2 weeks Ago By Rupert Hawksley
I don’t remember Halloween feeling particularly scary in prison . Surprising really, considering I was surrounded by the modern-day monsters we’re all supposed to be afraid of. But it never felt like that.
Ironically, the grounds of a prison were the only places I felt safe walking outside after dark. As a woman, night shifts in jail felt strangely liberating in that regard. Generally, mealtimes and bad phone calls precipitated violent behaviour more than the night of 31 October ever did.
In the first prison I worked at, a lifer celebrated Halloween by wrapping his entire body in toilet paper and staggering around the wing pretending to be a mummy. It made everyone laugh, though privately we questioned whether he should be sanctioned for wasting an all-too precious resource. Days in prison can be a strange mix of monotonous and unpredictable, boring and explosive.
There are moments of lightness and humour, and inevitably there are moments of tragedy too. Quiet, then unbearably loud. As officers, we would warn each other against saying it was quiet, the “Q” word, superstitious that it might precede an incident.
And we added to those institutional superstitions with tales of haunting and paranormal activity. At HMP Wormwood Scrubs, there were rumours that long-abandoned dungeons still existed beneath the foundations of the prison, dungeons that had been used to house recalcitrant inmates back in the 1800s. We imagined the ghosts of those rooms haunting the prison at night.
And inside the prison chapel, where the apostles on the stained-glass windows are said to feature the faces of the prisoners who painted them, the expressions of those men took on a different meaning when darkness fell. Not piety, but pain. Not faith, but hopelessness.
At HMP Belmarsh, the dog handlers would tell stories of certain corridors where their dogs would refuse to go, where they would stand completely still and bark at something no one else could see. The prison is built on the site of the former Royal Arsenal, an old munitions factory. Women worked there during the First World War, freeing up the men to join the Armed Forces.
But the conditions were hazardous. It wasn’t uncommon for women to die as a result of their work. Several officers claimed to have seen the figure of a woman dressed in old-fashioned clothing walking through empty sections of the healthcare department.
As officers, we re-told these stories to pass the time. It kept the boredom at bay during slow night shifts. Of course, we didn’t really need urban legends for that.
But maybe that’s the point. Perhaps the reason we told those stories was to distract from the real ghosts all around us. Read Next Halloween is stupid, pointless and increasingly dangerous I am saddened to hear of Peter Lynch, the 61-year- old man found dead in HMP Moorland earlier this month .
And I am saddened that the crime he was jailed for – violent disorder after taking part in rioting outside a hotel used to house asylum seekers – reminds us of the divisions that rupture society, the hatred and fear that characterises so much of our politics. Those divisions find their way into our prisons too – they weave their way through coils of barbed wire and squeeze in through the bars. Our penal system is buffeted by competing ideologies, one intent on increasing physical security and the other hoping to reduce it in place of care and compassion.
There seems to be little recognition of the ways in which one allows for the other. As a former prison governor recently said to me: “Without a foundation of safety and order, rehabilitation is merely a cruel fantasy.” But as always, the people at the receiving end of the system are the same ones with no say in it: the prisoners in the cells and the staff locking the doors behind them.
They have no voice, and yet they are completely at its mercy. I am sad for the family of Peter Lynch, whose grief is unfathomable. And I am sad for the officer who found his body.
I have been that officer. I remember the first man I knew who took his own life in prison. And I remember the last.
But the faces of many of those who died in between have begun to fade. It is more of a survival mechanism than an insensitive one. Sometimes it’s easier to forget than to remember.
But collectively, I don’t think we can afford to forget. We can’t forget the societal fractures that so often put people in prison, nor the reasons that some never leave. We think of prisons as places of life, both symbolic and literal.
People serving life, living life, the day-to-day bustle of mealtimes, laundry, phone calls and showers. And that is all true. But prisons are also memorials to past lives.
Etched in the brickwork and the stained-glass windows are lost opportunities, fear and utter despair. The kind that starts long before someone enters a cell. And that should haunt us all.
Alex South was a prison officer for 10 years;. She is the author of Behind These Doors: Stories of Strength, Suffering and Survival in Prison (Hodder & Stoughton).
