Inside HMP Berwyn
Acabatha Christie
Prior to coming to prison, I hadn't paid a huge amount of attention to the struggles and lives of those kept inside them. I was broadly against prison in a vague way: I understood that it didn't reduce "crime" and that the law was both unevenly created and applied to those funnelled into informal economies. Despite these beliefs, I still participated in the reproduction of the prison's desired effects, which is to disappear the so-called undesirable. I didn't write to prisoners. Nor did I invoke the presence of their absence, as so many effective organisers battling the carceral system do when demanding we know the names and faces of the disappeared. To cut myself and others some slack, this is precisely because the prison has been designed to ensure a general complicity even among the ideologically opposed to the erasure of large swathes of people from public life.
The purposeful architecture of separation ensures this. It is the imposing physical design of mesh fences, iron doors and barbed wire. It's a geography of dispersal, placing mostly vulnerable people far from their communities. It is also the invocation of an ideological distance, in which the nebulous, sticky, shifting proportions of the "criminal" label render all those that fall under its purview non-persons, no longer eligible for already-scarce forms of political representation or care. Just as we co-sign this disappearing act, so do we yearn to know all about the prison culture which, like prison hooch, has fermented in the warm and dark spaces kept out of the reach and eye of authorities.
This desire to make legible those whose lives have been made illegible is congealed in commodities, be they Netflix documentaries, podcasts or coffee table books. With few exceptions*, these cultural objects never meaningfully depict the variegated experiences, habits, rules, conflicts and social organisations of people locked up in the U.K. My own limitations withstanding, I've hoped to document some of these mores gleaned from my experiences and others as a means of chipping away at this collective blank and scratch that societal itch.
A lot of imprisoned people I've met reflect the opinion of the rags - prison is a doddle. In my opinion, this is machismo-as-coping-strategy because embedded within prisoners' etiquette is the admission that it isn't. Prison etiquette isn't a dogma but rather a helpful guideline to alleviate the burden of our sentences for one another. For instance, the age-old adage that you don't ask people what they are in for generally holds true for ice-breaker chit-chat. If you are leaving soon or only serving a short sentence, you should probably avoid boasting about it. I still wince thinking of the hours spent in a class with two obnoxious brothers, loudly bemoaning their three month sentence. They found it difficult, but it was a glitch in the normal ordering of things and they would certainly not be back, unlike the riff raff. They had committed an ultimate faux-pas in a room full of people serving sentences between three to thirteen years, many of whom had been locked in to the institution's revolving doors since a young age.
One person in this class was Pete*, an "IPP". This means he is serving an Imprisonment for Public Protection. The sentence to which the tag owes its namesake was introduced in 2005. IPPs serve a minimum tariff, but their release is dependent on review by Parole Board. Many of the conditions for release are vague or difficult to obtain - in Pete's case, it was the completion of a course that had been oversubscribed and unavailable, which meant that he had spent three years incarcerated on a waiting list. Although only sentenced to serve a three year tariff, he had ended up doing around thirteen years in total. While the IPP sentence was abolished in 2013, 3,000 people are still serving these potentially indeterminate sentences across the country, with recently sacked Justice Secretary Dominic Raab dismissing calls to re-evaluate all IPP prisoners as recommended by the Justice Select Committee (JSC) in February of this year. Enduring such fates requires a prisoner culture of thought and care, avoiding questions about people's crimes and their sentences as a way of ensuring that they aren't constantly reminded of both potentially troubling pasts on the out and futures spent in here.
There are also guidelines on how you can best minimise your own sentence, all anchored around the imperative that you "live your prison". Time is relative, and nowhere does that truth feel more painfully evident than here. To avoid the full weight of a year experienced in seconds requires getting stuck in. Pursue the compelling thriller of the missing laundry tablets with dogged curiosity. Study every contour of your cellmate's long-distance relationship. Play Connect 4 on the wing like you've bet your week's canteen order on it. Find hobbies. A non-exhaustive list of prison favourites include decorating the pad, cooking with the kettle, working out, watching TV or films off a "stick" (USBs full of porn, music and movies smuggled in), making and drinking hooch, getting a job, doing a course, playing football with bundled-socks, recreating Blackpool Tower with matchsticks and, of course, gossiping. Gossip in prison is as water is to a fish; more than an activity it is the very fabric of social existence and therefore unavoidable.
Reading books and magazines is of limited popularity inside as over half the prison population is functionally illiterate. Despite this, most important health related communiques from staff are only delivered in writing, so should you belong to the 56 percent of non-readers in here, you are likely going to miss the important information on particularly strong and dangerous batches of sp1ce circulating the wing or explosions of Hepatitis C. Added to this is a stigma, so prisoners who can't read might be embarrassed to ask another inmate or member of staff to help them. An inmate who has spent several months on the wing only recently asked if I could do his canteen order for him because he wasn't able to do it himself. This meant that he had opted for the automatically allocated food options, all of them terrible, so as to avoid a potentially humiliating admission.
Getting a job is a good way of escaping the tyranny of bang-up (being locked in your cell). For many, their formal employment symbiotically bolsters their informal employment. In 1991, the Listeners scheme was launched in response to a young man's suicide at HMP Swansea. The programme trains inmates (briefly) to become Listeners, who are sent out to provide an ear to the trials and tribulations of other incarcerated people struggling with their mental health. Many of the Listeners I have met are well-intentioned and do provide a necessary safety valve for people at the end of their tether. Nevertheless, I remain suspicious of the programme as a neoliberal response to the structural roots of depression and anxiety, of which the prison plays a significant role. To me, the Listeners scheme is exemplar of the ways in which the various stated purposes of prison as outlined in the Sentencing Act are always denying each other's fruition. A space designed for punishment cannot simultaneously also be designed for rehabilitation: it cannot seek to harm and also undo past harms. On top of this, I have known Listeners to use their privileges to move across wings as a means of expanding the market with which they can ply their wares, so to speak. I do not say this clutching my pearls: prison wages are incredibly dire and have not matched the already inflated price of goods. People are going to flog drugs in prison, with or without a scheme that enables them.
Tattooing is one of many channels for the teeming creativity of prisoners. One of my first cellmates, Adam*, was "institutionalised" (his words). He had spent an inordinate amount of time inside, embodied in his status as a master hooch brewer and fluency in backslang, a pig Latin lobbed out the windows and through the cell vents between the truly initiated. Another tell-tale sign of institutionalisation is the "jail accent", devoid of any regional identity resulting from ping-ponging between prisons across the country. Adam was also a body artist and told me all about his trade. For the tattoo gun, he would use the motor of a CD player, the motion of which would stab a pen back and forth. The ink would not come from the pen, though. Instead, a BIC razor would be burnt underneath a mirror. The smoke accrued on the mirror would then be scraped off and mixed with baby oil. The pen would then be dipped in this. The execution of the tattoo required caution and pre-planning. Adam's gnarly half-finished chest-crucifix was a testament to this, interrupted by screws bursting through the door alerted by the loud noise of the motor.
Of course, there are those that will completely ignore the sanity and money saving schemes developed over time by other prisoners. They would rather instead accept the sentence as outlined by the police and courts simply as a duration of time spent within a complex of buildings. These prisoners are often "D-Cat Chasers", spending their time counting the days of a years-long sentence and endlessly gabbing on about their potential transfer to prisons with open conditions. A conversation with one might go something like this:
"So technically - technically - I've got two years. But if you think about it, I'm half-way through this month, so we'll round up and say I've done it. And then I can go D-cat in 8 months, so that's not even really prison. Basically, I've served my time."
In this way, the cumbersome doner of Time that spins in the centre of every prisoner's mind should be whittled down by the skilled technician with the hope that it becomes more manageable. Ironically, the effect is quite the opposite, and the sentence drags to a snail-pace because you are once again thinking about it constantly. I know this as someone who has attempted such mental gymnastics before.
Instead, if you want to do your sentence the right way, I would suggest you immerse yourself in prison culture, the creation of social contracts and activities forged by prisoners themselves in the spaces left unscathed by regulation or in direct defiance of them. It contains within it many hierarchies and values that I disagree with. Nevertheless, as with any culture, it weaves together otherwise-disparate individuals into a social totality and offers positive identities unrelated to the "criminal" label enforced by HMPPS and, maybe most importantly, it helps you kill your time.
*Carl Cattermole's 'Prison: A Survival Guide' and the podcast, The Secret Life of Prisons, are two exceptions to this rule.
thumnbail image: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/alphonse-bertillon-s-synoptic-table-of-physiognomic-traits-ca-1909/
