The man to my left is trembling as he sits down. He drapes one arm across the back of the adjoining chair, but can’t seem to relax. “This is ... this really is quite intimidating,” he mutters, pinching the bridge of his nose with his other hand. The man to my right greets me warmly: “Thank you for coming.” He is calm and assured, with grey-flecked hair and kind eyes.
In a moment, as we work round the seated circle introducing ourselves, I will learn that Mr Anxious is a chronic alcoholic serving life for the murder of a drinking buddy; Mr Charisma, the same sentence, for rape. The windows of the meeting room in G Wing at Grendon jail in Buckinghamshire, northwest of London, are open. It’s a breezy afternoon and the blinds flutter against the glass like captive birds.
Last weekend, I spent the extra hour afforded by the return to Greenwich Mean Time in a cold and bare shoebox cell, with supper’s saved mini-muffin and a molded polyurethane pillow that my head left no impression upon for company. I was a guest of Friends of Grendon, the charity staging this sponsored sleepover to raise money for the most compelling, controversial and resilient penal experiment in Europe. Unusually, the inmates themselves were as much drivers of the event, with greater cause than any to evangelize about a regime that is painfully but irrevocably changing their lives — and is now under threat.
Grendon opened as a psychiatric prison in 1962, at a time when rehabilitative optimism was enjoying a brief blossoming. It is unique because it is run as a therapeutic democracy. Inmates don’t live on wings, but in communities that meet every Monday and Friday to vote on administrative business. The only reason I can report on the weekend’s activities is because I was thus granted permission.
They then revert to smaller sessions the rest of the week for intensive group therapy. The excavation doesn’t end there, though, continuing informally over pool tables and cups of tea with other prisoners and specially trained officers. Men must elect to come here and undergo a rigorous assessment. The ethos is one of dynamic security — inmates police themselves, holding those who breach rules to account, and maintain the ultimate sanction of voting out habitual transgressors.
The majority of Grendon inmates are lifers, comprising some of the most dangerous and disruptive men in the national prison system. Crucially, they have recognized that the tick-box brevity of cognitive behavioral therapy courses offered in conventional prisons don’t work for them. They want to change fundamentally. It isn’t an easy ride.
“The 18 months I’ve spent here have been the hardest in 18 years inside,” Craig tells me. “I was used to hiding behind bravado and violence. To show emotion was very hard. A lot of my development has come from hearing other people’s stories. The feelings are very raw. I don’t think many people come here knowing what it’s going to involve. Every image of yourself is broken down. And none of it is done in private.”
It is certainly perplexing to encounter such eloquent therapy-speak from a man whose alternate vocabulary is based around nonces, bang-up and beef. So is it yet more box-ticking?
The fact is that Grendon works. Research shows that for prisoners who stay here for more than 18 months, the reconviction rate within two years of release falls to 20 percent, compared with almost 50 percent for those serving in conventional prisons. Just as significantly, the number of drug and violence-related offenses is close to zero, compared with 120 annually for every 100 inmates elsewhere.
Despite this salutary record, recent and future cutbacks are strangling the regime. As the chief inspector of prisons for England and Wales, Anne Owers, noted in August, financial efficiency savings take little account of Grendon’s role, reducing time out of cell and canceling groups, while limiting the informal interaction with staff that supports the therapeutic process.
Grendon doesn’t work for everyone, but for those who survive it, the results are astonishing. So it’s equally astonishing that, nearly 50 years on, it remains an experiment, viewed by the rest of the prison service as at best a fig leaf, at worst a major pain in the neck.
As for my own time inside, it’s not that enlightening, as it lasted only a day and a night. But I did notice some things. First, how easy it was to cede responsibility. I was without a timepiece, so had to rely on barked commands telling me when to eat, mingle and sleep. I did not feel like Libby any more, carrying standard issue towels and plastic cutlery back to my cell. The unequivocal slam of the wing gate was horrible, even knowing it would be open again at 7am and that I’d done nothing wrong.
I was clearly never going to be an advocate for the prisons-as-holiday-camps school. But even I was shocked by how utterly erasing the most considerate of regimes can be. It is a choice we have, whether to meet man’s inhumanity to man with hope or derision. Grendon is the one place in the country to practice this most dangerous and magical of beliefs — that bad and broken men can redeem themselves.
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