The mad world of Parkhurst Prison

The Guardian, March 1994

Bob Johnson had never been in a prison before and yet as soon as he walked through the iron gates of C Wing, he felt the familiarity of it all: the sagging men with baggy eyes and their tired shuffle of a walk; the other men, with uniforms, calling them by their first names but never quite connecting; the overwhelming staleness of the place. He had seen it all before – on the locked wards of mental hospitals. And he didn’t like it.

Bob Johnson had never liked any kind of institution or, for that matter, any kind of authority at all. He was a natural rebel – he hadn’t worn a suit for 30 years – and he had spent his working life as an intellectual maverick, arguing with almost everyone, from his tutors at Cambridge who thought psychology was all about rats, to the Freudians who couldn’t see that Freud wrote such a lot of crap, to his fellow GPs who had tried to share his practice in Oldham. The last thing he wanted was to end up working in a dungeon like this. Yet, he was tempted.

Five years earlier, he had stumbled into a theory. It was the most exciting, penetrating moment. It had happened one dull Wednesday afternoon back in September 1986, when he was working as a family doctor in Oldham, and he had been trying to fathom the desperate sadness of a middle-aged woman who was a successful executive and yet driven by some hidden horror to a state of dangerous obesity. This particular afternoon, she had suddenly told him something which she had never mentioned before in all their hours of conversation.

She recalled how, as a child of five, her mother had grabbed her by the hand one afternoon and dragged her upstairs to one of the bedrooms and heaved furniture up against the door while, outside, her father started to batter his way through the door panels with a hatchet, screaming that he would kill them both when he got hold of them. In the end he had collapsed in a drunken heap outside the door. But the point was that the woman was still waiting for him to hack his way through to her. Johnson could see it so clearly: 40 years later, she was still expecting to die at her father’s hands and she was still so terrified of what was about to happen that she had never even dared to think of it, for fear that that thought would be her last.

And in a rush of adrenalin, he saw it all. This buried terror. This paralysis. This was the key point which Freud had missed – because, of course, the man was so terrified of his own father – that the ultimate source of all serious mental illness was the child’s terror of its parent, enduring through adulthood, unseen because it was unbearable, like some deadly undertow dragging the adult off course. He felt like he had found the Holy Grail. His 30 years of graft and intellectual passion had all been worthwhile. Yet when he tried to disclose his discovery to other psychiatrists, he was rebuffed. He couldn’t get his papers published. He couldn’t get anyone to listen. Despite his qualifications as a psychiatrist, he was still only a humble GP, and you had to be a professor, at least, before these people would bother with you.

Now, here he was, four and a half years later, in the Spring of 1991, walking into Parkhurst top security prison on the Isle of Wight, into this red-brick submarine called C Wing, where the Prison Department kept a hand-picked dozen of the most dangerous men in their custody – all of them violent, many of them multiple killers, all of them diagnosed mentally ill, all of them deemed to be beyond the control of a normal prison regime. If Johnson’s theory was right, this finally was his chance to prove it. It was a horrible place. It was exactly what he wanted.

Looking back now, there is no doubt that the Prison Department agreed to hire Bob Johnson without any idea of the effect he would have on their tightly controlled little world. The truth was that they couldn’t find anyone else. Their last psychiatrist had left three months earlier, they had been advertising for a replacement but there were very few psychiatrists who were willing to move to the Isle of Wight for a low-paid, part-time job in a place like Parkhurt Prison.

But once Bob Johnson started, there was no stopping him. There were plenty of rows, there were angry resignations and whispered recriminations, death threats and bloody noses, but Bob Johnson hung on and, what is more, he started to win. And now the man who runs the Prison Department has a serious problem. Because if Bob Johnson is right, then the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, is wrong – not just a little bit wrong but completely, profoundly wrong in almost everything he says and does about criminal justice. And, in a sense, that makes Bob Johnson the most dangerous man in a British prison today.

It took a while for the winning to start. When Johnson formally took up his post as C Wing psychiatrist in July 1991, he was pretty sure he was going to hit trouble, and so he resolved to be less of a rebel, to play office politics if that was the only way to succeed. Symbolically, he turned up for work on his first day, wearing a brand new, very respectable, two-piece suit. He felt like the Trojan Horse.

He could feel the resistance. Some of the officers were on his side from the start, but there was a little gang of dissidents who didn’t like the look of him at all. They wanted him to read the prisoners’ files. He refused politely and said he wanted to hear what the men had to say for themselves. “Well, they won’t talk to you,” he was told. He made it plain that, so far as he was concerned, prisoners were just ordinary people who happened to be living in a rather extraordinary place. He told the men to call him Bob. The little gang complained that he was undermining their authority. “All right,” he said, pursuing his new policy of compromise. “They can call me Dr. Bob.”

His first idea was to arrange weekly meetings of everyone in the unit: prisoners, officers, cleaners, everyone. He wanted them to understand each other and, in particular, he wanted the stronger prisoners to stop bullying. But the dissident officers set up the meetings in totally unsuitable rooms at times when most of the people Johnson wanted to see were not available. He could see they were deliiberately gumming him up, but he swallowed his anger and said that was fine. He would see everyone one at a time.

Scorn bubbled up around him. At a prison officers meeting, he tried to explain his theory in relation to one particular man. A sour voice spoke up: “I’ve known that man for 20 years, and he was born evil. You’ll never change him. You’re just wasting tax payer’s money.” He used to go home at night and tell his wife that it was like living in occupied Norway: you didn’t know who you could trust. But he stuck with it, because despite the bad predictions, the prisoners were beginning to talk to him. One, in particular, had seized his attention.

His name was Des, he was a tall, thick set man in his 40s who had battered a close friend to death in the midst of an incoherent row about nothing. He had carried on battering behind bars and had been tossed from one prison to another, in and out of solitary confinement, until he had arrived in C Wing to be swaddled in sedatives. When Johnson first tried to talk to him about his childhood, Des replied with amused indifference and suggested he was a quack. But Johnson was curious about him.

Why, for example, was Des full to the eyeballs with drugs? Simple. It was the only way he could control his temper. But what was this temper? He surely hadn’t been born with it. And why had he killed one of his closest friends? No-one had ever been able to explain it. It wasn’t for money or drugs or status. Des said he didn’t know. And Johnson asked him again to talk about his childhood and so, slowly, in a dull, matter-of-fact kind of way, Des began to relate the story of a small boy growing up in a regime of ceaseless, almost casual violence, all caught for Johnson in one single scene when Des’ mother had called to him across the road: “Come here, Des. I wanna batter you.” And so this small boy had trotted across to her, and she had battered him.

The talking went on for weeks, and Des allowed Johnson to video-tape their conversations. Soon Johnson could see the buried terror bulging up under the skin of Des’ personality. “What would you say to your mother if she came in now?” Johnson asked him one day.

“If she’s in this building, I’m out of it,” said Des, with genuine anxiety.

Johnson held the fear up in front of him over and over again, trying to make him see what had been living inside him. He urged Des to consider what would stop him confronting his mother.

“Fear,” said Des.

“Fear of what? What’s she going to do?”

“Well, she might get up and clout me.”

“Might she?”

“Well, she might.”

“How old is she?”

“Eighty five.”

“And she is going to do you an injury, is she?”

“Oh, she’s still lively.”

“Eighty five. How big is she?”

“Five feet, two inches.”

“And how big are you?”

“Six feet, three and a half inches.”

“It doesn’t sound much of a match, does it?”

“No.”

After three months, Des began to talk about himself in a different way. When Johnson asked him now what he would say if his mother came into the room, he replied: “I’d say ‘Mother, you can’t hit me any more. I am an adult.’”

Des now saw his fear with increasing clarity and he began to talk about his violence. Johnson asked him why he had murdered his friend. It turned out to be simple: Des and his friend had nowhere to sleep, and the friend had tried to insist that they went to stay with Des’ mother, the source of all his buried fear.

“I’ve been pushed around and pushed around and pushed around that much,” said Des. “ I just couldn’t take any more when this lad started on me. And I just went too far.”

“How does that relate to your mother?”

“Well, it’s bound to, isn’t it?”

“Go on, then.”

“She used violence on me and I couldn’t do anything back.”

“You couldn’t do anything back.”

“No, and when he started giving me some lip…”

“Right.”

“I battered the hell out of him.”

“Yes.”

“And I’ve got to say it: I meant to kill him.”

“You did?”

“I did… If violence is shown to you time and time again, there comes a time in your life when you just snap. And I snapped.”

So Des had arrived at a moment of truth. And so had Bob Johnson. The theory that had emerged in his surgery one Wednesday afternoon in Oldham had now materialised in the mind of this murderously violent man. And Johnson watched in awe as, week by week, Des became more and more certain that his mother could not really attack him any more and he drifted further and further away from his twisted thinking. The more he drifted back to reality, the more Johnson cut back on the drugs which had been containing him. To Johnson’s intense pleasure, Des remained calm. And his pleasure was even greater than he had imagined, for what he appeared to have done was not simply to have proved the truth of his theory but also to have rescued a very damaged man from madness.

But the Battle of C Wing continued. Johnson was merely the psychiatrist on the Wing and he had little control over the daily regime or any of its security or discipline. If a prisoner lashed out violently, he was liable to be hauled off to the segregation unit for 14 days in solitary, with Johnson standing by helplessly, wishing he could explain that this was the opposite of what the man really needed. Several times, his patients were removed from the Wing and ‘ghosted’ to other prisons while he was still in the middle of trying to help them.

But he was in charge of medicine and he insisted that he would not give prisoners drugs without their consent. Some of the officers said he had to, it was the only way they could keep control. There were some nasty clashes, and one officer resigned from the wing. A few of the staff supported a confidential memo to the Governor, complaining about his attitude and urging his removal. The Governor backed him. Then Johnson turned up for work one morning to find he was locked out of the wing by officers who said that prisoners might attack him over remarks he had made to a newspaper. It took him four hours of politicking before he could get to work.

He had a potentially disastrous encounter with a young schizophrenic prisoner who was terrified by visions of his father appearing in his cell. Johnson talked to the man and heard the now familiar story of brutality, culminating in an episode when the man had been eleven years old and his father had tied him to the staircase and thrashed him blind with a belt because he thought that the boy had taken his car keys (wrongly, as it turned out). But the man was obviously alarmed at the prospect of confronting his past and insisted that he be ‘nutted off’ to Broadmoor secure hospital.

One afternoon, after avoiding him for days, the man asked to see Johnson on the hospital wing, where he was now being held. Johnson went in and sat on the bed and asked him how he was feeling. “Not too well,” he said and thumped Johnson in the mouth with his fist. Johnson reeled out of the room with a sore lip and bruised pride. Some of the officers were sympathetic and did not even argue with him when he insisted that the man should not be charged. But some of them predicted with relish that they wouldn’t be seeing Dr Johnson on the wing for a while.

Johnson proved them wrong and waded on through his work and every time he dipped his hand into the memories of these men, he came up with another fistful of horrors. The father who was walking across a field with his son and who told him to keep walking while he disappeared into the trees, from where he took pot shots at the boy with his air rifle. The mother who wasn’t there when the small boy woke up one morning; he asked a neighbour where she was and he heard his mother say “Tell him you don’t know” and then he never saw her again. The father who tied rope round his son’s ankles and dangled him upside down over the side of a bridge. The father who came home and saw his eight-year-old son dressed up in his best clothes.

“Where you think you’re going?”

“I’m going to my friend’s birthday party.”

“No, you’re not.”

And he ordered the boy to get upstairs and get dressed in his ordinary clothes – until the next day, when he forced the child to get dressed again in his best clothes and then dragged him round to his friend’s house, weeping with humiliation. Sometimes Johnson wondered whether he could take it all any more, the endless bashing and battering, recycled years later in mutilation and murder.

Slowly Johnson began to feel that he was winning, not just with the men but also with the officers. But when the battle finally moved into its last skirmish, it caught him by surprise. It was a Monday evening in April 1993 and he was at home on the Isle of Wight with his wife. The phone rang. It was one of the prison officers. “I don’t want to worry you,” he said, “but I think you ought to know that one of the inmates says he’s going to kill you.”

Johnson was not sure whether this was another provocation or news of a real threat, but as the officer continued to speak, he began to see that it was real. The prisoner, Ronnie, was complaining that Johnson had been insulting his mother. He had told a senior member of the prison staff that he was going to ask for a meeting with Dr Bob and then, when he turned round to switch on his video camera, he was going to get in behind him and garotte him. He’d even put aside a pyjama cord to do the job.

Since Ronnie had a history of attacking staff in other prisons, it was clear that the threat needed to be taken seriously. And that was the point that the prison officer wanted to make. No one was doing anything about it. “No one’s even telling you,” he said. “ So I’m telling you. And my advice to you is to watch your back.”

Bob Johnson went into the Wing the next morning and found out that the story was true. He recalled that when another prisoner had threatened one of the officers, he had been raced out of the prison before night fall, but this morning, so far as he could see, there was no sign of anyone racing anywhere. He started calling senior staff and insisting that they do something and, that afternoon, as a result of his pressure, Ronnie was taken to the segregation unit. But the skirmish had not yet finished.

The next morning, three of the older prisoners came to Johnson’s room to plead for Ronnie to be allowed back on the wing. One of them, who was in his 50s, said he could see himself in the young man and he wanted him to have a chance at getting his life straight. Johnson was impressed by this unexpected show of solidarity and, that afternoon, he went to see Ronnie in his solitary cell. He was contrite. He was desperate to get out of solitary, and he said the truth was he wanted to talk to Johnson some more. Johnson asked for him to be sent back to C Wing.

And now, he felt, he had passed a turning point. An officer had helped him, the prisoners had helped each other, and he had shown he had the power to help himself.
From this moment, he began to feel that the Wing was moving in his direction.

Nowadays, when Bob Johnson walks through the iron gates of C Wing, he joins a different scene. Johnson is very tall and very thin, like a stork in a suit, and he paces round the unit, ricocheting from one encounter to another “All right, Geoff?… How are the voices, Geoff? Good, glad to hear it…Tom! You coming to see me, Tom? Good. My room, ten fifteen. Excellent.”

Geoff says he used to attack anyone who got on his nerves – with wood, if it was a prison officer, with metal if it was another inmate. After five years in jail, he heard voices taunting him one night in his cell. He ripped out all the electrical fittings looking for the source, but he couldn’t find it and so he turned up his radio to drown out the torment. An officer complained; Geoff shouted at him; a group of officers came in and strapped him in a body suit with his feet up in the small of his back and left him, raving and raging at the voices in his head.

After months of conversation with Johnson, he now understands that he was knocked off track by his father beating him and by his mother abandoning him. Johnson wrote him signs for his cell wall, reminding him not to be scared of his mother. “It was like I was wearing this suit of chain mail and Dr Bob took off one bit here and one bit there and then the whole fucking lot fell off. It changed my life completely.”

Tom is only just beginning. He stabbed and slashed an 18-year-old stranger to death and all the time he was doing it, he saw his father’s face. In prison, he became ever more dangerous. “I didn’t care. Someone could come up to me and say ‘Here’s a tin of baccy. Go and do that guy.’ And I’d go and do him. I wouldn’t know who the fuck he was. I’d just do him, cut him or slash him. I didn’t care.” Now he has started to tell Johnson his tale of childhood terror and, for the first time, he says, he is thinking about having a future.

Another man says he began his revival during long periods of solitary confinement in other prisons. The officers added one little extra torment to the punishment by filling the little library in the Seg Unit with the most boring books they could find, which turned out to be some of the finest in the history of Western civilisation – Rousseau, Locke, De Beauvoir, Sartre – and this man started to read them and to understand them. He asked to be transferred to C Wing, where he knew from a previous stay that there were people he could trust and where Johnson now gave him the chance to see how his father’s routine whippings had distorted his adult life.

Some of Johnson’s men have left him, with their buried terror exhumed and controlled. Des has moved off to another prison and has been involved in no more violence. Another of Johnson’s men has been released without trouble, two others have been reduced from Category A to B, indicating the fall in their dangerousness. There is less bullying and less aggravation on the Wing. And the battle with the dissident officers is over.

They can see the Wing is running smoother, particularly since Johnson helped them to persuade one of the most difficult men to stop registering his bad moods by leaving little packets of excrement around the place. The battle now is not within C Wing, but between C Wing and the office of the Home Secretary.

The message from Michael Howard and the Government is simple: violent men must be jailed for longer and in more austere conditions. Bob Johnson says it’s intellectual garbage. “They think they are deterring people, but deterrence makes the assumption that people are behaving rationally. And they’re not. These people may be offenders, but they are also victims, victims all the way through. They are desperate. Children are not born evil. You hit them and reject them and terrify them and make sure they know that the world is a terrifying place. You train them to be anti-social. They have zero social skills. They ask for what they don’t want. They don’t ask for what they do want. If they think you like them, they hit you.

“I’m an emotional plumber. I tell these men I’m teaching them about their emotions and where they come from and what is going on inside their head. I’m showing them that reality is bearable, that it’s not lethal after all. The most significantly difficult thing to understand in life is other people, but what’s most fascinating about people is that they are repairable. These people have been battered and abused all through their childhood and then the prison system comes along and carries on battering and abusing them. I want to stop punishing them and help them.”

Bob Johnson may well be on to something, but he knows that his discoveries are political cyanide for a Home Secretary who wants blood-red meat to feed to public opinion. Parkhurst Prison has asked the Home Office to analyse Johnson’s results so that they have hard evidence on which to build policy. The Home Office has done nothing. Johnson submitted a paper about his work to the Reed Committee on mentally disordered offenders. The Committee did not even acknowledge it. Johnson went to London to talk to the Prisons Minister, Peter Lloyd. He thought Lloyd understood what he was saying, but he has yet to see any action.

“The physical abuse of children was finally recognised in the 1960s only because of the use of X-rays which produced evidence which could not be ignored. What we’re doing here is evidence of the emotional equivalent, but you can’t X-ray people’s personalities to show the damage, and so people like Michael Howard are able to ignore it.

“If you ask why they let me work here in the first place, part of the answer is that they didn’t care enough about these men to be bothered very much. I’ve got all the qualifications but they never bothered to screen me: so far as a lot of the administrators were concerned, these men were just not worth worrying about. The last thing they thought I would do was to start changing people.”

* The names of inmates in this story have been changed.