jimmy-holland

Gazing out of the window, the gravel path roared as it was crushed into submission under the wheels of the car that was taking me towards a menacing looking medieval castle with two huge and terrifying turrets that seemingly reached out towards me. I imagined that I was the gravel and the wheels of the car were the social care system.

This was a new buzz, better than anything I__ tried before. For the first time, I could fight back at others. I__ even fight with a parked car! I was totally kyboshed on these drugs, I didn__ care how many boys were standing outside the pub, I__ run over and fight the lot of them. Even though I came off second best, in my mind, I still walked away a winner. I showed them I wasn__ a little shit-bag that always got battered, not when I had the drugs in me.

The rush I got from crime was better than that of glue, drink or hash. I loved playing cat and mouse with the local coppers. He Who Dares Wins, the SAS motto, was very applicable to my life then.

Once the cons were in the cell, they__ pull razors or homemade daggers out and rob the YOs of their trainers, leather jackets or jewellery. You couldn__ placate them; it would be akin to expecting not to be bitten from a Rhodesian Ridgeback whilst petting it! Bar L was full of rough, colourful and out-of-control junkies who wouldn__ think twice about stabbing you or slashing you just to get what you had on your feet to pay for their next hit of smack.

There are now babies being born in our hospitals with crack or heroin habits, come on, fuck, no one would have dreamt such a horrible thing would happen to a newborn babies in Scotland. I didn__ think the sons and daughters, mothers and fathers of Scotland would have been messed up in such a nasty circle of misery, depression, violence, suicides and prisons because of drugs.

On the morning of Wednesday 13 March 1996, Thomas West Hamilton shattered the peaceful country town of Dunblane, Stirlingshire, with a fusillade of gunfire that reverberated round the world.

TC Campbell doesn__ need any introduction, the man is a legend in the prison community and outside when this very strong-minded man was trying to prove his innocence for the six murders he had been convicted for. TC went on a fifty-day hunger strike, he ended up in hospital. This man was willing to die to prove his innocence, if he never done his famous hunger strike he probably would have never go the MPS in government to sit up and take note.

Mags seemed to attract trouble wherever she went. The Raploch Estate in Stirling was a nice backdrop, a middleclass place to live and bring up your kids until the scourge of drugs took a grip of its sons and daughters, like any other quiet township. The more the people needed drugs, the rougher and more violent the place became.

I will not go into detail but the screw put up a little bit of a resistance, fair play to him, but we were so desperate for the drugs in her medical bag that nothing was going to stop us getting at them. That is what happened, we got the bag of drugs from her hand. I can tell you, we were like two tramps round a bag of chips in a bin.

The last person to be hanged in Glasgow at the age of 31 was a beast by the name of Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel, he swung from the gallows in Barlinnie Prison on 11 July 1958.

At one point the worst thing to happen was the odd stabbing or slashing, the violence that we live with nowadays used to only be seen in Hollywood gangster movies such as Gangs of New York, Menace to Society and Boys and the Hood. Even when we were reading about the crack hitting London, no one in Scotland would have thought in their wildest dreams that it would have taken off in our cities, towns and now even highland villages.

Before Mags became a household name across Scotland, it was during the mid Nineties when she became an avid anti-paedophile campaigner against paedophiles on the Raploch Estate, attracting media attention, even appearing on Robert Kilroy-Silk__ morning TV show. At the height of her anti-paedophilic crusade, she led a howling mob of protesters to a hostel near her home where a known paedophile was staying.

No one was expecting the six-man team of elite SAS officers to storm the prison, but that is exactly what they did do. Hurling stun grenade and tear gas canisters, they entered the jail through a skylight before freeing the terrified prison warder.

When Barlinnie__ Prison doctor, Dr Danson, came to see Dingus, he turned in disgust at the state Dingus was left to lie in. Doctor Danson refused to treat him as he knew Dingus__ injuries were life threatening, he told the top warden that Dingus would need to be rushed to Glasgow Royal Infirmary for emergency surgery. The screws in the seg block refused to listen to the doctor, they pushed and manhandled their own doctor out of Dingus__ cell and threatened him with a severe beating if he made anything public about Dingus__ injuries.

I was reading that there are children at the age of twelve and thirteen selling their bodies at dinnertimes for as little as £5 when they should be at school. Now if that is not a problem, I don__ know what is. The drug problem has got way too far out of hand.

I pulled the homemade jail knife out that I had in my hand, Porkie pulled out the very sharp lockback knife that he had concealed up his sleeve. We told the warden and nurse to sit on the floor, and if they did as we told them then no one would get hurt.

I keep telling the screws over and over again, __f you treat a young boy in prison like a dog, keep him in a cell that is like a cage and constantly beat him and bully him, that boy is going to grow up hating yous and the system._ The only thing on his mind will be revenge, maybe it is not revenge on the screws that so frequently bullied and tortured him, but in the boy__ eyes he is getting revenge on the uniform, as it all means the same thing in the boy__ or man__ eyes.

Gary Moore is another legendary figure of sheer violence. In prison, Gary has spent most of his adult life inside one jail or another. When, on the odd occasion, he does get out of prison, it doesn__ take him long to go on a murderous campaign of total terror. Gary has been charged and stood trial for some three or four different murders.