JOE WHITTY was the Governor of Feltham Youth Custody Centre, one of the most senior men in British prisons, a respected advisor of Home Secretaries and civil servants, when, one bleak morning in March 1992, he walked into the cell of a young man named John Kirkland, who had hanged himself during the night.
Whitty remembers the scene: ‘He was lying there and I read his last letter, saying, ‘I am here and I am freezing cold and I haven’t got enough blankets and I haven’t got a single book to read.’ And I walked round that cell thinking, ‘Oh, come on, please, let there be one book here, if it’s only the Bible or Dandy.’ And there was nothing, not a single thing.
‘And I was kneeling down beside him – and he was only young, this lad – and I said to myself: ‘What fucking system am I part of that leaves a lad like this in a dirty, freezing, stinking cell with not even a book to distract him?’ And John Kirkland was an absolute toe-rag. But there was no excuse for it.’ It was not the first time that Joe Whitty had had cause to berate himself and his masters in the Home Office, though it may have been the most poignant. Nor was it the first time that this particular prison governor had pierced the ‘toe-rag’ image of an inmate to feel a real bond with his captive. Until his retirement a few months ago, Joe Whitty was a unique figure in British prisons.
No other governor has dealt with a flare-up about Aids behind bars by borrowing dirty underpants from an infected prisoner and personally washing them in front of the other inmates to prove there was no danger or defied the Home Office when they refused to pay for improvements to his prison, by pulling out his own Barclaycard or stood up in court to defend rioters who had wrecked a remand centre.
But Joe Whitty is no soft-centred liberal. In many ways, he is a hard-liner. For example, while he believes passionately that almost all the prisoners he has dealt with in the last 34 years could be helped if only the Home Office would provide a decent regime, he is equally convinced that there is a small group of profoundly dangerous men who will disrupt any decent prison. For them, he wants Alcatraz. ‘Lock them in a concrete box,’ he says. ‘There is nothing else for them.’ Now, aged 60, Joe Whitty has done something else unique. In an extraordinary series of interviews, he has opened the door on British prisons – the extremes of good and evil he has encountered in prisoners and prison officers alike, the riots and suicides and escape attempts. He joins a handful of other senior governors who have publicly denounced the system they have tried to save, accusing the Home Office of simply ‘warehousing’ prisoners in regimes which offer them no reason to change. ‘This system is a disaster . . . The Home Office have to start listening to people like me, operational people.’ But even more unusual, he has opened the door on his own life to disclose the story of a man who grew up as a captive himself, first of his impoverished background, then of sheer, bug-eyed, bad-tempered drunkenness. Looking back at this vulnerable life, it becomes clear that, in a sense, he was eventually released from his own delinquency by the prisoners he was guarding but, equally, that he was always at risk of being recaptured by his past. Even at the height of his career, he says, when he was a top-rank governor, he reached out for the bottle in an incident which was so frightening that he never even told his wife about it.
It is this personal struggle which has made him unique. Other governors may despise their Home Secretary or rail against the Prison Officers Association, but only in private. Whitty, however, has an almost reckless indifference to diplomacy. After the devastating 1973 riot at Gartree prison, where he was deputy governor, he discovered that some of the officers who had been called in from outside the prison to quell the trouble, had been dishing out beatings and, in search of support to crack down on the guilty officers, he telephoned a senior civil servant.
‘I told him about the beatings. He said, ‘I know all about this, I’ve already heard from several different people.’ He said he’d known for two or three days. I said, ‘And you have done nothing about it?’ He said ‘That’s the politics of a riot.’ Well, that was it. I lost all faith in him, he went to rock bottom in my estimation. And I told him so. Then I went and told the staff ‘The next one who does it gets five years – I’ll go straight to the police.’ It stopped. I know – the cons told me. The staff didn’t like it though. They got all pissed up in the club and gave me a vote of no confidence.’ In the same way, there have been other governors who genuinely cared for their inmates, but Whitty, who is so aware of his own fallibility, has found a real bond with many of the men and women and children who have been in his custody because he identifies with them. ‘These are my people,’ he says.
When he looks at a 16-year-old thief sulking at the back of an education class, he sees the image of himself as a child in the Catholic ghettos of Liverpool, running round bomb hollows and sagging off school. He remembers how he squandered the best chance of his life, when he was 11 and the local grammar school offered him a scholarship. He felt completely out of place in the posh school and, even worse, out of step with everyone else in his street and even in his family. He dealt with the problem by failing and, after four years of bad work, he was asked to leave without a credit to his name. It was a pattern which he repeated for years.
He found himself an apprenticeship but then walked out on it. He worked in the docks but he became a casual robber. His father told him to get a proper job and specifically instructed him not to join the Navy, so he defied his father, forged his signature on the consent form and went to sea for seven years. In the Navy, he became a rugby star, but that only made him an odd man out again – often the only below-deck rating in the naval team and one of the very few to be tipped as a future officer. So, he found a new way to destroy his potential, by becoming a drunk. ‘I drank and drank and drank and got into trouble. I thought it was just peer group pressure but it was worse than that. I’d get other people’s rum ration. I became addicted. At one point in the Navy, I was drinking meths and orange juice. I have lots of pictures of myself from the Navy, all pissy-arsed.’ Former colleagues confirm that years later, dealing with young prisoners who refused to give themselves a chance in life, he would come close to tears of desperation. ‘I did squander my own potential. I created opportunities by hard work or whatever, but time and time again I seemed to kick them into touch. I actually have nearly cried when I see kids with good potential who simply won’t listen. I have lied to them and threatened them and conned them to go to education classes and to learn. I’d say, ‘If you don’t do this, you’re not going to get parole.’ It wasn’t true but it might succeed.
‘And my understanding of these people was very much allied to my drinking. In the Navy, I repeatedly found myself on disciplinary charges. That’s why I was never an admiral which, given my potential, I maybe should have been. I got into fights, I overstayed, I was insubordinate. When I was drunk, I was a pain in the bum.’ And knowing what it felt like to be a real pain in the bum gave him a chance to know what it might feel like inside the lives of some of the most destructive men in this country. He made them his friends.
‘The cons often used to say to me ‘You’ll pick the wrong one one day and get yourself killed.’ I thought of that when I went to see this man one day and everything was smashed up – cell, TV, everything – and he was standing there naked, covered in boot polish, with a Rambo scarf tied round his forehead, and with a big iron bar in his hands waiting to smash me. I thought, ‘This is it, Whitty. This is what the cons all talk about.’ And I went in to the cell and I closed the door behind me and I don’t know why, I just said ‘Put that fucking thing down, you great stupid git.’ And he did.’ That man came to trust Whitty, with the result that he became calmer and more manageable, though when Whitty left the prison, he was so distressed that he took over an administrative office so that he could phone Whitty at his next prison. Later, he sent Whitty a message, a sheet of paper, across which he had scrawled four letters, ‘HELP’.
These kind of friendships – between governor and inmate – made Whitty a walking contradiction. Early in his career, he befriended one of the Kray gang, Duke Osbourne, simply by agreeing to take him out to see his sick mother. Osbourne became an ally and spent hours talking to Whitty about crime and criminals. Then, one of the regular prison informants gave Whitty three pieces of information: there was some escape equipment hidden in a cell; there was some money hidden; and Duke Osbourne and one of his mates were carrying drugs in their rectums.
Whitty followed the first two tips, and both of them turned out to be true. He stopped an escape attempt and found pounds 350 in cash. ‘So what could I do? Duke was my friend, but this was a good informant. So I told the doctor to do an internal. I hated doing it. And the doctor found fuck all. Duke and his mate thought it was my deputy who had authorised it and they were out for him, they were going to do him. Duke told me so himself.
‘I didn’t say anything but then I went back to him and I said it was me. He hit the fucking roof – ‘Do you know what it’s like to have an internal? I thought we were friends.’ I said ‘Sorry, mate, but when the chips are down, I’m still wearing blue.’ ‘ After several months of hostility, Whitty eventually persuaded Osbourne to see it from his point of view and they became friends again. Osbourne came as a guest to his son’s enrolment in the Boy Scouts and confided that he and his mate had hatched a plan to take Whitty hostage and give him an internal of his own. Other friendships simply collapsed in pain.
When Whitty was at Gartree in the early Seventies, he became close with a man named Billy O’Gorman who was serving 14 years for robbery. He was a well-respected gangster, taking his sentence in his stride. But during the riot there, prisoners broke into the admin area and found his records which suggested that he had helped staff. The truth was that he had talked some sense into wilder prisoners, but the others thought it meant that he had been grassing, and they set out to make his life hell.
‘He came to me and he said, ‘What should I do?’ And this was a man who responded – to the education officer, to the chaplain, to me. I shouldn’t have said this, but I said to him: ‘Get yourself a blade and go out on the yard and the first bastard that calls you a grass – do him.’ He said, ‘I can’t do that, I’ve become a Christian.’ I said, ‘You must be joking, you can’t be a Christian in this place.’ ‘Anyway, he went down and down and down, and they said, ‘He’s got to be moved.’ So, what do we do? We can take him off Category A, high security, and move him to Maidstone, which is a gangster’s prison, which he would like. Or we can keep him on Cat A and put him in Wakefield which I knew he would hate. In my heart, I wanted to take him off Cat A and send him to a reasonable jail, but professionally, I believed he was now potentially more dangerous than he had been, because of this threat hanging over him. So, he had to go to Wakefield.
‘I rang up a doctor I knew there and I said, ‘He’s a good guy but I think he’s suicidal.’ He said he’d pass it on. Well, Billy O’Gorman saw some doctor, who said ‘He’s just a toe-rag, he’s no more suicidal than I am.’ And I was woken up about six in the morning by the phone, and I said to my wife, ‘I bet that’s Wakefield.’ And it was. He’d hanged himself in his cell. I know if I had taken him off Cat A, it might all have been different. But I couldn’t’ For all the difficulties which they have caused him, these kind of relationships also saved him. When he left the Navy in the late Fifties, he was still drinking heavily and still charging blindly through life. He went to Canada and stumbled into a job as a prison officer, where he was revolted to find the governor personally strapping the naked backsides of difficult prisoners and intrigued to read leaflets by Canadian prison reformers who suggested that convicts could be changed, not merely punished. This idea was still with him when he returned to England and found work again as a prison officer.
In Blundeston, in the early Sixties, he worked for the first time in a therapeutic regime. Prisoners belonged to a committee which helped the governor to run the prison. Staff offered special therapy to sex offenders and brought in the men’s wives for family therapy. The burglars and robbers formed their own therapeutic group, which they called the Never Again Association. ‘We got very close to these very difficult and disturbed men, unpacking their personalities. A lot of them revealed themselves in a very brave way. We had outworkers to help them when they left. And we had success. All this confirmed in me the idea that prisons can change people. You don’t just have to warehouse them.’ But Joe Whitty soon found he was in no position to impress anyone with his ideas, not even when he was picked out from all the other officers and promoted to junior governor. His boss called him in. ‘He told me there was no career for me in the prison service because I was lower working class and I showed it in everything I did and thought and said. I nearly hit the roof, which would have been a very lower working class response. Then my wife suggested that he might be right. I had to acknowledge what he could see – the booze, the abrasive manner, the cleaving to officer grades rather than moving on.’
It was the prisoners themselves who finally forced him to confront the truth. One of them, an old recidivist named Pop Guyler, took him aside and told him plainly that he was making a real foul-up of being a junior governor and gave him long lectures on the right way to conduct himself in prison. Over and over again, Whitty found that as he pressed men to rescue themselves from their difficult personalities, he was compelled to consider his own advice to them, to see how his own future was being stunted by his past. He decided to stop drinking and joined Alcoholics Anonymous.
Over time, he succeeded in wrestling his personal problems under control and, although alcoholism was still to play a dramatic part in his life, he found that finally, at the age of 36, his career began to take off. By the early Seventies, when he moved to Gartree, his greatest professional problem was that the Home Office was losing its grip, allowing the therapeutic regimes which he had pioneered during the Sixties to be undermined by prison officers and prisoners alike. Whitty is outspoken in his condemnation of the Prison Officers Association.
‘The POA are a dreadful problem for any governor and for progress,’ he says now. ‘A lot of them are friends but there are others who are animals. They will use the POA’s power to destructive effect. They’ll make sure the prison is locked up so tight that it will blow, or they just withdraw their good will. They reflect majority opinion in the outside world and they will often bring their ideology to bear. I used to train new officers and a lot of them had the attitude that they would be best off with a hanging a day and they could work as pallbearers, which was the attitude of the man in the street, which is what they were. None of them is any great shakes at personal psychology or sociology. They will resist things like counselling just because they don’t like the smell of it.’ While prison officers dragged their heels on the road to progress, the Home Office made a policy decision which was to kill the therapeutic regimes forever, though Whitty didn’t see that at the time. They created the ‘dispersal system’ which distributed dangerous inmates through seven high-security prisons. ‘It was a disaster. There are lots of people in the dispersal system doing long terms for terrible things, but you can hold them and develop a regime and work with them.
‘Then, suddenly, we had the Krays and the Richardsons and Frankie Frazer and Tony Lambrianou – all the London shithouses – and their main job in life is to make prison comfortable for themselves, to be in control, to have power. They terrorise people to get their way. They get in there and they wreck things if they can. They got on to the prison committee and took the piss, they disrupted the counselling, they put inmates in fear of their lives, mucked up the art classes, set fire to the workshops. They live for confrontation, these men. There were no-go areas in Long Lartin and Gartree, where the staff were frightened to go.’ Whitty was deputy governor of Gartree when the hard men started to arrive and, for a while, he gave them the benefit of the doubt. Then, early in 1973, there was an extraordinary incident in the prison, which was barely reported to the outside world. It began when a group of men took their blankets out into the yard and announced that they were going to sleep out there. The prison governor, looking to avoid unnecessary confrontation, allowed them to stay. Soon other men followed and began to build a gigantic tent across the yard with blankets draped over ropes. They were taking their meals out and the staff were walking around them, nodding and bidding them Good Day. Then Joe Whitty got a message from a grass.
‘He said they were digging a tunnel out there and they only had about 10 yards to go. Now, there were maybe 300 cons out there, including 40 Cat A men, and if we went in mob-handed, it was going to be like the OK Corral, it would just blow up. They had an acknowledged leader, Joey Martin, one of these very disruptive, hard men. So I went across to him in the yard and I said, ‘Joey, you’re digging a tunnel.’ He said, ‘We’re not, I give you my word.’ I said, ‘I don’t give a shit, I’m coming in there.’ He said, ‘Then I’m not fucking responsible for what goes off.’ And by now the cons were all gathering around.
‘So, I went to the first tent and I ripped off the blanket, and there was a hole going straight down into the ground. I said, ‘So, this is you working with us, is it? What sort of shit houses are you?’ One or two of them were shamed, but not Joey Martin. It was getting nasty. I wanted to put a dog down the tunnel but I couldn’t in case there was a man down there and the dog started ripping into him. They’d have gone crazy. The POA bloke came up and said they all had to be searched before he would let them back in the prison. I talked him out of it and the men went back inside without a confrontation.’ The prison finally exploded a few months later. The summer of 1973 saw a sequence of prison riots, instigated by the new prisoners union, PROP. ‘The Home Office were so stupid. As each dispersal prison went up, they moved the troublemakers on to a new prison and we ended up with the lot of them in our kind of regime. We were completely overloaded.’ The final flare-up began, once again, with a grass, though this time, he was outside the prison.
‘He wanted to meet me, he wouldn’t talk on the phone. The police said, ‘Don’t do it, you’ll end up dead,’ but I said I wanted to and I didn’t want a tail. So I met the grass and I found out that Joey Martin was about to go over the wall with a group of others. They had made a key, they had a pick-up arranged, they had an outfit coming in with firearms to help them. So I stopped it, sent Joey Martin and one of the others off to the secure unit in Leicester. But the escape plan was so good that it didn’t stop.
‘When they tried it, all hell broke loose in the dining room. One particular bastard threw a chair through a plate-glass window, and they all went off. It went on for three days. In the end, we evacuated the whole prison. The destruction was really worth seeing. We were totally outnumbered. At one point, I was in the kitchen with about a dozen staff and they broke through a bloody great hole and started coming at us. The staff had these helmets on but the cons could see my face and they were shouting, ‘We’ll get you for this, Whitty,’ and I was hurling abuse back.’ When the riot was over, a third of the prison was destroyed, and the therapeutic regime lay in ruins. From that time, Whitty and others like him have been fighting isolated battles with a system which he believes has been dedicated to mere captivity.
In the last 15 years, Whitty has watched impotently while Home Secretaries have cut parole and pressed for ever longer sentences. The effect on his work has been devastating. ‘A young offender may feel he has no hope, but a mature man on one of these 30-year sentences knows he has none. There is something very wrong with that. I understand the judge needs to send out a message, that this crime will not be tolerated, but for those of us who have to deal with them, you are removing all hope from them. What you must do is to monitor the ability of people to change. The system that we have locks them up and ensures that there is no point in them changing.’ As the governor of Long Lartin during the late Eighties, Whitty saw just such a change in John ‘Ginger’ Bowden, who was serving a long life sentence for the most vicious murder and mutilation. Whitty believed that Bowden should be given hope. The system refused. Stuck with his sentence, Whitty campaigned to have his security status reduced to Category B. He even went to see the director-general of the prison service. ‘I pleaded like it was my own son we were talking about. They didn’t know what to do with him and eventually almost as a favour to me, they did put him down to Cat B’
But the Home Office refused to give Bowden any hint of release. ‘The inflexibility in a case like Bowden’s is crazy. John Bowden really did change. He has a brain, he has influence, he has leadership qualities. Outside, these people are nothing. Inside, they become exceptional people and we have to harness that but, because of the lack of resources and the lack of thinking, we don’t. This is part of the nonsense of prisons.’ As it was, the system produced its own, nonsensical result. Instead of preparing Bowden for release, they transferred him again. ‘They sent him to Maidstone which is run by London gangsters who hate John Bowden because they think he’s a lunatic. And he abhors bullies and gangsters and he believes that we allow them to run the place. I thought ‘Jesus Christ, he won’t last there.’ And fortunately – in a way – he escaped.’
It was when Whitty moved to Feltham Youth Custody Centre in the early Nineties that he felt most aggrieved by the failures of the system. He was looking after the kind of young hooligans who have been the butt of the Home Secretary’s anger, yet he saw their condition being worsened by the Home Secretary’s regime.
‘The problem with youth custody now is that there is no philosophy at work, no point to the thing. Most young offenders come up once and disappear. The number of real recidivists is relatively small. We are talking about thousands but not tens of thousands, whose experience of family and life are so bad that they will keep on offending. Institutions for them have to be about changing them. At the moment there are many institutions which make no attempt to change them and then there are some which do, but the after-care doesn’t work.
‘And this kind of repackaging or reprogramming doesn’t have to be soft. You need discipline and control. I’m saying we mustn’t just warehouse them. Out of 400 sentenced boys in Feltham, there are probably only 20 who are beyond help. They’re concrete box types – no touching them. But we are failing the other 380. They come in and they want to settle down, they’re nice kids. But we fail them: first, because there is a lack of constructive activity with them and second, because they are exposed to the hard little bastards who bully them or recruit them as bullies and exert this powerful peer group pressure.’ It was during this period that John Kirkland and three other young men in Feltham, who had been the victims of this pointless and violent regime, killed themselves. Whitty was devastated and broke down in tears during a radio interview. He was determined to stop the bullying by setting up a segregation unit for the bullies and installing closed circuit TV cameras to monitor assaults. ‘But HQ said, ‘Cameras are not acceptable and you can’t have a bullies unit because it would be a prison within a prison.’ I said, ‘I don’t give a shit what you say, I’m locking those bastards up.’ I talked to the staff and they said, ‘What we need is a programme for the bullies, to make them aware of what they are doing to other kids.’ We went ahead. Then the bill came for the cameras and HQ refused to pay for them. I said, ‘I’ll put it on my Barclaycard if I have to.’ But in the end they backed down and paid. Because it was working. The kids wanted more.’ It was the death of these four young men which forced Whitty to confront his alcoholism again. In a sense, it had never gone away. He had continued to go to AA meetings. During Long Lartin, as the stress built up around him, he says he had felt himself longing for a drink and had leaned more heavily on AA. He had also had a series of extraordinary encounters with officers in various prisons who were addicted to alcohol.
One officer used to get so drunk on court escort duties that Whitty found the prisoners were having to bring him back themselves. Another used to come on duty so drunk that staff would lock him in a cell to dry him out. Whitty set about changing them just as he tried to change the prisoners. He took them to AA meetings. He sent one officer to a detox unit for three weeks but on the day he came out, he was drunk again. Whitty went to his home and was staggered to find that, in an act of self-loathing, the officer had stripped out his bedroom so that it looked just like a prison cell. Whitty sat up all night with this man, arguing with his addiction. At one point in the middle of the night, he telephoned a woman prisoner, whom he had got to know as governor of Askham Grange women’s prison in the mid-Eighties. She had been a dedicated alcoholic, but, with Whitty’s help, she had saved her own life and, in a bizarre reversal, the ex-prisoner came on the phone in an attempt to deal with the delinquent prison officer.
By the time he was governor of Feltham, Whitty had gone more than 20 years without a drink. But the suicides made him feel deeply sad. ‘I really wanted very badly to start drinking again. At Feltham, the pressure was really on. I had had the suicides. I thought, ‘Why bother? Fuck it.’ I was out driving. I went to a pub and went in there and I knew that what I was doing was stupid. I knew I shouldn’t be drinking. And that if I started I would go out of control. I went up to the bar and the barman came and he said, ‘What will you have sir?’ Whitty shakes his head as he recalls how he stood at the bar and looked up and down the rows of brightly coloured bottles, unsure of what exactly he should ask for, but committed in his own mind to wrecking everything he had worked for. Then his eye touched on something he had never seen in a bar before, and he looked up and told the barman he would have a chocolate ice cream.
‘This must have been the only pub in England that sold choc-ice. Later on I was meeting a probation officer who understood alcoholics and I told him and I went to AA and shared it there. My wife, Mary, knew nothing of this. I just told her six or eight months ago.’ Now, he is retired. He is planning to start work with one of the new private prison companies. But for the Home Office and its warehouse regime and for the nearly 50,000 men, women and children who live within its walls, the regrettable reality is that there was only one Joe Whitty.
