How Philosophy Helped a Woman in Prison

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command…I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. We are here to read these words from all these wise men and women who will tell us that we are here for different reasons and the same reason.” – Charles Bukowski

I had been recalled to HMP Downview in August, the year earlier, for daring to tweet about National Probation Services. The Offender Management Unit ‘forgot’ I was there and didn’t give me recall paperwork for well over 2 weeks, so I didn’t know how long or indeed why I’d been recalled to prison, just that favourite catchall condition on everyone’s license conditions, “to be of good behaviour.” I was stuck in penal limbo. Not good for a control freak. Not good for my C- PTSD to be stuck in a prison where I had history and where I had been deeply traumatised by the abuse of women a decade earlier.

I hadn’t broken any rules, or license conditions. I had not committed further crimes and all I knew was that I was facing a further 27 months in custody, in this Orwellian hellhole, with pretty flower beds and a Governor who thought it was acceptable to put her hands on prisoners and keep women in segregation for months at a time. I can’t explain the daily acts of torture that are inflicted on women, the cruelness of late unlock so women miss time for the phone calls they cherish and speaking with their children, the unavailability of sanitary products, withholding letters, even legal letters, arbitrary punishments for no real or conceived infractions and this isn’t the place.

Just understand that my mental health was spiralling and I was angry and upset at what turned out to be, according to the Parole Board which looked at my case at an oral hearing 15 months later, unlawful detention.

The library was the only sanctuary, although it was being used as a grooming parlour by predatory prisoners, and was the equivalent of a one stop shop for all contraband and drug trafficking central. When Katherine the prison librarian told me to sign up for a philosophy course, I was sceptical about it. No thanks. She goaded me a little and said it would do me good, to have an outlet, other than my streams of complaints about the way in which other women and I were being treated. Reluctantly, I agreed. I was considered so high risk in prison, that I was not allowed to work, in any prison employment so I was confined to a narrow cell and daytime TV for upto 20 hours a day. Jeremy Kyle is not good for the soul.

The course started late and with some nervousness, Downview security is notoriously paranoid, and this was the first time the course had been run in a women’s prison. The 2 men and one woman running it were not the usual jaded teachers that run prison education courses. Andrea was bubbly and kind, Andy shared openly about his father being a former prisoner and the difficulty in that relationship, and Mike who was the person in charge was personable and never condescending.

For the 4 months that the course ran, in Downview’s cramped prison library, the dozen or so women who had been selected were freed, in our minds, from this dismal place and the barbed wire fences and sounds of gates clanging and locks turning. We wanted to learn.

In my own life, I was trying to cope with the injustice of having served a sentence for a crime I didn’t commit, now being recalled for imagined infractions by an overburdened National Probation Service, that just couldn’t cope. I was trying to understand why, for speaking up about something, maybe not in the most delicate or diplomatic way, I was being punished again and again. Why, although I have never committed a violent offence in my life, I was being treated like a terrorist or murderer and ‘managed’ under MAPPA 3 at the highest level of monitoring and scrutiny. The London Bridge attacker was managed at MAPPA 1. I have friends who are women who have killed, who are managed at MAPPA 1.

Nothing about what was happening to me was making sense to me. My mind, its processes, logical consequences that one might imagine that were not happening, everything normal and fair was taking a beating.

The Philosophy in Prisons course was a respite for me, from my jangled nerve endings and thoughts that woke me at 3-10 every morning, like clockwork. I know now that this was a symptom of PTSD. It gave me space to think about something else, and the puzzles and paradoxes took up my concentration and were more than a welcome distraction.

Weirdly, my son has always been interested in philosophy and this has given us something to talk about, since I was released, which is a relief. Sometimes, we feel so far apart, it’s like universes, not oceans separated us. He finds it amusing that I ‘did’ philosophy. It made him more patient with me. Perhaps I am not as stupid or shallow as he might have once thought? Every mother’s secret wish.

The course, my fellow students, the tutors treated us with respect, even when things got a bit rowdy they were always good humoured; there were handouts and homework and a sense of safety and community that had been lacking in my personal space at that awful prison. It made those few weeks bearable and was a welcome highlight in the mundane and deliberately devoid of all humanity Downview prison diary week.

I think the course helped me to stay sane and to be a little more philosophical about the endless delays by the Parole Board, the ridiculous excuses the OMU department kept inventing to delay it, and also being ghosted to West Yorkshire when the Governor decided she and her staff needed ‘respite’ after my case was mentioned in the House of Lords, and my Parole Hearing suddenly, magically had a date. This was unwelcome scrutiny for a prison system that causes so much harm, and just expects women to shut up and put up with it.

I really hope more women in prison are given the opportunity to take the Philosophy in Prison course. I hope they are encouraged to think, and see the world from a broader perspective which is what education does for women, we become freed birds, perched atop prison roofs, not jailed women, looking on, observers of their own lives and harms, and trapped from behind prison bars.