estate in Western Scotland, but in fact this is Aberdeen and the action has just played out inside the walls of Craiginches Prison. The blade-wielding menace has already been removed from society, but that hasn’t removed his willingness to lash out at everyone and everything that affronts him. According to a recent United Nations report, Scotland boasts the highest murder rate in Western Europe. Between 2007 and 2008, half of all Scottish murders were committed using a blade. John Muir, whose 34-year-old son was stabbed to death in Greenock in 2007, has led a campaign calling for anyone convicted of carrying a knife to receive a mandatory jail term. In spite of delivering a 15,000-strong petition to the Scottish Parliament however, his proposal has yet to be adopted by Holyrood. But even when those convicted of carrying – and using – a knife are jailed, the problem doesn’t end there. Prison merely contains the threat, like trapping a wasp in a jam jar. Once released, the aggressor emerges into the world madder than ever, hell-bent on retribution and revenge. Indeed, although prison may succeed in temporarily separating assailant from assailee, it is not even an effective means of separating the former from their weapon of choice. The plastic knives issued to inmates at mealtimes might be about as lethal as water pistols but there are plenty of other devices that the enterprising criminal can fashion into a shank. Where there’s a will, there’s a way to sharpen any number of innocuous items into lethal weapons. Surrounded by their disgruntled peers, many of whom are also in jail for being too quick on the draw, they soon resort to taking their grievances out on each other using an array of improvised invasive devices.
The razor blade-wielding convict who was incensed at the lack of methadone didn’t get a chance to carry out his threat on this occasion. The disturbance was spotted by the prison officers, who promptly locked up all the inmates, thereby separating the wolf from the rest of the pack. Other targets of knife rage in Craiginches haven’t been so lucky. Last week, another incensed inmate took his cellmate hostage using two improvised shanks fashioned out of a razor blade and a tuna can lid. It sparked a 13-hour siege that only ended after a lengthy stand-off with 20 prison officers, negotiators and riot police wielding shields and batons. The next day, in the holding cells at Aberdeen Sheriff Court, the victim showed me the marks on his neck where the blades had been held to his throat. ‘I thought he was gonna kill me,’ he confessed.
The holding cells are a series of squalid concrete rooms, each barely bigger than a domestic bathroom. Inside them, up to ten prisoners at a time are crammed together to await their court appearances. In these grim, squalid dungeons, the talk is of slashings, beatings and stabbings. Young Offenders, whom violence excites even more than their passion for sex, drugs and stolen cars, re-enact their previous skirmishes in high definition for the benefit of the assembled throng: ‘Boom! Boom! Boom! I just kept plugging my cellmate, did the boy 17 times through the leg with a biro. He was screaming for me to stop!’ In prison, the pen is often mightier than the sword.
Although Aberdeen’s inmates are not afraid to dispense summary justice with a few fell strokes, it is Glasgow that excels at this form of ultra-violence. Known as the murder capital of Europe, it has more deaths per capita than such cities as Minsk in Belarus and Istanbul. One visitor to the Sheriff Court holding cells was a Birmingham man, awaiting sentencing for drug offences. He had spent the last three months on remand in Glasgow’s Barlinnie, an experience he was not anxious to repeat. ‘All they speak about is stabbing there,’ he told me. ‘It’s all slash this, slash that. It’s mad; they’re in jail, they ain’t even got nothing worth slashing each other for.’ One particularly unpleasant technique favoured by Glaswegian gangs is the double-cut; two razor blades bound together, a few millimetres apart. Slash your victim across the face with such a device and you will create an unstitchable scar that causes hideous disfiguration.
In spite of the lawless nature of prison life, there is still some honour among thieves and slashers. Sex offenders and ‘granny bashers’ [muggers who prey on the elderly] are universally derided within the penal system and prone to being viciously attacked (with shanks, of course). And yet, paradoxically, the same convicts who will decry such ‘beasts and cowards’ feel no compunction in stabbing an unarmed opponent. Not having been raised a street-fighting man, I cannot muster the same enthusiasm as my peers for slicing and dicing anyone who crosses my path. Call me old-fashioned, but I am of the opinion that bread knives are best suited to slicing bread. With such a pacifist philosophy, one would think I shouldn’t have too many enemies in prison. However, one thing I have learned from my time inside is that it’s not only violence that begets violence; words too can have the undesired effect. Following my release from prison in 2006, extracts from an online weblog that I had secretly maintained while inside were published in The News Of The World under the headline ‘Stabbed In The Neck Three Times…Over A Packet Of Custard Creams.’ As I was walking through the jail last week, following my re-incarceration, a familiar face caught my eye. ‘Here, you’re that lad that wrote about me!’ exclaimed the inmate, the look of recognition slowly turning to anger. ‘I should fucking do you!’ His threat appeared to be in jest, but given that he had previously plugged a fellow prisoner in an argument about a packet of biscuits, I couldn’t be too sure. Even if I was given to fighting, I wouldn’t have squared up to him though. Not in here, where the philosophy I have adopted to stay alive is one of the oldest in the book: Never pick a fight with anyone uglier than you – they’ve got less to lose. Looking at the scarred and stitched up faces around me, that precludes pretty much everyone.