Prisoner Power

I have been sharing my views on prison across every forum for decades. From printing samizdat magazines in prison to Newsnight, I have foisted my views on others by whatever means the circumstances allowed. It can be fun, it can be entertaining and it can be informative.

Which is why I don't do it as much as I used to… For the most part, it is preaching to the choir. Having spoken everywhere from church halls to universities, I can’t recall once having a hostile audience. Questioning, certainly, and challenging but never outright hostile. My audiences were either already in broad sympathy with my views, or were very willing to be persuaded. They had, after all, paid my costs to be there and rarely are people prepared to pay to listen to someone they disagree with. If they were, I’d be the King of Twitter.

Which is all very interesting. But if the purpose is to try to provoke people to think about prison, and to prompt change, then preaching to the converted is very frustrating. There are many good reasons other than that to give talks, but when there are no minds to change then it is a different experience. And above all, provoking change is my ideal outcome. Otherwise I’m just an entertainment act.

Added to being dulled by talking to those who agree with me, is the sheer frustration of prison reform. Having began my sentence in a compulsory striped shirt with an AM radio being the height of convenience, I was in my later years confronted by endless stream of cons insisting that protesting for change was pointless - while wearing their own clothes and watching a TV in their cell.

Granted, change in prison can be glacial on a large scale, even if the details are endlessly messed about with. Week in and out I see reports from the Prison Inspectorate putting the boot into some prison, in a headline that's been perennial for most of my adult life. It's so frustrating to see the same crap, endlessly repeating. That applies to everything related to prison. The issues prisoners complain about, what staff complain about, never seem to change. For many prisoners, it probably is often true that nothing much changes. Because most prisoners comprise waves of short termers, whose sentence may not straddle some fiddling around the edges. Those of us with a longer perspective do get to experience changes, slow as they may be.

I long ago decided that genuine prison reform - achieving a justice system that actually cuts crime and social harm - is never going to be delivered by either politicians or the technocrats running HMP. Which seriously reduces my interest in trying to persuade people to support such change. Rather, I argue that reform lays in the hands of prisoners.

A conversation for another day…