If you believe what you read in the papers then prison is basically being stuck in a holiday camp for a bit where you can play PlayStation3 all day, make calls to your mates on a free mobile and smoke weed whenever you feel like it. That’s not exactly true – what you will encounter is incessant boredom, oddball crackheads and vindictive ‘screws’ who’ll try to make your life hell… it’s certainly no walk in the park, but there is help at hand in the form of this a new booklet written by former jailbird, Carl Cattermole.
HMP – A Survival Guide will tell you everything from how to make a complaint to dealing with having a girlfriend on the outside and even how to make your own hooch. Carl spent over a year behind the wall in various prisons around the south of England, so he knows what he’s talking about. He stopped by for a chat about the booklet, which is the first of its kind. Here’s what he had to say…
So Carl, surely prison is meant to be tough and push you into sorting yourself out – what made you decide to release a booklet that makes the whole thing easier?
Peoples vicarious view of prison, the horror stories and the myths, serve a purpose for the state. So, after I was released, I decided the most effective way to piss on this bonfire and avenge the fruitless and unconstructive injustice that prison is for most people was to decode the whole experience so that people could see that it was actually totally manageable. I took a lot of influence from Mark Barnesly who wrote similar pamphlets but from a much more extreme anarchist standpoint, Klaus Viehmann who wrote about surviving prison in Germany and my friend Andrew who as I mentioned before helped me before I was sentenced.
Did you write the whole thing alone or did you have help from other jailbirds?
Other than the short section by my partner, it was all written by me.
How did you go about putting it together?
A lot of help from friends and a lot of InDesign/Photoshop/website ball ache.
What's your ultimate aim with the booklet?
In the future I'd like people to contribute or add their own version so it becomes more consummate than just my own story; at the very least I'd like to add a guide to youth offenders and a guide to serving a longer sentence. In the mean time I'd just like to reach as large an audience as possible and help them with an experience which has the potential to be the hardest in their life thus far. Distribution is the problem, which is why I'd like to encourage people to spread the word of this booklet as far and wide as possible.
So, what do you think about the help that's handed out by the authorities to first time inmates?
Bullshit. They're supposed to put you through an induction course but they never do. It's a joke. Any information they do give you is totally sanitised and useless.
Were you given any advice before you went in? Who by?
I talked in depth to a friend who'd just come out from serving a couple of years. He told me what to take, how I should act, what to expect. It was incredible, made the whole experience about a hundred times easier. That's what inspired me to write HMP - A Survival Guide, hopefully it will help others in a similar way.
You appear to have picked up several DIY skills from your time in jail (a hooch recipe, making salad dressing) - how did you acquire these skills? Was it one person who taught you and is this knowledge available to everyone in jail or just the privileged few?
These are things that you just pick up along the way, but you never, never want to ask too many questions lest you sound wet behind the ears, so hopefully this basic knowledge I've included in the booklet will give people a leg up.
According to your booklet D-Cat jails are like the fabled promised land - how easy is it for prisoners to make it to such a place?
The difference between C-Category and D-Category jails is vast, it's worth doing anything you can to get in one; pre-empt the OMU's (offender management unit) decision by writing to them and have your solicitor do the same. But if not, then fuck it, smoke weed, refuse your piss tests and go on basic because the difference between B and C is so minimal.
What's the worst thing you saw in jail?
Vulnerable people getting minor sentences for things they really shouldn’t have been imprisoned for, picking up a heroin habit because they couldn't cope with it, and subsequently being in and out of jail for the rest of their life. The amount of heroin in British jails is fucking mental. What else? Screws throwing away peoples’ appeal applications. Violence-wise I guess it was a 30 man all out fight.
Any positives about being in jail, meet any decent people or find anything that was surprisingly positive about the experience?
I read almost every classic on the bookshelf. I sharpened up my mind and refocused what I want to do with my life. I also met a handful of amazing people who I’m still in regular contact with.
Tell me about some of the 'characters' you met in prison.
Where do I start? Bacon Bitty, this guy who was in jail for stealing bacon. He got released, and on the way back home got arrested for stealing another packet of bacon. There was a Yardie I know who had an all-in-one denim jump suit with 500 euro notes printed all over it. One of my best friends in there was serving 20 years for running the most complex drugs laboratory ever discovered in Europe, he was fucking funny. He’d roll around the wing forcing all the rudeboys to listen to Miles Davis and Flaming Lips (jail is just wall to wall Giggs and Happy Hardcore) and showing them photos of him eating magic mushrooms off elephant dung in Nepal.
Any last words?...
Prison is a life experience. It's totally manageable. Read HMP - A Survival Guide, it's totally free, and spread the word to anyone who might benefit from it.
HMP – A Survival Guide is available for FREE from www.prisonism.info
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