A talk given by Marie Lasenby to a meeting of the North London Interfaith group
Probably the first question that anyone would say to me if I said that I was visiting a prison would be “What’s it like in there?” and when you think of it, it’s one of the few places that you don’t get into unless you’ve undertaken something fairly antisocial or you’ve gone in there in some kind of employment or official capacity. In answer to people’s questions, I used to say ‘Well, if you’ve seen “Porridge”, that’s what it’s like’. I went into Pentonville Prison, which is one of the original prisons in London, and it’s a model on which a lot of others were based, and although my knowledge of “Porridge” is not extensive - I’ve never watched a whole episode - but what I’ve watched is rather dark. Nowadays, of course they’ve painted the brick walls white and lighter colours and so on, but fundamentally it’s a pretty horrible place, it’s a horrible environment, it couldn’t be otherwise, I think, but we can come to more of that later.
I had always felt deeply uncomfortable about prisons. I hadn’t really faced the question in myself about why I felt so uncomfortable and I sometimes wonder whether it dates back to being a very small child, and being told that my father was going to collect Old Mick off the train, and bring him back to my home, where my mother would give him a meal and then my father would take him home. Old Mick, he was a bit of a poacher really, and who my father looked after to some extent, and he’d been in prison, that was what had happened, and not only was I told that this was happening, but I was told not to comment on his hair. I think those of us here know that there was a time when a man in prison had his hair shaved and I suppose my parents were worried that a small child would come up with an awkward question. I sometimes wonder if the conversations that went on in my home about what had been going on, were what lay at the bottom of my feeling of unease about prison. I found it very difficult to go round on the North London line because I knew I would go past Pentonville Prison, and I never liked looking at it and thinking of people in it.
I still don’t, but I suppose I now feel a little different about it. I was appointed by our local Quaker Area Meeting, (then Monthly Meeting), which embraces both Holloway Women’s Prison and Pentonville Men’s Prison, and churches within those areas can appoint what, in my time, were called ministers, but are now called chaplains, and I was appointed to go in, and duly did. There have been slight changes. The senior chaplain always was a Church of England chaplain, and prisons were run very much on militaristic lines, and the chaplain was all-powerful, so it was important to get on well with him. It wasn’t that easy to do anything. My predecessor, Jean Jenn, who many of you will know, had been going in for some years, and she accompanied me and started me off, and said “Well, what I do is this” and took me in and introduced me to some of the men she’d been visiting, and there are different sections to the prison, and there were some she knew quite well, which she went into regularly and got to know some of the men on them, and I did likewise for quite a while.
Then I started visiting the hospital wing quite regularly, and I won my spurs with one man who was in there, who was extremely difficult, but he would ask to see me, and I went regularly week by week, over such a long period that the Church of England chaplain said he admired my tenacity to keep going. But in the course of all this, you have to be let in, you have to be approved and all the rest of it, and everywhere there are doors, and all the doors are locked, so you need keys, and there’s lots of clanking, and all the bars that you see in movies and so on, it’s really an uncomfortable environment, and inevitably in any environment people look for power and you could say, oh well of course all the prison officers have got power, and they have, but what I was impressed with was how caring many of them were. There was one young man I met who was often on the shift when I visited, he’d always have someone, he’d say “look, if you can just talk to him, he needs to talk to someone”, he was really good to work with. At other times, I had no introduction, and I would just say hallo to people, and the men would always ask me “who are you, what do you do here?”, and I got all kinds of responses. If you had your eyes open and you’d worked around in the world, you’d know people who were pretty hard and tough, There was one man who undoubtedly was, and I recognised that he was the boss on that landing, there wasn’t any doubt about it, and he came up to me one day and checked me out and after that every time I passed through that landing I would say hallo to him, and we got on quite well over the months. It finished up with him taking me into his cell, and he showed me the pictures of his family, his wife and children.
I never wanted to know why people were in prison, it didn’t seem it was anything to do with me, unless they wanted to talk about it, but he did indicate one day, when he said “Well, I don’t think he died”. He was very clever, because Pentonville does not hold lifers, and he was a lifer, and he had managed to be in Pentonville and he also managed to ring his family every evening and speak to his children before they went to bed, and so on. There are some people who defeat the system, and he seemed to be defeating it. But on the other hand, all I can say is if I met him on the street, or anywhere today, I’d be pleased to talk to him. There was a sense in which we met as two ordinary people meeting, and we made some kind of friendship. He spoke of his wife as a real diamond, and I felt that his family were being as cared for by him as they could be, and that was one thing I found terribly disturbing. Just look at the figures of the number of children who are separated and where one parent goes into prison, the numbers of families who are then disrupted and don’t get back together again, but that’s all another matter.
I often found another thing that disturbed me was the number of older men in the prison. I felt over and over again it wasn’t going to come to much good to put some of those men in prison. Certainly one man who was in there when I first went, who’d been in for a comparatively short time, his local pub had a welcome home for him and the whole village turned out to welcome him home - word got back!
We never think it’s someone we know, and on the whole I didn’t meet many people in prison who were the kind of people I was likely to meet in my ordinary life, except on one occasion when I met a man who had certainly been running quite a substantial business, and had in some way offended Customs & Excise. I don’t quite know what went on, but to his surprise and amazement he found himself in prison, and he was of course very distressed. I watched him try to cope with the prison regime, but he was going to survive only by the help of the other men in the prison. There are all kinds of things, like when you can have a shower and when you can’t, and when you can do this and when you can do that, and he needed help at every stage, and he was getting it, from a man who in ordinary life would have been very low down on the rung. I don’t know what happened to him, of course.
And then one of the other sad things that happened was that I saw one man come in and out three times, and each time he was a bit more battered than he’d been the previous time, and he was in for one of those common causes, he was involved in drugs, and people like that are pretty vulnerable, because they usually live on quite lavish sums of money when they’re out in the community, and when they go out of prison and have very little money to re-establish themselves, they’re just sitting targets to be picked up, and I saw that process going on, and it seemed such a waste.
You have to deal with your own feelings in these matters, and recognise that you really don’t have any power to change the system. The power you have is to be there, as another human being, trying to use what for me is an essential Quaker principle, that we’re all equal before God, and that each person I met, I was meeting as a whole person, and I hoped they were meeting me as a whole person, and we could exchange things and talk about why I was there. I was challenged one day in a way I didn’t realise until later, but often there’d be a group of people talking, and once a man interrupted me and said, “what do you feel when you go out of here?”, and I said “I often walk out and I’m seething and I’m angry and if I could I’d be punching the air, I’m so angry with this system”, or words to this effect, and there was a sudden silence, and I realised that what he was getting at was: you’re a do-gooder, so you feel good having been to prison and talked to us and gone out, and I didn’t realise that until I was walking out that day myself, and my answer had totally taken the wind out of his sails.
But you’re supposed to be there in a sense about spiritual matters also, and when I introduced myself, I’d say “I’ll talk about my religion, about belief, about God, about anything, but, how are you today?”, so I left it open for people to raise that kind of issue. Sometimes people wanted to, and they often wanted to know what Quakers were, and most of the people had never heard of Quakers, didn’t know what Quakers were, so in some ways in was easy to talk about Quakers.
The stress that some people go through when they go into prison is awful, and on one occasion when I went into the hospital, there was a big, good-looking, tall, dark man, very distressed, crying, and another man said to me “you must see if you can do something for him”, which meant they’d been trying, and this was the third day and he’d been in tears throughout the time he’d come in, and I sat down next to him, and we started talking, and he told me how he’d come to be in there. He was in the hospital because they were keeping a close watch on him, they were worried about suicide, and suddenly in the midst of his tears he said “do you believe me?” and I said “of course, yes”, and that was all he needed, he just needed someone to believe him. He’d got into trouble with his neighbour over something, and there’d been fisticuffs, and he’d bitten the man’s ear. It turned out that culturally for him this was not a dreadful thing, but of course for us biting is one of the things that is abhorrent and the judge hadn’t liked it at all, but in his culture it wasn’t such a dreadful thing, but there were good outcomes. He was a Muslim, and very soon after that, they had an imam appointed to the prison, which was really necessary because he could have Friday prayers, and things like that. The imam would collect the men up, and this man was then embraced by his own religious group and he totally forgot about the distress he’d been in, and I think forgot about who I was, which didn’t matter, but just was one of those great lessons of life: that we need someone to believe in us and that was all he needed, and all those people in the prison hospital - which, I must say, is a bit of a stretch of imagination to call it a hospital, but that’s what it’s called, and they’re freer there than anywhere else - they’d listened to him, but none of them had thought to impress on him that they believed him, and probably in their terms they all pitched stories and so on, but that was what he needed, someone to say “yes” to his “do you believe in me?”. His employer was wonderful, and came and said he’d have a job for him when he came out, and was doing all he could to support him and look after him. He was Turkish and a Kurd, and obviously a hard-working man and it was a disaster for someone like him to come in. He was sending money home to his family, he’d had a brother who’d disappeared and all those horrible things in his background, he felt it was a great shame on his family, but I think in time he overcame all that.
But those are the dramatic things you can talk about, mostly it’s going in and finding there’s what they call a lock-down and you can’t go in, or going in and there’s an alarm and everything’s locked down and you have to go out, or they’re short of staff or this and that, and prisons have a timetable of their own, they just work according to themselves, it doesn’t work like anywhere outside, and where I’d always worked very strictly to time, you had to learn to work with the flow.
I was never able to do what I should have liked to be able to do which was to start a Meeting for Worship in the prison, but the Quaker chaplain who took over from me was able to. The Church of England chaplain had another prison to look after, and was rather busy, so it freed things up a little, and John was able to start a Meeting for Worship, which they hold every Thursday in the prison now. The churches are quite active in prisons. They’re quite an important part of the prison, and their carol service at Christmas is always a lot of fun, and then the officer in charge of the prison, he had a wonderful voice and would always sing, and of course you can imagine the men gave him a great hand, but he had a great deal of time for Quakers, so he smoothed our paths. When I first went in, they said ”you should have a key so you can go through the doors”, but 3 or 4 years later when I finished I still hadn’t got the key. It wasn’t that anyone had said no, it just hadn’t gone through all the official channels, but that meant that when you moved from one wing or another, you had to wait for an officer passing through to open the gate for you, which in some ways wasn’t bad as it gave you the opportunity to talk with them. I remember one officer one evening who asked me into their tea room to have a cup of tea and really wanted to talk to someone. He spent a long while with me that night, and I didn’t see any of the men on the wing because I spent a lot of time talking with him.
So sometimes I think you’re there, you’re someone from outside with a listening ear, but none of that really reconciles my unease about prisons, and echoing what I said in the introduction, I do think we need to think very carefully about the way in which legislation seems only to see one way of dealing with people who don’t conform, which is to lock them up. W e have more than sufficient evidence to show that, particularly with young people, going into prison, only leads to a return to prison later, it’s not a corrective, it doesn’t change people’s ways, and the attempts people have made to find other ways of dealing with - I don’t want to say wrongdoers but people who are not conforming - are tinkering around the edges. We’re locking up more and more people, at great expense, and I do think there must be room to do something very different; I don’t have anything specific to offer any more than any of you, but that’s something we could all talk about later. I’ve been thinking about this talk, and for a variety of reasons I’ve been rereading the early books of the Bible and I’ve been reflecting, you get all kinds of instructions about how to live, and there have always been people who have offended grossly against society, and early on if someone killed someone else, you put them to death, and so on. That was a nomadic, early peoples’ way of dealing with wrongdoers. We’ve moved quite a long way since then, but what we seem to have done is to have acquired a whole list of things that can be seen as doing wrong and need to be punished, and some of them I think we could question, and we could question our ways of dealing with people, and trying to reform them in the best ways we could. Having been a teacher, one knows there’s always a naughty one in the class, for you, but maybe not for the next teacher. As a group, we’re probably not among the offenders of our society, unless we decide not to pay our military taxes, as Quakers, but I think we all need to ask ourselves what directions we want our society to go in, and how we want to get there, and particularly how we want to treat our fellow citizens, and that doesn’t seem a very happy note to end on.