BLOG 249 - CAUGHT!

“Women who love men behind bars find their routine tends to revolve around that visit, making parenting, work, and even day to day life more difficult than it would be under normal circumstances.” Rachel Pickett  Author :Men behind Bars

Where I live in South East London/North Kent there is a maximum security prison.

It has been home to some people who should have never been incarcerated (leading it to be called the British Version of Guantanamo Bay). It had been in much trouble for the extremely high amount of force used to control inmates. It has a prison within the prison (for young offenders). It has been home to Ronnie Biggs, Jonathan King and whole host of sociopaths whose names I would choke rather than repeat. But best of all it was home to Lord Archer of Weston Super mare when he perverted the course of justice to his own ends.

Whether you are evil or bad or misguided or just in the wrong place at the wrong time… everyone is in prison for the same crime… being caught.

I have no interest in the incarcerated per se really.  However living within proximity to a prison does sometime challenge the way you look at things.

One would not think of love when one thinks of a maximum security prison, but should you use public transportation in the area you get to witness something that makes you ask yourself the question…. Could I love someone enough?

Every week, three normal every day buses the 244, 380 and 672 drop women with eyes cast firmly at the ground at the prisons perimeter.

UK prisons allow just two 60 minute visits per month. These women (and if you live in the area you kind of get to recognise faces) negotiate the usual annoyances of the British public transport system, struggling with pushchairs, fatigued and sometimes disagreeable children, desperate lack of seats and oyster card machines that double bleep and empty your balance for no apparent reason.

Why? To see some bloke who managed to get himself caught.

For these women it is an undeserved sentence. Simply by caring for someone, a son, a husband, a lover, a baby-father… they too are sentenced to make this trip every fortnight for years…. Sometimes decades.

I find myself inspired by these women.

I know they are regarded as an underclass. As the appendages to scum. And maybe that is true.

But they love. I cannot help but be inspired by the depths of their love.

I am not sure if I could love someone enough to put myself through such degradation.

I see the looks they get.

It’s a regular ordinary bus – the British taxation system does not allow for a special charter. These prison visitors (majority of whom seem to be women and children) board the same bus that I get when coming back from the hospital.

I am amazed… you get to recognise the same faces. You get to recognise the same squaring of the shoulders and defiance should anyone catch their eye. You get to know it’ll be the same ritual of  brushing hair and dabbing of perfume before the same disembarkation point. You get to watch for the same failure of bravado as they step of the bus and feel the gaze of the curious upon them.

But they do their sentence.

Overtime, you get to notice that the baby is now walking or the little boy now sports the shadow of beard to come, or the teenage girl is now a woman in her own right.

You get to notice the time going by. You get to feel that your emotions are rather dwarfed by the loyalty and commitment it must take to serve a sentence alongside your man. I know … I really just know I’d walk. You would not see me fortnight after fortnight, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, on the prison bus.

How do they do it? Is it really caring for someone that makes them put themselves through it?

It just makes me wonder that’s all… what on earth must be like to be caught in a love like that?

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