The Prisoner

Ben Crewe, Jamie Bennett, Ben Crewe, Jamie Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415668668
• eBook ISBN: 9781136576317
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Little of what we know about prison comes from the mouths of prisoners, and very few academic accounts of prison life manage to convey some of its most profound and important features: its daily pressures and frustrations, the culture of the wings and landings, and the relationships which shape the everyday experience of being imprisoned.

The Prisoner aims to redress this by foregrounding prisoners' own accounts of prison life in what is an original and penetrating edited collection. Each of its chapters explores a particular prisoner sub-group or an important aspect of prisoners' lives, and each is divided into two sections: extended extracts from interviews with prisoners, followed by academic commentary and analysis written by a leading scholar or practitioner. This structure allows prisoners' voices to speak for themselves, while situating what they say in a wider discussion of research, policy and practice. The result is a rich and evocative portrayal of the lived reality of imprisonment and a poignant insight into prisoners' lives.

The book aims to bring to life key penological issues and to provide an accessible text for anyone interested in prisons, including students, practitioners and a general audience. It seeks to represent and humanize a group which is often silent in discussions of imprisonment, and to shine a light on a world which is generally hidden from view.

1 Prisoner backgrounds and biographies

Jamie Bennett

Alan was a young, white British prisoner, who always appeared happy and optimistic. He saw himself as something of a ‘ladies’ man’ and liked to flirt with female staff. He was sanguine about his future, despite the difficulties he had experienced in life, and was an extremely likeable interviewee.

I grew up on a working-class estate. The estate was where all the bad apples went. There was a mixture of coloureds, Asians, all the ethnic minorities plus the white families. The council didn't really give two monkeys about them, get them in there quick and stop them moaning. I remember I was playing with my brother out on the street and twice a week or something there would be a burnt-out car at the end of the road and we'd always end up playing in that. All the kids on the estate would be running around just in nappies, and holes in their shoes. Other members of the family used to give my mum clothes and that for us. My mum didn't have much money to scrape together, she was always struggling. My old man was working on doors for nightclubs and pubs and just didn't give two monkeys about my mum and me and my brother; he didn't really care.

My mum and dad split up when I was three. My mum and dad didn't get on. I always resented the fact that my old man used to fill my head with, ‘It's your mum's fault we split up’, because I would always say, ‘Why have you split up? Families are meant to be together, get your arse back here’. And he would say, ‘It's your mum, she don't like me’. I always thought it was my mum, but as I got older my mum would say, ‘No, it's your dad’.

Me and my dad have always had a funny relationship. I wouldn't call it a father-son relationship, more brother to brother. The amount of time I remember through my teenage years him taking me to different women's houses – it was meant to be my weekend with my dad and I'd end up sitting in some bird's house while he was giving her one. But when my mum got together with another bloke and we all ended up living in his house, I didn't like him because he weren't my dad. I got on so badly with him that I got whacked into care. He had these old LPs and I smashed them up because he told me off. He had a top-of-the-range stereo, I set fire to that just to get back at him. I hated the fact that he was trying to replace my dad. He was one of those guys, he was trying to be too nice, but in my eyes it just didn't seem right. He was always trying to fob me and my brother off with gifts and presents and I would say, ‘If I want something I'll ask my dad’.

I went backwards and forwards from care to my mum, to 13. When I was 13, I met a bird from my school, I'd like to say it was my first love but I don't really know for sure because I can't really remember. One weekend she was going to stay at mine, at my old man's because I used to go there for the weekend. We got in an argument over some other girl, and I said, ‘You best go’, so she rang her older brother and said to him, ‘Come and pick me up’, so he did. I was going, ‘Fuck off – see you later’, me thinking at that stage that the next morning I'll ring her up and apologise, no more will be said, because the girl she was accusing me of doing something with I hadn't, so I knew I was in the right. She got in the car. An hour and a half later I got a phone call. It was her mum crying down the phone to me saying she's dead. On the way back from mine, some drunk driver pulled out in front of her brother – he had swerved to miss, and crashed into a barrier, the car caught fire. He managed to get out the car but couldn't save her. That was a shock to the system. I ended up going to her funeral, I was devastated.

By then I was already smoking weed and there was one lad in the kids’ home, he was about 17 and he was into car crime, he was forever getting nicked at the kids’ home. I was proper pissed off, it was two days after her funeral, and I was down. He came in and passed me a bottle of whisky. I had a few drinks with him and he said, ‘Come on, we'll go out and rob some cars, I'll teach you to drive’. At that stage I was prepared to do anything because I was blaming myself for her death because I told her to fuck off. I ended up going out with him that night, robbed this car, he ended up crashing that one and then we robbed another one, got back to the kids’ home about four in the morning, we had to climb back up the drainpipes. Then the police came round about ten in the morning and nicked him but I didn't get arrested. He got took to the police station because they knew straight away, he'd been seen, they knew it was him. They were saying to him, ‘Who is the other guy with you?’ He said, ‘I don't know, there weren't no one with me’, so they didn't know it was me. When he got put into prison I went to see him and he said, ‘I never put you in, so do me a favour, look after my sister for me’. I didn't know what he meant, I thought he meant go around and see if she's all right. One day after school I went around to see her and she said, ‘I've got no money, my brother told you to look after me’. I got back to the kids’ home and there was this lad, he was always doing crime – I didn't know what, I just knew it was criminal. I said, ‘I need to make money fast, how can I?’ He said, ‘I'm doing a factory later, come and do that with me’.

We ended up doing three factories one night and ended up with about £14,000 – this is before my fifteenth birthday. I had that much money, I didn't know what the fuck to do with it. Within the space of about six months we must have done about 40 or 50 merchant burglaries and we only got caught once, which was a shock, because I always thought the police force was a lot more use than that. Even though I was getting away with it, I thought I shouldn't be getting away with this. I had the biggest collection of trainers for a kid my age, at one stage I had about 70 pairs. I had that much money I was just chucking it away, I didn't know what to spend it on, so every time I walked into town I'd see a pair of trainers, I'd have the money on me I'd think, fuck it, I'll buy them. I remember going into town once and buying one pair of trainers and then a week later I went into town and they'd brought out a different colour. I thought, fuck it, I'll have them. If you have good trainers and good clothes, then people would look up to you. When you're wearing nice garms¹ and looking smart, the girls flock to you, the lads show you a different kind of respect. That makes you feel wanted, because when you're in a kids’ home you think, ‘no fucker cares about me; if they do, why am I in here?’ With getting a name for yourself on the estate and people looking up to you, it makes you feel the more people that like you, the more wanted you feel.

It's like a mini-jail in those homes. It just fucks your life up. If it hadn't been for care I don't think I would have done half the shit I've done. Even though I was unruly I was never into crime. Our children's home was up by the estate and we used to call ourselves ‘The Crew’, and there are four of us in this jail now, that's not including me, and there is about another three or four that's in jails all over the place as well. The only one that I know of to this day that got into trouble once with us and he's managed to get out and stay clean, he's an estate agent now. The rest of us are all a menace to society. I'm not proud of the crime or anything I've done, or any of the things that hurt other people, hurt other members of my family. The way I see it, it was out of my control, because it was something that was confronted at me and I just made the wrong choice. I had two paths to take and I just took the wrong one every time, I just didn't learn from my mistakes.

David was a small, mixed-race prisoner from a deprived inner-city estate. He had a tough façade, and was highly cynical, but when he talked about his mother and grandmother, he lit up with warmth.

I was brought up on an estate in a city. It had a bad name. Even kids from other estates wouldn't go there. We didn't have much as kids, I remember that. But it's a tight-knit community. Everyone knows everyone and there used to be a youth club and everyone from the community used to go there.

My dad used to beat up my mum and he done loads of horrible things to her. Things I can't even remember. These are just things that my mum and my grandma told me, like she bought him a car and he sold it for a pint, would you believe? We went to Morecambe or somewhere one weekend. We've come back and he's totally stripped the house of everything, carpet, everything. He's never been there over the years.

My mum was a superstar. At the time when you want certain things, like the latest BMX, and she just couldn't afford it and you can't see that when you're a kid. Nine times out of ten she used to get me them things. When I look back now, I feel bad. She couldn't afford it. She used to do quite a lot with us kids, but she didn't work until later, she worked in a pub. My gran lived about five minutes from us, in the same area. I had my own bedroom there and practically every day I'd go round my gran's, and a lot of the time I'd stay round there as well. Later, when she was ill, she come to live with us.

One day my gran was babysitting and my dad kept coming round the house and banging on the door threatening to take me and one of my sisters. It scared my gran and she started to get a headache. He's drunk and he's doing circles in his car and he's got his other kids and his wife in the car as well. Gran got scared. I remember she started to complain of a headache. The headache got really bad. It turned out she was having a brain haemorrhage. My mum managed to get an ambulance and my gran went to the hospital. She was in hospital four or five months. One day she's woke up and she's turned around and she asked me who I was. She didn't even recognise me. My dad didn't give a shit about any of us. He's never been there for none of us. A couple of years after, me and my gran sat down and we spoke about it. And she says, ‘Well, you know what triggered it? I was petrified that he was going to take you and your sister and I wouldn't see you again. But not only that, I was petrified for the kids in the car, when he's drinking vodka and he's driving round and he's banging on the door and all sorts.’

As I was growing up at the bottom of my street there's a junior school I went to, and next to that is the pub. Now and again when I used to go down, I'd see my dad. He seemed all right. He'd buy me a drink and stuff like that. Now and again I'd go up to see him. He used to cry his eyes out saying, ‘I love you, I wish I was there for you’. But it was just false. It was just the gin talking. It was just false. He never done nothing for me. I remember once we were at my auntie's and my dad said, ‘Go home, get ready and get changed, and we'll go somewhere’. Me and my sister have gone home and got changed, dressed and all the rest of it. We've gone back and that, and my cousin said, ‘He's upstairs in bed asleep, pissed out of his head’. That's something that's stuck with me. There's another thing as well. I remember my brother and my cousin have gone to the shop and my dad's come walking up the road. He's seen my cousin and patted him on the head: ‘How are you? Who's your little friend?’ to my brother, his son. And my brother said, ‘You're my dad’. He's a fucking arsehole. I hate him.

I found another father-figure in the estate. I wanted the respect he had. There ain't a man in the estate that commands more respect than him. A lot of it's fear as well. There are lot of things that I'd look at him and think, yeah, I want to be like him; like the money, the girls round them, nice clothes, them kind of things. A lot of older people in the community, like big criminals, they'd see me and they'd give me weed or they'd give me a fiver. This one man, we'd meet other people in the community, like big men, and he used to say to them, ‘This is my boy, I'd do anything for him, I'd take stab wounds for him, I'd do anything for him. I love him to bits.’ I remember one day we were sat there and he said, ‘You know something, I love you to bits. You're my foster son.’ And that always kind of stuck with me. I used to see him smoking crack, and about this time everyone around me was smoking crack. I never used to smoke it. I used to smoke weed. I couldn't smoke crack in front of him, he'd have killed me.

It was before that that I started to get into crime. I'd done the odd burglaries and breaking into cars and stuff like that, but when I was hanging around with older people I seen it's a different world, like, pimping, prostitution, crack, robberies, fraud, just everything. In the estate, the big people are either crack smokers, crack dealers, robbers, you know. There is some that work but I'd say the majority of them have got their hand in the drug case.

They respected me. A lot of them would say to me, ‘You carry yourself like you're a big man, an adult’. They used to show me respect. They used to show me love. As bad as they were, evil criminals, pimps, whatever, they used to show me love. I didn't get that nowhere else really, apart from my mum.

I ended up in care because I had started to get into trouble, breaking into cars, burglaries, robberies as well. I had a best mate at school, he's serving life, as it goes. I used to stay out at night with him and go to different places, like flats and stuff like that. That's when I first started to smoke weed. Then we'd break into cars and that. I remember my mum used to come looking for me. It used to put the fear of God in me. She'd put me in the car and take me back home. I'd just climb out of the bathroom window and be off again. I just didn't want to be in the house sat watching TV, I wanted to be out there doing things. If I'd sat at home I'd be thinking, I'm missing something, I'm missing out on something, and I'd want to be out there. I just started breaking into cars. It was for lots of reasons but I did want the money so we could get the latest trainers and we wanted to smoke some weed.

Anyway I was getting arrested and what-not. My mum used to come looking for me and she'd take me back home in the car. She tried to do everything she could, bless her. One time I got arrested and through some friends in kids’ homes, they're telling me stories like you can get clothing grants and stuff like that. So next time I got nicked I remember saying, ‘I don't want to go back home. I want to go in a kids’ home.’ I didn't say anything bad like my mum's beating me, or anything. I just said, ‘I don't want to go back home’, and wanted to go in a kids’ home. From there I went in kids’ homes all over the fucking country. I went into loads of secure units. I was in and out of secure units, kids’ homes and then prison.

After getting out, I started to use crack. I'd seen all them smoke it. From when I was 12, 13, everyone was smoking it. I used to be with a lot of these people smoking weed, and I said, ‘Can I try that?’ – tried it, and never stopped. The appeal, up until now, has been partly the buzz, and the scene, the environment. It's bad and it's horrible and it's violent. But I grew up around it. It's all I know. I just love the environment. But I hate the environment as well.

A typical day for me was sleep all day, get up about mid-afternoon, wash, change. We'd go out to work, just be driving round the ghetto, ‘round the beat’ we call it, robbing people, selling drugs, just wheeling and dealing kind of thing, smoking crack, going from house to house. Just moving round the beat, kind of thing. Committing crimes: robberies, cat burglaries, frauds, pimping, drug dealing. Every kind of crime there is. Committing crime and smoking crack like there's no tomorrow. The amount of money I've spent on that it's ridiculous. In a day I'd probably smoke between £500 and £600 a day, easy.

Commentary

The ways in which the public and politicians have understood prisoners’ backgrounds and biographies have changed significantly in the last 60 years, reflecting broader social and political thinking. The two decades after the Second World War were shaped by the shared experiences of that long conflict and the increased social cohesion that it brought. As the post-war economic recovery took hold, most people enjoyed increasing prosperity and optimism. Against this background there was a relatively sympathetic view of prisoners, which put great store by their social situation and individual experiences. Many were seen as victims of circumstances, including poverty, social disruption and individual neglect, and the prison system was based on the idea – although not always the reality – that prisoners should be treated humanely and provided with the opportunity to rehabilitate themselves. From the late 1960s, there was an extended period of social and economic upheaval that lasted until the mid-1980s. In this era, faith in rehabilitation declined and the post-war consensus became weakened. A new orthodoxy took grip in the 1980s, characterised by a more individualistic and consumerist outlook. In social policy terms, the rise of this new way of thinking was encapsulated in Margaret Thatcher's well-known comment to Woman ‘S Own magazine: ‘There is no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.’ In this environment, prisoners were no longer seen as the victims of circumstance. Instead, crime was increasingly seen as an act of personal choice and the responsibility of the individual offender. The role of prison was to protect society from these individuals by taking them off the streets and deterring them from committing further crimes. It was in this respect that Michael Howard claimed that ‘prison works’. This was challenged by New Labour's pledge to be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, a shift in thinking that encapsulated their ‘Third Way’ philosophy. This approach attempted to mould together the two approaches, suggesting that governments should punish individuals for law-breaking, whilst also seeking to ameliorate poverty and social deprivation.

As this brief historical sketch has attempted to illustrate, the role of prisons has long been both to punish prisoners and to reform them – aims that are not easy to reconcile – but the balance between those goals varies significantly, in part according to wider discourses about society, morality and criminality.

Despite shifts in public rhetoric, criminology has attempted to present analyses of prisoners’ backgrounds and histories that are more empirically driven, but also attuned to wider social forces, such as power and inequality. There are a number of factors that have emerged consistently from academic literature as being linked to criminality. The most prominent of these are biology, poverty, emotional strain and family dynamics.

The first of these, biology, has a rather undistinguished history in criminological thinking. This arises from concerns about the accuracy and reliability of biological theories of c...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• The Prisoner
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Prisoner backgrounds and biographies
• 2 Custody, care and staff-prisoner relationships
• 3 Prison culture and the prisoner society
• 4 Identity and adaptation in prison
• 5 Vulnerability, struggling and coping in prison
• 6 Prisoners and their families
• 7 Children and young people in custody
• 8 Ageing prisoners
• 9 Women prisoners
• 10 Cultural diversity, ethnicity and race relations in prison
• 11 Rehabilitation, generativity and mutual aid
• Afterword
• Index