Paul’s Letter from Prison
Recently Anna told me that she would be writing a Good Friday service and that part of what she intends to do is offer our brothers and sisters in the congregation testimonies from some of those who are incarcerated within the prison system.
As a serving prisoner myself I have written a short piece about myself. I also offered to ask a few of my friends to do the same. Within a couple of days I sent my own and my friends’ writing to Anna.
Since then Anna has kept me up to date with the work she is doing for the Good Friday service. It means a lot to her. It means a lot to me too that she has been given the opportunity to voice the thoughts and feelings that she experiences about an issue that she feels so passionately about.
Today I received a tape in the post, a recording of Ray’s sermon where he spoke about the recently executed Stan ‘Tookie’ Williams. I was moved by Ray’s words and the way he delivered them, from his heart. I was also moved by Ray’s description of his mother’s last days and the way Ray was able to be both a son and priest to his dying mother.
I met Ray a few years ago, when he came to visit me in HMP Whitemoor, a maximum security prison where I was being held. Meeting him demolished any preconceived ideas that I had about ‘men of the cloth’. I found Ray to be funny, intelligent and completely down to earth and since then Anna has mentioned him often.
I suspect that Ray is not comfortable with being praised for the acts of love, humanity and brotherhood that he extends to others. I imagine that for Ray he is simply trying to live God’s way. So I will say no more, other than to say, Ray, you are much loved.
Hearing the tape of Ray’s sermon I became inspired to write something more on the subject of imprisonment and oppression.
Firstly I want to tell you a little about myself. In October 1996 I was involved in a robbery that resulted in the death of an elderly man. My brother and I were tried for murder. We were both sentenced to life imprisonment.
Since then I have been in many places of darkness. I have tortured myself with guilt and self-hatred for the pain that I have inflicted on others. For a long period of time I was lost on the threshold of life and death, consumed with thoughts of suicide.
One day, six years ago I told Anna (who was then my drug counsellor in HMP Wakefield) about my thoughts of self- destruction. I saw the tears rolling down her cheeks and I was deeply moved. There I was in a maximum security jail being shown compassion for the first time in my life. For me, that was the day that I changed. It was a defining moment, the day that from the midst of darkness I saw some light.
Something that Anna said to me has always stayed with me. I was telling her over and over ‘I want to die’ and one day she just looked at me with so much compassion and love and said ‘Paul, maybe there are parts of you that do need to die.’ From then on I have been on a journey of truth, always questioning and examining and scrutinising my behaviour and my thought processes. I see this as a lifelong journey. When I look back I can see how far I have come and how much I have changed. I can now see myself as lovable, the old me is dying and from that death has come new life, still in its infancy but full of hope. That hope comes from the love that has been given to me and shown to me in so many ways. I have had to learn to love and to trust and to be open to love and offerings of peace. In doing so I have I have seen my self and the world in a new light. After much pain, suffering and emptiness I choose love.
Being where I am I am constantly reminded of the consequences of bad decisions. Like in the Pilgrim’s Progress there are temptations and paths that lead to misery and suffering and sometimes those paths are not clearly sign-posted.
I dream of a life where I don’t see and hear the things I see and hear daily. I live amongst people who are in the same dark place I was in for thirty years. I understand their anger and their rage. I empathize with their suffering. I am lucky. I have support. I have friends. I am loved and cared about. Many men in prison have nothing and have never had anything but what they snatched from others. Many men in prison are uneducated. They come from backgrounds of poverty and abuse and are simply living their lives treating others as they have been treated. How can you love others if you have always been hated? How can you be compassionate if you have only known cruelty?
Listening to Ray talk about Tookie Williams brought back strong feelings of sadness and anger that I have about the prison system and all oppressive regimes. Tookie Williams served 24 years in a tough prison with long periods spent in solitary confinement. He fought against his upbringing and his long-standing belief system to turn his back on the respect of his peer group and he risked reaching out to children in order to help them not to make the same mistakes he had made. In his own eyes he had redeemed himself but the American system, often racist, often cruel, had to exact its revenge.
My thoughts are: let us not pray for Tookie, he is already saved, let us pray for those like Arnold Schwarzenegger who chose to condemn rather than to forgive.
I feel strongly about the cruelty inflicted by those in power. I have spent years in the prison system, many of those years in the highest security jails. Myself and others deserve to be there for what we have done but until we have some visionary thinkers in the seats of power then incarceration will remain the only option for serious offenders. If you ask most long-term prisoners they will tell you that they deserved to lose their liberty, but what is less understood in this country is the fact that the prison sentence means so much more than a loss of liberty. Once in the prison system prisoners are subjected to a systematic abuse of their human rights. There is no privacy. There is a whole system run on control. Mail is censored, visits are monitored, and visitors are criminalised by virtue of their association with the inmate. Sniffer dogs are used on visitors and inmates. Searches are done routinely, daily, cells are searched and the contents left in disarray. Everywhere you go you are searched, counted, watched, reported upon and the prison decides what you can and cannot have and the quantity. They decide so much it dehumanises and desensitises you. They decide what behaviour modification courses you can do and if you refuse or disagree you are labelled and prevented from progressing towards release. Prisons are overrun with psychologists and psychiatrists who never write a favourable report for fear it may come back to haunt them if an inmate offends again.
A lot of prison officers are unprofessional, some are incompetent, and some are bullies who enjoy persecuting people who are weaker than them selves. Some smuggle in telephones, drugs and alcohol and sell them to inmates. These same officers put on report (punish and observe) inmates they catch breaking petty rules.
In a lot of prisons I have been in there are a high proportion of inmates suffering some kind of mental disorder. These are the men I feel most for. They are the most vulnerable, but the least cared for. I have met dozens of men who slash their arms and legs, screaming out for help only to be met with cold indifference or threats of punishment. The hospital and punishment blocks in these places are only different in terms of the uniform the prison staff are wearing.
Amongst all the cruelty I have seen acts of kindness and compassion by both staff and inmates but overall the attitude is one of ‘could not care less’. The cons know they are hated by the screws and see only the cruelty and abuse of power. The prison staff are the enemy. The prison staff know they are hated and only see the cons for the crimes they have committed and look upon them as scum. There is always a potential for violence and therefore the staff try to maintain the upper hand through aggression.
It is common for staff to turn cons against each other by spreading rumours or handing out favours which then stir up feelings of anger and jealousy.
Over the years I have developed my own way of surviving imprisonment. I will be a friend to those who want my friendship. I will help and support those that want support. I will respect those staff or inmates who deserve my respect but I will not compromise myself or my beliefs.
What I have learnt is that a lot of what I experience within the prison system frustrates and angers me but I have learnt to own my own feelings, without letting them impact on others’ lives. All I can do is try to understand more about what I can do to change myself. We cannot change anyone else, we can only change ourselves. It’s easy to go with the crowd and act as others act. But it is much tougher to stand apart and be counted for who you really are. But so much more rewarding and enriching.
Love brings us all closer as brothers and sisters, and in that love, God becomes visible.
Paul