#9 POV: You Work in a Prison
This week we hear about a justice worker's thoughts on prisons and the people who live in them 🕊.
Hello dear friends,
I hope you’re having a top notch Tuesday.
This week’s edition of SIL is written in partnership with someone who works in the prison system.
Everything written here is the real experience of someone who spends time in prisons and with the people who live in them.
It’s beautiful and sad and really good.
Love Belle X
PS. In the interest of privacy, all names have been changed.
If you ask my mother what kind of teenager I was, boy, would she paint you a picture. In fact, she’d love nothing more.
Her favourite story to tell is the time I unapologetically lit a cigarette in the back of her Volvo on the way to school. Whether this story is true or not, it really doesn’t matter.
Mum swears by it, I can’t remember it.
Either way, as a fully grown adult, I cringe at my lame attempts to be controversial as a teenager. I was such a cliché, but I truly thought my family had subjected me to a level of dysfunction that gave me every reason to be a little shit. At the end of the day though, I was adored, apparently unconditionally. The enormous black letters spelling out SLIP KNOT that I painted on my bedroom wall were proof of that.
My mother literally dragged me to every day of year 12 because she knew life would be that little bit easier for me if I got that piece of paper. She played Beethoven in the car to stimulate my brain. My dad gave me some hard and fast boundaries because he loves me so much and I bloody needed them. And I realised that everyone I had grown up around, really, was relatively sheltered. Even my badass, ex-boyfriend Joey, who burnt down a public toilet and got expelled from not one, but two high schools for storing weed in old glue sticks, was loved by his wacky parents. It’s that love, as misguided, annoying, as vibe kill-y as it may be, that holds you up.
I was 24 years old when I visited a real-life prison for the first time. The building was squat and grey. I remember standing in the car park out the front with Ray, my eccentric Vietnam Veteran placement supervisor, looking up at the gates and thinking about how it seemed just like the movies.
Ray gingerly patted me on the shoulder in what was supposed to be a gesture of comfort, ‘now, this kid’s a real piece of work. Don’t believe a word he says’.
The kid he was talking about was Tom, a 17-year-old prisoner and my first ever client as part of my Diploma of Community Services.
As we walked towards the gates of the prison, Ray continued to ramble on about how I’d need to be tough, careful, smart. But at this point I wasn’t really listening, because holy shit, I was in a fucking prison.
We were ushered into a visiting area, where everything was plastic and dull. Rubbed and scratched and faded by years of other people. It felt sad in there.
A few minutes later, Tom was brought to our table by a pot-bellied man in uniform. He smiled broadly and shook my hand firmly, it was warm. There was no murderous gaze, no inappropriate statements, no attempts to ensnare me into an escape attempt. He was just a kid. Like me.
A few weeks later, Tom got out of prison and over the next few months we did everything together. We eventually found him a place to live (hard), went shopping at Kmart and bought him a whole bunch of those $3 T shirts, we navigated the latest changes to the KFC menu (also surprisingly hard), fought with Telstra about his phone credit, fought with Centrelink about his Youth Allowance, opened a bank account and drove to his weekly drug and alcohol appointments.
Most of the time, I was completely unsupervised in my work, despite only being a student. But hey, that’s the fast and loose nature of the public service (despite what they’d like you to think).
Here was this kid, a ‘notorious criminal’, babysitting me. I was teaching him sweet fuck all, while he was teaching me everything. And he did it all with humour and kindness.
I remember one time we pulled over so that I could run into one of those old school lolly shoppes, I leapt out of the car like a kid and raced in, not thinking about anything but a packet of pretzel M&Ms. When I got back to the car Tom was laughing and shaking his head, ‘you realise what you just did?’
I winced. Â
‘You just left a criminal alone in your car with your keys, wallet and phone.’
Eventually, I started to notice the little red needle marks multiplying in the crook of his arm, the bags under his eyes, the thick shine of grease in his dark hair.
With no hope of a job, never quite enough cash and no one looking out for him, I knew he was getting the warmth he needed from drugs and bad people. I watched as he slowly became thinner and harder to find each day. But I believed so much in him, in his warmth and kindness and his scrappy resilience and every time I told him that, I could see it made him believe in those things too.
Yeah, Tom had done some pretty bad things, but he didn’t have anyone looking out for him, ever. His mum wasn’t making him a wholesome breakfast every day of year 12, she wasn’t playing him classical music to stimulate his brain. Instead, she’d neglected him and then left him entirely. He went to prison for the first time when he was just 12 years old. When you think about it, the system raised him and spoiler alert, it did a pretty shit job.
So, for Tom, everything was hard and lonely. There was no safety net for him to fall in when he fucked up. There was just prison and police and public servants like me. He couldn’t even get his court ordered guardian, Ray, to organise a place for him to stay when he got out. I think the few months we spent together may have been the first time he ever felt what it was like to have someone really care. I cared about what he did, where he went, who he saw, what he was aiming for. However clumsily.
After 3 months, my placement ended and it was time for me to leave Tom, to hand him back to Ray, who was jaded and fatigued.
Saying goodbye to Tom was so hard. I can’t put into words how hard it was. I was leaving him with people who didn’t give a shit and had given up on him a long time ago.
He went back to prison less than a week after I finished my placement and he’s still there today.
That was eight years ago. Since then, I’ve worked in the justice field with children, young people and now adults. I’ve learnt in that time that a vast majority of people in prison are not serial killers, or rapists or child abusers. They’re people, who’ve had truly shit things happen in their lives, a lot of the time without any love or support to help them through. Most of us can think of the worst things to happen to us, and its bad, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve had help, we’ve had love. And because of that, we’re the lucky ones.
Every Wednesday, I take something I baked at home into the prison and hand it out amongst my group participants. I’m not a very good baker, but they love it. They love that it’s not prison food and they love that I give enough of a shit to bake for them. At the end of each session, one of my participants Baz, will look over at me with a sly grin and asks, ‘oi, what are you gonna do with the rest of those?’ We do this dance every week. I tell him ‘I guess not much’, and he’ll pull his hat off and throw them in, beaming.
Baz tells me every week how good I am to them. He hasn’t had many people be good to him, he was taken from his country a long time ago, they put him with a white family that abused him so horrifically and now he’s spent most of his adult life in prison – over and over again for petty things. He gets scared of being outside because he doesn’t have anywhere to go out here.  I hear stories like this all the time.
Tom is in his mid-twenties now, he’s angry and tough. He spends a lot of time in the behavioural units of the prison. We’ve been writing each other letters ever since we met, I’ve got a box of them under my bed and sometimes I read a couple. Reading these letters makes me so fucking sad, to see how being in our prison system hasn’t made him better but actually, worse.
He was a kid, a complicated sweet kid and now he’s an angry man.
Recently, in his awkward scrawly handwriting, he confessed to feeling safe in prison because he understands how it works. It’s all he knows. There’s a hierarchy and he’s worked his way to the top. I don’t know what to say to that, other than I still believe in him and I always will.
I wish you all got to see what I see at work. The people I get to work with are funny, and so kind and decent.
And I guess what I really want to say is, in the end these people are coming back to us, you and me. Pretty much everyone gets paroled eventually. Even Tom. And when they do, will they have been made whole again? Or will they be even more broken than before?
So good Belle. I'm really enjoying your writing - thank you for sharing it with the world :)
Powerful and profound. Thanks so much for publishing this story Belle. I hope it inspires all of us to live with more compassion and empathy.