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It was a 250 mile trip from my B-Cat local prison to my new C-Cat long term training jail, but I arrived in style. As a thank you for my stellar work the Governor of the Offender Management Unit in B-Cat arranged an ‘Escort’ for my move. In my case three members of staff had volunteered to drive me to my new home in the ‘Pool car’. After About 30 minutes on the road one of my escort crew finally asked me for any information that might be useful to them in that weird half-joking way. I paused for a moment before asking back, ‘What type of information do you mean?”
Well the three necks of my companions craned as they told me they wanted to know anything that people were doing that they shouldn’t be doing. I poured out my soul.
“Well Officer B locks himself in the kit room over lunch so he can have a kip. Officer H takes brand new white t-shirts from the clothes storeroom home every week, and Officer M hasn’t bought bog-rolls in the three years I was here – and judging by the amount he nicks, he must have a serious wiping problem. Do you need me to write this down for you?”
They knew where we all stood, and saw the funny side. When I arrived at my new digs I was shocked. There were trees that you could actually walk up to, and grass, not just little median strips that were out of bounds, but honest to goodness, sit-your-arse-down-on grass! Ironically, I initially spent more time locked behind a door in this lower category of prison. In some ways it was like school all over again. I had gone from being at the top of the food chain in Primary, to being at the bottom now I was in Secondary. As far as the kangas were concerned I wasn’t the exemplary prisoner, I was just another Lifer who landed on their wing.
I wrote apps listing all of my achievements, hoping to become a Listener and peer supporter again. Thankfully the person who ran the department at that time was notoriously lazy and they never replied. Instead I enrolled to study English in the Education Department, pretty much because I needed something to do. Talk about Serendipity! On the Friday of a Bank Holiday weekend the tutor, Ena, told us that we would be paid the 80p attendance wages if we came to class on Tuesday with a page of written work. On Wednesday morning Ena asked me to read an excerpt, one paragraph I had written. She commented that she had been able to hear my voice when she read it, and urged me to finish the story. This was ‘O’Keefe and the Aliens’ – the first piece of writing by the Jailhouse Moose. (Available to read on this site)
Before I finished English, the governor of Education gave me a trial on the prison magazine, ‘Paper Soldier’, which subsequently became ‘The Manor’, a multi Koestler award winning magazine that I edited for 5+ years (back editions in PDF on this site).
It is crazy to think that I could have had a very different journey had the kanga in charge of Safer Custody replied promptly to my app – she tried to recruit me for the next 6 years! But instead of focusing on other people’s issues I finally started to deal with my own. I began to examine my life, my crime and to face my demons.
I had two years of intensive Cognitive Behavioural Therapy interventions around alcohol and relationships. Since coming to prison I needed to have the TV on at night time to distract me until exhaustion would take me to sleep. It was in year 6 of my life sentence that I finally started to fall asleep in a darkened room. In the years since I have used sleep as a barometer of my mental wellbeing – if I am struggling to sleep it informs me that there is something that I need to deal with, be it an uncomfortable truth or a situation that I might prefer to avoid.
I broke a lifetime’s habit of passivity and self-sabotage by setting goals for myself – and achieving them. I developed a new addiction as I became a completer of tasks. It was at this stage of my life sentence that I started to educate myself. I studied Prison Law to manage my own sentence (I dislike lawyers), then Counselling to manage my own emotions and then Journalism, to develop my writing. I became one of the first men in closed prison conditions to complete a Teaching Qualification.
From the beginning I regarded my Life Sentence as a ‘Channel Swim’. If I had looked up for the coast of France I think I would have drowned. I was in the water and I just kept my head down and kept swimming. But as I approached 10 years in prison, although I still didn’t look up, I started to hear the crying of seagulls as I approached land (society) once again.
I looked at the timetable for my parole and possible move to Open Conditions. As an exemplary prisoner, who had completed (and exceeded) all sentence plan requirements, I could be eligible to have my parole brought forward by 6 months. My case was sent to the Public Protection Casework Section (PPCS) for consideration. If I was successful, I might be able to get to Open Conditions in time to start University in the community the following September. If I could do that, then I would have enough time to achieve my degree before my parole for release. But as the days, weeks and months ticked past there was no word from the PPCS.
With the PPCS delays and disturbed sleep, the old, narcissistic version of me would have been outraged, thrown the toys out of the pram and self-sabotaged in one way or another. But this time I reacted differently.
In the first instance I reminded myself that I had killed somebody to be here, so I had no right to feel aggrieved at any delays I experienced. Then I identified that much of my upset was stemming from the deadline of starting University in September.
As I used the transactional analysis method I learned during my Counselling course I realised that I could still achieve a degree before my parole if I at least started my study with the Open University. In that moment I removed the influence of delays by the PPCS from my life. Once again I could sleep at night. In the end my parole process was advanced by 19 days instead of 6 months. There were further delays due to Covid, but I coped with them.
I arrived in C-Cat prison as a fat smoker who distracted himself by sorting other people’s problems. I was a passive pleaser, and a compulsive appeaser with no sense of purpose, no direction and a penchant for self-sabotaged to avoid criticism. I left for D-Cat and Open Prison Conditions in the best physical, emotional and mental shape of my entire adult life. Furthermore, I had a CV with a list of qualifications that I would previously have considered too unlikely to believe possible.
Although I felt far more resilient I was still anxious at the prospect of a move, even though it was to better conditions. I was less reliant on others, less sociable – in a good way, i.e. I didn’t need to be in everybody’s good books anymore. I was finally comfortable in my own skin and had developed clear values and life goals that I lived by. Now was the time for my plans and resilience to be tested but I was aware that (to paraphrase), ‘No plan survives contact with society.’
