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.

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