What stood in one corner of the cell was disgusting: two empty disinfectant canisters and one well used and well stained piss pot, the sort of chamber pot that people would train their babies to be potty trained on before they would learn to use the toilet.

I believe the most degrading thing in the world is to be treated worse than a starving dog by five growling, muscle-bound thugs, better known as screws!

In Polmont, everyone was acting the hard man and giving it the large. I had to fight or cosh or do something to be accepted. I can tell you, it was better to be in a gang than being on your own, and I’d do anything in Polmont, no questions asked!

After a couple of weeks in Polmont, I started to become more assertive and began arguing with older, bigger boys. I loved it. This is where my ugly side would make some scary and unpredictable appearances. Even to this day, I can go from a happy-go-lucky cunt to the devil on acid.

Once the cons were in the cell, they’d pull razors or homemade daggers out and rob the YOs of their trainers, leather jackets or jewellery. You couldn’t 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’t 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.

I waltzed into the hall with my escort of five screws like some rapper with his well-paid entourage. A fiendish looking, little bastard with blonde hair and a crooked nose came up to me and said, ‘Okay, Holland, welcome to Shotts. Welcome to the man-eater!

I got my lawyer to visit me in the jail. He couldn’t believe the bruising over my body, so he pulled the governor and asked why I was covered in marks. The governor said to my lawyer that it was ‘self-inflicted’ and was caused by my ‘running into walls’. That part was disproved because walls don’t leave footprints all over your body.

Aberdeenshire’s Peterhead jail housed the hardest, badest, meanest motherfucker prisoners in the Scottish prison system. So no one was surprised when the pressure pot jail finally erupted in to violence that has not been seen or equalled since.

Thirteen years have past since 1993, and I still have not seen one single book, documentary or anything to the biggest epidemic in Scottish, British prison history. I would go as far and say, no other prison in the world had fourteen men catching the HIV virus at the same time.

I keep telling the screws over and over again, ‘If 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’s eyes he is getting revenge on the uniform, as it all means the same thing in the boy’s or man’s eyes.