Once their cleaning is done, the grim Liverpudlians, nicknamed "the breakfast club," sit like statues at their table overlooking the wing and discuss football or do crosswords. They are armed robbers, mainly. They have one Derbyshire man with them, a disturbed youth who shot at a neighbour from his window. He sometimes retires to his cell to play the guitar. He talks to me, but the most elderly and malevolent of the Liverpudlians, with a face etched in suffering like a Rembrandt, will not. He is serving 25 years and hates me because I said I was depressed, even though I am getting out next year.
Below them, on the wing, a kind, well-padded middle-aged cockney gets on with his relentless chores like a swan, as a friend said, outwardly calm, but inside frantically paddling. At one of the tables he cleans, four black men sit endlessly playing cards. They are so absorbed that I have never dared to disturb them. They have no need to pace around the yard, as I and certain other prisoners do, in a ritual unchanged since Victorian times. Even on warm weekends I am reluctant to join those who sit exposing their well-honed bodies to the sun without a consoling pint in their hands. I fear their rejection too much.
In the workshops, where I went only once before they decided to spare me, the most unskilled men fold paper hats and must complete 1,000 to earn £1.40. If they can rehabilitate wheelchairs or face handling dog food, they earn more. Escape from here is to the gym (which I avoid) where the men crowd around the weights, or to Education, where we sit in rows at computers in crowded hot rooms. As everyone is at different levels, not much teaching is done. I am intolerably bored here, and as a result spend a lot of time locked in my cell, watching the well-built northern warders strutting along the paths, and prisoners pushing huge meal trolleys, learning the lesson once again that I cannot participate much in life but must strive to interpret and endure it.
This is Lowdham Grange, a medium to high-security private prison on the outskirts of Nottingham. It is by no means as hellish as Brixton and Belmarsh, where I was before, but rather prides itself on its kind and professional atmosphere. It is a serving prison, with all the human waste and controlled suffering associated with that term. Many here are serving long sentences. They are a great mixture of types, only about half any danger to society, only a few educated, the great majority heterosexuals, almost all as much victims as perpetrators. On the whole they deal quietly with having so much valuable time taken away. Mostly kind, if selfish, they live only for what hope of family and sensual life the future may hold. Those with IPP sentences (no fixed release date) are the most depressed and hopeless.
One young man, brighter than the rest although intermittently violent, expounded an interesting theory to me. The great majority of crimes, he argued, are drug or alcohol-related. The government could radically cut crime by banning alcohol and instituting rigorous drug checks at borders. But it prefers not to. In recent years, a whole army of civilian workers have been recruited to prisons, many of them to run the rather useless rehabilitation courses. Jails have thus become a major part of the economy, in which many powerful people have a vested interest. The prison system is being relentlessly expanded for largely economic and political purposes; prisoners are the helpless pawns of those who administer and profit from them. Sentences are handed out routinely according to crime, with no attempt made to assess individuals. For instance, those with a remote connection to a drug operation may find themselves serving ten years, as will Christian businessmen involved in rather technical frauds. These men do much to civilise the atmosphere of prison, but it is difficult to see much other use in imprisoning them.
For myself, I tried to get someone murdered, which is a most serious crime, but I no longer have the least desire to see him dead, and am being kept at huge public expense in an environment to which I can contribute little, and which offers nothing but food, shelter and unease. I am technically classed as a violent risk, although anyone who meets me would find this laughable. With only 13 months to go, I have little prospect of progressing. I will probably just rot away here until the time comes to put me outside the gate with £46.
I used to believe that prison might be redemptive, and it is true I have gained patience, Christian faith, practical skills and perhaps learnt to deal better with people I find alien. In Belmarsh, I managed to develop many warm human relationships. It was a real community of suffering. This intensity has so far eluded me here. My life has entered an arid and very lonely phase.
I pray sometimes that I may not end my sentence here, far from all my friends, but can go to HMP Ford in the Sussex countryside I know, on the blessed railway line to Clapham Junction that leads to my home. I believe I could heal there and end my sentence on a good note. But it will be over soon. I am alive, have my health, my spirits are improving, I believe in God. That is enough. If necessary, I will try to live happily at Lowdham Grange.
