Have you ever wondered what prisoners get up to all day? I thought I’d put pen to paper today to let you know how we “serve our time”.
I’d love to be able to tell you that there is loads of offender behaviour work happening. I’d genuinely love to describe lots of rooms with small groups of prisoners working with psychologists to address the factors that led to offending or maybe you’d expect me to outline amazing education sessions to look at literacy or numeracy development needs or maybe other employability issues. Certainly, before I came in here, I had expected that prisoners would be supported in to becoming physically healthier by making them exercise but I’m sad to say that I cannot honestly say that any of these things are happening.
Scandalously, the most common way that prisoners are “paying for their criminal activity” is watching rubbish on TV for hours and hours every day. The average prisoner I see does nothing at all. Diddly squat. Hee haw.
Most of us are locked in our cells for 23 hours every day and the only thing we’re given to occupy our time is a TV. Some of us are able to take responsibility for our own development and read books, listen to the radio ro write but most guys lack the skills to be able to do that.
You might expect the guards here to encourage some positive and productive way for time to be spent but the truth is that they really don’t care what we do. It’s disgraceful that there is so little positive action by staff in here and it feels that, as long as we’re not giing them hassle, they don’t care what we do.
The result of this is that people are committing horrific crimes, being sent to prison for a couple of years, spending their whole time either sleeping or watching “Bargain Hunt” and then being released back into the community with none of their crimogenic needs met. It’s really shocking. Some prisoners do have jobs but in the main they’re hardly meaningful.
One area that some people get really into is weight lifting/body building. I have to say that I think that any physical activity is a good thing and there is to much gluttony in here leading to serious obesity so it’s great that people get into the gym and work out.
How could this situation be improved? I really do think that staff have a responsibility to engage with prisoners and encourage participation in the opportunities that do exist in prisons because there are the chances to take responsibility and develop. We have time and lots of it so we need to be supported to switch off the TV, begin to read books, to capture our inner emotions by writing poetry or to maybe learn a foreign language by DVD based learning.
We need to be encouraged to attend education sessions to sort out barriers to positive societal involvement and to address attitudes based on false beliefs and we need to be encouraged to develop our spiritual health through involvement in faith based activities. Unfortunately, that encouragement by staff simply doesn’t happen and, in fact, we are discouraged from inconveniencing staff by becoming involved. I think that is shameful.
NaN.