It’s no secret I’ve been in prison. A couple of prisons, actually. I talk about it all the time at events and in interviews. Never hide it. In fact, I like saying it because it pulls people up, makes them give me a second, untrustworthy glance. Sometimes they even check their wallets or their watches. Or flinch, wondering whether I’m going to attack them. Then I go on to explain I was there for a reason. You see, I used to be a Writer-in-Residence. They relax then, a little bit. Because even though I tell people I was on the outside going in and could leave at night, there’s a little bit of that word – prison – that powerful, stigmatic word that everyone has an opinion about, but most people don’t actually understand, that stays there until I speak further. And sometimes, unfortunately, afterwards.
Long story short, I answered an ad in the paper from the Writers in Prison Network and ended up in Huntercombe Young Offenders Institution for two and a half years. And I loved it. It may well have been the happiest job I’ve ever done, which sounds contradictory at least since I was behind bars doing it. I was working with kids up to eighteen. The place I was going into had just appointed the country’s first full time Arts Co-Ordinator, helping a group of inmates form themselves into a rap act – X-Konz – and perform at Capital Radio’s Party in the Park that summer. The Governor came to see me (unheard of in most prions, I later found out) and gave me a two-word brief: ‘Bring life’. I tried my damnedest.
Another Writer-in-Residence told me before I went in that the lives and backgrounds of the kids I would be working with were the stuff of nightmares. And straight away I found that to be true. I wrote a short story, Let’s Pretend, about a teenage rapist who’s in prison because his mother sold him to a paedophile ring and who, on being let out, can’t go to his terminally ill father and instead has to become a procurer of young boys for his tormentors or they’ll abuse his baby daughter. My then wife said it was the most depressing thing she had ever read. My boss called it a normal day at the office.
Some of the kids I worked with were unreachable, even at that young age. I can admit that. And it was sad. I still tried to work with them, though. Their futures weren’t bright because their pasts had been so damaging but they still needed help, coping strategies, even if I was just a guy trying to get them to write stories and maybe change the endings to the ones that had led them into prison. To get them to imagine, to dream. One of my class said that when he sat down to write a story, the walls just opened up and he was free.
It was a polarising environment. There were no ‘meh’ days. Because I was working in such close emotional proximity to these kids, (without, as Home Office rules stated, giving too much of myself away – try making that one work) getting them to open up, talk freely, relax and know that what they said or wrote in my writing room wouldn’t go back onto the wing with them and that if anyone tried to do that they wouldn’t be back again; it was demanding, full-on work. And sometimes things went brilliantly. Really brilliantly. I had the privilege of helping people to turn their lives around for the better, by using writing as a breakthrough instrument. I had great poets, rappers, story writers and magazine editors. Kids who found something they were good at and could be valued for. Who were made to feel worthwhile for the first time in their lives. Later, I had a group member decide to get help for his alcohol addiction because of realisations he’d come to through his writing. A father took me out to lunch to thank me for helping him to re-establish a relationship with his son because all he talked about in their visits was writing class. Or the one guy who said he was having so much fun he didn’t want to be released.
Like I said, great stuff. But, I always stressed, it wasn’t me, it was the process. And by that same definition, good days would be followed by bad days. A combination of factors, the process not working, the prison system being what it is, any number of things, I felt like there was nothing I could do. Days like that I went home and drank copiously.
After two and half years of this I moved to work in an adult prison. Not Blackmoor, I hasten to add, that place is entirely made up. And then after that I felt quite burned out. I like to believe – have to believe – that what I did helped though.
Unfortunately, since 2010 the prison budget has been slashed and my kind of work – along with anything broadly rehabilitative – was the first to go. Now our prisons are overcrowded, understaffed and we recently had a moron of a Justice Minister who banned prisoners from receiving books until he was challenged in court. A far cry from my experience. Then, I felt like I was trying to grasp something that was always almost out of reach but could be found. Sometimes I managed it, other times I wasn’t so lucky. I just hope there are still people within the prison environment doing that now.