HMP Grendon: What is easier?

We light a fire and hunker down with a houseful of children and friends. Last trip out before Snow closed in was the annual Carol Service at HMP Grendon. This is the only UK Psychiatric prison, founded in 1962. The service was devised by Keith Salter, Co-ordinating chaplain, and led by Major Bert Roper of the Salvation Army. It was good to catch up personally with one or two prisoners I remember from two years ago at this same event.

Each of its six wings operates as a therapeutic community, under competent psychiatric supervision. This is a specialised approach that wouldn’t work for every prisoner, and it has its misses as well as hits, but the fact is it often actually sorts out people’s lives to go straight. Grendon 2-year reoffending rates are dramatically lower than usual for English prisons — as much as ten times lower. Fewer criminals, less crime suits me and, you might think, when you consider the terrible personal impact of crime on innocent peoples’ lives, everyone else. But you’d be wrong. Grendon’s work can be vulnerable to misunderstanding and frustrating limitations:

1. Decent people feel naturally disgusted and angry about serious crime — punishment is very much one reason people are, rightly, deprived of their liberty in prison. But after we have all got angry, it’s time to get even, and to protect ourselves for the future. Grendon’s therapeutic approach can be caricatured by ignorant journalists as a soft option for hard people. Actually most inmates find it considerably harder work, some would say a fitter punishment, to have to confront and work through the roots of their wrongdoing and grow up, than just become designer criminals who won’t take responsibility for behaviour or attitudes. Civil Servants and politicians, however, don’t always have the moral courage to stand up to some of the more ignorant and strident media voices — result = more criminals and higher crime.
   
   
2. Experience of prisons, on and off, over twenty years has shown me that when times are financially tight resources tend to go into security, ideologically driven restructuring, and media stunts. Ther’s little left for the labour intensive régimes that dedicated professionals use to turn criminals straight. There are Nordic societies where they have almost abolished conventional imprisonment, with crime rates a tiny fraction of ours in the UK — but until we have the wit and courage to be more pragmatic in our response to crime, it’s porridge for us all, in a way...

h/t Art collected by the Koestler Trust

Lifers Carols: Christmas begins here

One of the most significant party of Christmas for me is the Lifers Carol Service at Aylesbury Gaol. It’s now a Young Offenders Institution, where all male young offenders in the country serving life sentences are imprisoned. According to the book of words,

The prison was opened as a county gaol in 1847 and served as such until 1890 when it became a women's prison. Two new wings were added in 1902 serving initially as an Inebriates Centre and in the 1930s as a girls' borstal. In 1959, the prison was converted to house adult male prisoners and in 1961, it changed again to house young male offenders aged between 17 and 21. In 1989, Aylesbury was designated as a long term young offender institution. Aylesbury holds the longest sentenced young adult males in the English prison system.

At Christmas, the chaplaincy organises a carol service to which lifers’ families are invited. They are able to give a small present provided by the Institution, whilst prisoners give a Christmas candle to their families, to remember them at home with everyone else at Christmas.

Image by R P Marks via Flickr

Families are brought in from the visits area, and then inmates. Fr John Fleming, RC chaplain, expertly planned and led the service. From the front I couldn’t miss an unforgettable rush of emotion as people were reunited in this context — tears, laughter, one or two whoops of joy, even, and two people dancing in silly little circles. After the service there is some socialising time afterwards, when it's very important if you're an extraneous visitor not to get in the way — but a welcome opportunity to touch base with chaplains, volunteers and staff.

Everybody puts themselves out to make this rather extraordinary hour and a half happen. Supervision of such an event requires real professionalism in depth, in that it has to feel generally light and personal, but, of course with security and safety routines to be maintained for the good of all. Staff were fabulous, and the whole evening good humoured, passionate and engaged, with, sounding like a wine writer, undertones of comfort and joy. How strange it should take the birth of a baby 2,000 years ago to trigger such an encounter ...