Do Not Pass Go!
Well I screwed up – royally. My first nicking came two weeks before my parole hearing and it was a beauty. A perfect example of complacency and a proper comeuppance for me!
I had been in Open Prison for nearly 3 years – I had over a decade of impeccable, and I mean inspirational prison conduct behind me. I had been working fulltime in the community for two years – out of the prison for 14 hours a day, 6 days a week. I was the poster child for rehabilitation in a crumbling prison system. I guess I thought that I was so close to the end that the rules didn’t apply to me? Even if I got caught, surely my conduct would get me a wrist slap and nothing more – right? Oh hairy bollocks no!
So I had invested in a SMART phone to supplement my prison issued Nokia dinosaur. Now I could rationalise this here – and I did at the time, but it doesn’t take from the fact that I chose to break a prison rule. In my licence it stated that I was not allowed a device other than my issued one. But did I stop there? Did I buggery!
I decided that the world would be a better place if I had a podcast – sure I’d likely be out the door before they found it, right? Wrong! This was rule #2 broken – thou shalt not publish stuff on social media! I mean, what are the odds that of the three people who hear a podcast – 1 of them works for the prison? Well pretty good as it happens.
So there I was at work when my wee prison phone goes off. The caller display says ‘Mom’ – in case a member of the public saw ‘Prison’ on my caller ID. Well I needn’t tell you that I get scared when I see Mom calling – and my arse fell out when I heard, ‘I need you to return to camp as quickly as possible please.’ I scrambled. Made a couple of calls, spoke to work colleagues and started to head for camp. I was nervous, but unaware of what the next few days held – I arrived back on camp at about 3-30pm on a Monday. I checked back in at reception and was told that I was being stood down subject to an investigation. I went back to my cell and sweated until 4-30pm when I was summoned to the OMU (Offender Management Unit) and walked in to a room with my Offender manager, her boss and her bosses boss. Judging by the looks on their faces I deduced that I hadn’t won an award.
It started, ‘It has come to our attention that you have been running a podcast under the name….’ well what could I do? I tried a little bit of a dodge, but my heart wasn’t really in it. It was my voice – no doubting that. After a few ‘I’m disappointed’ and ‘Do you realise’ cliches I was excused. A few hours later I had my paperwork – I was nicked and set for my first ever adjudication.
The following morning I was brought in front of a governor and I pleaded guilty immediately. I was given every sanction on camp. Loss of earnings, canteen, gym the lot. That didn’t bother me – I had good people around me and I knew they would help out. What really stung me was the delight that some of the staff and prisoners derived from my fall. There was way too much glee – especially from staff and kangas. I guess that it served the confirmation bias of some who state that all prisoners are scum and they can never change. Always puzzled me that, I mean, if you hate meat it’s probably best not to be a butcher. Therefore, if you hate people who have committed crimes….
Anyway, Wednesday morning and I’m called to a PIC (Prisoner in Crisis) meeting – it’s my Offender Supervisor and a governor. Now in fairness, the gov was pretty sympathetic. He said that there were 280 men on camp that day and if he had been asked, he would have said I was the 280th name he would have written on a list of who might appear in front of him for this nicking. He wasn’t going to labour the point he said. I was intelligent enough to know how much peril I had placed myself in. Then he asked me, ‘How did you publish the podcast?’
He was on to me. ‘I kept a phone at work.’ says I. He just nodded. I told him where the phone was and the PIN code for it. He told me to go back to my cell and he would investigate. I updated my mates – the look on their faces was chilling. You know in the movies, when a soldier is injured and looks to his comrades asking ‘Is it bad?’ – well that was the look I got. Like they could see my guts hanging from my belly. I was dead, but just didn’t know it yet. Two hours later it happened. One of the kangas came to my door and politely asked me to come to the centre (the admin building). When I sat down I saw one of the three kangas that came in to the room after us turn on the body camera. Oh shit.
The gist of what they said was that after current events it had been deemed that my behaviour was not that of an Open Prison candidate and that I was to be immediately returned to closed conditions. I was handcuffed and brought to reception. I was strip searched and held in a dry room while kangas went to my cell and threw my possessions in to bags. They then decided which 3 bags to include with me and the rest would have to follow on. I managed to persuade them to let me extract a couple of numbers from my mobile phone and scribble them on a piece of paper. Then at just before 5pm I was cuffed and in a van on my way to HMP The Mount. By 7pm I was back behind a locked cell door in a spartan cell with a few odds and sods of my belongings with me. Ten days before my parole and I had basically wiped out over ten years of impeccable behaviour.
I took a breath and thought to myself – Moose, you’ve done this before. You can do it again. I decided to be OK with my situation. I had fucked up, I would wear it. I picked through my bags checking what I had been shipped out with. Almost instantly my positivity was reinforced – my resilience topped up. In one of the bags I found my MP3 player, headphones and charger. I went straight to ELO – ‘Don’t bring me down, Bruce!’
My recall was a setback – and added over 6 months to my sentence. As I reflect on it now, I would not have had it any other way. It was meant to happen and I found new levels of resilience that I took into the community when I achieved my parole. This is the first blog that I have written in quite a while – and the first that I have typed live and published myself. I’m still a lifer – but now I’m a Moose on the Loose! The adventures continue….
