My Fellow Prisoners

‘The investigation will get things straight’

When I read articles, letters or blogs I am often amazed at people’s genuine belief in the integrity of the police and judiciary, and how their pronouncements and interviews are taken as a fairly reliable source of information.

I will admit, of course, that many representatives of these professions, in their personal lives, are entirely decent citizens who, like the rest of us, lie only occasionally – when they have to – and feel bad about doing so.

When they’re at work and part of ‘the system’, however, they lie virtually all the time, and as a rule tell the truth only to gain someone’s trust – which then enables them to lie more successfully afterwards. They lie to individuals, to the court, to one another. These are the rules of a system which, if for this reason alone, needs to be dismantled. It just isn’t a place where honest people can function.

I happened to come across a rather interesting person in prison. A con-man, a member of one of the ‘law enforcement’ gangs. Led by a colonel serving as prosecutor, the gang comprised dozens of operatives, a customs officer, a few other people of official rank, a civilian intermediary (my new acquaintance) and a trader.

Its ‘business’ was of the standard kind: the customs officer would find out who had just received some merchandise at the warehouse, the prosecutor (as he then was) would initiate criminal proceedings, the operatives would ‘arrest’ the goods and pass them on to the trader who sold them at profit, whereas a notional cost was returned as ‘compensation for the loss’.

While all this was going on, the owners of the property would be rotting away in jail; afterwards they would either be released or given the full treatment, depending on how ‘perceptive’ they’d proved to be.

And so it continued until one fine day when this particular cabal happened to stumble across a bigger racket than their own.

While the prosecutor slunk off to Armenia, and the operatives were released on bail, the civilian members of the group ended up in pre-trial detention. It’s well known, after all, that ‘ravens don’t peck out other ravens’ eyes’.

Despite what had happened, my cellmate still retained a steadfast faith in the ‘law-enforcement agencies’. ‘The investigation will get things straight’ was his stock response to any flagrant abuse we might hear about from fellow inmates, or see on television.

At first this really got on everyone’s nerves. In prison there just isn’t anyone so naïve as to put their trust in ‘the investigation’. But then I found a useful outlet for my cellmate’s way of thinking. For example, when we watch a TV report on a police general’s luxury residence worth millions of dollars – gilded toilets, piles of jewellery, the works – I immediately ask: ‘How come nobody knew? He must have been paying off the top brass, surely? What’s the investigation going to say?’

‘The investigation will get things straight,’ is my cellmate’s inevitable response. ‘No doubt the money for the house was provided by the general’s children who earned it honestly working in a state company; criminal elements who’d had their wings clipped by the general must have set him up, and the most he’s guilty of is dereliction of duty.’

When I first heard this kind of reasoning, I assumed my cellmate was joking. But he was quite serious, and a couple of weeks later his version was confirmed by the official press secretary of the ‘respected’ Investigative Committee.

And so it went on. Whether it was the latest government bandit shown on TV or an article about a truly dreadful case like a drunk copper running over a woman and her child, my cellmate would declare that ‘the investigation will get things straight’; and he’d come up with some totally absurd version of events (along the lines of ‘they threw themselves under the wheels, and in any case he’d been dismissed from the force long before’). And soon enough this version would be officially confirmed. He got it right every single time.

But nothing lasts for ever. The time came for his verdict. None of us were surprised when the operatives got suspended sentences, the trader ten years, and my cellmate – fourteen.

The investigation had straightened things out all right…

But to say that to his face would have been cruel. Back in the cell, not a word was spoken…

After a couple of days the shock wore off and he sat down to lodge a cassation appeal, saying: ‘It’s okay, the investigation will get things straight.’

Soon after that he was transferred, but we heard on the prison grapevine that his sentence remained unchanged.

So when you’re next watching television and hear the words ‘criminal proceedings have been initiated’ or ‘the investigation has established’, before you allow yourself even for a second to believe what’s being said, just think: maybe the person who has written these words is a colleague of my cellmate, the con-man.

At any rate, in the regular announcements of the Investigative Committee’s press secretary, I hear his voice loud and clear.