‘I was a prison guard – we hated dirty protests but there’s something far worse’
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A disgusted prison officer has told how vile lags have a sick tactic to rebel – which is even worse than a 'dirty protest'.
The screw said some prisoners have resorted to slashing their limbs to draw blood before painting cell walls scarlet.
Dirty protests – where a prisoner will smear their own poo over themselves and their cells – are among the most unpleasant things that a prison officer has to deal with. But ex guard Paul Hutchinson insists there is far worse challenges.
He says: "I’d take a dirty protest over a blood protest all day long. A blood protest is when a prisoner deliberately cuts themselves and smears blood all over the cell. The smell of a blood protest, he says, is as unforgettable as it is horrible.
One particular case from when he was working at HMP Stocken has stuck in Paul’s mind. He told podcaster Shaun Attwood: “It was an old guy … I can't remember his name but he was about 70. He had been a homeless guy for years. He liked being in prison because he got free food and free meds and looked after.”
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But, he added, the elderly lag was “a little bit odd.” That’s something of an understatement, Paul reveals.
“He would cut himself on his arm and then he would push a a spoon underneath the skin to keep the wound open. He would let the blood out into a container…”
In one particularly horrific case, Paul happened to peep through the flap on the lag’s cell door during a head count. “You could just see blood everywhere,” he said.
The blood was smeared on every available surface, the floor was thick with congealed blood, and the prisoner had even used some of his blood the words “NAZI SCREWS” on his cell wall.
“We had to go in and restrain him and bring him out,” Paul says, “for his own safety as well as anything else.”
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The floor was slippery with blood – “it kind of goes like jelly,” Paul said, adding that the memory of the incident made him feel sick to this day. “The smell of a blood protest is like nothing I can describe,” he said.
Paul has plenty of other harrowing stories from his time as a prison officer, including the day when a giant American football player decided he wanted to be extradited.
“He was huge,” Paul recalls. “And not just big he was fat. He was getting deported but he was American in the UK on a Jamaican passport so he was getting deported back to Jamaica.
The only problem was he was homosexual. So if he was going to go to Jamaica they were going to kill him”
“He said I'm gay – as soon as I get off that plane in Jamaica they're going to kill me. You can't send me there because they don't accept that.”
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Paul and the other prison officers tried to explain that they had no choice, but the con was adamant. He wasn’t moving.
“I remember there must have been six of us down. Some of the big lads,” Paul said. While normally a team would get fully kitted up in riot gear to deal with a prisoner who was refusing to leave his cell, it didn’t seem reasonable in that case because as long as the bloke had been inside, he had been a model prisoner and never given anyone any trouble.
“The first thing you do,” Paul explained, “is put your hand on the back of the neck force his head down between the knees. But couldn't bend him over … there's two of us trying to get his left arm, me and another screw, but we couldn't move his arms.”
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For about 15 minute the four-man team tried to make the giant lag move, but he simply refused to move a muscle. Then, to everyone’s surprise, he suddenly dropped to the floor.
“We put him in restraints but he's just laid still. We thought ‘What we going to do now? We're going to have to carry this guy and he weighs about 20 stone’.”
The prison officers managed to carry him a short distance, but then had to stop for a rest, at which point reinforcements arrived. As the new prison officers turned up the prisoner kicked the first of them hard in the face.”
The situation turned into a massive melée. “I can't even tell you how many screws there were,” Paul says. “This went on for about an hour before he finally gave up.
“We got him out the back door into the yard where the the transport was waiting. They had sent civilian transport to pick him up. Two G4S officers, and they said ‘What we going to do of he kicks off?’ And we just said ‘He’s yours now’.”
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- Prison News
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