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Diary Of A Secret Prisoner: Falling in debt inside can be fatal

Most day-to-day business between inmates is done with vape boxes, with rapidly escalating debts a major driver of violence

As Britain is gripped by a prisons crisis, the Telegraph is publishing a series of dispatches from an inmate at a Category B jail – the second highest level of security – to discover what life is really like inside. Recently, the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) found the jail to be chronically overcrowded and understaffed, with self-harm and drug use rife. 
The inmate, a British professional and entrepreneur on the outside, is on remand awaiting trial charged with non-violent crimes which he denies. To protect his identity, he is not named. Other names and nicknames have been changed.
It is curious that an item so trivial as the vape cap should be at the heart of prison life. Although you are no longer allowed to smoke tobacco in a British prison, vaping is almost encouraged. One of Oscar Wilde’s imposing female characters stated that she approved of smoking because all men should have an occupation, and it’s the same in here. 
Vape caps are the flavour cartridges which screw onto e-cigarettes, but they do much more than provide a substitute for smoking. They serve as the basic unit of currency for almost all transactions in a jail. 
In some countries, like Mexico, prisoners are permitted to keep and exchange their own cash, though this invariably creates a hierarchy reflecting the wealth and influence of prisoners on the outside. 
British prisoners will occasionally make financial arrangements through third parties on the outside, but most day-to-day business inside is done with vape boxes. These you order weekly – either tobacco or menthol flavour – on your canteen sheet. If you’re “debted up” and have promised to pay other prisoners with vapes when canteen day comes, you had better make sure you’re square. On our wing, canteen day is known as “Black Eye Friday”. 
Prisoners can earn money inside, but wages are laughable – £1.50 for a two-hour shift is typical. The real incentive in taking a prison job is to get out of your cell and off the wing for a few hours. You never see your earnings as cash, but they appear as a modest weekly credit – say £20 on your canteen. By the time they’ve deducted the obligatory TV licence fee which all prisoners pay, that will buy about five boxes of caps. 
I don’t vape but I do buy a couple of boxes weekly on canteen. An innocent transaction would be a box (three vape caps) for a haircut. Prisoners cut each other’s hair with electric shears – scissors are not permitted, for obvious reasons. Some do it better than others. If you are going to court and don’t want to look like a convict, it might be worth paying a couple of boxes to someone skilled enough to ensure your crew cut is graded nicely and no nicks are left on your scalp. 
If you do owe a box this week, the price next week is two boxes. The rapid escalation of debt is a major driver of violence. It’s common for debted-up prisoners to move wings quite frequently, closely followed by their reputation. 
Another seemingly innocent transaction is to sell an item like a leg of chicken from your servery ration for a cap or two. Protein is prized inside, where the diet is mostly carbs (a week’s milk ration – seven-quarter-litre UHT cartons – seems a bargain for the going price of just one cap). But you don’t need to look very deep below the surface to realise that if someone is selling their food for caps they are probably a heroin addict on the outside, known as a “nitty” in here. 
Invariably, nitties get debted-up and pick up physical damage, some of it cumulative and serious like concussions and lost teeth (on top of the physical ailments that using heroin on the outside inflicts). They are always begging you for a breakfast pack (cereal, tea bags, sugars and whiteners issued every evening), or its component parts, or a piece of fruit or a pack of biscuits. They either need it because they are starving (the prison ration is about 1300-1500 calories per day, depending on whether the bread ration is being shared equitably, so it is almost dependent upon prisoners buying supplementary rations on canteen), or because someone has agreed to give them a vape or two for a kilo of sugar, which they will collect sachet by sachet. And if someone wants a kilo, that’s not infrequently because they are brewing hooch: prison alcohol. 
I was padded-up with a nitty – we’ll call him Mr M – for most of May and June. It was evident he was getting debted-up. At the end of May, when he arrived in my cell, I paid off a few boxes for him because it was becoming too stressful having collectors visit us whenever the doors opened for social times or meals. There is also a weird prison logic that if you are padded-up with a debtor and he is moved out of reach – to another wing or another prison – you take on his debt. 
But Mr M kept using spice [ed. a synthetic cannabinoid which is smoked] and had no means of paying for it so I stood the risk of becoming a sort of patsy. In fact, I refused to pay his debts after that and went around the dealers on our spur (four that I knew of – out of seventy prisoners on the spur) and asked them to shut down all sales to Mr M. A blockade of sorts. 
Mr M quickly found a way around the blockade I had attempted to implement. He started brewing hooch, which is dangerous on two levels – it gets inmates who drink it worked up and aggressive, and it undoubtedly contains unrefined toxins in addition to the alcohol. I then had the big dilemma of whether to rat on Mr M. 
The player he was brewing for, whom we will call Mr Big, told me “as a professional courtesy” that it would be happening and there was nothing I could do about it. The obvious thing, as a general prison rule, is never to grass: you’ll get hot-watered or a pencil through your windpipe. But the problem is that the authorities, discovering hooch, will invariably blame both inmates in a cell. 
To be fair to Mr M, he insisted if we were caught it would “all be on him”. So I watched him squeezing balls of bread (apparently, it reactivates the yeast), and sticking them into a plastic bottle with fruit, water and sugar. These bottles are then incubated a bit like eggs: kept in warm water (we each get a plastic bowl for washing clothes) for several days until, in theory, alcohol is produced. 
Whether our hooch turned to alcohol, I never learned. Coming back from the block shower one morning, I found officers “spinning” our cell, and looking very pleased with themselves. They actually found only one of Mr M’s bottles. I had to laugh out loud when, after they had gone, Mr M pulled another one out of his bedside cupboard. 
Who grassed on us, I don’t know, but Mr Big blamed me – not for grassing, but for airing the problem with other prisoners. If you have an anxiety or a problem in prison, you are encouraged to speak to a Listener – a prisoner trained to be, basically, a decent guy (which most inmates are anyway, at least when it comes to sharing each other’s burdens). I had done this, and the prevailing view was that the Listener, who was himself a dealer, had grassed. 
With a retail value of around 15-20 vape boxes for the quarter pint of alcohol it might yield, a bottle of hooch would have got Mr M out of debt and paid for his spice for a couple of weeks. As it turned out, both Mr M and I were nicked, he did take it all on himself, but then cut his wrists in our cell loo while I was nonchalantly watching TV. 
He survived, but was moved off-wing, away from his creditors. 
Next time, the Secret Prisoner will reveal more about the drugs epidemic rife in our jails
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