The tragedy of institutionalised prisoners

By Dan McCurry

I had a client recently in West End Central police station. She was a 30 year old female, attractive and well-spoken, who was accused of walking up to a policeman on the street, and attacking him. She told me that she didn’t mean any harm to the officer; she was quite apologetic; she just wanted to get back into Holloway (a north London prison).

As a legal executive charged with defending this lady, I had to ensure that she was mentally well and was not making a false admission, so I questioned her further. She again admitted hitting the officer and told me that in Holloway the staff and everyone are “really nice”.

Realising that I was dealing with an institutionalised prisoner, who just wanted to admit it, there wasn’t much for me to do professionally, so I found myself chatting to her; I was curious as to what makes an institutionalised prisoner tick. When I asked her if she found the outside world stressful she giggled. I asked her why she was giggling and she told me that “stressful” was a funny word to use, but it probably was true, she’d just never thought of it that way.

It was at this moment that I realised what it was that I found so strange about people who are institutionalised in the British prison system – they don’t know the language of therapy. Not only are they unable to talk about their emotions and feelings but they also have no command of the vocabulary of the therapy business. If someone doesn’t know the language of therapy, then we can only assume that she has never done therapy.

This woman had been in and out of jail since her early teens but had never committed a serious offence. It was just repetition of low level stuff. Jail for her would have come only once the magistrate had tried all other options without success. Once she’d entered the system, she just didn’t ever come out again.

Now she’s aged 30 and her life is slipping by, and she simply doesn’t have the skills to cope outside of prison; so much so that she just wants to get back in. It’s tragic.

I’ve seen this situation so many times before amongst the institutionalised; this lack of understanding themselves, of knowing themselves. They mostly start out in the same way. I’ve seen youngsters becoming institutionalised. I’ve seen mothers who have been full of condemnation for their wayward child, then on the next incident, turn to pleading to the boy, then on the next turn to defending everything he does as if it’s a great big conspiracy against him. This isn’t because the mother is stupid; it’s just that she’s realised that her son is not planning on changing and she wants to carry on having a relationship with him rather than push him away, so she joins him in abusing the police, abusing the courts, etc.

I’ve seen the way I’ve reacted to these youngsters by having a laugh at the way they swear at the police, rather than giving them fatherly advice. Sometimes you know the advice is falling on deaf ears and you just want them to phone your firm next time they get nicked, rather than the other bloke. We all need to be kept in shoe leather.

And somehow it goes up the system like that. Everyone dips their beak but no-one actually does what we came into this business to do, to make a difference. As they become accustomed to regimented jail life through that vital period where they turn from teenagers into adults, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to learn the ordinary day-to-day skills they need to get by in the outside world. And that’s how people become institutionalised.

But what I can’t understand is how the authorities can give up on that person for the rest of their life. Surely a person mellows with age? Surely if we give up on them in their youth, we should be able to return to them later and try again? Surely there must be a mechanism for this?

One of the problems is the way that politicians feel the need to sell themselves as tough guys to the electorate, leaving little incentive to search for answers to complex questions. I’ve been internet searching to see if I can find some study that tells me how many prisoners are classed as institutionalised, and there doesn’t seem to be anything out there. My own estimate based just on my experience is that roughly 5% of convicts are institutionalised. That makes about 4,250 of the adult jail population. If it costs £30,000 a year to keep them in jail for the rest of their lives, then that’s £1.7 million for each one, or £7 billion in total.

I’m not saying that every prisoner stays in jail for all his life, as no case is entirely the same, and I’m certainly not saying that all institutionalised prisoners are petty offenders, but what I am saying is that the numbers are a staggering amount even if discounted.

If we can’t approach this issue from the point of view of compassion then maybe we’ve a chance of influencing policy on the basis of simple economics. So that’s why I urge people to take the view that if we act, we can save money.