‘The second sentence’

‘The second sentence’

By: Ben Gunn - HMP Shepton Mallet

Lifer Ben Gunn believes the families of prisoners get a raw deal and are often viewed with suspicion and benign indifference.

Imprisonment in the UK just doesn't affect in excess of 80,000 inmates. I realise this is a statement of the glaringly obvious, yet the hundreds of thousands of people that comprise our families and friends are also dragged into the mess that we created. But whilst prisoners get a lot of attention, a lot of column inches, those serving 'the second sentence' seem to get little or no public recognition whatsoever.

Perhaps this reflects the ambiguity that our families are viewed with. This is brought into focus by the way they are treated when they visit - the screws know that they are not criminals, they are members of the public, and yet there is a broad attitude that merely being associated with us cons places them on very uncertain moral ground. It's as if criminality is infectious, and our friends and families are contaminated. This puts society in an awkward position; should they sympathise and support, or should they condemn? In a fit of paralysing indecision, the default state seems to be to opt for wilfully ignoring them instead.

Of course, the prison service has policies and statements of aspiration relating to families. These are not born out of any sense of decency or humanity you understand, they reflect the known truth that those of us released into settled home circumstances are far less likely to re-offend. It's in society’s interests to try to mitigate the worst effects of imprisonment on our relationships.

Even in the face of this self-interest, society just can't bring itself to deliver. The practical effects of prison service policies have seen the number of visitors drop by half just when the prison population has been doubling. That is a result of either very careful planning, or gross stupidity on a scale that is remarkable even for prison service managers. Regardless of the hype, the best our families can hope for from society and the State is benign indifference - and that tends to be the best they ever get.

Actually, it’s usually worse. Just like cons, families also have a clutter of charities that exist to support them and lobby policy makers. And just like the penal reform charities, there can be problems with this - the tendency to ignore and marginalise the very people they claim to represent. Our families, like ourselves, get to play a very marginal role in the operations of these charities. The result is a mass of resentment and isolation.

Just like prisoners, our families are treated with suspicion and assumed to be a collection of incapable, wayward halfwits. They are another group who is "done to" rather than "done with", viewed as clients rather than capable individuals. This attitude is expected from the prison service, but it shouldn't be expected from families’ charity groups. What a mess to find ourselves in. It needn’t be this way, and it shouldn’t be allowed to continue.

Families could assert themselves in precise ways, all based on the solid ground that happy families lead to cuts in future offending. Charities that deal with families could be asked the simple question: how many of their employees have a relative inside? I'd guess that number is very, very low. They could start changing that situation by advertising jobs in Inside Time, where we could see potential matches with our families and encourage them to apply.

There are some remarkably capable people amongst our families and there should be no reason why families’ charities are not directed, run and operated by those with a direct stake in the business. As it stands, these operations function like Victorian charities - the great and the good making occasional tours of the estates to dispense tea and sympathy to the unfortunates. If necessary, families themselves could gird their loins and begin a new charity, one that gives them a direct voice. I'd like to see some Governor or Minister face down that collective of disgruntled wives and mothers! Women on a mission are a force to be heard.

As each Governor has a Resettlement Pathway (who comes up with this nonsense?), families should drop the Governor a line and ask what involvement families have in this? Don't let him fob you off with waffle about a visiting allowance that was set 40 years ago; press for invites to meetings and forums. If there isn't a resettlement forum, ask why not? And with a foot through the door, awkward questions about the lack of support for relationships can be raised. Remember, having a settled home to return to is worth a thousand dodgy education certificates in the re-offending stakes, even if the nick doesn't like to face that truth.

And then there is involvement in Sentence Planning. Not many people realise that you can have a member of family or a friend at that conflab, and people who have one tell me that having an 'outsider' at the table tends to make the staff cut out a fair bit of their crap.

Families deserve to be involved in the course of our sentence, and we owe them a place in the decisions we make as to how we serve our sentence. And while families can develop new ways to make their voices heard, we shouldn't take them for granted. When we reappear out of the gate it's not unreasonable for them to expect that we have spent our time sorting ourselves out and to be ready to offer them the quality of life they deserve. This is especially true for partners with children.

And while families themselves can become more assertive, we can play our part. It is all too easy to fall into a dependency trap, expecting private cash and goodies on demand. Been there, done that, and it's like being treated like a kid again, only reinforcing the system's view of us as being incapable and dependent. Our families didn't ask for this burden and we could try harder to be supportive of them, as they are of us. I know this won't be a popular view amongst some of my peers, but there you go.

We could also be more assertive on our families’ behalf, chipping away at management for them to be more involved in our lives. We should challenge stupid, harmful restrictions such as the need to be enhanced to get extra or family day visits. Why do they need to be earned, exactly? It is all in the cause of reducing future offending; funny how we don't have to 'earn' a place on some psychology course. This inequality, this inconsistent vindictive stupidity, lies with us to challenge.

With our families and friends, our prison-affected community comprises hundreds of thousands of people, and if all those voices, all those votes and all that energy could be channeled; then at long last our families could take their rightful place in the public and political consciousness.