The Lawnmower Thing

In truth, I've no idea if Speedyhire deal with lawnmowers but I bet I'm not far off the mark.  And why shouldn't I spend my days tinkering in their workshop?

For many reasons.  I've paid my dues in shit prison jobs for 31 years and it's about time I had a chance at something better.  I aspire to more, which is an attitude my keepers hate - scumbag convicts are meant to be morons, happy for any crappy future that they line up for us.  Well, that's just not good enough.

But the two main reasons I resist working in the Speedhire workshop are ones that any sensible observer can appreciate.

Firstly, I resist being given crap work on allocation by a bureaucrat. This is the UK in 2011, not the Soviet Union in 1930!  I could accept ending up in a bad job through financial necessity, the blind hand of fate or market forces.  But to have some petty functionary decide that such work is all I'm fit for is an outrage that I will always resist.

Secondly, I have a problem with slavery.  I'm funny like that.  Being sold to work for a private company under threat of punishment, for that company and the prison to make a healthy profit - that just gets my goat.

And having read some of your comments around this, I'm surprised to note how many of you are so keen for me to accept this work situation.  Slavery is repulsive, and any of you who accept it for prisoners should be ashamed.

Social History

One of my many peeves is the idea that prisoners are excluded from society. Prisons are like small villages; they may be remote from the Big City but we still have electricity!

The cultural shifts, ideologies, the currents that shape the wider society are as prevalent here as they are out there. Or so says the old 'importation' theory of prisoner culture. Whilst there is truth in it, to the extent that everybody in prison was first shaped outside, new factors must be included.

Prisons have a complex social structure, politics, power, and an economy. All that gives meaning to live outside also exists here. Although not in replica. Prisons are places of great material, political, emotional and economic shortage, all of which plays its part in moulding the culture. These scarcities imply that the importation of some new resource can have a disproportionate effect, as can the loss of some long standing feature.

Prison societies, though, are much neglected by sociologists and criminologists. I say this in the full knowledge of the mountain of material that has been produced, much of it of a quality I can only dream of aspiring to.

The neglect I speak of results from the motivations of researchers to date. They tend to be examining specific problems, mostly related to order, discipline, riots, violence and suicide. Excellent though this work may be, it is rather narrow in its scope.

No one is going back to the very fundamentals - just looking to see how prisoners’ society works. How we cooperate, have relationships, create economic alliances... Just as the original

generations of psychologists and sociologists took a wide scope of society to form initial 'laws', the same could be done for prisons.

My particular interest in this is social history. Having been here for a few decades, I have a historical perspective on our little society and the changes that have accrued.

A few years ago it struck me that it may be a useful sociological resource to have lifers like myself record our experiences. These could then be stored away in some university basement until the day comes when it may be of use to some historian or sociologist.

Such an oral history is all that there is. Much of what prisoners do, their interactions with each other, are semi-secret from the institution. And so, unlike a normal history, there are no documents, no diaries, no letters for the future to refer to. Our memories are all that there is and as each generation grows old and dies, that history is lost forever.