The thrum of her printer is almost keeping time with the aching pulse inside her head. Manon is cross-legged on the floor in pyjamas and thick socks, a blanket around her shoulders. Her back is aching, her knees stiff. The room is crepuscular but for the light from an Anglepoise which she has dragged onto the floor; it is interrogating, with its brash light, the sheaves of paper which surround her.
Paper, upon paper, upon paper, and as the printer spews out more, they flutter down, creating more chaos. Can’t get the AV list off of this, Wilco Bennett’s email said, so I’m just attaching his entire IIS file – all fifteen years of it. Enjoy!
The Inmate Information System contained everything about the life of a prisoner: personal details, offence, sentence, possibility of parole, relationships, movements (from that spur on that wing to another), case note information, risk assessments, courses taken, activities, paid and unpaid work, breaches of discipline, offender rehabilitation programmes.
Manon crawls across the white sea, leaving her blanket like a worm cast in sand, to where her phone has vibrated.
She’s reminded to take more Nurofen, alternating them two-hourly with paracetamol, though the dull ache remains like a background noise. She pads to the kitchen where the chill curls itself about her neck and ankles. And as she tips her head back, swallowing, she wonders what she hopes she’ll find delving into Tony Wright’s life inside and – also printing out in reams – the 200-page Ministry of Justice report compiled by the CIC with Edith Hind’s assistance. ‘Staff–prisoner relations in Whitemoor prison’ – a vivid portrait of prison life.
The nice doctor discharged her from Addenbrooke’s last night and Harriet has forbidden her from coming into the office. ‘Don’t be a nutter. Stay home. Recuperate. I don’t want to see you in before Tuesday at the earliest,’ she said.
Back in her twilit lounge, the pages crinkle under her feet. She crosses one foot over the other and lowers to the floor, pulling the blanket around her shoulders and gathering new sheaves to read.
The first three years of a long sentence are the worst, she has learned. New inmates are put on the induction spur on C-wing and are most prone to existential crises; likely to self-harm. Here are men facing fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years in prison without hope of release. They are desperate for meaning, beset by loss. Tony Wright, then in his early forties, was no exception. He cut his arms with razor blades when he could get hold of them, and blades appear to feature widely in Whitemoor.
She shuffles the papers, then glances at her watch. Four p.m. She began reading at ten this morning, but she must have dozed at intervals right here on the floor, the blanket like a cocoon.
Page 20 of Wright’s file: Emotional outbursts. No reduction in Cat A status. For years he seemed to suffer the most stringent form of incarceration, every emotion deemed ‘risk’. Stints in segregation. One suicide attempt. In conversation with his personal officer following this attempt, Tony Wright said, ‘I’m spam. I’m meat in a tin.’
Don’t laugh, don’t look happy, he wrote in a letter home that was confiscated and kept on file, cos someone is looking at you on a monitor, deciding you’re not suffering enough, and that someone is deciding your sentence review.
Inmate moved to different cell every 28 days, a note on Wright’s file states, including strip searches and ‘cell turns’, to prevent the formation of gang-style relationships. Or any relationships, Manon thinks.
Paracetamol. Cups of tea. At one point she takes a bath. Perhaps she dozes off once or twice. But she comes back to the floor, the puzzle tessellating in white across her carpet.
The CIC report describes a brutalising regime in Whitemoor towards the back end of Wright’s sentence. Staff were distant, distrustful; violence endemic. Where previously high security prisons used to function on a known code – a gentlemanly agreement between the old lags and the screws – the modern, multicultural population of Whitemoor was viewed with intense suspicion by its staff. Prison officers were frightened by the growing Muslim population; while outside, in the run-up to a general election, the press and public were growing less liberal by the day. Prison should be for punishment, not rehabilitation. Offenders, particularly those convicted under the terrorism act, were having an easy ride. In response to these hard-line views, the Home Secretary cancelled rafts of arts and education courses inside Whitemoor.
Manon looks up. The printer is growling, turning over against itself. A red light flashes. Paper jam.
She gets up, opens the printer’s various drawers and flaps, pulls out an inky drum, fingers blackened, then can’t jimmy it back in again. She cannot locate the jammed paper. She slaps the flaps shut again, jabs at the button angrily, turns it off, waits, then on again. She roars in frustration when she sees the red light resume its flashing and thinks she might hurl it against the wall. Then she cries. Alan could’ve fixed it. Alan probably has a laser jet, which never jams because he checked its reviews on Which? And he probably keeps spare cartridges in a drawer. No one can help her with the printer jam. She is alone. And all this time they have misunderstood Tony Wright.
Back sitting cross-legged on the floor, she picks up another page of Wright’s IIS report. Tony Wright moved to B-wing, to the spur for prisoners on the enhanced level of the incentives and earned privileges scheme. Things seem to be improving for him. In 2005 he gets a job in the library. A note says he keeps his head down – a ‘loner’. Prisoner 518 focused on serving his sentence and leaving prison at the earliest opportunity. Wright has learned how to make life better for himself, plus he is nearing the end of his sentence, but in the truly repressive conditions of Whitemoor, he is living in a febrile atmosphere. In another confiscated letter, he writes: I keep my head down. I don’t talk to nobody. My personality’s out there somewhere, waiting for me to grasp it when I’m out.
On the same page is a note: Prisoner reading Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Material confiscated: violent themes.
Manon wipes the tears from her cheeks.
Along came Edith Hind: listening to him, trying to understand him. Asking how his day was, how his life was, what his plans might be, and whether she could help him. She must’ve been the first person to treat him like a human being in fifteen years. Even the words, ‘Hello, Tony, how are you?’ must’ve been like a long drink to a man dying of thirst.
She looks at her watch. It is 2 a.m. She pulls the blanket more closely about her shoulders, crawls to the last pages spewed by her now-paralysed printer. Page 258 of Tony Wright’s IIS file. Inmate returned to C-wing, Cat A status.
Manon is frowning. What has happened to cause a set-back like this?
Prisoner 518 involved in breach of prison discipline during altercation with prisoner 678 in the gym. Sentence review frozen. In light of prisoner 518’s involvement in this violent episode, consideration of parole denied until further risk assessment has been carried out.
Who was prisoner 678? Manon pushes at the papers around her on the floor. They slide over each other like water. She leafs, faster and faster, through the white sea, looking for an explanation for this about-turn after a decade of model behaviour. Then she finds it. IIS file page 259: Prisoner 518 statement, transcribed verbatim from a recording of an interview with prison staff, investigating the gym incident, 21 January 2009.
I was workin’ out in the gym by myself, runnin’ on the treadmill, when Prisoner 678 came and began working the weights next tae me. Dumb bells an’ that. We were nice an’ quiet, the two of us, no’ talkin’. I seen him about but he wisnae ma pal or nothin’. Anyways, a group of prisoners walked into the gym, white guys wi’ tatts. Hated the Brotherhood, these guys. Thought the Muslims had too much power. They surrounded the lad next tae me. I’d like tae use his name, no’ his number, if ye dinnae mind, because he’s a human bein’, ye ken?
So this chap, Khalil – Abdul, I think his first name is – he’s carrying on nice an’ quiet, lifting his weights, but ye could cut the tension w’ a knife. He an’ I both knew those guys had come in here fer violence, a ‘lesson’ it’s called in here, ’cos there’s no cameras in the gym. All the cuttin’ and punchin’ in Whitemoor happens in the gym.
‘Brother Khalil,’ one of ’em said to him. Another of them pulled a blade. They held his arms behind his back and cut his throat. Then they walked out.
I was still runnin’ on the treadmill – can ye believe that? – an’ ma first thought was: There’ll be a lock-down now on the wing. Ah need te get ma stuff ’cos they’ll be turnin’ all the cells after this. That’s what this place turned me into. That’s how much o’ my humanity’s been sucked from me in here. An’ maybe there’s folk’d say I didnae have any humanity to start with, but I had some. Anyways, I remembered maself at that moment, an’ I raised the alarm, an’ I tried to stop him bleeding to death until the medic got tae us. He’s a person. An’ I’m a person, ye ken?
Prisoner’s sentence review unfrozen and all privileges restored, says Wright’s file, in the light of this statement and supporting statement from Prisoner 678 (A-G Khalil).
Manon looks up, dazed. Tony Wright saved Abdul-Ghani Khalil’s life.