30/04/2025
WWO
By Gemma Waller
What do you think prison is like?
This is the question most people think when they have a first-time custodial sentence hanging over them. What is it like? How will I survive? Perhaps they have reruns of a thousand prison films running through their mind. The reality is raw, immediate, and sometimes brutal. The experience clings to you like the strongest of scents, never to be washed off. It has a sensory world all of its own, one that takes time to make sense.
My first time working in a prison I was violently sick. It was projectile, the type of vomit that appears from nowhere, purely reactionary. My body processed the environment before my rational mind could. I was talking to a prisoner at the time, he was desperately trying to communicate that he didn’t deserve to be there, and he wasn’t like the rest. My body made me bolt and I could manage no more than a shoddy, ‘Excuse me’ as my teeth held back the deluge. I’m grateful to this day that the toilet wasn’t locked.
When I re-entered the room, filled with 20 men, I caught sight of the man I had been talking to, his sadness was visible, he had experienced me as someone who hadn’t wanted to see him or hear him. Probably not for the first time, he had been missed. It was my first lesson in a prison setting; people can feel like they get missed, things aren’t seen or heard, and everything is reactionary and happens as quick as my attack of vomitus.
For the next 4 years, I would go into prisons and work with various men in different settings and for different purposes. On my first draft of this article, I referred to the men as customers and then realised the contention this could be met with. Semantics in a prison setting are important. It may seem a strange word, but those men had to buy into me to trust me, to allow themselves to sit with me, that makes them, to my mind, customers. Why did I ultimately remove the word customer? For one, I am aware of the impact of this wording on survivors of crimes or family members of victims. They must always play a central role in the work. But essentially, because customers have choice. For these men, there is no choice. They serve the sentence they are given. It explains the essence of how I view working in the justice system. If you view it through one lens, for example – offender work – you miss the human behind the offence. You miss the nuances, the ability to escape that label and, therefore, the life. I would propose that by considering the work kaleidoscopically, we offer a greater opportunity for rehabilitation and progression.
However, challenges exist with this approach. What am I referring to when I say kaleidoscope? For me, the word encapsulates the idea that in the justice system it is easy to make assumptions, judgements and considerations based on an individual’s paperwork or demographic. This doesn’t just happen with offenders; it happens with victims of crime as well. The sexual violence arena is full of assumptive claims which can and do affect how someone is treated.
In prison, as I mentioned earlier, semantics are everything. People can feel like they are defined by their crime or their behaviours such as substance misuse or attitude to prison life. For example, a gentleman I worked with who was incredibly astute and eloquent asked me to guess why he was in. I assumed it would be some kind of fraud or laundering. How wrong I was. He was in for a Section 18 (violent offence) because of his drug addiction. It was this man, among others, who inspired my approach to prison work. If you can remember those wonderful kaleidoscope toys you would get from Santa as a child, you would turn the barrel, hold it to your eye and as you turned, colours would change and shapes appear and develop into new shapes, every turn created change and was never the same. Consider each individual like this. Life can be changed at a computer click in prison, at a phone call, as a cell change. People end up offending for a multitude of reasons and it isn’t always because they come from a deprived background or have a habit. Just like looking into a kaleidoscope, ask yourself, ‘What am I seeing?’
Unconscious bias – what has happened in your life?
Before you look to start working in this environment and with people who have offended, think about what your personal feelings are on this subject. How do you feel when you see a news article about a drug dealer being sent down for 10+ years? Are your insides clapping the sentencing judge? Are you looking at the picture and thinking ‘disgrace’? Or are you scrolling down voyeuristically for the grim details of a murder sentence? When a rapist is convicted, is your inner monologue wishing that they get their comeuppance on the wing?
So many of these are natural responses and we all judge, it’s part of our survival instinct, how we live. But, when we do this work, we must be able to bracket these feelings and search for the empathy for the human in front of us. Set the crime aside for a minute, move the kaleidoscope and look for the other shapes and colours that make up these individuals you are working with. You might be the only person that ever does or has.
In my previous role as a secondary school teacher, I would read screeds of emails or sit in meetings where kids were labelled as trouble before they came through the doors: in the words of Taylor Swift, ‘I knew you were trouble when you walked in’. What does that do to a child? What does that do to the adult they become? Think about this deeply because the chances are, these will be your customers.
Think about your life experiences. Are there any crimes that you struggle with specifically or traumatise you in terms of your own lived experience? What has been your experience of justice and criminality? I struggle occasionally to listen to acts of theft because when I was 10 years old, my birthday Nike trainers were stolen from a changing room. I can still vividly remember the feeling of hurt that someone had taken something that was mine, the palpable feeling of injustice. This seems like a minor example but if that can rankle me, what is it to sit with someone with an index offence of domestic abuse, or sexual violence? I remember the first time I worked with a man who told me about the murder he had committed. I couldn’t stop looking at his hands. He had a skull tattooed on his right fist. I imagined that right fist and how in a clashing of knuckle on bone, it had ended a life. Utterly catastrophic. I have no doubt the man saw me looking, probably something he did himself regularly in devastating disbelief.
Empathy not collusion
How do you approach a person with empathy whilst not colluding with what they have done? This is, without doubt, one of the hardest things to work with. Occasionally in work I can be speaking to one man, and someone might say, ‘Do you know what he is in for?’ Sometimes I will know, sometimes I won’t. If a person chooses to disclose their crime to me, I listen with empathy but offer no words of understanding around the criminal act itself. I can listen and hear how life circumstances may have contributed to cataclysmic events that created the crime, but I also know there are victims/survivors at the centre, that includes the perpetrator who is a victim and survivor of themselves. There is a myriad of reasons why people offend and we, as professionals, need to see that. However, helping an offender explore the multiple perspectives on their crime in a safe and careful held way is a key tenant of working from a rehabilitation approach.
How are you seen? Who are you to them?
In my view, as a female working in a male estate, things are a little more challenging. I am always conscious about where I work and with the individuals I am working with. Being aware of the system itself and how it can view females. Everything in a prison is information, just like the kaleidoscope, things can seem different from different perspectives. Things can be heard differently and received differently. The customers are varied, lived experiences are varied, as is how I as a female am perceived. Same with male staff members. Think about it in this way, prison is survival. For some, it is safer than being on the out. For some, it is a terrifying life experience that they didn’t expect, and for others, it was an inevitability, a rite of passage. All these presentations will cross your path, knowing where you stand in terms of that individual’s view of the world can be a helpful exercise. Again, the overall message is don’t view this work as static, it is dynamic and needs pragmatism and the ability to build rapport in a moving echo chamber. Always ask yourself, ‘Why?’. A good example is when you go into a room with white pieces of paper. For some prisoners, this isn’t daunting but for others, they have spent their lives avoiding people with white bits of paper who take things away from them.
Who are you working with?
What do they need?
How does that fit within the system requirements?
For me, these three areas are a small but vital part of working within the criminal justice system. Hear the voices, see the faces, and think about your own verbal and non-verbal feedback. If I could go back to that first time, how would I change my behaviour? I would come out of the toilet and openly apologise to the guy and explain it wasn’t him but that clearly, I had a bug. He didn’t make me sick and nor did his crime.
The most significant piece of advice I have ever been given was from a prisoner: ‘Prisons aren’t full of bad people, just people who have done bad things.’ Now, why would I ignore a lesson from a man who had been doing time since the age of 15 and was now 35 years old. Hear it, notice it, and work with the individual.
At the start of this article, I asked what you thought prison might be like. Now I want you to consider the fact that, ultimately, it will never be the same experience as the individual who sits on the court transport because the difference is that you have the keys, and you get to leave.
About the author
Gemma Waller is a freelance writer and therapist. She has worked in male estate prisons in the Northeast since 2021 through various organisations.