In my articles I am conscious that I can be fairly critical of the prison system and with some good reason. However, today I’d like to consider if prisoners actually do enough to help themselves.

Prisons offer many opportunities such as education, physical fitness and spiritual development. They also offer possibilities like drug taking, violence and laziness and it is up to us as individuals to hungrily grasp the positive opportunities which are available to us and when there are barriers to those opportunities it is up to us to engage appropriately with authority to work around those barriers.

I wrote about the issues with education last week so I will use the example of physical health. We have the opportunity to improve our physical health in prison but we have to work for it. I know plenty of guys who are grotesquely overweight and fire blame off in all directions. They fail to realise that the true blame for their obesity is within themselves. Yes, it is a shame if you can only go to the gym twice a week and yes it’s a shame that the food isn’t more healthy and that we’re locked in our cells for 23 hours a day. However, if you choose not to go out for the hour of exercise because it’s raining a little bit and if you choose to go back for a second, third or fourth helping of food and order a load of high fat and sugar snacks from the canteen each week then the blame for your corpulence lies at your own door.

I have observed a growing swell in TV of the notion of being true to yourself ad this is grounded in good practice. Being your “authentic self” has, for decades, been promoted by various self-help books and psychologists but I believe that in the past few years, this has been hijacked and now “being true to yourself” is a self-granted permission to behave however you want and that is not necessarily a good thing.

In here, I have observed several inmates being “their authentic self” and it is not very nice but maybe I shouldn’t be surprised by this. People say it’s their human rights to be able to choose whatever they want to order from the canteen or to lie in bed all day if that’s what they want. If this isn’t one of the clearest examples of rights without responsibility, I’m not sure what else would be.

We have various “rights” but we also have corresponding responsibilities. It’s also worth pointing out (and I do, frequently) that “Human Rights” comes with it a legal definition and framework and, although I’m not a human rights lawyer, I don’t remember anything in the Human Rights Act which gives prisoners a legal right to be a lazy, fat slob totally devoid of any responsibility for the situation they are in.

I believe everybody, prisoners included, have the moral responsibility to do everything they can to be a positive member of their community so in prison we have the responsibility to access education, health and personal development opportunities and also to persist in challenging any barriers in an appropriate manner.

Unfortunately, I have seen time and time again that this is not happening so I am drawn to the conclusion that prisoners are not doing enough to help themselves.

NaN.