Facing the harsh reality of lockdown life in jail
IMAGINE being locked in a room 23 hours a day.
You eat, sleep and go to the toilet in a room no bigger than many people’s bathrooms. All of this while cohabiting with a stranger.
Imagine that in the 45 minutes of time you have out of that room you have to make a conscious choice about whether you have a shower or a make brief call to your loved one. It is either/or, that is your decision.
Throughout the pandemic, this was the lived reality for people in many Welsh prisons.
As we have all learned from Covid, severely limiting the degree to which people can interact with others, get fresh air, exercise and see their families can have a catastrophic impact on even the most well-adjusted people’s mental health.
To try to understand what it has been like for prisoners, we have spoken to people from Wales’ Independent Monitoring Boards.
These are groups of ordinary members of the public who regularly visit prisons to make sure that the inmates are being treated correctly with proper standards of care and decency.
They paint a grim picture for many inmates since the coronavirus crisis began in March 2020.
“When Covid started rising in last February and March 2020, there were nightmare scenarios about prisons and people were really terrified about what would happen,” said Steve Cocks, who is the Wales representative for Independent Monitoring Boards.
“Obviously you have got large groups of people in very small confined spaces. There were predictions of thousands of deaths. There were contingency plans for feeding people in case the ways of getting food to prisoners broke down, for example.”
Much like care homes, prisons offered a perfect environment for Covid. Lots of people living in close proximity, some with health issues, often needing direct physical contact.
But despite a few flare-ups, especially early on, the worst has been avoided.
Mr Cocks added: “There is no doubt that prisoners have been kept safe and that the levels of infection and deaths have been nowhere near what was predicted originally.”
But this protection from Covid has come at a severe cost, with the vast majority of the courses, skills classes and rehabilitation inmates normally get totally shut down.
David Freeman is an inmate in HMP Parc in Bridgend. Writing in the prisoner newspaper InsideTime, he said: “I am a high-risk prisoner with just under two years to serve before I’ll be released on licence. Last week I was handed my sentence plan stating that I have to do the Kaizen course to ‘maybe’ lower my risk.
“I do want to do the course, but the problem is this prison doesn’t do the course, so I feel like I am just rotting away and wasting valuable time doing absolutely nothing at all.
“I am banged up in my cell for 23 hours a day and my high-risk status affects me being able to work.
“The judge sent me to prison to be rehabilitated, but obviously that is not the case. I want to use the time to better myself for release, but I feel like a caged animal. The prison regime is making me worse and that is the truth.
“Giving me targets that I cannot achieve is starting to stress me out and it is plain and simple that Probation are already setting me up to fail.
“I’m not the only one who needs to fix up, the system should try it too.”
This is hardly an experience that will help prepare these men for life outside prison and the impact on mental health is clear – especially because many of the services in the prison supporting wellbeing have had to stop.
“It is well-documented that confining people in spaces like that for long periods is very damaging for them and their mental health,” said Mr Cocks. “The men have been in these conditions now for 18 months, most of them. There has been a real big, big concern for their mental health at a time when mental health services in prisons have found it much more difficult to operate because of Covid.
“They have had to take all sorts of precautions, they haven’t been able to do group work or anything like that.”
As well as punishment, rehabilitating these men to go back into society is a basic function of the prison. Being locked in a cell for 23 hours doesn’t help this process, it hinders.
As inmate Steven Allen from Parc prison wrote: “Dare to treat us like humans and you never know... we may live up to your expectations.”
Other services that came to a creaking halt with the arrival of Covid included resettlement, which is all about preparing inmates for a successful release, making sure they have somewhere to live and a bank account when they leave prison.
The careers service also stopped in many places. This is really important in the prison because it is a fact that if men go out and get a job, they are much less likely to reoffend and end up back inside.
On top of this, there is the choice between a phone call with your family and a shower.
Mr Cocks said: “One thing that has come out regularly, and this applies to Cardiff Prison, is that these men have 45 minutes out of the cell in the morning and 45 minutes in the afternoon.
“In that time they are expected to to shower, exercise and make a phone call. but there are only about three phones on the wing and each slot has about three dozen men out.
“You can imagine the queue for the phone and the issues that arise when people are getting frustrated that their time out of the cell is coming to an end and they haven’t made their call.
“Many men face a choice in that they either come out of their cell and phone their loved one or they take a shower, because if you take the shower and there is a queue for the phone the officers may be banging you back up before you had a chance to make your phone call.
“I can’t overemphasise the importance of keeping family contact. The statistics are absolutely clear – the men who keep in contact with their family are much more likely to be successful when they are released from prison.”
Dylan Nicholas is in prison for the first time and is an inmate in Cardiff.
In a letter to InsideTime, he said: “Our socialisation times are about 45 minutes twice a day, which sounds good but when you take into account waiting time at the meds hatch for five minutes twice a day and a 10-minute shower, it all works out at 70 minutes a day for socialising.
“Being classed as high-risk and also on an ‘act’, I remain in solitary confinement for 22 hours a day, barring a few minutes to collect my meals.
“Prison is a very lonely place for me. I am trying my hardest to remain in good spirits and work through my mental health issues, but feel like I’m getting closer to giving up a bit more each day.”
There have been initiatives in the prisons to make up for the lack of visitors, including some video calls. Some inmates have enjoyed this because it allows them to see the family dog or a slice of normality beyond prison walls.
Though the prisons are gradually opening up again, this is happening at a very slow pace in places.
Ultimately, whatever crimes they committed, these people are the responsibility of the state.
The cost of not rehabilitating them, or them leaving prison with addiction and mental health issues, stretches beyond the human cost to them and has an impact on wider society.
A revolving-door justice system is sure to create more victims, not fewer.
Wales’ Independent Monitoring Boards are in desperate need of volunteers to help oversee Wales’ prisons. They are actively looking for people from a diverse range of backgrounds. To find out more, contact the Independent Monitoring Board in Wales by emailing: walesimb@outlook.com