Interview | Conditions from Barlinnie prison

In Glasgow, the 143-year old Barlinnie prison, recently described as being at ‘breaking point’, is set to be closed and replaced by the new HMP Glasgow. The project may eventually cost over £400 million. Scotland has one of the highest rates of imprisonment in Western Europe, with a quarter of prisoners on remand (meaning that they haven’t been tried yet). Meanwhile, there have been 350 deaths in prisons between 2012 and 2022, with suicide rates rising by 42 per cent. Barlinnie is at 140 per cent capacity; a recent BBC documentary suggests that the prison has always been overcrowded.

rs21 Glasgow conducted this interview with former HMP Barlinnie inmate Calum so that we could share some of these conditions from Scotland’s largest prison and communicate some of their experience of an ‘intolerable’ system. Calum was arrested with other Palestine Action activists as part of the Thales 5 who shut down the French weapons manufacturer’s Govan site in June 2022. Calum was sentenced to 12 months in prison in August 2024, one of the most serious sentences for a Palestine activist in Scotland, this following the passing of increasingly severe policing and crime bills, which have since been followed by the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist group.

rs21: Can you tell us a bit about your day-to-day life in Barlinnie? 

Calum: The cell itself is tiny. Even in the Victorian era, it was deemed not suitable for more than one person to inhabit a cell – and two people are in every single cell, in a bunk bed. The cell is probably five feet across, and about 15 feet deep, so it’s like a weird rectangular box you’re in.
And there’s one really tiny window at the top of the far wall with bars over it.

You get one hour a day for just walking around the big asphalt lot. It’s this empty asphalt area where you go with your “flat” [the other prisoners on your level]. They’ve been walking the circle in the same direction since the prison was built 140 years ago – there’s erosion on the asphalt lot from all the prisoners walking in the circle. Every other hour of the day is in your cell. Even when you eat, you go downstairs, get your tray, get your food and you go back to your cell. There’s no cafeteria, nothing like that.

Once a week you get a canteen sheet. There’s no actual shop or anything, or a cart that comes by, like in The Shawshank Redemption. There’s just a slip of paper that gets passed under your door, every Sunday night. And you have to do the total for how much it all costs as well. That’s where you buy stamps, shampoo, soap, snacks, some stationery. You pass that to the “pass man” Monday morning, which is when they also give you breakfast. And that’s when you also ask for anything you need from the prison officers. They come to your door, go “Requests!” really loudly, and you say, I need to go to the gym,
I need to shower today etc. And if you don’t ask in the morning, then you just don’t get it that day.

I was lucky enough to be working a prison job, so that was five hours a day I’d be out of the cell, basically. I was doing horticulture – growing plants and stuff like that. 

rs21: How much were you getting paid for work, and what was that work like?

Calum: I got paid £15 a week for that, for five hours a day. That works out to less than £1 an hour.  Luckily for me, the work was very easy and very chilled out. I had a slightly more humane boss, a prison officer named Martin¹, who was running horticulture. When you’re outside, it’s ACAB with the prison officers. But when you’re in there, I have to know which ones are going to be nicer to me than the other ones. Martin was nice in a way that he would actually bend the rules for you and he’d also call you by your first name, which almost no other prison officers would do. And he didn’t give a fuck about making us work or making sure we were on the ball or anything, he really just cared more about growing plants and teaching us to grow plants. Could’ve been a lot worse. 

It was a lot tougher for other people. People in ‘recycling’ got paid more, but that job was pretty tough because they were in a warehouse, where all of the trash for the whole prison went through and they had to sort through the trash for the whole prison. More actual labour to run the prison than anything else. And it was just a big open warehouse in the middle of Glasgow winter. Cold as fuck and a lot stricter, from what I hear, since the work is actually necessary to run the prison, and they’re keeping an eye on you if you try and smuggle some stuff from the trash back to your cell. So a lot of people would join recycling and quit really quickly, because they just couldn’t handle it.

My co-accused got in contact with the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) and tried to get the prison workers involved and get them unionised. We all signed a letter to send to the IWW. The prisoners, they put their name down,
but it’s like most of them didn’t really give a fuck, except for a couple of guys who were more excited about it. But I also admittedly didn’t push as far as I could have, because I was trying not to stick out too much, I guess. A workers’ union for the prisoners would be good; if you could organise a strike, that would affect the prisons. 

rs21: One of the main themes from the BBC documentary is the liberal argument that prison work rehabilitates prisoners. How would you respond? 

Calum: The guy who’s interviewed in that documentary, Kieran, was someone who I knew and chatted to on a pretty regular basis. He says in the documentary about how he’s grateful that he’s had access to counselling and support groups he never had before and how much that’s helped him. And it’s true, in prison he has access to all kinds of support that just didn’t exist for him before, but when I chatted to him about it he was the first to say how messed up it is that he didn’t have any of that support before going to prison. And the bare minimum support that people get in there still isn’t really “enough” for someone to really turn themselves around. There’s no follow up care post-prison and not any like official support with getting employed with your new experience working in prison. Really now you’re just an ex-con who’s gonna have a much harder time finding a stable job. Most of the guys I met in prison had been in and out for years of their life, and they were the first to say how they’re stuck in a loop of doing illegal stuff to get by and then getting locked up, over and over. If anyone gets out of that loop and gets a better life for themselves, I’d say that’s all on them, and I don’t believe for a second that the prison had anything to do with rehabilitating them.

rs21: What was it like in terms of getting medical care? Lots of conversation about Barlinnie centres around high levels of drug use inside – what were addiction services like? 

Calum: If you had a real emergency, you’re not seeing anybody unless you’re screaming – I don’t think you’re getting healthcare immediately. Getting anything in prison, including healthcare, requires you to fill in three different forms and hand them in. None of the officers will tell you how to do that; only other prisoners would really tell you how to get what you need.
Then maybe you get it after a really long time. Some people get stuff quicker – but it’s totally arbitrary. One of the guys that I was working with was waiting for some kind of dental appointment for a few months. I put in a slip after he did, and ended up getting seen before him. The system just doesn’t seem to work.

The drug use was pretty crazy. There were a lot of guys doing this thing they called Legal in there; super ironic name. I think people usually call it spice out here. No one had anything good to say about it, even the people who did it. I heard from someone that they did a bunch and basically came to like three days later, and didn’t remember anything from the past few days. And that was the main draw, was just making the time go by. There was some support in the form of groups and stuff for addiction, but I can’t imagine that they’re doing much since drug use is rampant. I mean really rampant. Sometimes drones come up to people’s cell windows to drop off drugs. I’d hear crazy sounds out of my window at night and people running around and someone at work told me that’s what was happening, drone deliveries. But that’s what you get when you have a literal captive market with nothing else to do, you know? The conditions are perfect for that kind of drug use, and there’s definitely not any super impactful support for it, and there’s barely even an alternative for the guys in there. I don’t know, I guess I have a lot of sympathy for those guys. It’s a real problem for sure.

rs21: Could you talk about the other prisoners’ politics and their political interpretations of their situation?

Calum: Most of them were pretty right-wing, straight up. They were experiencing how bad the prison system was – how much none of it really worked, how many people were there for like, totally nothing and how much the people in there didn’t deserve to be there.
And still people had a resignation to it, they didn’t feel like it could change, or that was just what they have to deal with. Some people in there kind of believe they deserved it. Abolition was a new concept to most people. Most of my coworkers – they would argue with me about it or just be mostly ambivalent about it really.

One of the guys I worked with, who was pretty sound overall. He was more pro-abolition and pro-unions, he’s also pro-Trump and thinks Trump is gonna kick Vladimir Putin’s ass. Most of them were probably people who’d describe themselves as apolitical.
I met one guy who was a hardcore Tory and he wanted to argue politics with me all the time. 

About 90 per cent of the prison population is from just the east end of Glasgow. Guys from the east end had a recognition of the fact that prison oppresses the poor. They say: ‘We’re from the poor part of Glasgow. We did crime for money and now we’re in prison.’ And that’s just how the world worked for them, for the most part. 

Some people definitely were more politically conscious about it, like this is a symptom of capitalism. Probably more people than average would recognise this is a symptom of the system that we’re in.

rs21: Could you talk about forms of solidarity between prisoners? How did people look out for each other, if they did?

Calum: I mean, there’s a couple of guys who would be assholes, but usually people you actually talk to every day will be friendly to you. There were a few people who were even parental figures in the community, and looked after people.
The prisoners will help you far more than any officer will, because the officers don’t even know what the rules are. They make them up and they will enforce whatever they think the rules are on you whenever they want to. So the prisoners are the only ones who actually tell you what to do and how to survive in there. 

There’s a huge shadow economy that prisoners trade in. On the one hand, drugs and money are definitely going around, but there’s also a huge underground gift economy of stuff that’s legal outside of prison, just useful stuff you’re not meant to have. Like you’re not allowed to have pepper, but if you make friends with people, there’s a network where it’s like, “Oh, this guy knows that guy and he can give you pepper to spice your meals. And let me teach you a really cool way to hide towels so you can have three towels”. And there’s a lot of very material, logistical, community learning, I guess. 

I knew one guy who was 63 and had been in and out of Barlinnie and prisons all over Scotland since he was a teenager. And he was a fountain of knowledge for, like, prison life hacks. He was bald, but he had a wall in his cell that was covered in bottles of shampoo and conditioner, for trading mostly, but also he was like, if you take the squeezy bottle of a certain conditioner, mix it with water and put it in a spray bottle and spray it, it freshens your room – he was full of stuff like that. 

rs21: Did you talk with the others about the Thales action?

Calum: Yeah, I mean, all the prison officers knew. They were fucking badgering us about it all the time, especially at the start, and trying to argue politics with me and my co-accused. Other prisoners would come and be like, “so can you tell me what you’re in here for?” Then they’d be like, “what actually happened there?” Then word gets around.
Most of them thought it was pretty cool.
They definitely didn’t look down on it. There was one guy who was really pro-Palestine, he’s pro-IRA, and he’s like, what they’re going through down there – it’s just like what happened in Ireland. But even guys who didn’t know or didn’t really care about Palestine just loved that we were sticking it to the man, I think.

rs21: What were the other prisoners’ views of the new HMP Glasgow?

Calum: They like the idea of making a new nicer one, but no-one thinks they’ll demolish the old one.
They’ll just make a new one and put new people in. People talked about it a reasonable amount. We had a mock up cell as well in there, like a show home. Yeah. It was just a warehouse, right next to where we were working. We’d be like, wow, it’s pretty cushy.
It’d be nice to be there instead of here, because the cells were a lot bigger and they had big windows. 

No one thinks Barlinnie is going to be demolished to build a new prison and replace it. All the other prisons in Scotland are nicer than Barlinnie, and it’s not even close, so it’s like, where are they gonna put the people that they really want to fuck with? The new prison has less capacity anyway, 1200 spaces compared to Barlinnie’s 1400. From what I’ve heard, in HMP Glasgow they’ve been talking about how Barlinnie is outdated and inhumane since it was built. But they never run out of prisoners, you know? The new prisons are always filled with new prisoners. 

1. The officer’s name had been changed to anonymise them. ↩︎