Paul Hill and Phil Sheridan arrived into Exeter, a local jail rarely used to hold IRA prisoners. Hill was quickly moved on to Winchester and Wakefield while Sheridan endured nine months in the ‘awful’, ill-appointed Exeter where the Segregation Block resembled ‘a subterranean dungeon’.60 Sheehan was dispatched via Wormwood Scrubs to Parkhurst. McCluskey and McCartney were shifted to Winchester and very quickly into the punishment block for protesting the local conditions. Whereas McCluskey was shortly afterwards moved on to Wormwood Scrubs for an extended bout of solitary confinement, McCartney’s refusal to co-operate with the staff and rejection of ‘closed’ visits resulted in his being detained in a ‘strong box’ cell in the Segregation Unit.61
Ronnie McCartney spent December 1978 and January 1979 in the ‘strong box’, during which time he was refused permission to attend religious services or use personal cash to buy Christmas cards for his family.62 The adapted cell was soundproofed by reinforced doors and walls: a combination of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation which, prisoners claimed, facilitated physical attacks by staff. The Winchester variant was painted in brilliant white, which accentuated the impact of the overhead light being left on constantly, and resulted in the lasting impairment of McCartney’s vision.63 While the hardships endured by all IRA prisoners in England featured in republican organs, the perception that McCartney had been particularly maltreated resonated in political prints for several months. His progress was reported following transfer to Hull in February 1979.64 His defiance in Hull, where he was held on ‘E-List’ in the Punishment Block, led to beatings and confinement in the ‘strong-box’. The special cell consisted of a concrete bed behind a heavy double door which ensured ‘no one could hear what was happening to you’.65
The highly visible and media-covered Gartree protest exposed the potential for violence within an overstressed penal environment. Overcrowding exerted strain across the network and ensured that prisoner pacification was a pressing matter in 1978 in the aftermath of expensive and embarrassing riots in the Dispersal System.66 Brixton staff, as part of an ambitious POA strategy involving forty of Britain’s 120 prisons, voted on 19 October to refuse admittance to an average of twenty-five remand prisoners per day from 5 November.67 Such threats, in the context of prisoner restiveness, obliged Home Secretary Merlyn Rees to seek ‘urgent’ Cabinet approval for an inquiry into the grievances of Prison Service employees. This was granted on 2 November.68 The POA were unequivocal in citing the Irish political dimension to the cusp of exaggeration, although many members would have realised that IRA personnel were due to give evidence in York Crown Court from 2 November when proceedings commenced against staff accused of offences committed during and after the Hull riot.69 It was significant that warders did not overreact in terms of physical assaults when their ascendancy in Gartree was restored.70
In the advent of the Home Secretary’s review, David Heywood, Assistant Secretary of the Society of Civil and Public Servants, pressed the case in a naked reference to the danger posed by IRA prisoners: ‘Riots on the scale of the recent Gartree disturbances might break out at several prisons at the same time. Violent prisoners and IRA extremists would be delighted to exploit the situation’.71 A joint letter to the Home Secretary from prison governors was similarly themed: ‘If the present trend continues there will be a serious loss of control, which has to be quelled by armed intervention, with the probability of both staff and prisoners being killed’.72 The allusion to an Attica - style massacre, if extreme and unprecedented in Britain, did not appear entirely unreasonable in the last years of the most violent decade of the century inside the country’s prisons. PROP had predicted a major incident for years and was unsurprised by the near manifestation of armed intervention in Albany in May 1983.73
Questions of control lay at the heart of most serious controversies of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Inmates were conventionally punished for dissent and violation of regulations by temporary loss of privileges and remission of sentence. Punishments included imprisonment in detached or small spaces engineered to promote desocialization, discomfort, tedium and under stimulation. If mentally and often physically debilitating, the additional prospect of being ‘sectioned’ to ‘hospitals’ for long term and potentially even more severe maltreatment was omnipresent. PROP and other prisoner advocates alleged that ‘kicking squads’ and a psychotic element within the penal establishment abused and even staged ‘suicides’ of vulnerable and selected uncooperative prisoners. Psychotropic medicine, administered in either inappropriate dosages or forcibly by injection, was a widespread concern which went far beyond traditional jailhouse suspicions that the sedative Bromide was routinely added to liquids.74 Dr. McCleery’s admission, following relocation to southern Sudan, that ‘problems of containment of psychopaths’ led to the drugging of men showing ‘no evidence of formal illness’ on the Isle of Wight were publicised by the Sunday Times on 22 October 1978. Persistent allegations of untoward ‘staff violence’ towards prisoners and unsatisfactory inquests were not entertained by the insulated Home Office.75
Guardian correspondent David Beresford highlighted the retention of twenty-five Gartree rioters in a ‘new unit’ commissioned in 1975. ‘Mystery’ surrounded the function of the two - storey building which housed ‘Twenty-five cells with a direct link to the prison hospital’.76 Prisoners were convinced it had been conceived as a ‘Control Unit’ along the lines of that temporarily operated in Wakefield and that constructed but used in an alternate manner in Wormwood Scrubs. Official claims that the detached Gartree block was merely a high security ‘segregation unit’ did not mollify those familiar with the rebranded F Wing in Wakefield, where a regime of sensory deprivation operated, albeit without the strict schedule of modular progression which the formerly secret annexe had trialled.77
It was significant that the prisoners retained in what was described as simply ‘temporary accommodation’ in Gartree were inside another newly designated ‘F Wing’ which staffing problems had hitherto kept closed.78 They were not, however, physically mistreated, and the contrast with Hull in 1976 was obvious. Labour MP John Prescott provided a direct connection given his role in negotiations, which resulted in the termination of the earlier protest in his Hull East constituency. His accurate prediction of unrest in Gartree, however, drew the ire of John Farr, Conservative MP for Harborough, who told his fellow Yorkshire man to keep ‘his long nose’ out of the affair.79 By 1980 it was evident that the Prison Department, stymied in its sinister ‘Control Unit’ strategy, adapted the basic concept and infrastructure to regularize the de facto practise of prolonged solitary confinement. Harsh segregation was viewed as a vital tool in the arsenal of prisoner management and popular within the POA. The persistence of legal actions arising from the Wakefield prototype, however, sensitized its proponents to the importance of discretion, media - friendly terminology and institutional secrecy.80
