Those who are sent to B Block probably imagine that it will be a larger version of Room 101 (Google it) – a place where his or her deepest fears are made real. If they fear snakes, then they will be forced to live in a cell full of snakes, like in an Indiana Jones movie, but without the flaming torch. Sleeping with snakes: just the thought would drive them mad (though typing that now, it’s made me wonder what a movie with that title would look like).
If they fear flying, they’d be imprisoned in a flight simulator, only it would simulate the passenger’s experience, not the pilot’s. The prisoner would have to endure, for hours a day, the endless repetition of the emergency procedure, carried out by burly prison guards dressed as cabin crew. They would experience hours of the engines revving up ready to go: all the moments that render nervous passengers shaky with sickly anticipation. And then every day, the airplane would simulate a six-hour flight: like flying to New York from London every single day, but without the joys of New York at the end of the trip. And, sad to say it now, but the flight does actually go down in the Atlantic on its 623rd voyage. The airplane hits the water after a horrifying 35-minute battle to save everyone, despite two burning engines and losing the tail.
Others are most scared of finding themselves naked in a room of matronly but full-bodied beautiful Russian women without any hope of escape. Or so they said anyway.
But B Block isn’t like that at all. On the face of it, it’s not a scary place. On the contrary, it looks like a very safe place to live. Everything seems very orderly. The prisoners are well behaved and usually quiet, keeping themselves to themselves. The guards look cautious and uptight, but that’s how guards should look, shouldn’t they? They permanently wear helmets, and always have their guns within reach. But it doesn’t seem like an unpleasant place to see out your sentence. There’s no screaming, at least.
The walls, like everything else on B Block, are neat and well scrubbed. No one would dare graffiti anything here. Instead, the walls have their own (official) writing:
68 percent of prisoners die before they’re released.
Prison food likely cause of high incidence of bowel cancer in prisoners.
454 prisoners injured in showers in 2012.
Traumatized guard loses it and pulverizes prisoner.
The many walls are covered in scary facts about daily life in prison. Not about disasters in far-off places, but the dangers that lurk everywhere – even dangers that can’t be seen.
Superbugs out of control in prisons.
Even the dangers that you’d never usually think about.
Sleeping too much can lead to respiratory problems.
And dangers that simply confuse you.
Sleeping too little can lead to heart problems.
So, how much SHOULD I sleep? And that’s one of the questions the prisoners endlessly debate – especially, late at night. It’s a question that keeps them awake, thus directing them more at risk from heart disease than respiratory problems. Is eight hours too much or too little? What are the facts? Ah, but scientists disagree on the facts. In fact, one historian has just declared that, until 300 years ago, we all used to sleep in two parts: we’d go to bed and sleep for three to four hours, then get up for an hour, have a meal, or read a book, or visit friends, then go back to bed for another three to four hours. Perhaps we should try that?
Living on B Block is like living in a world where there is nothing else to read but the Daily Mail1. In fact, the Daily Mail is the prisoners’ newspaper of choice: it seems like the best place to get up-to-date information on all things to be scared of and all the terrible things that are happening in the world. And if there’s one thing that can reassure a prisoner living in fear of terrible things happening, it’s the knowledge that some REALLY terrible things are happening elsewhere in the world.
Not that anything can alleviate their suffering. They worry from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep. And then suffer restless nights because their worries have penetrated their unconscious and take elaborate, dramatized manifestations in the form of end-of-the-world-scary nightmares. The prisoners talk endlessly about their fears: about their health, their safety in such a dangerous place, about the terrible things lying in wait in the canteen or the bathroom block or the exercise yard. They’re constantly torn as to whether to do something that might seem dangerous:
Injuries involving weights up 33 percent.
Or whether not doing it is more dangerous:
Muscle waste in prisoners causes early-onset arthritis.
Their fears usually render them passive, tight, and suspicious. Even though the crime levels on B Block are remarkably low (though the writing on the walls would never say: IT’S ACTUALLY VERY SAFE HERE, because it wouldn’t make a good headline), and the prisoners talk a lot with each other (and scared people talk an awful lot), but they always think the worst about what someone else could do to them or say about them. So no real friendships are developed; no confidences are exchanged. It’s better to stay on a safe subject:
Danger, risk, and threat.
And it seems funny that, in their few quiet, solitary moments, the prisoners choose to read newspapers, watch TV news shows, or surf the net for more scare stories. It’s almost as if they LIKE this fear stuff. And that’s the sad fact. As B Block demonstrates, when people live in an environment of fear, they somehow start to crave it, to like it even. They want to know how much worse it could get. They want to know about the fine details of the dangers lurking everywhere around them.
On B Block, fear is the drug. And it’s freely available. All the prisoners are addicted. And no one has even thought of the long-term effects of this form of drug abuse. No one has even considered that the biggest thing to fear could be… fear itself.
If you prefer, you can go straight to Breaking Through the Wall of the Story.
1 British newspaper renowned for its scaremongering headline stories – read and duly absorbed by around two million people in the UK each day.