by Kerry Daynes
The next officer to ask me out was a good few years older than me and not the kind of man I would have ever imagined myself being involved with. But I was lonely in Wakefield without my friends and family close by, and he was handsome – and persistent.
My time at Wakefield was coming to an end. The research I’d been working on had been quietly dropped, as numerous projects are. I had been redirected to more appropriate tasks, conducting a dull staff communication survey and doing admin for a treatment programme for sex offenders. But I still wasn’t getting a pay cheque at Wakefield and so had been applying for paid positions at the same time. (Eventually I got a job as a trainee forensic psychologist in a secure hospital – my first real job. I’d be swapping prisoners for patients soon.)
When my new love interest told me he and his fellow officers had written a message to their inmates, ‘Merry Christmas and may you get all that is coming to you in the New Year’ in big letters on the board on the bottom landing, I winced. When he drove up to my parents’ house in Stockport to bring me back to Wakefield after his Boxing Day shift, and sat with his hand firmly on my knee while he chatted to my mum and dad, I accepted his eagerness to return me to his home turf, and this physical display of ownership, as affection. But I would soon come to recognize it as control. I mistook a number of his early behaviours as romantic, another subliminal consequence, perhaps, of all of the films I’d watched with my gran as child – watching her swoon at John Wayne in The Quiet Man, as he wrestles Maureen O’Hara into a wind-swept and violent kiss, even though she is clearly trying her hardest to escape him.
*
In 2006, Prison Officer John Hall was arrested, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Over a period of eight years, while he had been the senior officer at Wakefield, including the time I was working there, he had raped four women, including a work colleague. When one of the women he attacked begged him to stop, he punched her so hard in the face that he dislocated her jaw. He had also kidnapped and sexually assaulted three girls, the youngest of whom was just 12 years old. He’d persuaded them to get in his car and then driven them to deserted places where he locked the doors, forcibly pulled their clothes down, groped them and masturbated himself in front of them. After his arrest, police found child-abuse images on his computer. Hall used his warrant card and usually wore his prison officer’s uniform during these attacks, passing himself off as a policeman. I heard through the grapevine that colleagues of Hall’s were apparently shocked to their core by his arrest. It brought to mind the phrase toads in hot water. Maybe we had all been toads in hot water at HMP Wakefield during that time. Some were bigger toads than others.
People don’t always come with a warning sign. The truth is that the outfit might be different, they might be behind bars, they might be patrolling the streets. They might have families and careers, hold positions of authority and trust. They might be someone you know. But civilized society has such fixed ideas about who criminals are – we carry around our internalized profiles of the law-breakers, existing in negative relief to us, the good ones. And one of the many consequences when we psychologically divorce ourselves from them in this way, dehumanize them even, consider them monsters, is that we become blind to those who are moving among us.
The truth is that no modesty curtain can be conveniently drawn between them and us. There is no them and us, it is just us.
CHAPTER 2
BIG BOYS DON’T CRY
When we cannot find a way of telling our story,
our story tells us.
Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life
Some time before his arrival in prison, Patrick Thompson had tried to kill himself with a shotgun but had missed his brain and blew a chunk of the left side of his face off instead. When he walked into the small interview room that morning, still very much alive, I didn’t manage to fully disguise my shock at how he looked. His earlobe, some of his jaw and most of his cheek were missing, and what remained was a collection of scars and bumps and hollows. The other side of his face seemed disfigured too, almost melted, and his right eye was cloudy. Thankfully he had come prepared with some of his paintings to show me, which provided a welcome diversion for both of us. We spent some moments looking at them, exchanging polite conversation about his work, while we both mentally settled into the unnatural situation in which we found ourselves. I was here to find out if Thompson had any plans to try to kill himself again.
It was a couple of years after my first research post in Wakefield that I found myself in jail again, this time doing a brief stint as a locum on the healthcare wing of a category B local prison. Most jails have a healthcare wing or unit, where sick or injured prisoners are held and treated by prison nurses and (if they are lucky and can find one) visiting doctors. It is no exaggeration to say that the units, by and large, are warehouses of human suffering. At any time there will be a mix of prisoners who are physically ill, some terminal and dying, others injured through violence or self-harm, those who are dangerously drunk or high, or experiencing severe withdrawal from their addictions. People in the healthcare unit are at their lowest depths, mentally and physically. Even the smell is desperate – a blend of disinfectant, sweat, vomit and every other human discharge imaginable. The sound is haunting, too. In any prison you’ll generally notice a continual background drone of chatter, activity and radios, but a healthcare unit is more often a place of ominous silence, punctuated by immediate and absolute cacophony – shouting, banging, alarm bells, doors clanging, screaming. The things you see and hear in a prison healthcare unit can be profoundly unnerving unless you are used to it. By that time, I was used to it.
On my second day, I was walked up to the interview room by an operational support grade (OSG), a member of the ancillary staff responsible for gate procedures and visitor movements, a round man with a beard and a pot belly who in a different life would have made a great Father Christmas. He was clearly relieved to see an outsider, and talked at me all the way through the corridors and up the stairs, cheerily explaining how most of his workmates were off sick with stress, or had been battered by inmates and were incapacitated.
We went past the safe cell, a space you find in most healthcare wings, with a gate rather than a solid door so the occupant can be observed at all times. There are no sharp edges or things to hang yourself from in a safe cell. Out of my peripheral vision I noticed the inmate inside wave casually at me and I nodded back. The OSG told me that this man had been taken to A & E two nights before, because he’d reopened an old self-inflicted wound on his groin and packed it with dirty toilet paper, so that it had become infected. Apparently the escorting officer, who was handcuffed to the inmate throughout the visit to A & E, thought he just fancied a trip out, or some opiates that he didn’t have to pay for, so had told the nurse on duty not to give him any painkillers while they washed out the wound and stitched him up. The prisoner jerked so violently with the agony of the stitches that it had pulled the officer’s shoulder straight out of its socket, with an audible pop. My gossipy escort was telling me this story as though it was a hilarious anecdote, but his enthusiasm tailed off as he saw my face hardening into a Queen Victoria scowl.
It was an unforgiving British winter, cold to the bone, and I remember wearing my standard prison ‘uniform’ of black woollen polo neck and trousers to work most days. The healthcare wing was an extension to the main building, a 1980s block with low ceilings and harsh strip lighting, moulded plastic furniture and the kind of lino flooring that goes halfway up the wall. The rooms were all painted in that drab NHS green that is supposed to be calming but instead evokes a strange kind of despondency. In the small room I was allocated, the table was fixed to the wall (so no one could throw it at you) and the large storage heater, hanging from the wall like a piece of hot Lego, was on full blast. Even if Thompson wasn’t intending to kill himself, it felt like we might both roast to death in there.
The low staff numbers weren’t a surprise. New, tougher sentencing legislation
meant prisoner counts were creeping up, but at the same time what would become savage cutbacks to staffing budgets were being introduced, and the pace of new prison building was far shy of demand. The chronic overcrowding, and the squalor that comes with it, that I have come to think of as normal in prisons today, was just starting to take hold at this place. I always say that, unless they have inordinate powers of self-awareness, the workforce ends up taking on the characteristics of the people they are responsible for. The staff here were clearly overwhelmed, feeling unsupported and losing the will to carry on.
With overcrowding and understaffing, nearly all offender-rehabilitation work had ground to a halt. When rehab stops there is no work or education, no therapy groups or counselling. Prisoners have less meaningful contact with staff and each other, spending more time on lockdown in their cells (in theory alone, but there were very few inmates alone in a cell here – more like three crammed in at a time, the world’s worst game of sardines). Lockdown contains people, but it can also mentally shut them down. As the Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky put it: ‘Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.’ For prisoners spending up to 23 hours a day on lockdown there is no purpose, no stimulation and, most brutal: no hope. At this prison, a very real sense of hopelessness – the psychological precursor to suicide – pervaded the air.
Suicide is a big problem in prison. The basic duty of care to keep people alive isn’t as simple as it should be. Along with one of the highest prison populations, we also have one of the highest prison suicide rates in Europe. (Suicide was still illegal in the UK until 1961, which is why we still hear talk of people ‘committing’ suicide. Oddly enough, I’ve never worked with anyone with a conviction for killing themselves.) In England and Wales, male prisoners are up to six times more likely to die by suicide than their unincarcerated counterparts, and suicide rates in female prisoners are 20 times higher than in women on the outside. It’s not a decision that comes easily, to end your life. The majority of prisoners show signs of significant mental disturbance; the Prison Reform Trust estimates 70 per cent. How many come in like that or start to struggle once there is unclear. But even a short sentence – nearly half of all UK prisoners go in for six months or less – makes a person far more likely to develop mental health problems in the future. Like a trip to Ikea, it’s almost impossible to leave without something.
So there was a very real sense at this prison that the ship was sinking. The work of what was left of the staff had become about throwing the water out, trying to stay afloat. Prisons follow a procedure to monitor inmates who are considered to be at risk of harming or killing themselves. Certain forms should be continuously updated by a nurse or prison officer, someone who sees the inmate day to day and knows them, but with a skeletal staff and the number of inmates causing concern so high, I’d been brought in to help wade through the sheer volume of open cases. If they hadn’t already disappeared, any lofty ideas I had about the rehabilitation of offenders were about to get a reality check.
I was a kind of one-woman pop-up clinic for inmates, operating from a glorified, and very hot, cupboard in the healthcare wing. I was here to ask questions, observe and look for red flags that might predict a suicide attempt: had a relationship on the outside stalled, were they being bullied, how were they feeling, had they made a plan to kill themselves? These questions are standard, and important, but can feel perfunctory, as someone planning to end their life may not want to share these details with a random woman they’ve just met in an overheated box room. Besides, as if being in prison isn’t enough, the triggers conspiring to drive someone over the edge are often too numerous and varied to point at and say: It was this. You can rarely be that certain.
*
Patrick was brought up to see me from his normal location on B wing. I’d had only a brief moment to glance at his form beforehand. It had been created three weeks ago, after he had tried to hang himself with a makeshift noose fashioned from his bed sheet – the preferred method for most suicides in prison.
I sensed he had brought his pictures with him as a way of deflecting attention from his face, and that he was aware of how people instinctively reacted. I was grateful to him for it. Art is a surprisingly common activity inside – something absorbing that everyone can do peacefully in their cells, and which isn’t pornographic or illegal. The paintings reminded me of Van Gogh on a bad day; thick, dauby brush strokes, portraits of unknown men and women, the obligatory fruit bowl, landscapes of green fields with trees and familiar-looking coastlines. They were homely, traditional subjects painted in the sort of splodgy, semi-abstract style that comes into better focus the further away you stand. He told me he painted with his left hand, although he was naturally right-handed – he was missing his index, middle and ring finger on that side. I wondered what had happened to them, but I didn’t ask. After we’d looked at the pictures I propped them up against the wall behind us and we got on with the assessment interview.
His responses were flat and monosyllabic, almost predictable. He seemed to put all his energy into just getting the answers out, without making much eye contact with me or expanding on anything. He was clearly uncomfortable being asked to reveal anything personal and was shutting me down with the brevity of his replies. When I asked if he was still having thoughts about killing himself, there was only an almost imperceptible quick nod and flare of the nostrils. I was, after all, a perfect stranger to him, and here I was asking him if he wanted to die.
Having gone through all the questions, I concluded that Patrick’s mood remained low, his ‘at risk’ form should remain open and that he should stay in the shared cell he was in on the normal wing. Any change to his present management – increased observation (hello safe cell) or other safety measures – was likely to be demeaning and counter-productive. Realistically, they’d also be practically impossible with the crisis that the prison was in.
Feeling that he wasn’t going to say much more and with an eye on the clock – I had 20 of these reviews to plough through – I got up to retrieve his pictures from behind me.
That’s when I realized they had melted. I had propped Patrick’s paintings up against the raging hot wall heater and now gooey dribbles of paint were sliding down from the canvases onto the lino floor. The plastic pouch they’d been in had also melted, and was stuck to the wall heater like a piece of bad shrink wrap.
My first thought was simply, Fuck! This man’s pride and joy had been gently simmered into a custard and it was all my fault. I had arrived this morning on a mission to preserve lives and now I was about to be responsible for triggering even greater despair. I couldn’t speak; I was trying to pull the pictures apart slowly, hoping to salvage something from the wreckage, but also aware of a terrible nervous impulse to laugh. I knew he was watching me, and when I looked at him and he saw the mortified look on my face something wonderful happened: he burst out laughing. For a moment I wasn’t actually sure it was laughter. It was an unfamiliar, rasping sound – the result of his facial injuries. But then he picked up one of the melted portraits and held it next to his own face, the scurrilous implication being that it looked like him. He was trying to make me feel better.
I couldn’t help myself, I erupted too. We were both really giggling now, in that side-clutching way that you just can’t stop. Just as the laughter tailed off we both glanced at each other and set off again – in genuine hysterics. I kept apologizing.
A nurse looked in through the observation panel in the door and then popped her head inside, just to make sure everyone was all right. Her shocked-slash-disapproving expression from behind the door made her look for a split second like Kenneth Williams in Carry On Matron. It must have been an unusual sound, me and him roaring with laughter – real belly laughs aren’t that common in prison, even in the unpredictable healthcare environment. And this was supposed to be a suicide risk assessment.
I learned the value of humour in my work in
that moment. Sometimes in the most inappropriate situations it is the only appropriate response. Spend time with any emergency services teams, and you’ll hear gallows humour as a means of coping in the bleakest situations. But in psychology and mental health, laughter with a patient or client can still feel somehow wrong, unrestrained, too improper. The popular image of a psychologist is someone buttoned-up and coolly analytical; as forensic trainees we are taught to remain professionally distant. But it can also make you seem like an automaton. Boundaries need to be maintained, of course, but not at the expense of being authentic.
In laughing uncontrollably about this man’s melted paintings, I was breaking unwritten rules about letting go in this kind of exchange. But, between you and me, I have always loved a good joke at the wrong moment, if it is done kindly and at no one’s expense – as they say, laughing with people not at them. It can be a very effective tool. Laughter is the best tension diffuser I know. There is a place for it even, as it turns out, in a suicide assessment. This moment with Patrick was a real and harmless way to respond in the situation, and its effects turned out to be remarkable.
Patrick started to cry. I quickly reached for the box of tissues I always have on the table for this kind of moment (although no inmate would usually ever have dreamed of using them in front of me). He said he wasn’t crying because of the pictures, but because of ‘everything else’. I looked at the clock, knowing this would put me behind schedule, but I didn’t want to stop him, so I asked him to tell me about it. This overly controlled man, who had been so hard to read a few minutes ago, was opening up, prompted by that little bit of human connection and a shared moment of vulnerability. I wasn’t going to stop him now.