Barlinnie Special Unit: What it can teach us today

The unit was established at a time when Scottish prisons were known for being, by far, the worst in the UK.

With the abolition of the death penalty in 1969, convicts who knew they would likely never be released - but by the same token wouldn't be hanged - felt they had nothing to lose.

Violence between inmates was common, as it was against guards - sometimes in the form of full-scale riots.

The approach at the time was to despatch the most troublesome prisoners to remote incarceration in the north of the country.

If it wasn't quite the Soviet Gulag system it wasn't far off, with inmates frequently subject to isolation and any resistance met with an iron fist - a special segregation unit at HMP Inverness dubbed simply 'The Cages' was described as "the Siberia for prisoners in the Scottish Prison System" by Jimmy Boyle, once Scotland's most violent prisoner who was released from the BSU and never re-offended.

Murderer Jimmy Boyle at work in the special unit 1974 (Image: The Herald)

Dr Anderson tells The Herald: "They were very violent, they were very austere, we were still slopping out. There was very little communication between prisoners and their families, later on a number of the riots were about that.

"Putting them in a cage within a prison cell, often removing their clothing – it was drastically different to what prisons look like today. And it wasn’t that long ago.”

By 1970 it had become clear that simply quashing dissent by force wasn't working - riots, attacks on staff and dirty protests were common.

A working party under the chairmanship of Alex Stephen was set up by the then Scottish Prisons Department to consider the ‘Treatment of Certain Male Long-Term Prisoners and Potentially Violent Prisoners’.

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It included senior Prison Service officials, a consultant psychiatrist, two prison governors and representatives of the Scottish Prison Officers’ Association (SPOA).

An idea was proposed by Ken Murray, a Scottish prison officer, and Ian Stephen, who worked for the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) as a forensic psychologist - removing some of the most violent offenders and using therapy, rather than repression, to deal with them.

Three years later, the Barlinnie Special Unit opened in the former women's wing of the prison.

Dr Anderson says: "It was immediately not popular.

“There were lots of people in the Prison Service who did not agree with it, because it was seen as being soft on some of the most violent men in the service.

“These were men who had attacked prison officers and other prisoners, which made it very difficult for the staff on the Unit in the early days because they were often seen by their fellow prison officers as ‘going to the other side’.

“It lasted for nearly 22 years, I think it was a month shy before they shut it down.”

The first inmates were suspicious, too. Some had come direct from The Cages in Inverness, and found the relaxed atmosphere disorienting. Many felt the focus on psychology was a thinly-veiled plot to get them sent to Carstairs.

A cell in the Barlinnie Special Unit in 1981 (Image: Newsquest)

"And understandably," Dr Anderson says. "Most of the men in the first round of the unit were coming from the cages, so of course you’re going to be suspicious about what's going on – ‘why are you all of a sudden being so kind to me? What are you going to do to me next?’.

“We have a chapter by Johnny Steele and he writes about that, as someone who was in the prison system for many years coming to the unit was really a shock for him.

"They were highly suspicious of the idea that a prison officer would call you by your first name, or ask how your mum was doing.

“Not everyone stayed in the unit, they found it stressful or too challenging because, unlike in a jail, you couldn’t just keep your head down and keep to yourself. If you were too quiet the community would ask why you weren’t participating.

“It wasn’t the holiday that some people like to propose it was.”

Rather than solitary confinement and slopping out, the inmates could paint and sculpt, wear their own clothes, and have visits from loved ones outside of set hours.

Initially, the response of the media, who were invited to an open day on 25 July, 1974, was positive.

In the Glasgow Herald, Jim Hewitson wrote: "The visit to the 'murderers’ block' has turned out to be a rather surprising, almost baffling, encounter with a bunch of 'nice guys’."

However, things soon turned and the SPS began to be accused of giving some of the most violent, dangerous criminals in Scotland an easy ride.

For those working on the unit though, this new approach brought surprising results.

David J Cooke, the first psychologist to work at the Special Unit, used Robert D. Hare's method to determine whether the prisoners suffered from psyochopathy: 72% fitted his description of ‘psychopath’; and another 25% had significant elements of the disorder. This compared to 3-5% in the prison population as a whole.

Prevailing wisdom held that such people could not be treated - Dr Cooke writes: "the BSU prisoners were not a good bet for treatment, they were not a good bet for change".

Change they did, though. The psychologist reviewed prisoner records comparing the number of assaults inmates had committed during their sentence before and after entering the unit.

The Barlinnie Special Unit - Art, Punishment & innovation front cover (Image: Waterside Press)

He found that the prisoner cohort had committed a combined 181 assaults before being transferred - certainly an undercount because of how much prison violence goes unreported - while a grand total of two happened in the BSU.

Dr Anderson says: "I think this speaks to a larger challenge around understanding punishment - because in some ways the unit did exactly what it was supposed to do and that still wasn’t enough for some people.

"At the time people looked to Scotland and were fascinated by this proposition, to have this therapeutic unit: in Barlinnie.

“There’s this BBC video from the 70s which opens with the men in Barlinnie walking in a circle in the exercise yard and it’s such a perfect representation of the Victorian ideals of a prison and then they go into the Special Unit and you see guys in their 70s outfits talking with the prison officers.

"It’s such a complete juxtaposition between what was happening in the rest of the service, and that made a lot of people angry.”

The unit was quietly closed in 1994 and today no such institution exists in Scotland - HMP Grendon in Buckinghamshire is the UK's only therapeutic prison.

Dr Anderson believes, though, that there is plenty the Barlinnie Special Unit can teach us today.

She says: "We’re not proposing another Special Unit in the same blueprint, but hopefully this book can open up some dialogue about the possibility  of Scotland thinking differently about punishment.

“Right now you look at the development of HMP Barlinnie, which is going to be a huge prison, with the exception of the community custody units for women of which there are no more planned to be built, we’re on the road to just building bigger prisons and putting more people in them.

"I think Scotland has the capacity to think more creatively, it doesn’t have to be a blueprint of the unit but we can take some of those lessons learned.

"It probably hasn’t happened for a number of reasons. The SPS work in the present, and to a certain degree they have to.

“But they’re not very good at highlighting the work they do which is good and meaningful, and that’s political because people jump on that. To do something good and meaningful in a prison you have to pay attention to the individual, their families and their communities and that, to some, can look like they’re not being punished – and sometimes the media will perpetuate that.

“The Barlinnie Special Unit is a perfect example of that, the focus was on the men getting to decorate their cells, to wear their own clothes, the fact they could have visitors at any time. It wasn’t on the difficulty of these men having to come out of a prison system that was incredibly brutal.

“Coming out of solitary confinement and physical punishment to the BSU, it wasn’t just like walking in and saying ‘oh great, this is so much better’. These men were traumatised.

"I think it asks us, as Scottish society, what we mean and what we want from punishment.

"If truly the outcome we want is for people to be able to come out of prison and be integrated back into communities and contribute, and to not commit a crime again; the punishment that was happening in the 70s is not going to make that happen.

“It’s more something like the Barlinnie Special Unit that would make that happen. Jimmy Boyle left the unit and he didn’t re-offend, he became quite successful as an artist in his own right after that – and a lot of people didn’t like that, they didn’t like that he did what the punishment was supposed to do.

“So that asks bigger questions of us as a society. If we just want prisons to punish people and their communities they’re doing it really well. But if we really want something in which we recognise the harm that is done to people, and ask the people who have perpetrated that harm to respond to it, we need something different.

“We know just locking people up doesn’t do that.

"Most people just accept prisons as ‘oh yeah, of course we have prisons. Why would we not?’.

“But there are different ways we can respond to people who have harmed us, and I hope this book contributes to that in some way.”

The Barlinnie Special Unit: Art, Punishment and Innovation is available from Waterside Press, Amazon, and all good bookshops. It is released on October 1, RRP £25.