A prison poem that highlights the gulf in understanding between the general public, informed mostly by the gutter press, and those concerned with prison life on a day-to-day basis. It was read to the lady Mayor of Bury St.Edmunds when she visited HMP Highpoint. I tried desperately to get her to actually see the washrooms in the so-called ‘Super Enhanced Wings’, but I’m not sure it ever happened.
I used to find the television series ‘Porridge’ amusing until I was obliged to experience reality. If we can judge a nation by the way it treats its prisoners then we should all judge ourselves with severity. Until, of course, we accept to share responsibility for the lack of dignity that we heap on tens of thousands of our fellow citizens and the people we pay to keep them safe and secure.
Please bear in mind that my aim is to create some popular momentum for an improvment in the conditions for prisoners in British prisons – to ensure that they are treated with the dignity that any reasonable British citizen would assume they would be. By doing so, we will also improve conditions for the people that work in the prison system. Remember that this poem describes conditions for ‘super enhanced’ prisoners -the elite of Cat C prisons
Please subscribe if you want to know more or are already convinced that – as in B Cat and some parts of C Cat prisons – locking two strangers up in a space designed for one person, with an open toilet a few centimetres away from their faces for 23 hours a day is unacceptable, and that obliging them to eat in that same toilet is just plain disgusting.
I am happy to debate this issue with anyone, any time on any platform or to defend these statements in any way anyone may choose.
Washrooms of Divine Despair
Their bodies bent before basin, boldly
Washing head and hands and face
Mumbled greetings delivered coldly
Monotone meetings in a putrid place
That all the inmates reluctantly share
These washrooms of divine despair
One enquires, strangely, after my health
The ultimate rhetorical question
I return the compliment, as if by stealth
He shrugs his shoulders at the simple suggestion
As if anyone could really care
In these washrooms of divine despair
On leaving, he comments on the smell
Caused by the toilets, void of flush
And describes other users as ‘men from hell’
Whose habits would make most mothers blush
But his criticisms are hardly fair
In these washrooms of divine despair
For nothing functions here correctly
In agèd, temporary, accommodation
Where ablutions are executed circumspectly
Clogging this cess pit of civilisation
O, that journalists might once go there!
To the washrooms of divine despair
And if that great day finally comes
When truth will be told to the population
Somewhere among pages of tits and bums
And the scripts of unscrupulous speculation
Let their readers with us, just once, share
The washrooms of divine despair
For newspapers tell us that prison’s a dream
And softness is built into the system
It’s enough to make prison workers scream
As they struggle valiantly to fix a cistern
For most fittings are beyond repair
In the washrooms of divine despair
And, so, I rise as early as I can
To ensure that I get enough water
And give myself time to clean the pan
Before other lambs come to their slaughter
To pray to their gods, or stand and stare
Before the washrooms of divine despair