In English jails they’re called nonces, in Australia, rock spiders - but in Scotland it’s beast. Always beast.

A beast is a sex offender and sex offenders have to be separated for their own protection, because given half a chance the other prisoners - all those decent, right-thinking blokes who stole cars, broke into houses, peddled drugs and started fights - would pee in their tea, crap in their porridge and roast their meat and two veg with scalding dishwater. 

In every jail in every country the beasts, the blokes in the protection wing, are universally reviled and despised in a manner Jeremy Clarkson simply couldn’t envisage.

I was in there a writer-in-residence trying to work up a script, acting out sketches and scenes and - most of all - struggling to convince the young sex offenders on the protection wing to take it halfway seriously and stop talking about sex for longer than 30 seconds. Noble intentions,  of which one, at least, proved to be spectacularly unsuccessful.

So we get jokes, stories, anecdotes, memories, dreams, longings.  Boasts, inventions, flights of fancy and fantasies. Mostly, fantasies. Outlandish, bizarre, highly unlikely fantasies, fairly normal fun-of-the-mill ones, all sorts of vague, uninformed and frankly peculiar musings on the singular factor which influences the emergent male. 

Sex. In all its many, varied and yet, at the same time, remarkably similar forms. I’m not saying I was the expert. Not at all.  But I knew more about it than them.

But then, that’s hardly surprising, they were beasts after all - although the thing was, although some of them were in there for sex-related offences, not every beast was, in fact, truly bestial. 

Remember, this was the protection wing of the Prison, and there are lots of reasons why someone would need to be protected in jail. Some of them because of the nature of their offence sure, because the other prisoners would deliver self-righteous retribution, but some - actually quite a few - were there for other reasons. Some of them because of their assessed vulnerability, or state of mind, their susceptibility to corruption and/or bullying.  

And some of them were there - get this - because of their accents or nationality. A couple of English boys had been placed on the protection wing based purely on the assumption they’d get their heads kicked in for being from  Yorkshire. 

And, just before you think that Scotland is a place simmering with anti-English racism (even though, let’s face it, it is), one guy was there because he came from Benbecula, which in case you don’t know, is actually in Scotland. He was different.  And you get nothing in this game for being different.

The wing boasted a single ping-pong table, a small flickering television and a pervading atmosphere of defeat, so someone decided there was an urgent requirement to allocate additional resources to the wing’s recreation programme. That’s where I came in. Take the ideas of this disparate group of bad boys - some badder than others as it turned out - and turn them into something significant, experiential and artistic. 

Or, at least relieve the boredom. And, hopefully, give these lads – and feel free to crucify me if you think I’m utterly misguided here - a much-needed cheer along the way.

There was Tony (not his real name), one of the singularly ugliest guys I think I’ve ever seen.  Known to the others as Merrick - after Joseph Merrick, of course – which might have been harsh on the Elephant Man. 

There was Graeme who was sullen, moody, aggressive and whiny - amongst his better points.  The only thing he was any good at – and he was good it - was rolling bubbles made of spit around his tongue and blowing them in the air. He used to do this all day long and it really got on everybody’s nerves, but he wouldn’t stop since it was his thing. Everybody has a thing, something they’re good at it, something that makes them proud to have such a talent. Graeme’s was blowing bubbles.

Other members of The Company were Davy, who focused and bright most of the time, but was possessed of a hair-trigger temper when provoked, which he could be by more or less anything, depending on his moods and medication. 

then there was Teddy, one of those obviously gay young blokes whose soft effeminate tendencies are mixed in with a hard-as-nails, seen-it-all-done-it-all toughness acquired the hard way. Something about Teddy never made you see him in any way as a victim; he used to be a rent boy but the way he told it, selling sex is actually all about free enterprise and self-determination rather than oppression and exploitation. 

Chunk, an over-sized ginger haired boy of low intelligence had been involved in the drugs scene and  said he was inside for "chibbing c****s". (He wasn’t. He’d been jailed for stealing ladies underwear from a washing line.)

The Hebridean, whose crime appeared to be comparatively trivial - a few beer casks stolen from outside a local pub which led to him having two years, worked up him by a Sheriff who turned out to be a golfing mate of the landlord. Or so he said.

Of the others there was Sam, a Glasgow teenager with five kids, the oldest of which was an unlikely but apparently indisputable seven-year-old, and Paulo, a cardboard gangster rapist and Brian, a beanpole Edinburgh schoolboy who’d strangled a classmate in a brawl over a girl. 

Criminals. Ratbags. Scum of the earth. Beasts. Each and every one – if only in some cases by association. Who’d been unlucky. Were screwed-up. Who, in lots of cases, never had much of a chance in the first place but had then compounded it by being too stupid, too pissed-up, too sick or way too horny to even begin to think straight. Beasts.

Revilement and disgust doesn’t really help anyone, you know. Self-righteous ire and indignation doesn’t make the streets any safer. Condemnation is worthless, on its own. I’m not sure I know what the answer is, but I do know it isn’t that.