Monday 27 August 2018

Who Am I?

I am many people

I am the small baby born to my genetic parents, the product of those genes with all that it entails:the mental health issues, medical complaints, historic background. 

I am the young child who is affected by all the attachment issues of being born to those parents and then neglected through infant-hood. 

I am also the frightened and confused child who went through the care system, who was sexually abused in a children's home, physically and mentally abused by relatives, and then palmed off into the 1970's care system

I then become the intelligent (off the top of the scale) child who is forced to become the product of an upper middle class, educated foster family. The trophy child. Well spoken, with a good education; and no heed paid to being emotionally screwed up. Emotional health is not a consideration in this family.

Sent back to the birth mother aged 13 and I become, again, an abused child. Verbally, emotionally and phsyically. 

Living alone from sixteen I re-invent myself again as yet another person. Lonely, needy, sexually provocative, desperate to be wanted and loved. 

Then I became a mother. My biggest challenge and my greatest gift. 

But with no family background, no traditions or experiences to call on, I became an improvisor. 

Who am I now? I am the product of all those people. The scared, abused, neglected child. The lonely, needy, vulnerable young adult. The young inexperienced parent who is winging it. 

My mind whirrs constantly. I don't know who I am. I am such a mixture of different backgrounds, different experiences. I have no security and no grounding. I have nobody to ask. Nobody with memories of me to call on. 

I cry.

Late at night, on my own, I cry. 

I am a strong person, but I need to know who I am. I crave security. I crave the feeling of belonging. I walk past houses at night, I look into their front windows and I just want to be part of that family. 

Am I working class or middle class?
Am I educated or uneducated?
Am I a professional?
Am I nothing?

I have invented myself. But that doesn't stop the pain
I have amazing children who are my world. But that doesn't stop the pain.
I have a wife. But that doesn't stop the pain
I have amazing intelligence and talent. But that doesn't stop the pain. 

It eats away every day.
Every day.
Every single day.
Every hour of every day.
Every minute of every hour. 

When an abused and neglected child is taken into care, professionals need to take their family background and upbringing on board. Although it seems idylic to foster children into lovely middle class families, this then leads to adults who don't know where they belong. I don't want to be the product of my birth parents..... but I am.

At 48 years old I don't know where I come from. I have no parents, no grandparents, no aunts or uncles. I have nobody to share my children with. Nobody to offer support. 

I am sad. 







Thursday 18 January 2018

Chaos & Crisis, Learning from Lived Experiences

This is the speech I gave at Chaos and Crisis - Can Prison Be Better than This?, at the University of Warwick on January 17th 2018.


Interesting facts about me: 
I was a scholar at St. Paul's Girls School in London (consistently top of the league tables), I was a musical prodigy, my maths skills at 6 were better than that of the average adult and my IQ is 20 points above that needed to join MENSA.
I grew up in care, I was physically emotionally and sexually abused, I have 8 children (all my own and no twins!) the oldest of which has a first class degree from this very university; and I have spent two years in prison. Living.... not working (as is often assumed!) I was sentenced, in 2013, to four years in prison for a fraud I did not commit.

I want to talk about the reality of being in prison, at the present time, specifically with respect to female offenders and about the diversity within jail that is not addressed or recognised.

The perception from the general public is that the prison population is made up from lower or working class, probably uneducated, repeat offenders who are mostly in addiction. People with no boundaries, who consciously choose to commit crime. I have seen this repeated across Twitter in the last few days. One particular thread from a persistent and judgemental tweeter, following an ex-prisoners blog and interview, sadly showing the ignorance that often surrounds how and why crimes are committed.

I am a well-educated, usually well spoken, intelligent, articulate professional person, and I met many ladies like myself in my gated retreats. I spent time in three of these across the south of England. All of us had similarities in both our sentencing and our judges’ attitudes; we were condemned for being intelligent and it was assumed that we should "know better". Currently, high profile cases such as the student doctor at Oxford would appear to show a leniency in sentencing intelligent or professional defendants. However, I personally found the opposite to be true, definitely in my case, and also in the cases of many professional and educated women I met in prison. And referring to Jon Collins’ previous talk today about pre-sentence reports, my judge just didn't allow them for me. The assumption was that I had no needs or issues that should be considered when sentencing, just intelligence!!

Yet, once sentenced to prison you enter a one size fits all environment. Being an intelligent and capable prisoner is seen as a negative. It is assumed that you will be manipulative. Knowing the rules and PSis makes you a "difficult" inmate.You are always under suspicion. Especially if, like me, you start to send the SOs' notices back with the spelling and grammatical errors ringed in red pen!!

I knew nothing about prison before I went. I'd never met anyone who had been to prison, I only knew what I had read about in books and newspapers. I now have lived experience, from my four years on bail, two years in prison and two years on licence in the community. And boy does it differ from what I read about!

This lived experience is absolutely vital when learning about diversity and difference within the CJS. To most, a middle aged, white, professional woman wouldn't really fit into an image of a diverse person. However, in jail, I was definitely different, and diverse! In actuality we were all diverse, but the system uses the commonality of being convicted, when it chooses how to judge and treat its prisoners.

Prison is about addressing offending behaviour and being rehabilitated. To do this you are sent on courses. (Otherwise known as tick boxes within the prison community). Now, I like to educate myself, I enjoy learning and growing, and I really love to self analyse, but a Level 1 course in Money Management isn't really going to do it for me! I do appreciate that some people will need this. And it is vital that courses are available at this level. But what is also vital is that courses are differentiated for ALL abilities and needs. I came home with a folder filled with level 1 and 2 certificates. Totally useless to me, but I ticked the boxes. It was a boring, time wasting and meaningless waste of tax payers money. And this is the same for most inmates, as we are all considered to be the same. We are just criminals. Boredom, due to a lack of appropriate education, work and opportunity, was my biggest problem, and if I was a person prone to be badly behaved, well I definitely would have been! There are too many hours of wasted time spent in jail, just sitting on a bed drinking coffee and watching tv.

One of the things that really hit me was the unfairness of the one size philosophy. When I first arrived at Bronzefield, I landed a job in Induction. My own experiences, within my family and youth work, of autism and mental health issues, meant I was seeing many prisoners coming through the door who very obviously to me fitted into one of these groups. I would despair at the way anxious and vulnerable ladies were firstly left in the health care wing (one flew over the cuckoos nest comes to mind) and then dumped on a main wing to be cared for by other prisoners. Now admittedly some of the ladies I met were probably swinging the lead, acting out in some way, but even that is a mental health issue and needs treating as such. Don’t forget that hypochondria is an illness. Punishments were doled out with no respect for the diverse nature of personalities and emotional states, with behaviours becoming more and more erratic and punishments becoming more and more severe. I was called upon by the head of education to pick out, at induction, those who I believed to be on the spectrum and that department, at least when I was there, seemed to want to try to give appropriate input. I didn't see this care, though,in the two HMP jails I subsequently moved to.

I believe that many of the ladies I met did not need to be in jail at all. Very few were a risk to the general public. Many had issues such as domestic abuse, addiction, a deprived or difficult childhood, culture or language difficulties and gender or sexuality confusion. Putting these vulnerable and diverse people into a rigid, unempathetic environment and expecting change, rehabilitation and achievement is idiotic.

To move forward and change the system, to end the chaos, and to achieve a reduction in crime and successful rehabilitation, we need people like us. People who can see it from the inside, who have felt and lived it. We are the experts, not the MPs, not the VIPs who are named on reform charity websites, not even the Prison Officers and Governors, although some of them really are trying to enact change.

Women with the lived experience of the criminal justice system know where it's going wrong. Put us in places where we can make it change. Employ us, because we are good, and we know what we are doing. Let us in.

Wednesday 3 January 2018

You Never Get Over It

On Monday my social media threw two things at me, both of which affected me on a personal level. 

Firstly I was hit with the news that another performing arts mum had passed away, in her 50s and far too early. She leaves two children and a husband, and an extended family of performing children from her many years as head of a dance school. Cancer is a hateful, indiscriminatory disease, and it stole the life of someone who did so much good in this world, enabling young people to achieve and gain skills and  confidence. RIP Liz, you were an amazing person and will aways be remembered. You made your mark on this world and left behind many who love you dearly. 

Secondly, I was bombarded with newspaper articles about a missing girl. The headlines screamed about the need to find this young lady who "spent five years in prison for murdering her friend's boyfriend". Yet again, the emphasis from the media was on the criminal connection rather than the vulnerability of the missing person. This particular girl, I will call her X, is someone I knew very well in my time in the gated retreats. X was convicted of murder in 2010 and sentenced to life with a minimum of nine years to serve. It's a complex case. After all, she did kill someone. But is that murder? How do we determine the difference between murder, manslaughter, self defence, accident, joint enterprise......

This case focuses on domestic violence and self defence. It also encapsulates the incredible difficulties of having mental health issues and how this effects the way you deal with difficult situations. X was a 17 year old, incredibly naive, child, with very obvious ADHD and personality issues, which were all later diagnosed in jail. When I knew her she was 23 and 24, but appeared to me to still act and think like a young teenager. A prolific self-harmer, she attempted suicide on numerous occasions. Yet, whenever I saw her she would sing like a small child and sit cross legged on the tables in the library, chatting away about a cartoon film or a children's comic book. 

When I read about her disappearance I used social media to contact her. And thankfully it paid off. We have chatted on and off since she was found. I quickly learnt why the media was used so quickly after her disappearance. After all, an adult who runs away, or fails to return home, isn't usually considered missing for at least 24 hours, if not longer. But in this case the missing person had escaped from being a psychiatric in-patient (something not mentioned in the papers), which didn't surprise me at all. Five years in jail would leave anyone needing psychiatric support, even though the support you are "supposed" to get in jail and afterwards on licence should negate this. This support is non-existent in today's CJS and HMP climate.

I am sure the Daily Mail readers of this world would assume that a release from prison, after a wrongful conviction, would enable the person to be happy, thankful and to simply continue on with their previous life. 
WRONG!!!!!!

Prison is about addressing offending behaviours. Prison is for punishment, public protection and rehabilitation. Those who have a wrongful conviction really struggle. As I have mentioned before, maintaining innocence is very hard work and very painful in jail. How can you take part in an offending behaviour course if you don't have any offending behaviour? X was very aware that she had killed a man. She was distraught that she had killed a man. But that act happened when she was protecting herself and a friend from violence. It was never murder. How many of us would allow a man to kill us without fighting back? What a brave child she was at 17 to cope with an awful situation. I have a 17 year old son, he's just a baby, I cannot imagine how he would cope with a friend's partner attacking them and him. 

X said to me today "Just had bad after bad since coming out of prison". Two and a half years after release from a wrongful conviction she is still being sectioned to a psychiatric unit. Jail effects everyone. Don't believe the right wing press about holiday camps. Jail is dire, tragic, painful, depressing, threatening, corrupt, pointless, demeaning, failing, dark, lonely and a million other adjectives; I could carry on forever. 

I spent two years in jail for a wrongful conviction. That is bad enough. It broke my heart and destroyed my children while I was inside. A pointless waste of tax payers' money to incarcerate someone who was zero risk to the public. But X spent 5 years inside. And I was in my 40s, a capable and intelligent adult and parent, able to compartmentalise the situation and use and abuse the system to update my qualifications. X was a child. 17. A child. 

The impact of spending time in jail is never ending. I have PTSD. I have nightmares most nights about being back inside. Being in jail for a crime you haven't commited is heartbreaking. Thankfully I have enough mental strength to cope. I have my children, my new wife, a future. But it is still so hard.

X, heartbreakingly, is still unable to cope after two years back with her family. I want to go to her and wrap my arms around her and tell her she is loved. That she matters, that I care. But why would she believe it? When a jury has found you guilty, and you have then listened to a judge summing up about just how appalling a person you are, how can you ever believe that you are not?

I am standing with Injustice Documentary to open the world's eyes to the corrupt and failing criminal justice system. I met children and adults like X many times. It needs to stop. Now.