OLD TIMERS AND HARD TIMERS

On the first day of my prison sentence I was joined in the reception cell of HMP Norwich by an older man, probably in his late forties, also starting his sentence. We exchanged a few cagey formalities: ‘How long are you doing?’ he asked, ‘Three months’ I said. ‘F*** me!’ he scoffed ‘I done more than that in a Panda car.’ I believe he had and he faced a long haul on his latest sentence. He was the saddest, most broken man I met in the prison. The first days of a long sentence in prison can be like that, I’m told – no road ahead, no road back. I thought of him as I read Doing Harder Time, a book by Natalie Mann (2012), which recounts the experiences of men in a growing and ageing UK prison population. It makes grim reading, but it is also a compelling account of an issue few people will find compelling. It tells the story of men in prison who will, most likely, die there of old age, their lives progressively degraded by growing infirmity and permanent incarceration.

Reading Doing Harder Time I was reminded of how short my time inside was, and how long prison sentences have become since. Not for the first time, I feel lucky. I had the same feeling listening to a radio programme that interviewed the governor of a vast American prison. He indicated the extent of his prison by saying ‘Pretty much all you can see between here and the horizon, that's us.’ Then, according to the reporter, he gestured to a workshop building, ‘That's the busiest place here, that's where they make the coffins.’ In addition to providing the local community with coffins, long-term inmates prided themselves on the kind of coffin they could make for themselves. They knew it was how they would leave the prison and they wanted to do it in style. Mann declares that her book is an attempt ‘to give a voice to all those individuals who have been systematically ignored by governments, by prison service policy, and until very recently, by criminologists’.