At her majesty's pleasure

After a nightmare flight from New York to London, I was thrown into a Victorian hellhole of a prison alongside drug smugglers and rapists. This is my story.

By Peter Kurth

Read more: AIDS, England, Terrorism, Peter Kurth, Prisons, Airlines, Homeland Security, Life

May 1, 2007 | The following diary is excerpted from a journal I kept while incarcerated in December 2006 and January 2007 at Her Majesty's Prison at Wormwood Scrubs, London. Until December, I had never before been in a prison of any kind, for any reason, let alone such a filthy, decrepit, Victorian heap of stone and sadism as the Scrubs. That I found myself there at all may be put down to a collision of intractable forces -- first, my own loudmouth pigheadedness, which has landed me in trouble before; second, a humorless and probably exhausted flight attendant; and, third, the heightened tension now common to air travel, thanks to real and imagined threats to public safety resulting from the worldwide "war on terror." What follows is my story alone, though I have no reason to suspect that under like circumstances, other hapless saps would not find themselves in similar straits. And so, I offer my reflections on the experience here more or less as a cautionary tale.

On Dec. 6 of last year, I boarded a British Airways flight from JFK in New York on what was meant to be a four-day research trip to London, to examine documents recently released by Scotland Yard relating to a book I'm writing. I left the states on the spur of the moment, after I noticed that I had only seven days left on my passport before it expired. That's why I went when I did -- to take advantage of the time remaining. I expected to be back home in Vermont within a week -- not knowing, or having forgotten, about a law in Britain that demands that you have at least six months' time on your passport in order to be admitted into the country. This law has been on the books for ages, apparently, but, to my knowledge, it was rarely enforced. No longer: Travel documents and other identification papers are now screened in Britain with all the watchfulness of the doomed.

My flight was delayed by a couple of hours; it was nearly midnight when we boarded. By that time, I'd had a couple of scotches and a full dinner at one of the airport's generic bars, but I can state for sure that I was not "intoxicated." I certainly wasn't "plainly intoxicated," as the airline staff later told the courts, because if I had been, they wouldn't have let me on board. (I also feel safe in assuming that they wouldn't have offered me free bottles of wine after we took off: The last time I'd flown from London to New York, "security" actually canvassed people in the bars at Heathrow, interrogating passengers to see if they were "fit to fly.") Everything might have worked out fine if a) I hadn't discovered that my laptop was missing after about an hour in the air; and b) I'd been given a seat that wasn't tailor-made to form blood clots in my legs. I've been HIV-positive since the AIDS epidemic began -- I'm what they call a long-term survivor -- and I've got peripheral neuropathy in both my legs: It's impossible for me to sit shoved up against a wall for six hours, unable to move or lean back while the person in front of me reclines.

I should have told the airline upfront about the HIV situation, my "no longer invariably fatal but still miserably complicated chronic manageable disease." Indeed, when interrogated later by the police, I was asked why I hadn't done this, and could only reply that I'm not accustomed to blaring the news around in public. It's one thing to be "out" about your HIV status. It's quite another to trumpet the news openly before 400 people who are already in a state of anxiety. So I didn't explain that part of things when it might have helped. Neither did I bear in mind (since I was plenty anxious myself) that one of the medications I'm on -- ritonavir, which has especially terrible side effects -- is administered as part of the AIDS cocktail precisely because of its ability to inhibit a metabolic pathway and help the front-line antivirals circulate longer in the bloodstream.

Unfortunately, ritonavir has -- or can have, depending on who you ask -- the same effect with alcohol, so that "a couple of scotches" at the bar and a bottle of wine at 35,000 feet might easily send you to Cloud Cuckoo Land before you can say, "Fasten your seat belts." I mention this not as an excuse, but as a possible explanation for the fact that I completely lost my mind on that plane. I hadn't conceivably had enough alcohol to account for the reaction that ultimately led me to the clink.

My sins, in brief: When the cabin crew refused to radio JFK to see if I'd left my laptop at the gate and also declined to move me to another seat, "an altercation ensued" -- not physical, but verbal, with the flight attendants becoming snootier by the minute and me becoming, well, let's say, more American. I behaved badly in-flight, yelling at the crew, "I am an American citizen! You are our lapdog ally!" and other remarks of a vulgar and unhelpful nature. Very vulgar, I'm afraid: At one point I called that tired stewardess the worst thing you can call a woman -- you all know what it is -- but by then I was in full-blown air rage, something the airlines used to understand but, on the evidence, no longer do.

Finally, I went back to the galley and sat on what is called the "bustle," which is where they keep those rubber slides should a plane go down in water and where, over many years of these flights, I've seen lots of people sitting and children playing without anyone making a fuss about it. But times have changed, and now parking your ass on the bustle constitutes "endangering an aircraft," which is a very high crime under Britain's new anti-terrorism laws, and can get you sent to prison for a minimum of two years. I was warned about this (so they tell me), but I still refused to move; and when we finally landed at Heathrow the next morning I was escorted off the plane by two of London's finest -- not the sort of "bobby" I remember from many years in London, but fully outfitted SWAT-team types, bristling with munitions and in no mood for smart alecks. They dragged me past customs straight to police headquarters at Uxbridge, an indescribably dreary, prefabricated suburb and corporate-operations center west of London, where "incidents" originating at Heathrow are all referred for jurisdiction.

It wasn't until I got to the police station that I began to realize, slowly, the nature of the trouble I was in. A solicitor -- in my case, the English version of a public defender -- was rustled up from somewhere, and seemed to think that I'd probably get off with a slap on the wrist for "disturbing the peace" and be sent home. But I had no idea of the depth of modern Britain's terror paranoia, and I was amazed to discover, after I was "cautioned" and formally "interviewed," that the Uxbridge constabulary knew all kinds of things about me that I hadn't told them. Evidently, the "suspicious" passport and the last-minute ticket purchase, not to mention the bustle business, had resulted in a call to Interpol or some other surveillance outfit. I'm guessing here (because the police aren't obliged to tell you anything), but in the eyes of British law I apparently bore all the marks of a jihadi-in-waiting. Most surprising to me was the fact that the police had information about my family -- specifically, that my father is a convert to Islam, married to a Moroccan woman; that I have two Moroccan half-sisters; that I have spent long periods in the Middle East. I was appalled to find out that such details are available "at the click of a mouse" to any squirt with a badge, and I must have indicated as much to the squirts in question, because their notes about my "attitude and behavior" boiled down to one word: "obnoxious."

After a day and a night in isolation at Uxbridge, I was hauled the next morning, a Friday, to Magistrate's Court, where I was formally charged with "endangerment" and ... something else. I'm looking through legal papers to see what it was, but I can't find any record of it. It had something to do with "bad behaviour," a point I'd pass over if the British, under Tony Blair, hadn't made "behaviour," with or without damage to third parties, a crime in itself when it suits them. Did I know that "verbal abuse" was a criminal offense in Britain, the police had asked -- I didn't -- and that the laws of Britain also apply on board a British aircraft?

At my first court appearance, bail was instantly denied, owing to the "gravity" of the charge, and that night I was bundled off to Wormwood Scrubs, to what they call the "First Night Centre." This is, essentially, an induction wing, and fairly comfortable, all things considered -- though I think it's kept that way only to trick newcomers into thinking that the prison itself will be the same once they get there. A sad delusion: Wormwood Scrubs is a perfect shit-hole, as I would learn soon enough.

Please note that "bail" in the U.K. isn't the same thing as it is here (nothing about British judicial procedure is the same as it is in the U.S.). In Britain, bail doesn't necessarily involve money. It merely demands that you have "a fixed address" and that someone be willing to guarantee that you won't "abscond" if you're let loose on the streets. I'd been planning to stay with a friend in London during my ill-fated trip, but, helpful as he tried to be when he learned of my plight, he was scheduled to leave the country before the case could be resolved and was thus unable to provide the kind of assurance the court required. I know a lot of people in London, and I might have phoned any one of them, I suppose, except for two obstacles: First, their phone numbers were all recorded in my missing computer and, second, I wasn't able to make a phone call at any time. While prisoners are assigned calling-card numbers for use on prison phones, mine never worked -- and though I repeatedly requested to have it fixed, the matter was never resolved. In fact, until I was released in January, every bit of communication I had with the outside world was conducted through my lawyer and embassy. The whole matter might have been settled quickly had it not been Christmastime -- what the British call "the festive season" -- when everything in England shuts up tight like a drum and no court could deal with me until after the New Year.

So, that's how I wound up in the most notorious prison in London, with some of the most dangerous criminals in the city, many of whom are black and Islamic. Be advised that I use the term "black" the way the English do, to designate anyone with dark skin -- and I choose it to reflect the prevailing attitude in the U.K. right now toward "immigrants" in general and Muslims in particular. Believe me, the Brits are as nasty as we are, and just as hypocritical. At one point, even, a guard at the Scrubs advised me not to refer to "Britain" any longer. "We are English, Welsh, Scots, Irish and an awful lot of Muslims," he said. "Please remember that." Certainly one of the most horrifying moments of my incarceration came on the day of Saddam Hussein's execution, when I heard one of the guards (female) talking to another about what she called "a double standard." She wasn't sayin', mind, that she was "in fay-vuh of the death penalty," but she'd "'ad it up to 'ere" with the Muslim prisoners, "'oo'd 'ave their bloody 'ands cut off if they was in their own countries. But just listen to 'em squeal when we take away their tellies!"

To that I say: It was the Muslim prisoners in custody who taught me the most about British justice as it currently functions, and who treated me more kindly, on the whole, than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. Britain has the highest rate of drug abuse in the EU and the highest rate of incarceration. At one point last month, there were only "four prison beds" remaining in the whole of the United Kingdom. The home secretary, John Reid, has proposed putting criminals onto ships, like they did in the good old days, when Britannia ruled the waves.

There's a lot more to the diary I kept in prison than you'll read in the excerpts below, and a lot that I didn't write down at the time, not knowing from minute to minute when the guards might burst into the cell and confiscate anything they thought was "subversive." The unutterable tedium of prison life is itself a brutality, and can scarcely be rendered in words. I assure you, you have no idea what boredom is until you find yourself in the slammer, with only mealtimes, twice a day, guaranteed to get you out of your cell for a few precious minutes.

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