Rehab Re-hope
A prisoner stands on one side of the law, and the free man stands on the other. But what really separates these two people, and how do we bridge the divide?
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"The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
Behind a scattering of modern outbuildings and extended wings, the redbrick towers of HMP Bristol, a Victorian prison founded in 1883, rise up to the sky. At the centre, it’s a surprisingly traditional building, windows crosshatched with bars and high walls lined with barbed wire. But beyond the old-fashioned exterior there is a progressive space for change – a workshop, about the size of a community hall, where inmates participate in a number of rehabilitative projects.
When we arrive, at the beginning of June, a group of prisoners in the far corner of the workshop are assembling remembrance poppies – an envied duty as these prisoners hold the forces in high regard – and in the central section, among cranks, tires and oily rags, another group are working for BikeBack – a bicycle recycling project set up by Bristol-based charity Life Cycle UK. The workshop leader, Dave Rudland, looks over the trainee mechanics as they strip down frames, clean parts and reassemble the bikes that will be sold at a market in the city at the end of the month. “I love doing this,” says John*, thirty weeks into a two-year sentence. “It gets so boring, being inside.”
Of the six hundred-plus prisoners held at HMP Bristol, many are on remand and will likely be moved on within a matter of weeks – a system-wide phenomenon referred to as “churn”, which sees prisoners transported, at random, between various prisons to deal with overcrowding and local, pre-trial incarceration. It makes it difficult for prisoners to form relationships with rehabilitators and lift themselves out of the repetitive cycle of crime. In fact, the stats say over fifty per cent of these prisoners will reoffend within a year of release.
But for inmates like John, who has spent four hours a day, five days a week at BikeBack, for the majority of his thirty weeks inside, it’s exactly these projects that offer a way out. “Prison gives you time to reflect,” he says. “Once I’m on road [free], I’m never coming back in here.” Another inmate, who was homeless and addicted to heroin at the time of his imprisonment, says he will use his newfound skills as a mechanic to approach bike shops and try to get a job. On the ‘horror’ of prison he says: “At least you’re safe in here, and you have somewhere to stay.”
Prisons are too soft, sceptics often exclaim. But Jacqui, 62, a volunteer at HMP Wandsworth disagrees. “Prison is not a holiday camp,” she says angrily. “It’s a holiday camp from hell. I mean Wandsworth prison was designed with one-man cells, and each cell now has two men. It is not a pleasant place. But the prisoners are very good as a whole, they’re very accepting. People say, ‘Oh, but they have televisions,’ but they have to work for those televisions, and they’re tiny. I personally would go insane if I shared a cell with someone who had the telly on loud when I was locked up seventeen hours a day… A lot of inmates are mentally unstable.” In fact, according to a recent Green Paper commissioned by Justice Secretary Ken Clarke called Breaking the Cycle, over seventy per cent of sentenced prisoners in the UK suffer from two or more mental health disorders, with 10 per cent of those suffering with psychotic illnesses.
Jacqui has volunteered at Fine Cell Work – a charity that teaches needlework to prisoners – for eight years and she has been amazed at the enthusiasm from prisoners, considering the effeminate nature of the craft. “In actual fact the men get a lot of credence from the other men because they get paid well [a third of the sale],” she says. “And they’re just so desperate for something to do. There’s an awful lot of sitting around doing nothing in prison, and wasted time isn’t good for anyone… Many prisoners get depressed and spend a staggering amount of time asleep, because it passes the time… I mean they’ve had very, very mixed up lives some of them. I used to run after school clubs and we sometimes felt we could see the kids who would end up in Wandsworth, aged seven, because it’s a vicious circle. They’re not getting support from home, perhaps. Some of them can’t get a job because they’ve got no skills. So you feel, well, if I’d started life like that, I could have ended up here, too.”
* Prisoners names have been changed out of respect
Check out the full feature in HUCK #027, out now.
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Rehab (text) by Shelley Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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