My body isn't mine

There are very many aspects of imprisonment which are extremely difficult to explain. While the wider world focuses its sporadic attention upon the easily visible artefacts of menus and TV’s, the actual experience of being a prisoner comprises intangibles.

It is taken for granted that everybody exercises sovereignty over their own body. Hundreds of years of legal argument has honed this into a deep strand of law; assault, negligence, murder, rape, medical ethics...all stand as testament to the socio-political belief that our body is inviolate. It is ours, trespass at your peril!

None of this is true for the prisoner. Our persons are liable to be searched and examined at the whim of staff, if necessary by the use of force. It is a loss of privacy, a degradation that cannot be surpassed unless a mind-reading machine is invented.

Prisoners are searched as we move about the prison, leaving a wing, moving to work, before and after receiving a domestic or legal visit. This is often a 'pat down' search, with the screw rubbing his hands around the body over the clothes.

Less frequently, we are strip searched. Leaving visits, during cell searches, drug tests, transfers...all involve stripping naked. The screws examine your clothing and your body, sometimes to the extent of insisting we squat over a mirror, lift our testicles and pull back our foreskin.

There are various responses to this intrusion, a number of emotions evoked by this systematised degradation. Often, all parties work in silence or attempt to mask the unpleasantness with irrelevant chatter. This is determined by the level hostility which motivates the search. Some strip searches are accompanied by forthright mockery, the con waving his body at the staff and accusing them of taking a perverse sexual pleasure in the process.

Pat down searches, a rub down, are often conducted with a certain level of indifference, even irritation, as being a mere institutional requirement that amounts to a pointless interruption to the daily flow.

The loss of bodily sovereignty is merely one aspect of the loss of privacy that comes with the status of 'prisoner'. It is a degradation which can often be conducted in an inoffensive manner. But it is never accepted, it is never comfortable, and it should never become a mere bureaucratic process.

It is these intangibles, these daily experiences, which are the essence of what it means to be a prisoner. These are the strands from which our daily life is woven. To overlook this is favour of the more easily grasped physical items, such as TV’s, is to wholly miss any opportunity for understanding.