Never been in prison.
I have visited a prison twice and my entire knowledge of
prison life is based upon those two visits. I didn’t actually think it was too
bad. Certainly nowhere near as bad as I expected it would be.
We employed a guy at the time who when he wasn’t working
for us was a bit of a tearaway oblique football hooligan oblique hardcase. He
was a good worker though, handled clients well and was an asset to the
business. He was arrested tried and found guilty of an unprovoked attack on a
football hooligan from the other team’s supporters and was given, I think it
was eighteen months. Quite a severe sentence. He was found with a billiard ball
in his possession; apparently not as innocent as it sounds. They become
dangerous weapons when swung in a sock and so he wasn’t just unlucky to be the
one the police caught . . . though technically that may be true . . . he was armed and therefore his plea of innocent
bystander fell on deaf ears.
He had had a particularly gruelling young life. No
qualifications from school; football seemed to be his only interest. In theory
I should have kept well away but he was always polite toward me and I had been
very impressed at interview that he had excelled on the youth employment scheme
he had been placed on. He obviously believed in himself even if no-one else
did. And there is always that there but fortune thing; someone needed to give
him a chance and I took it upon myself to be that person. Later in life and
while he still worked for me, he came home late at night from a date with his
girl-friend and found his mother dead on the kitchen floor from a single stab
wound.
So . . . hard, hard life.
He had a girl-friend who believed in him as well. Pretty
girl with dirty-blonde frizzy hair. Sorry can’t remember her name now and she
and I visited him in prison a couple of times. We sat at a table with him and
had a soft drink in a plastic cup and he told us about the regime and the scams.
They seemed to either be watching TV all day or playing five-a side football in
the yard outside.
He got out after about a year and came back to work for us.
Left about a year later.
There was something on the web this week saying that
prisons in the UK are dirty and overcrowded and full of people who should be in
mental hospitals, not prisons. Their only crime really is that they cannot
cope: with life; with keeping down a job; with the rent-man and the gas-man and
the job-centre woman; with the neighbours still screeching at one another at
two-o’clock in the morning and all the other minor irritants of 21stC Britain.
Should you be in prison for substance-abuse? One has to
wonder. And what is also true I think is that it is the people who rail against
societies’ rules and regulations that end up in prison; in a situation where
petty rules and regulations meet them at every turn. Being taught to do what
you are told, don’t cry, don’t weep, don’t lose your temper, reign in your
emotions at all times is how to get through a prison sentence but not I suggest
how to live in society.
