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On Being Locked Up
The overwhelming impression made upon new captives is that they are entombed. And yet they are alive, frightened, miserable and confused. Apart from the dire events which have led to their incarceration, there is the prospect, for the majority, of being propelled into a world which is beyond their imagining, but which they may be certain has no redeeming features.
Rupert Croft-Cooke was convicted of homosexual behaviour in 1953, at that time defined as a criminal offence, and sentenced to six months imprisonment, which he served in Wormwood Scrubs and Brixton prisons in London. Always denying his guilt, he wrote a moving account of how a prisoner feels when they wake up on their first morning of captivity:
Whatever his crime or failure or bungling or bad luck may have been, he is consciously or unconsciously in a state of raw sensitivity. At Wormwood Scrubs, a prison for first offenders, he is probably spending the first hours of his life in captivity, separated from those he loves, and fearful of the future. Yesterday was the most cruel and critical day of his life. He stood in the dock and was sentenced, locked in a cell below the courts with others similarly treated, handcuffed, put through the long and painful business of Reception, and finally left in a cell. He has risen this morning without having slept and has been brought before the man responsible for his immediate future.1
This statement sums up the universal experience of the newly arrived captive, even if this is not the first time they are being locked up. And more shocks are to follow.
One of these, and surely the most feared, is the expectation that they are likely to be physically hurt. Another English prisoner, Erwin James, serving a life sentence for murder, has a lesson in the endemic violence present in all kinds of captive institutions even before he has spent a night in prison:
A stream of denim-clad men in identical blue-and-white-striped shirts are shuffling past my door. I step out and join the flux. Down two flights of metal stairs to the ground floor, we head towards a set of trestle tables.
A row of prisoners in white are serving food. Before I get there I am stopped in my tracks by a scream.
āHeās fuckinā dead meat!ā
āNonce! Heās fuckinā dead meat!ā
I turn and see two men: one wields a mop handle, the other a metal bucket. They are using the metal instruments to beat a third prisoner, who cowers in a cell doorway.
āHeās fuckinā dead meat!ā
Suddenly I am aware that no one else is stopping. Nobody is intervening. Few even look in the direction of the violence. I fall back in line, pick up a tray and return to my cell. As I sit on the chair and spoon down the food, all thought and feelings about why I am in prison are relegated. My first priority, I now understand, is to learn to survive.2
Very soon after arrival, the deadening process of āreceptionā ā the euphemism used to describe the next stage ā is set in motion. Watching the reaction of new arrivals tends to make any observer wonder if there cannot be an alternative to imprisonment.
The womenās prison at Holloway, London, is one of the best known prisons in the world. And it was there that Jenny Hicks started a five-year sentence for fraud. Despite her considerable experience of being locked up, this time even she was surprised at what she met:
The reception at Holloway was quite horrific. There were women there who had been in police cells for days and had not had a proper wash. There were women at various stages of shock or trauma ā some withdrawing from drugs or drink ā and all of us had our clothes taken from us and were wrapped in those horrible towelling dressing-gowns. I was put in this small box like a horse box and I sat there eating the piece of white bread and butter and cold sausage which had been given to me.3
Another prisoner, Amanda, also had experience of Holloway. When she arrived in 1997, what struck her, as it has for generations of captives, was the grime:
I just couldnāt believe it when I opened the door that I was going to be put in a room like this, with graffiti all over the wall. The room was filthy, the mattresses were filthy. Two of us got moved together, and we literally scrubbed our room from top to bottom. I scrubbed my loo, and it was sparkling in the end.4
In many other countries the atmosphere was at least as bad, and often worse. The Nigerian writer and political activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was shocked to learn about conditions in the cells of the Central Police Station in Port Harcourt. These were a good deal worse than Holloway:
If you had no money, you were subjected to brutality and condemned to stand up all night to fan the guardroom bosses with old newspapers. If you had money, you might be allowed to stay outside the toilet room in which some of the inmates were forced to sleep so cramped was the available space.
Of course, there was no food. Inmates had to depend on food sent in by their families. And whenever such food was sent, it had to be shared with the inmates, the bosses having the greatest share thereof.5
When he was imprisoned himself, the system was so chaotic and corrupt that as a well-off political prisoner, he was able to engineer better conditions, as such prisoners often can:
I took a look at the food which was being served and almost puked. It was fit neither for man nor beast. Thereafter, for me, it was a matter of receiving visitors, having read the newspapers which arrived with my breakfast. There was a bit of time to read, and I followed the news on my radio very keenly. The day ended at about seven oāclock when the warders locked us in. Quite dreary, I would think. And not meant to keep one in good health.6
This is an incidental comment on another phenomenon of captivity: that in many situations, mostly in developing countries, money buys privilege.
The first task of an institution, whether penal, allegedly therapeutic or functional ā or whether the inmates are captive or volunteers ā is to isolate the inmates and to break any links they have, social or emotional, with the world of freedom. This is often facilitated by using islands, which not only are potent symbols of that break, but have the advantage of making escape very difficult. The examples are legion: Alcatraz off California, Devilās Island off South America, Rottnest off Western Australia, Robben Island off Cape Town, Sakhalin Island off Siberia and two prisons on the British Isle of Wight. All of these island prisons feature in this book. Indeed, so obviously suitable are such locations that when Lord Mountbatten, in the wake of spectacular escapes from English prisons in the 1960s, recommended the creation of a super high security prison, he suggested islands, including the Isle of Wight as suitable sites. This despite the fact that it already had three prisons.
When institutions are not located on islands, they can be inland many miles from centres of population; the Russian Gulag is a notorious case. When the famous English prison, Dartmoor, was established to house Napoleonic prisoners of war (POWs), that part of Devon was very remote. In the United States, Rose Giallombardo points out, Alderson Prison in West Virginia is in a remote rural area well away from urban conurbations: āAt all times, the mountains form a remarkably compact wall around the prison and in many ways present a more formidable obstacle to freedom than a man-built fortress.ā7 A major grievance of Palestinians imprisoned by the Israeli authorities is that they are removed from the Occupied Territories and locked up in Israel, a situation which one critic defines as very like being consigned to Devilās Island.
But as well as effectively removing captives from the rest of society and making escape difficult, such locatio...
