With the return to Ireland of all but the 3 most recently convicted Irish POWs the Prison Service is increasingly having the confidence to pursue a policy of limited provocation and containment, gradually clawing back the few concessions to humanity they have been forced to make in the past, while at the same time identifying and isolating prison militants. This is part of the wider policy of polarisation which the Prison Service have used to divide prisoners, firstly through the ‘Incentives and Earned Privileges Scheme’, and ultimately leading to a situation where you have totally passive prisoners on ‘Enhanced’ wings at one end of the spectrum, and people being brutalised and tortured in ‘Control Units’ at the other. In other words another re-working of the age-old ‘divide and rule’ / ‘carrot and stick’ policies, with Woodhill Unit being the stick for anybody who doesn’t want to play along. Meanwhile, as the mainstream prison population is pacified, in large part with in-cell TV, the hoops that prisoners have to jump through in order to maintain their current ‘privilege level’ are getting steadily smaller and higher. The clear aim of the Prison Service is the smashing of prisoner resistance once and for all.
The Prison Service are not having it all their own way, there are indications that they are currently encountering a good few problems in the Woodhill Torture Unit for example, and it is to be hoped that the forthcoming action on Prisoners Justice Day will lead to the closure of this bestial place once and for all. As readers will no doubt already be aware though, the recent highlighting of brutality at Wormwood Scrubs is only the tip of the iceberg, and even if the Woodhill Unit closes, the Prison Service will still have plenty of dark and nasty little holes in which to try and lose those prisoners who continue to show spirit and resistance.
John Bowden will be well known to regular readers of FRFI, for 20 years he has been a beacon of prisoner resistance; courageous in the face of sustained brutality, unusually astute and articulate, and a tireless prison militant, John is a revolutionary in every sense of the word, as well-respected by his fellow cons as he is hated and feared by the System. John has been targeted time and time again for his activism, but despite being on the receiving end of often horrendous violence, he remains unbowed and unbroken, his natural spirit of resistance as fresh as that dark day 20 years ago when he was thrown into Her Majesty’s dungeons. More than anything the System hates and fears those prisoners who show a selfless determination to defend the humanity of their fellow prisoners, and are willing and able to organise resistance to inhumane prison conditions, as far as the ‘Dark Forces’ of the Prison Service are concerned solidarity is a very dirty word.
Having been moved back into the Dispersal System last year after a short spell at Nottingham Prison, John has been awaiting news of a transfer to Scotland, so as to allow for regular visits from his wife, who lives in Edinburgh. His refusal to kneel to the increasingly petty regime at Full Sutton however has once more led to him being targeted and punished. On the 22nd of June John was the subject of what can only be described as a ‘constructive nicking’ for disobeying a totally unreasonable ‘order’, a cowardly means of quietly moving him to the Full Sutton Block. Within minutes of John arriving the POA Block Rats were trying to play games with him, and when other prisoners stuck up for John one of them was rushed in his cell and assaulted.
Entirely at home in the Block, John remained as strong and courageous as always, so it was clearly deemed necessary to punish him further. When the prison van came to move him on the morning of the 29th of June, it was not to Scotland that John was transferred, but to Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, as far away as it is possible to get from his wife. Once again, it is not only the prisoner, but the prisoner’s family that the Prison Service punishes, and John has not even done anything ‘wrong’ apart from refusing to get down on his knees and grovel.
What John Bowden has suffered in British gaols during the past 20 years amounts to sustained inhumanity and torture. Even after all these years it seems the Prison Service are unprepared to offer any kind of truce or the barest concessions to human decency. There is still a war raging in Britain’s prisons, a war declared unilaterally on its prisoners, and pursued ruthlessly by the prison authorities. It is a war in which only the total surrender or death of prisoner combatants has been deemed acceptable, and revolutionaries ‘outside’ need to realise this, and ‘take up arms’. John Bowden deserves our fullest support.
Mark Barnsley
June 1999. Full Sutton Prison.
Written for the ‘Prisoners Fightback’ column of ‘Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!’