I began my career as a prison officer at a high-security men’s establishment, working with prisoners serving sentences ranging from 25 years to natural life. From there I transferred to a busy London prison housing short-termers, lifers and everything in between, before returning to the high-security estate.
After a decade in the job, I’m used to the different ways people talk about prisons and the people inside. Holiday camps one day, hell on earth the next.
But the phrase I hate the most is “behind bars”. It brings with it connotations of fierce institutions, punishing regimes and emotionless, monotone staff. It’s illusory. And yet, I’ve been reading it a lot lately.
There it was in various political responses to last week’s justice and home affairs committee report, Cutting Crime: Better Community Sentences. The report acknowledges the critical situation in England and Wales’s prisons, and calls for more community sentences that can provide both punishment and rehabilitation. Prison sentences of under a year are to be scrapped for most offences in England and Wales, mainly affecting cases of shoplifting, common assault or battery, and the assault of emergency workers. Mentoring, community engagement and individualised treatment are all ways of holding a person accountable while addressing the root causes of crime and social vulnerability. The report also celebrates the remarkable work of third-sector organisations already providing these services to women and young offenders, where recidivism rates have gone down.
The report is bold, brave and timely. All things that the political rhetoric on this subject has not been. Routinely we hear calls for yet “tougher sentences”, to put “hardened criminals … behind bars”, or calls to “toughen up the law to deal with these career criminals. Empty phrases that bear no resemblance to the system I spent so long working inside.
Behind bars. What bars? There are no bars left. Our prisons are at 99% capacity. We’re talking about building “pop-up” cells in exercise yards, or sending people to serve their sentences abroad. There’s no room at the inn here. In emphasising the potential of community sentences as an untapped resource, the “cutting crime” report does not shy away from an uncomfortable truth; we must look for effective and meaningful alternatives to custody, because custody is no longer an option.
And as for the frequently referenced “hardened criminals”, I’ve met plenty. None of them were shoplifters. Let me tell you about some of the shoplifters I’ve met during my decade as a prison officer. The prisoner who asked for extra slices of bread at every single meal. “Hello Miss, more bread please, Miss? Any spare, Miss?” There was never any spare bread.
Or the prisoner who came through reception and had to have his socks cut from his feet because the material had fused with his skin, so long had he been wearing that same filthy pair. Or the endless stream of men I have known over the years who came in for petty theft with glazed expressions and enormous pupils, high on spice or crack or heroin or anything they could get their hands on. People whose addictions only worsened inside, because we don’t have any spare bread, but the place is rife with drugs. Or the prisoner who, once released, was spotted by one of my colleagues nicking apples from Greenwich market. And when he saw her, he mouthed, “Sorry, Miss”, put the apples back and ran. This is Dickensian stuff.
It felt like there wasn’t enough bread in the world to satisfy that prisoner. Not because he had some innate pathology to thieve carbohydrates, but because he was poor. He was poor, malnourished, stinking and dirty. And he was a drain. A drain on resources, staff, funding, all of it. Because what is prison supposed to do for him?
He doesn’t need time “behind bars”, he needs a job and a decent home and, for the love of God, some more bread. And he represents the majority, not these “hardened criminal shoplifters” who must “pay for their crimes” that I’m reading about. They can’t pay for an apple, never mind anything else. Prisons don’t punish. Nor do they rehabilitate. They contain.
If you think the prison system is full of organised criminals and men notorious for their extreme violence, please let me dispel that illusion for you. And for those who do fulfil that criteria, instead of prison officers spending their time and skills robustly challenging that behaviour, they’re busy running round trying to find toilet roll, bedsheets, even a spare cell. And more bread. And if you think that, once inside, prison is a place where shoplifters will decide never again to steal, I can dispel that illusion also.
I’m starting to think that the real prison is politics itself. Where the people inside are confined to only ever opposing the other, rather than considering what actually works. Instead of creative thinking, there is constant backbiting. Instead of progression, there is endless back and forth. Behind bars indeed.
Alex South was a prison officer for 10 years, working at men’s prisons around the country, and is the author of Behind These Doors (Hodder & Stoughton)
