I began my career as a prison officer at a high-security men’s welfare institution, working with prisoners serving sentences ranging from 25 years to natural life. From there, I was transferred to a busy London prison housing short-term prisoners, lifers and everything in between, before returning to the high-security mansion.
After ten years on the job, I’ve gotten used to the different ways people talk about prisons and the people inside. Holiday camps one day, hell the next.
But the biggest expression of hatred is “behind bars”. It brings with it connotations of violent institutions, punitive regimes, and emotionless, monotonous staff. This is an illusion. I’ve been reading it a lot lately, though.
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This was evident in the various political responses to last week’s justice and home affairs committee report, Reducing Crime: Better Community Sentences. The report acknowledges the critical situation in prisons in England and Wales and calls for more collective sentencing that can provide both punishment and rehabilitation. Prison sentences of under one year will be abolished for most offenses in England and Wales, mainly affecting cases of shoplifting, common assault or battery and assaults on emergency workers. Mentoring, community involvement, and individualized treatment are ways to hold a person accountable while addressing the root causes of crime and social vulnerability. The report also praises the remarkable work of third sector organizations already providing these services to women and young offenders, where recidivism rates have been reduced.
The report is bold, courageous and timely. Political discourse on this issue is everything it is not. We regularly hear calls to “make penalties tougher,” “put hardened criminals behind bars,” or “toughen the law to deal with these career criminals.” Empty statements that have nothing to do with the system in which I worked for a long time.
In prison. Which bars? There are no bars left. Our prisons are 99 percent full. We’re talking about building “pop-up” cells on training grounds or sending people abroad to serve their sentences. There’s no room at the inn here. While the “reducing crime” report highlights the potential of community sentences as an untapped resource, it does not ignore a disturbing reality; We must seek effective and meaningful alternatives to custody because custody is no longer an option.
As for the oft-cited “hardened criminals,” I have met many. None of them were thieves. I’d like to tell you about some of the thieves I’ve met during my ten years as a prison officer. The prisoner who asked for extra slices of bread at every meal. “Hello Miss, more bread please Miss? Is there a spare, Miss?” There was no spare bread.
Or the prisoner from reception who had to have his socks cut off because he had been wearing the same dirty pair for so long. Or the endless stream of men I’ve known over the years who come in for petty theft, men with deadpan expressions and wide pupils, drunk on spice, crack, heroin, or anything else they can get their hands on. People whose addictions are getting worse inside because we don’t have much bread, but this place is full of drugs. Or the prisoner who, upon his release, one of my colleagues noticed stealing apples from the Greenwich market. When he saw her, he said, “I’m sorry, ma’am,” put the apples back and ran away. This is Dickensian.
It seemed as if there wasn’t enough bread in the world to satisfy that prisoner. Not because he has a congenital pathology like stealing carbohydrates, but because he is poor. He was poor, malnourished, smelly and dirty. And it was a sewer. Exhaustion of resources, staff, funding and all of that. Because what is the prison supposed to do for him?
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He doesn’t need time “behind bars”; He needs a job, a decent home, and for God’s sake, some more bread. And he represents the majority, not the “hardened criminal thieves” who have to “pay for their crimes” that I read about. They can’t even pay for an apple, they don’t care about anything else. Prisons do not punish. They don’t rehabilitate either. What they contain.
If you think the prison system is full of organized criminals and men with a reputation for extreme violence, please let me dispel that illusion for you. And for those who meet these criteria, rather than spending their time and skills enforcing this behavior, prison officers are too busy trying to find toilet rolls, sheets, or even a spare cell. And more bread. And if you think that prison is a place where thieves, once inside, will decide never to steal again, I can dispel that illusion, too.
I’m starting to think that the real prison is politics itself. Where people inside are limited to just opposing each other rather than thinking about what actually works. Instead of creative thinking, there is constant backbiting. Instead of progress there is endless back and forth. He’s actually behind bars.
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Alex South was a corrections officer who worked in men’s prisons across the country for 10 years and is the author of Behind These Doors (Hodder & Stoughton).