John
I began counselling in HMP Holloway for one day a week. A qualified counsellor for ten years and a social worker for very much longer I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I was taking on. Whilst I was expecting to find working in this new environment a real challenge, I was surprised by the nature of the challenges and dilemmas of offering therapy in prisons.
Steve, Forensic Therapies Director, did his best to prepare me. His policy, he told me, is always to conduct interviews in the prison as candidates tended to get a sense straight away of whether they could work in this environment. “Before you can engage with the people,” he said, “you have to be able to engage with the institution.” How right he proved to be.
I remember my interview and the long walk with Steve along endless corridors. Even after five minutes, the constant locking and unlocking, the clanging of gates and the jangling of keys began to grate. It was easy to imagine how some might find this intolerable. Then there was my ‘key talk’ from Security. We were shown the improvised weapons made by inmates – scary – and we tried to absorb the dos and don’ts of a security regime. (What do I do if my key breaks in a lock?) I arrived on my first day feeling very apprehensive and definitely not ‘engaged with the institution’. I needed to make a solo flight and try and become familiar with this institution. By the time I had got myself lost and found my way back, the friendliness and helpfulness of the staff had enabled me to overcome my apprehension. OK. So far so good. Institution engaged, now for the inmates.
However, I discovered that there was one more ‘thing’ I had to engage with in order to engage with the inmates and this was ‘the hatch’: the opening in the cell door which has a lockable drop down cover. I felt so uncomfortable with the hatch. Inmates have no control over their privacy. I noticed that some officers, male and female, were in the habit of just lowering it and looking through with no warning. I have since developed my own hatch protocol. I always knock, even if the hatch is open, and call out the name of the person I want to see and wait for a reply. When someone has been referred for counselling, the first encounter with them is usually a conversation through the hatch.
The great challenge of the hatch for a counsellor is how to make an engagement in such an impersonal setting. If it is a dorm cell then there will be others who can hear everything that is said. Often the face that appears at the hatch looks anxious or unhappy or depressed. I need to muster all my inner resources to try and project something of myself through this hole in a door, something that will enable them to feel that they would at least like to meet me again, that at least some helpful possibility is being offered. This wasn’t something that was covered in my therapeutic training. Sometimes two or three hatch conversations are needed before clients feel comfortable about meeting for any longer.
The next stage is meeting on the wing. If you are lucky a ‘Listeners’’ room is available; more likely venues are dining rooms, computer rooms and, once, for me, a store room full of mops and buckets and stacks of plastic chairs. Usually you are also in full view of people passing in the corridor.
Though officers will always try and get you the best space possible, interruptions are common. Sometimes by mistake because someone thought the room was empty, but sometimes on purpose. Recently three inmates came in to get a drink from the water cooler which took several minutes. Once it was an officer who wanted to tell my client something. On another occasion I had to abandon a session because the interruptions were so constant. Conventional therapeutic training assumes that, in the interests of client safety, therapy should only take place in a protected space. I address this problem in prison by raising it in the first session so that clients are at least prepared for the possibility of interruption and to agree that, if it happens, we will both stop speaking until we are alone again. It seems important at least to acknowledge it for the invasion that it is when so much of their life in prison is characterised by a lack of privacy.
Once engaged my next lesson from the prison was always to remember that my client may not be here next week. Inmates can be transferred unexpectedly. Therapeutic training tends to stress the importance of avoiding unplanned endings but when counselling in a prison it is often not possible. In other settings I have felt upset, as many counsellors do, when a client with whom I have developed an engagement simply stops attending, but somehow, in prison, the effect on me is amplified. Maybe because it is something that neither of us has chosen. The first time this happened I knew that my client would be in court before I next saw her and therefore the possibility existed that we might not meet again. We used our last session to make the best ending we could in the circumstances ‘just in case’. Despite this preparation I was completely unprepared for my great sense of loss when I came in the next week, checked the database and saw that she had been transferred. Something in which we had both invested, which was showing signs of enabling change and growth, had been aborted. I hoped what she had gained for herself in our meetings would remain with her. I also hoped that she coped with our unplanned ending better than I did! I wrote to her and wished her well, something I would not do elsewhere.
The narratives of the clients I have seen so far tend to bring up the same themes. I sometimes spend my whole day in the prison hearing about childhood neglect and abuse (emotional, physical and sexual), loveless parents, domestic violence, rape, bereavement, miscarriage, child death, or loss of children to adoption. Para-suicide, self harm and drug and alcohol abuse are frequently the responses to overwhelming pain and despair. Sometimes it seems that prison is what is keeping a person alive; the only way a destructive lifestyle could be interrupted.
Many of my clients seem to have been offended against far more than they themselves have offended. It seems a great irony that they are the ones who are incarcerated rather than, say, the people who have beaten and abused them. All of the women I have seen, bar one, say they want to stop offending which often means being ‘clean’. Their motivation while in prison to stop offending doesn’t seem in doubt, just their ability to do it. My hope is that therapy which addresses the pain and loss in their lives will make them less vulnerable to adopting lifestyles that they can only sustain by offending.
Often I am moved by the human spirit of some of the women I counsel in prison. How, with such life histories, are they able still to strive for something better, to think about the person they could become? One client whose life was a shocking account of sexual abuse, domestic violence and drugs – related to me without a trace of self pity – had seen all her children removed and adopted. She had no contact with them and knew that she may never see them again. This was her greatest pain and sadness. “They will want to find me one day and when they do I don’t want them to find a junkie. I’m still their mother.” And so she began the painful process of therapy to create the possibility of recovering her lost motherhood; the chance to be the good mother she still felt she could become.
I had hoped to work with this woman for many months but yet another sudden ending, a transfer at a week’s notice, brought her therapy to an end. Again I was left wondering if she had achieved enough in therapy to be able to continue her journey.
We counsellors debrief together at the end of the day and sometimes this is all I need to leave behind everything I have absorbed in my sessions. But on some days I really need my six mile cycle ride home which, on summer evenings, might include half an hour with a pint and the Guardian at a canal-side pub, before I really feel that I have been ‘released’ from the prison and can rejoin my everyday life.
John, Forensic Therapies Integrative Counsellor, HMP Holloway