A letter from Liz Bridge, former chaplain at HMP Wandsworth and the spokesperson for the Wandsworth Prison Improvement Campaign.
If you are reading this the chances are that you were at the public meeting, or
would like to have been. And if you missed it you are right to think that you
missed out, because it was a resounding success. I tease our organizing
team that they can now volunteer to organize the next tour of the Rolling
Stones.
We did not fall flat on our faces, it was a meeting with compassion, energy
and drive and will help us to go forward, and before I say any more let me say
a sincere thank you to the...
mums and dads who had the courage to come and give a glimpse into their suffering
ex residents of HMP Wandsworth who were prepared to remember their bad times with us,
politicians and thinkers who were prepared to stick their necks out and talk in public about a serious failing of our society,
residents of Wandsworth and church and meeting goers who were brave enough to let us shatter their comfortable view of what prison is like
vicar and her dog who patiently kept us all functioning in her beautiful church
friends and relatives who manned the doors, counted bodies, got the microphones to work, laid out leaflets, poured water and were always polite and patient when some people can be really annoying...
Thank you all: together we created an amazing public meeting!
What did we learn?
The group that formed WPIC are not the only people in Wandsworth worried
about prison conditions. About 250 people came to hear what the prison was
like and what could be done about it and we filled the main church and had
people sitting in the balconies which was fun and brought a buzz to the
proceedings.
Channel 4 News filmed and were good at being everywhere without
interrupting and we had moving contributions from mothers, ex-prisoners, ex-
staff and a local counsellor. It wasn’t just prison reformers and do-gooders
banging on, there were first hand emotional descriptions of real life
shortcomings of HMP Wandsworth and how they impacted on the lives of the
prisoners and their families.
The opener - the disgraced chaplain
I began with a description of a typical cell (much more cramped than in the old
TV programme "Porridge") and moved swiftly on to the problems with food
(none of the communal meals featured in "The Shawshank Redemption"), the
vermin, the unreliable heating and plumbing systems, and the lack of clothes
and difficulty in getting laundry done. Nothing works, everything is broken or
was bought cheap, everyone struggles to keep clean and sane. Boredom and
frustration lead to violence towards others and increasingly to self- harm.
It is easy to think that an ex-chaplain, thrown out for soft heartedness, is over-egging her pudding but then we heard from two ex-prisoners.
From the horses’ mouths
Daniel B (a big lad!) spoke about being issued with clothes in miscellaneous
sizes none of which fitted and of trying to wash and dry his vest and pants
each night in a cell with a tiny basin and no hanging space. He talked about
the vermin and his horror at the pigeon droppings everywhere and of using his
only towel to stop mice and worse coming into his cell at night
Davis S spoke about a dark and uncaring system where medication is not
always delivered to time and healthcare is withheld until a moment of crisis,
where drugs are easily available and used because there is simply nothing
else to do. He spoke of officers who stood and watched incidents without
intervening, their humanity apparently switched off.
Both of them dismissed the idea of 22-hour lockdowns with wry humour. They
remembered being out for an hour or less and stressed the anxiety of the time
out of the cell with the race to shower, get any exercise outside, get laundry
out, get cleaning materials for the cell - all the chores needed in a regime
where you don’t know when next you can get out.
The audience joined in
We had an open discussion at that point with the audience, and mothers
spoke about their fears for sons who were very vulnerable, locked up for long
periods without care or medical help when they were young, seriously
depressed, and self-harming. Those mothers described the prison as utterly
uncaring, unwilling to answer its phones or act with any compassion.
An ex-prisoner described the joy of singing with a choir of volunteers and the
hope that could be gained from the people who came in with charities. One
talked about hospital appointments which were missed because of a lack of
transport, or visits which were so humiliating because he was handcuffed and
chained to officers.
In a nutshell, it is safe to say that in the first hour we established that Wandsworth was a prison that was failing its inmates and their families and its staff - a nasty place for all, one of the worst prisons to be.
Is there any hope?
If we had been left at this point I think we might have all just sat and sobbed.
But then Pia Sinha took the microphone. She now runs the Prison Reform
Trust but was once the number one Governor at Liverpool Prison which was a failing prison when she arrived. She described arriving to a situation where
damage had become normalised, and there was a sort of learned helplessness. But she filled us with enthusiasm that there were things that could be done. Cells could be written off as unusable until they were clean, with working plumbing and proper bedding. Standards could be set for staff which were uncompromising, set around a clear moral compass, where officers and staff bought into or left the prison. The aim was to get a regular reliable regime, where decency was the theme. She described involving people with power, MPs, and the press to see what was happening and to create a drum beat of interest and change.
We all felt a bit brighter after that. Pia is very charismatic and there is nothing like hoping that change is possible and that it is much more achievable than we might have thought.
What about the future?
Fred Ponsonby from the House of Lords summed up beautifully for me what is
wrong with Wandsworth - it stinks, both literally and metaphorically. (The rats
may be besieged at the moment but the mice and the cockroaches, the
pigeons and the silverfish smell on.) But he knew of prisons which had been
turned around and, whilst no government will have a magic money tree, he
acknowledged that politicians in the Lords believed that it was essential that
men kept in prison had dignity and decency and they were committed to work
to that end.
Ruth Cadbury, the shadow prisons minister, was next. She acknowledged that
Wandsworth was one of the three worst prisons in the country but emphasised that being an old building was no excuse. She too thought that whilst money would be hard to find, the real issue was leadership.
Andrew Neilson was our last speaker and I think was rather unlucky in that by
the time he spoke we were tired and had already ridden the roller coaster of
despair and hope. He came from The Howard League for Prison Reform and
addressed a really serious issue, that of the secrecy that surrounds the prisons. They are closed systems, there is little public scrutiny and, faced with unpleasant truths, there is a tendency to blame the witnesses rather than take action to right the failures. The prison service had lost its way and there should be efforts made to penetrate the veil of secrecy. (I had commented earlier that staff from the prison had been ‘dissuaded’ from attending the meeting as had charity workers, too frightened that they would lose their jobs or their right to go into the prison).
This is our first milestone in a long journey. Now we pack our knapsacks for the next part.
Thank you for reading this and all you are doing to support us.
Yours,
Liz Bridge
Liz Bridge is the former chaplain at HMP Wandsworth and the spokesperson
for the Wandsworth Prison Improvement Campaign.