Total Pageviews

Wednesday 4 January 2017

A broken system "they know not what they do'!

Reform? What reform?
 
says
I have read Inside Time for years but never had the inclination to write in before. Now though I am just sick and tired of hearing people in power saying a lot of things but basically, doing nothing.
Liz Truss recently made a great show of telling everyone that ‘Great’ prison reform was coming. Well, I have been in and out of prison since I was 16, I’m now 38 and serving a 30-year rec, and I have yet to see any reform, ‘great’ or otherwise. We don’t need another sticking plaster on the open and festering wound of prison.

It is no good just locking people up, you need to work on helping them from ‘day one’ to make the change they need, instead of sending people back into society with a bullshit Maths and English certificate which isn’t worth the paper it is printed on.
I think we all know by now that whatever reforms do happen, they will not be that ‘great’ and the people who need help will not get it. This will affect younger prisoners more than people my age. Wake up and do something worthwhile or what is the point of any of it?

Broken
 
I have been in out of  the jail system now for the past 5 years. Out of a 5-year sentence I have served 4 years, an extra year-and-a-half behind the door and I’ve not committed another offence to get that. How sick is this system?
 
My whole experience of the jail system has been an eye-opener, to say the least. I have seen people who should be in mental hospitals receiving treatment who are instead left in the general prison population to be bullied by inmates and staff alike. I have seen people get ‘kettled’ (have boiling water from a kettle thrown in their face) over minor arguments in the meal queue. I’ve seen people carved up for two quid’s worth of canteen. The point I am making is that the system as it stands – low staffing levels, overcrowding, mixing young offenders with adult prisoners, the lack of work, education and regimes, is just not working.
 
“My whole experience of the jail system has been an eye-opener, to say the least. I have seen people who should be in mental hospitals receiving treatment who are instead left in the general prison population to be bullied by inmates and staff alike”
 
Surely we, as prisoners, should be able to have faith in the so-called system to at least try to rehabilitate us? But how can we have faith in a broken system run by organic robots that are too stretched to help even if they wanted to?
 
I have done loads of courses in prison, a lot with Milton Keynes College, all of which look good on paper but if I show them to prospective employers they tell me the courses are already outdated.
 
So, what are we supposed to do upon release with £46 in our pocket, no home, no job, no help? Prison does not help; it just silences the issues until a later date.
 
 I feel failed by the system,
 
years wasted and I still have a list of problems. Even when we are out on license, we get no help from the system. It’s just thanks for labouring for private companies for £2 per day slave wages and try not to get run over on the way back to your shop doorway.
 
 
 Battram says:
 The British way is to kick a dog when it’s down and does not have a good record of rehabilitating offenders. Recently, I visited a newly released prisoner, their accomadation was appalling, a so-called studio flat, but it was a small room in a converted house, cell sized, a small toilet cubicle and small kitchenette, there was literally no room for two people to move about. succeed, it has become a dog eat dog society, where the prisoner, considered a dog is kept down.
 

No comments:

Post a Comment

comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.