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We can't have dancin' at the local county jail…

‘Get the army in,’ shrieked the Commissar, ‘We can’t let those cons dictate terms. They decided to riot. Violence is never a solution. Full combat gear and fixed bayonets.’

The leader of the rioters found himself there by accident. But that didn’t suit the Commissar. This was a conspiracy theory they did want.

‘For some time now, we have been aware of a small group of politically motivated men, hell-bent on the overthrow of society as we know and love it. They are everywhere, and some have found their way into HM Prison Ballbreak.

Their ringleader, Brown, is the head of a local cell, and has been behind this from the start.’

Geoff Brown’s reaction to this would have been interesting had he known at the time how the establishment viewed him. Brown was serving 2 years for fraud, and had ended up in Ballbreak instead of the open prison at Leafy Meadow due to overcrowding.

Brown remembered the 60’s when he was growing up, and how political parties vied with each other to say who would create the best possible world to live in. Now, he thought, they compete over proclaiming who can keep us the most safe from rabid criminals and te*r***i*ts. And he knew that kind of thinking was dangerous.

He had lost his business overnight when the government scrapped all rural post offices, under the slogan ‘They might be reliable, but they ain’t viable.’ The use of ain’t was preferred to aren’t because it would appeal to the younger voter, who never went in post offices except possibly to rob them. No-one cared about reliability any more, so it was an obvious winner.

The Ballbreak riot was actually triggered when an inmate, who had become one of Geoff Brown’s best friends, had been beaten up by prison officers. In the months leading up to riot, the food had been getting worse, ‘privileges’ [association time, visiting hours, training and rehabilitation] taken away or reduced, and speeches of Tony Blair and John Prescott had been played endlessly on prison radio. So strongly did everyone at the prison react to this, that even some of the prison officers had joined in with the riot, and had set fire to the tapes in the radio studio.

Commissar Bucket reflected.

‘We know 80% of them will come back in 2 years, so it’s obvious prison doesn’t work at rehabilitation. And why should it? The public don’t want the ba**ards to have it easy. If they all stopped being criminals, look at the unemployment that would create in the prisons, the police, probation and social services, the legal profession, the fashion industry [‘prison-chic’], newspapers and stereotyped actors playing grim-faced coppers on the television and ex-army authors writing about it all. No way! On sink estates, crime is a career option for teenagers. Start with an ASBO, end up in a young offender’s institution, and then ‘graduate’ to prison. What would they all do without a core of hoodies terrorising neighbourhoods? We need a number of criminals to keep the majority scared. Trouble is, we’ve become too good with the schools of crime, and they are bursting at the seams because of people wanting to come in.

Like the cleansing aftermath of a forest fire, the odd riot is to be welcomed. We condemn all violence.’

Johnny Pagent, Brown’s friend, had wound up the staff in Ballbreak for months. Geoff knew this, but was still impressed by his passion for prison reform, and proper rehabilitation.

Johnny knew his stuff:

‘Look at the NSS [NHS], the National Sickness Service. They poison people as kids, convince us all dis-ease is waiting in Eastern Europe, Africa or Wolverhampton like a coiled spring ready to pounce randomly unless we make ourselves susceptible to other problems by being vaccinated. Lip service is paid to healthy living, and Alzheimer’s is looked at like a curse from God instead of an accumulation of unhealthy living [eating] during your life.

What would happen if we all did actually lead healthier lives? How many of the 1 million NSS staff would still have jobs? What about the fast food industry, the drink, drugs and fags companies?’

Brown couldn’t square Pagent’s zeal for the obvious with his anti-social attitude to the innocent staff at Ballbreak.

After the riot, Brown had 10 years added to his sentence. Pagent was re-packaged and programmed and sent to Iraq.

Geoff Brown had gained unwanted notoriety for his role in saving Pagent’s life, and standing up to the governor [“I was only carrying out orders sir!”] over the deterioration of the prison before the riot. He had become an unofficial guru and wise man at the re-named Soylent Green Penitentiary [SGP]. Just two years later, only 40% of ex-SGP inmates were returning to a life of crime.

The new regime at SGP had attracted those more interested in rehabilitation than creating then pandering to a false public mood. Bucket had ‘resigned’ and gone on to slag everyone off on his soapbox in Wolverhampton:

‘Why do we need Post Offices? Machine gun the pensioners.’ Was a typical rant.

The turnaround at SGP had been kept from the media. In the annual play ‘Rubber Bullets’ staged by the prisoners, Geoff Brown played the ‘governor’ in an imaginary riot at an imaginary flagship ‘model’ [rehabilitative] prison. The new Commissar had permitted the play because the fictitious prison actually closed in the play, thus in their opinion, giving reform a bad name…

After the play, a dance was held, the most popular song containing these words:

“I love to hear those convicts squeal, it's a shame these slugs ain't real, but we can't have dancin' at the local county jail” *

JS, October 2006.

* taken from the old 10 cc song, Rubber Bullets.