In 1991 or 1992 I was asked to cover for a writer who’d been teaching creative writing in HMP Maze, or Long Kesh if you prefer, and who had had to leave suddenly. It was a six-week contract.
Long story short, that six-week stint turned in to a permanent part-time job and I have been teaching prisoners in Northern Ireland’s prisons ever since and I am still doing so, under the aegis of the Prison Arts Foundation charity. My work was and continues to be incredibly varied: I help and have helped with creative writing (plays, novels, poems, memoir, the works) but in addition I’ve helped with the writing of petitions, Open University essays, letters to the Secretary of State and personal statements for Life Sentence and Parole Commissioners. I’ve run several book clubs too.
In my life (I’m now 61) I have been the recipient of many kinds of good fortune but the prison work and the encounters that I have had (with prison staff as well as prisoners) as a result of that work is the experience that has most changed me as well as being the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
In summary, it’s made me more radical, more sceptical (of good intentions), more tolerant of human folly and possibly even slightly nicer. It’s also enriched me – immeasurably.
I’m a writer, a storyteller and the tale, the “what happened”, is my principal obsession. I want, I crave narrative and in a jail, unlike elsewhere in modern neo-liberal culture, narrative is everywhere. Jails teem with stories and to work in a place, a jail, where stories are everywhere, was and is an incredible gift.
And then, on top of the wealth of narrative, there was and is the content of that narrative. I am middle class and privileged. Most of those that I meet and met in jail did not come from the background I came from and had not lived the kind of life I had lived. They had lived a rather different kind of life: one where things had gone wrong and the accumulation of things going wrong was what had led to them coming to prison.
Imprisonment, as I learnt from the life stories I was told (and readers need to remember that prisons, contrary to what they would like to think, are places of searing honesty and not hotbeds of dissembling and rhetorical dishonesty, so these were true stories I’m talking about here), is never simply a consequence of badness or criminality or malfeasance.
Imprisonment, on the contrary, is always the consequence of a cascade of catastrophic events, many or even most of which have nothing to do with badness or criminality or malfeasance, and everything to do with, for example (and this list is provisional), the rupturing of attachment to the mother, poverty, family dysfunction, poor housing, alcohol, bad school experiences, sectarianism and terrible luck.
Crime, as I discovered (and I’m talking all kinds, the gamut from fine defaulting to murder and everything in between) is invariably what comes at the end of the long list of calamities and is invariably, when you look at the long list of calamities, the product of those calamities. Without the calamities – no crime.
Yes, yes, I know: we can choose not to do wrong, just as we can choose to do wrong. Yes, absolutely: we all have free choice only we forget at our peril that the distribution of free choice in modern society is not equal. Some of us (people like me) have more free choice than others (like many of those I met when I was teaching in the Maze and Maghaberry); yes, I know this goes against a principal piety of modern neo-liberal culture, which would have us believe we are all morally equivalent, but there we are, I am going against this nostrum and saying, baldly, it isn’t true. It’s a lie. As I discovered, or, as I would prefer to put it, as I was taught by the prisoners who told me about their lives, the amount of free choice you have varies according to your economic and social status. The people who go to prison have less free choice, much less free choice, than people like me.
Readers who are sceptical of this opinion may at this stage be wondering whether I am not a victim of an insidious form of Stockholm Syndrome: I have spent so long in jail they could be forgiven for thinking that I have started to identify with the specious, warped world views of the criminal and consequently I have lost touch with our accepted norms.
Well, okay, but I still have a strong sense of right and wrong: I still understand and accept that prisons are part of our social practice (though I’d very much like to see them reformed): and I can even see that under certain circumstances and in the histories of some of the men I have taught that imprisonment has been good, meaning the education they received while imprisoned has been helpful.
But the position I have reached is that I believe all that I have stated here about the efficacy of imprisonment (if it involves education it can work) and simultaneously I have come to see or believe very emphatically that our certainty that crime alone is what puts a man or occasionally a woman in jail is nonsense. That doesn’t sound like new variant Stockholm Syndrome to me.
Inevitably, my experience of prison has produced fiction, a collection of stories called The Wing Orderly’s Tales, which has just been published by New Island: these stories, are narrated by an orderly, Harold “Chalky” Chalkman, the guy who cleans the toilets, buffs the landing, dishes out the dinners and makes up the welcome packs for the new prisoners. He’s hard, violent, devious, bookish, intelligent and beady: but he’s also a sentient, thinking, feeling human being (as all prisoners are) with his own, albeit left-field ideas about right and wrong and what constitutes the right way to live and the wrong way to live.
He has had a calamitous life (though the stories, which are all set inside the fictional prison of HMP Loanend, focus exclusively on him as he operates on the wing rather than on his back story) and what the stories describe is his struggle to lead a good life, or at least a good enough life on the wings. Prisoners, as I try to show through these stories, are just like us – they are intensely moral beings. But then of course they are, they’re humans, just like us.
[ The Wing Orderly’s Tales is published by New Island, at €9.95Opens in new window ]
