Did Ram face brutal treatment by prison staff? Probably not! Prisons can be brutal places, and, it should be remembered, Ram murdered a stranger over a triviality in a quite brutal fashion. Although he was far from the worst of the worst, prison staff do not put up with any sort of nonsense, certainly not the kind dished out by him. Prisons are run on discipline, especially the prisons in which he would have been held for the bulk of his sentence. Not everyone who works in prisons is a prison officer; prisons employ civilians including medical staff and teachers. Female civilians also work in male prisons, so they require special protection. Corporal punishment was abolished in British prisons long before capital punishment, so when inmates break the rules, the sanctions that can be handed out to them are limited.
Such punishments include segregation, known as The Block, and loss of remission. If an inmate commits a very serious crime, he will be taken to an outside court.
The Block involves locking an inmate in a cell with little or nothing to do. This is a real punishment because the lack of human contact and most of all the associated boredom can and does drive people nuts.
Ram spent a lot of time down The Block; whose fault was that?
Re prison transfers, these are a regular feature, especially for prisoners serving very long sentences up to and including life. There is nothing sinister about this; for security reasons they are often unannounced and may take an inmate totally by surprise. Inmates can also request transfers, usually to make it easier for visitors.
Why was Ram transferred such an extraordinary number of times? This is what can and does happen to inmates who are extremely disruptive. Most of them get the message, not Ram. It should be noted that in December 1993, he was involved in a major disturbance at Whitemoor Prison which led to him being taken to an outside court.
As for the so-called racism of prison officers; at that time there were many non-white inmates in British prisons, Asians as well as blacks. Some were convicted of more serious crimes than Ram; for the most part, like white inmates, they accepted their fate and got on with life as well as they could. Those who complain usually have the same grievances as white inmates. In this connection, I am reminded of something the left wing journalist Sophie McBain once wrote. She said that not all women were affected equally by misogyny; in other words, some women are likeable, others are not. The same applies to people who complain incessantly about racism.