I was woken at 5.45am by a phone call. It’s Saturday morning and I
thought it was my alarm going off as my daughter is off on a scout hike
first thing.At the other end of the phone was one of my prison-community
friends. She was feeling suicidal and was sat in a stream in her
dressing gown, needing to rant and have some support….
When you
are sentenced, for most crimes, you spend half your sentence in prison
and half on licence in the community, supported (i say this loosely) by
the probation service, or actually often now by the new privately run
community rehabilitation companies or CRCs! Their job, as my very own
personal member of the service keeps telling me, is firstly to protect
the public from us terrible, awful, scary, dangerous convicts, and
secondly to prevent us reoffending….. if for any reason we cock up in
any way at all we are recalled straight back to camp! However, there
seems to be no requirement at all for the authorites to actually help
you to achieve a trouble free time on licence in any way, shape or form!
My
friend who called me at dawn today is one of so many ladies I know who
are out on license and feeling totally unsupported and lost and
forgotten. The punishment of prison is the loss of freedom; the loss of
the control of your own life and decisions for a set period of time. Yet
all of us who have been convicted of a crime (I won’t say ‘committted’ a
crime, as many people are unfairly or wrongly convicted every year, in
fact latest figures show 4 appeals against conviction being won every
single week…. that is four people too many who have suffered in prison
as an innocent) suffer far beyond the prison gates. I myself am about to
be homeless. After two years struggling to keep my children stable, and
succeeding, I have returned home to a total lack of any housing help
whatsoever, a lack of any money or financial support (my children’s tax
credits are going to take five weeks to come through), no car, no job
and a probation officer who signposts, tells me I am doing all the right
things and keeps reminding me not to re-offend! Well, I tell her I
won’t offend, as re-offending makes the assumption of an original crime and there simply wasn’t one in my case!!
Let me tell you about just two ladies, both on license and both first time offenders who are low risk.
My
friend who called me today did so for the second time in two weeks, The
last occasion was at about 2am when again she was feeling unable to
cope. In prison she was one of my gym buddies and one of the few people I
met on the same wavelength. She went into prison for a relatively minor
offence (drink driving), not to be condoned, but one that most men (or
famous/rich people with a good barrister) would get a community order
for. She was given a 16 month sentence, so she would have been due to
serve 8 months in prison and leave after the first 4 months to be on HDC
(home detention curfew or tag). This is the same sentence that the
judge Constance Briscoe was given for perverting the course of justice,
and she left on HDC on exactly the right day..! ( I know this as I was
there!). When my unhappy friend sat her HDC board she was told she had
to do a course before she could leave. As always, this was just thrown
at her the week before her children expected her back home and four
months after arriving in prison. Standard prison service behaviour. This
course was RAPT (Rehabilitation for Addicted Prisoner’s Trust) due to
alcohol being part of her crime. This is an onsite rehab for those in
serious addictions. The course which uses the 12 steps, lasts from 4 to
6 months, full time, living and working and sleeping and eating with
other addicts and away from the main prison population. Totally
unsuitable for a one time offender without an addiction and a waste of
taxpayers money. There are so many women desperately waiting to get onto
this treatment and deal with their very long term addictive behaviours.
So she refused and had to spend twice as long inside, away from her
partner and two lovely boys.
An intelligent and assertive lady,
after refusing the course, which she was entitled to do, she then spent
the last four months being picked on and tripped up wherever possible by
staff and was frequently put on BASIC and Cellular Confinement,
stopping her from being able to talk to others and from going to the gym
which was her only mental health support inside.
She left
prison to a partner who hadn’t coped and had become someone she no
longer recognised, who had not paid all the rent, and to an eviction
notice, children who had needed her at home and were emotionally
damaged, and severe depression caused by this situation and the weeks
spent alone in a room inside. The partner fell apart, and their
relationship is pretty much done, she is going to be homeless soon with
two kids and several dogs, and she really feels like she has nothing to
carry on for. The council may determine her as intentionally homeless as
the rent wasn’t paid while she was inside, which means they won’t help
her. One issue is that in most households it is the mum or the woman in
the family who organises these things, and when we are sentenced to a
custodial sentence, the one left behind just cannot manage. That is if
there is even another adult left behind, often there isn’t. And again,
there is no support.
My second friend has served longer inside.
Five and a half years. Again she is a first time offender, who committed
a crime through trusting a relative. No crime should be condoned, but
she received an incredibly long sentence for pleading not guilty, and
she truly believes and knows she is not guilty of the specific charges
put to her, although she takes responsibility for committing a crime of
some sort.
Another intelligent and articulate and professional
women, she has taken every course going inside. She has completed above
and beyond her sentence plans, the most recent of which asked her to
find full time employment, build a supportive local network of friends
and maintain family contact. Through a total lack of any support from
the inside, or from outside probation who knew this lady through 18
months of ROTLS, she was due to leave her open prison without any
accomodation. The solution? She was returned to Scotland (where she
lived when her crime occurred) from the south east of England, and is
now living in temporary homeless accomodation with no job, no money, no
support, no friends, and is also feeling depressed and unable to cope.
Although she has sourced accomodation near her support network and full
time job (both on her sentence plan which supposedly both prisoner and
prison service/probation have to adhere to….), and actually gave the
adddress to probation five days before leaving prison, two weeks later
she is still sitting in her homeless flat, alone, with not even a
television to watch. Going from over five years in the busy prison
community with others around you 24/7 to offer support or to just chat
to, this enforced isolation has had a hugely detrimental affect on this
lady. Again, she is too intelligent and sensible to re-offend…… but many
in her position would. She has had to beg the probation service for
money, as she has nothing at all and her electricity and gas for her
empty and lonely accomodation are on key meters. They produced £20, last
thing on a Friday afternoon, which she had to walk for an hour to get;
not usually a problem for most of us but this lady has a severe heart
condition.
All she needs is for her new accomodation (in a
Christian family home) to be approved and she can get back to her job
and her support. But the powers that be are not rushing or even
bothered, her job is only kept open another week and she is losing
everything that she herself has gained through her own rehabilitation.
She also has life saving surgery lined up in the next few weeks by a
specialist in the south and has not been able to access any health care
in Scotland yet, totally unacceptable.
Committing a crime
needs to be, and must be, addressed by the offender, and a punishment
shoud be served. But when that punishment is over should that offender’s
life and their entire family, be totally destroyed and at rock bottom?
If this is the case then don’t make rehabilitation a part of a prison
sentence. Because what is the point if you are always on the back foot
from the day you walk through the gates. No wonder the re-offending
rates are so high. Luckily both of these ladies are intelligent,
professional and educated women, and will never re-offend. However, they
are both suffering unacceptable levels of stress, depression and
deprivation in a society that has meted its punishment. Their sentences
have been served, and we should all now be supporting them back into
being profitable members of that society. Instead, society, and those in
charge of helping these women, have left them vulnerable and at risk.
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