A visit to prison

In 1992 I turned 17 years old. I was vulnerable, still officially living at home in my Mum’s council house but aside from when I did go into school, I spent most of my time walking from place-to-place, hanging around with different groups of people, often on the streets, drinking or around the ‘underclass’ culture at the time in various shared houses.

My parents had divorced 10 years earlier, when I was 7. My Mum decided to move out of the house we were living in and move to a nearby city. My Dad, by 1992, had by that time been a prison officer for about 14 years at a prison in Buckinghamshire, called HMP Grendon Underwood, I think a category B male prison. I was already somewhat used to life around the prison, as before my parents finally split up for good, when we first moved away from my home town of Burton-Upon-Trent, for a few years, we’d lived on the estate at the bottom of the hill from the prison. I had a little experience of spending some time with my dad on gate duty normally at night or early morning I think. I’d also met one or two of the prisoners, including a guy called Mickey, who had been in prison for raping and possibly murdering a child, while high on glue. Somehow after his release, Mickey ended up friends with my Dad (which wasn’t unusual). As a 17 year old, I was also relatively used to people who had been in and out of prison, some of them very violent, including one man who after cornering me and punching me in the mouth (because I’d told someone about him or his friend cheating on his teenage girlfriend), then went off and put a stranger in hospital, and was sent to prison for it.

So one day in 1992, an experienced prison officer, invited his vulnerable 17 year old child, to spend a few hours with him, at work.

I don’t mean, just in a visiting room, I mean actually inside the prison, on the wings, and even a cell. Hang on though, it was an adult prison, right? Also, most people would not be allowed inside a prison, unless they were sent there for committing a crime, or working there, or some celebrity on a day trip. Certainly, you’d normally need to at least be an adult.

My dad achieved this, at that time, unprecedented prison visit, by ‘clearing’ it with the then prison Governor. I think my Dad told the Governor that it was for my psychology GSCE, particularly as HMP Grendon had, and I think still does have, a therapeutic community.

What my Dad told the prison governor, wasn’t true. I was indeed doing GCSE Psychology, but it had nothing to do with visiting the prison.

I think by the time my Dad had invited me to visit HMP Grendon, before I even knew about it, he’d already cleared my visit with the Governor. How my dad got me interested in the visit was by telling me that a US rock band, Love/Hate, would be playing in the prison gym the day of my visit. Since I was at that point a fan of the band, I was unlikely to say no.

The other thing that my Dad said to me, was that I’d be the youngest person in UK history, to be officially allowed inside an adult prison. This may well have been the case, but possibly superseded a few years later when my Dad took my 9 year old step sister into prison to play with an inmate he was counselling at the time, the notorious serial child killer, ‘Moors Murderer’, Myra Hindley.

So the day of my visit to Prison came. I don’t remember how I felt during my visit. I know in general I felt a lot of anxiety and fear in my life, sadness too, and also I was often depressed, but I was a vulnerable 17 year old with Gender Dysphoria and anxiety around my sexuality, which I tried to hide.

We went through the huge towering double gates of the prison, which I was familiar with, then my Dad took me into the prison itself, down a long corridor dubbed “The M1” and to the Therapeutic Community Wing where he worked. I think there were the usual gates with bars keeping the wings secure, but I don’t remember any security checks. My dad was in his uniform, I think I was my usual almost skeletal self, with a leather jacket, too big for me, hanging off me, skinny black jeans, printed band t-shirt and long black hair covering my pale face.

First I think I met some of the other officers who were in and out of a little staff room at the end of the wing. Then my Dad took me down the corridor where I started meeting some of the inmates. In those days, I had a tendency to take people on face value, I didn’t really judge people. I remember meeting a man who seemed reasonably nice, chatted to him for a little while then after he left I asked my dad about him, why he was in prison, to which my dad replied something like “He blew a security guard’s legs off with a shotgun”.

I was also taken for a visit to another wing. The sex offenders wing. Where I think I met a different kind of man, less macho looking, but seemed ok but a bit weird to talk to. Possibly a paedophile.

I then got an extra treat, back on my Dad’s wing. My Dad said I could go and spend some time in a cell. I think we went upstairs to some cells, walked along another corridor, and there was a cell with 2 relatively young men in their cell, sitting opposite each other, rolling ‘skinny burns’ (very thin rolled cigarettes) with Golden Virginia tobacco. I was invited in and I sat down on one of the beds and we chatted for a while, as my Dad walked up and down the corridor outside, peering in sometimes.

So there I was, a 17 year old just having a day trip to a prison, chatting to violent criminals and saying hello to paedophiles who all seemed reasonably nice.

Things then changed a little. My Dad’s wing had called a “special wing meeting”. These are not a normal part of prison life since this wing was a therapeutic community. The prisoners in the therapeutic community, apply to go to them and are given the chance on the basis that they behave in a certain way, don’t bring drugs or alcohol into the prison, and abide by the rules and ethics of a therapeutic community. If anyone then goes against these rules, they can be ‘voted’ out and returned to a normal prison. On the day of my visit, it just so happened, that a problem had arisen around an inmate’s behaviour, and the special wing meeting was called for the inmates of the wing and my Dad, in order to discuss the problem and what to do.

So I went back downstairs from the cell, back along the main corridor and then into a big room. In the room was a circle of chairs. I sat down in one of the chairs, opposite the door. My Dad I think sat elsewhere in the room, and inmates started entering the room and sitting down until the circle of chairs were all occupied.

There I was, a teenager, sitting in a big circle with a load of prisoners, and my Dad.

One of the inmates was a tall white man, maybe in his 60s, with greyish hair. He had a mean, powerful air about him. I don’t remember the man’s name, but my Dad explained to me that he was an old East End gangster, and also the subject of the special wing meeting.

The meeting began. What had happened, was just a week or so prior to my visit, the wing, as part of one of the privileges the inmates in the therapeutic community get, had an ‘open day’ in which I think inmates could have a family member in. This took place in a room, possibly the prison gym, I’m not sure. My Dad had been taking photos, as he liked to do, whether people wanted them taken or not. I say that because I also years later noted that while my Dad was co-ordinating a session for a local mental health charity, he set up video equipment to video it, without asking anyone, and then I picked up that some members of the group were uncomfortable about being film but too afraid to say anything, so I did.

My understanding from what was said during the special wing meeting, was that Gangster guy was angry at my Dad. My Dad had been taking photos of people in the room, Gangster guy (who I think had no family visiting him, or indeed maybe just no family) was there but according to my dad, kept ‘getting in the shot’. Gangster guy did not like being photographed and so he started telling my Dad not to take photos of him, to which my Dad simply told him to just stay out of the shot then.

The main problem came, it seems, when Gangster guy finally got really annoyed that my Dad wouldn’t stop taking photos, and then told my Dad, the prison officer, to “Stop taking photos of me or I’ll smash the camera over your head!”.

Needless to say, threatening his jailer with being hit over the head with a blunt instrument, didn’t go down too well.

I just sat and listened as a bit of an argument started between Gangster guy and my Dad.

Then, all of sudden, I somehow got inserted into the argument. I think the argument got around to my Dad, trying to make himself look good, which to be honest, was a perfectly reasonable thing to say about my Dad, a man later diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (which I don’t think he told his family about). Gangster guy motioned towards me and said “Is that why you’ve brought your child in today?”.

I think my Dad’s answer was “no”, but actually I was thinking “Hmmm… good point! I may well be at least partly here, to make my Dad look good”. Thinking back, I think regardless of the special wing meeting argument, I suspect ultimately not only was I at the prison to make my Dad look (and feel) good, but my very existence itself might be partly based on inflating my Dad’s ego.

Gangster guy was totally in the wrong though, and he’d been causing trouble for quite some time, according to the other inmates. I think the result of the meeting was that Gangster guy had to be kicked out. I think my Dad might have been smug about this, but then his default setting is smug anyway, so who knows.

After the excitement of the clash of egos that was the special wing meeting, came the special event, the rock gig in the gym.

My dad took me to the prison gym, I think before most of the inmates got there. It was a normal looking gym, not too different from those in schools. There was a stage area at one end, and then a little room at the back of the stage where the band, Love/Hate were.

I was introduced to the band, well, not sure, I might have just walked up to them and started talking to them. I think the band gave me some weird looks, which is hardly surprising, since they’d just been approached by some skinny teenager in a leather jacket, in a prison. I think they might have said something about this, not being sure if I was an inmate or what. There was a brief conversation, then a few inmates started coming in, we got autographs on some black and white printed photos. One of the inmates I spoke to at that point, later escaped from the prison I remember. A few inmates had escaped over the years I think, including one may have attempted to visit my Dad while on the run, or at least the police thought so as they hovered over my Dad’s house in a helicopter.

I think the gig itself went well. The band, Love/Hate, weren’t that well known but were probably at their peak of popularity at that time. When I first published this piece of writing, I gave it the title of “Grendon Prison Blues” in reference to Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” (a great song by the way) in which cash famously played in Folsom Prison in the US. This gig featured a load of prisoners and a band but it wasn’t of the calibre of Johnny Cash, although I think it’d be difficult for any band to be.

My unprecedented prison experience lasted a few hours, featured mostly seemingly ‘normal’ people and ended in a very unusual live performance by a touring rock band from America. This all makes for perhaps an interesting anecdote, and for many years, that’s pretty much all it has been for me, an anecdote, a story I tell, almost as if I wasn’t there. There’s the thing though, I was there and when I was stop for a moment, and stop just telling the anecdote, and I think about my now defunct, dysfunctional relationship with my Dad, I feel pretty sad, and worried for the teenager I was.

I just started crying. All the way through writing this, I hadn’t felt it, I probably would not have felt it if I hadn’t written the last bit of that last paragraph, but in a way, it’s the only authentic bit of all of this. Not that any of what I’ve written is a lie, it’s not (although memory is a funny thing, so some things might have happened slightly differently), it’s just that only that last bit about feeling sad and worried for who I was, the situation I was in, and my relationship with my Dad, spoke directly about my feelings.

I’ve not finished though, but I can feel the cluster headache coming on, so I’ll get to the end shortly.

A couple of years ago, I decided, after about 9 years of not speaking to my Dad, to try again. To try to have some form of relationship with him, but accept how he is. That failed dismally, I just could not stand him, I do not feel safe around him and he showed me that he doesn’t intend to change, so I literally shut the door on him one last time. Well, I got him out of the house so fast he forgot his coat and had to come back, so I shut the door on him again. I can shut doors physically on him, but actually getting him out of my head is another matter. The answer there I think, is to not try to forget, but to put him, and my past, in a safer place, maybe down some prison corridor in the depths of my mind. Then after that, a friend told me they’d seen a video of my Dad online. I told myself to not look at it, but failed in that. I didn’t, and couldn’t watch the whole, something like 2 hours of him talking about himself. I don’t really know how anyone could to be honest. The man now seems to have a knack of using words that might elude to remorse over things he’s done but what he’s really full of, I think, are anecdotes about stupid and dangerous things he’s repeatedly done in his life, delivered with his trade mark smug face. Practically everything he says sounds like a man paying tribute to his own stupidity in such I way as to admonish himself of responsibility. Like “Oops look at what a silly moron I was taking a child to play with a serial killer, what am I like?! Wahey! Honk Honk!”.

The comments section for the video interview with my Dad, are far more serious though. Largely consisting of people using words like “nonce” and “nonce lover”, and showing utter disbelief at how anyone like my Dad would be allowed to have any responsibility in a prison or over children.

The final bit of this, lies in the video itself and something my Dad said in it. During the interview, I think when being asked about bringing children into prisons, he briefly mentioned my visit to HMP Grendon. Importantly, my Dad, gave a reason, probably the real reason for my visit to Prison. That reason was not to do with any psychology GCSE, nor a rock band. My Dad, told everyone who watches that video, that the problem was that I was going down a ‘bad road’ (or words to that effect), and he had brought a vulnerable 17 year old, to spend time with violent criminals, inside an adult prison, which is normally against the rules, to in effect, teach me a lesson.

Oh I learnt a lesson alright, several of them. One of them being, sometimes there’s little difference between those who lock people up, and the people they lock up.