Erwin James wrote a regular column from prison for the Guardian – the first of its kind in British journalism. This piece was first published in the Guardian on 9 January 2003.
A life inside: It’s new year, and Tank needs advice – but it’s still not time to tell him the hardest lesson I’ve learned in prison
The beginning of a new year can be an odd time for those in long-term prisons. After 12 months of anticipation, counting off the national holidays, noting the passing of the seasons, seeing old faces go and new ones arrive – suddenly it’s here. Once the adrenalin produced by the chimes and the screaming and hammering on cell doors at midnight has subsided and the handshakes and happy new year wishes have been exchanged on the first day, a lull falls. By the third day people are asking each other, “Is that it?” Before the end of the first week the atmosphere is gloom-laden as the realisation sets in that another year inside stretches ahead.
In the beginning it felt as though each year was a new mountain to climb. December was the high point, Christmas the summit. But January was a hellish long way down.
Unlike this new year. On January 1 I went jogging with Tank. The big compound was locked because of ice on the path so we ended up doing circuits of the football pitch. Nobody else was out which left us room to swing our elbows and the pace was steady enough for us to talk as we cantered. Tank was asking me about earlier years in my sentence. I told him how anti-climactic the beginning of January can feel with seemingly endless years stretching out ahead. I explained that it takes a while, and no small effort, to get back a positive attitude and re-focus on the optimism and fresh hope that a new year brings, even behind 20ft walls.
“But how do you do that exactly?” he said. He wanted to know how I’d managed to do all the years I’d done and “look so normal at the end of it”. I hoped that that was a compliment. “But I’m not at the end of it yet,” I said.
Tank has been in three years. If he gets his parole, he’ll be out in the spring. He’s a giant of a man at 6ft 4in and 21 stones, but gentle with it, if a little naive, which is why I never take offence at his slightly overfamiliar probing.
His questions took me back through a long tunnel. Back to my first weeks in a high-security prison. “Doing time” is definitely something that has to be learned. And the best way to learn, I discovered, is to look for others who appear to have found the answers.
My first influence, I told Tank, was Dave, the former postman who lived in the cell across the landing opposite mine. Why certain types of people gravitate towards one another is a mystery, but I used to find myself next to Dave in the meal queue or I’d bump into him on the way to the workshops. A slim, fit man, Dave was always running in the exercise yard, or working out in the gym in his “association” time. One day, as we chatted over a cup of tea, he showed me some photos. “That’s me,” he said. The glum-faced man he indicated, standing at about 5ft 6in next to a red post van, looked like his dangerously overweight and unhappy brother: “Over 16 stone,” he said, “and chronic asthmatic.”
He explained that coming to prison for life was the best thing that could have happened to him. He added, “I thought, I’ve been given life, I’m gonna live.” I hadn’t realised it until then but these were just the words I needed to hear. Dave told me that he decided to look on his sentence as “an opportunity”. He shed six stone and virtually cured his asthma. His newfound sporting activities included captaining the wing football team and regularly running the equivalent of half-marathons around the prison exercise yard, raising thousands of pounds in sponsorship for charity.
When I met him he’d done seven years to my one and a bit. We were friends for a year before he moved on to “progress through the system”. But long after he had gone, when I found myself telling others at the beginning of life terms things such as, “Use the time, don’t let the time use you”; “Few people get the chance of a life sentence”; “It’s an opportunity – be careful not to waste it”, I’d hear my postie pal’s voice ringing in my ears.
Not that everybody appreciates “sound advice” from other cons. But when Tank asks, I tell him – except for one thing. When we finish our 12 laps he asks me what has been the most important thing I’ve learned. I still haven’t told him. It has been such a hard lesson and taken so long to learn. I couldn’t hand it over just like that. But I’ll tell him before he leaves and this is what I’ll say: “Learn to live where you are, and not where you think you want to be.”
