Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton (32 page)

One bank holiday afternoon, I was pulled into the office and told I was ‘self-opinionated’ and would no longer be considered ‘a well-behaved inmate’. I lost all the usual prison privileges includ- ing the one good thing about being on H-wing – the television. I felt nothing but contempt for the prison authorities.

There is constant banter in prison and many of the officers often throw their weight around under the guise of humour. I devel- oped the tendency to give back as good as they gave, but my sense of humour had now got me downgraded.

So many of the women in Durham were genuinely bad people, but in order to be accepted by others they projected themselves in a sociable manner, feigning concern for others and trying hard to appear genuine. My mind began working overtime. If the officers could slate me when I meant no harm, then I was convinced the evil prisoners could take them in. I had visions of all these nasty cons being allowed to leave prison and my grandfather being stabbed through the neck with a rusty screwdriver, my mother being tied up and battered, my niece being abducted and abused. It was crazy! My mind was no longer working normally, I was no longer thinking in a rational manner. I was paranoid.

By October my mood swings were extreme.Alone, I seemed to be fine. But when the door opened and other prisoners or guards spoke with me I would get angry or upset. Quietly I sank into a deep depression. On H-wing, no one noticed. No one wanted to. Despite some of the crimes many prisoners had committed or been involved in, I didn’t hate them all, they weren’t all so bad, but I did hate the system. Likewise, not all the officers were so bad either. Some were genuinely good people, who treated the inmates with respect, trying hard to fight their own battles against

the system in which they worked.The good ones, of course, were few and far between.

There never seemed to be any light at the end of the tunnel and if things carried on the way they were I was sure I’d never reach the end. At this time I was still facing at least another three and a half years before being eligible for parole. I would be almost
40
if I was granted parole and released. It would be Christmas Eve
2003
and I would have served
11
years in prison.

Constantly I was told ‘There is no guarantee of parole no matter how good your prison behaviour. First application on a drugs charge is usually declined.’ And I had four parole dates – one in
2003
, others in
2004
,
2005
and
2006
– and this security move to Durham would certainly go against me if I made it through to parole. My release date was at the end of
2007
and the licence would expire in June
2009
.The end of the sentence was listed as being
10
November
2014
. I would have no family of my own and all my good years would be behind me.

But I never wanted to be treated differently or given special privileges; all I asked for was that I was treated fairly.At this stage, with my mental health in tatters, I felt that I had suffered enough. In any other prison I would have been OK, but this place was killing me. Letters from friends and my family tried to keep my spirits up but even these were not enough. I couldn’t connect with people outside any longer but didn’t want to go on about my own situation all the time. I was losing touch with the real world and losing touch with reality. H-wing represented the whole world to me and I imagined people everywhere to be the same as those I was living with.

So many times I wished I had never transferred back from Thailand. Over there it had been bad but the way the place had run the prisoners had to organise their own lives. There was always something to keep you occupied. Even the stressful elements became quite stimulating. I’d learnt to look out for myself, knowing

that if I didn’t no one else would do it for me. In Durham I was simply a cog in the lousy system of so-called reform.

Rehabilitation? What exactly is meant by this term? I know the literal meaning but I doubted if anyone in Durham did.

In Durham there was such an impending sense of isolation and frustration, with virtually no control over my own life, that it caused great psychological hardship, and proved virtually impossi- ble to deal with. In Bangkok, while the conditions were pitiful, coupled with the physical brutality and distance from home, at least there was a sense that I was someone.

Durham was so much harder to endure than Bangkok.Although being able to see my family, being able to use the telephone and having access to newspapers and radio brought their own rewards, other than the walls to focus on,there were points in Durham where I was on the verge of collapsing with insanity. In Lard Yao I was treated no better and no worse than anyone else,yet here I seemed to find myself singled out and subjected to scrutiny for no reason.All I wanted to do was get through my time.I didn’t want to rock the boat and wanted nothing from the system. I never expected or wanted to be treated differently, and I just couldn’t understand why I had come home to be treated with such suspicion?

Intimidation and bullying are as commonplace in prisons as mugs of weak tea. But when that intimidation comes from an officer you are in serious trouble.When I found myself subjected to the antics of a guard it was impossible to win. Report an officer for any indiscretion and they will all be on your case. Try to defend yourself verbally and you will find yourself on adjudication, charged with something ridiculous.

Constantly, prisoners are subjected to monitoring and count- ing, rub-down searches and wanding – being checked for metal objects with a black-stick type of metal detector. There are cameras everywhere, so every single movement is monitored, recorded, noted and analysed; and conclusions, invariably, are

drawn from them. Is the prisoner acting normally? Is the prisoner a risk? Is the prisoner depressed? Is the prisoner suspicious? Is the prisoner plotting? Is the prisoner likely to? On and on, questions and counter-questions, but never anything direct.

We were watched constantly and the guards noted their obser- vations in daily records. One guard noted that I had ‘looked at her funny on the stairs’. It was first thing in the morning and I was off to collect some milk, and I doubt I even saw her.After being told I was self-opinionated, I realised that they misunderstood me and I couldn’t speak to anyone; I was too scared to speak in case my words were misinterpreted and I began again to withdraw. I couldn’t see the point in speaking and wanted to just crawl into a hole and disappear. I couldn’t win with them, so I gave up. Most guards do their job just because they need the money.The rest are usually just sickos who have managed to sneak through the selec- tion process.

Maybe I was as bad as the others. As the months ticked by I began believing I was worthless and evil. Maybe that was the purpose of punishment. Break down the spirit and compliance will follow.

I knew it wouldn’t be a holiday camp and knew I didn’t deserve one after what I had done but I hadn’t expected it to be like this. It got to the stage where I no longer wanted to call home to my family and I didn’t want anyone to come and visit me. I felt like a fraud; I was not the person I had thought I had been. I was now as bad as all the other reptiles.Was suicide an option? Constantly.Yet it didn’t seem like an option as much as a beautiful promise.

Prison cells are specifically designed so that suicide is as difficult as possible but where there is a will there is always a way. Cells in Durham are about
10
feet long by about six feet wide, with a small sectioned off area (in some of the cells) with a sink and toilet.The ceilings are low and there are no fixtures from which a prisoner could hang something. All the iron beds are clamped to the wall with metal brackets so that they don’t move. It used to be

common for people to stand the bed up on one end and attach a rope to the top and hang themselves from there.A bed standing on its end is about six feet high, so there’s plenty of space for an average-sized woman to dangle from.

There are doorknobs on the sectioned-off area and inmates have been known to tie a short rope around the doorknob, sit on the floor, tie the other end around their necks and hang that way. I’m not sure that I actually wanted to die; more that I no longer wanted to live. My saving grace was that I am too much of a coward and was never brave enough to hang from anything. I was even embarrassed in case I failed. If a prisoner tries and fails, every- one knows because they have a red mark around their neck. Can you imagine? Too embarrassed to commit suicide.

We nicknamed one woman ‘Knit One, Purl One’, because she loved knitting. Before she had come to prison she had also liked to abuse her daughters. She and her husband had taken pleasure in hanging their daughters up by their ankles, over a bed, from a hook in the ceiling and had systematically sexually abused them with table legs and sadomasochistic devices. Knit One, Purl One and her husband had videoed their acts for years and kept the videos on a bedroom shelf. A neighbour had asked to borrow a movie one day and Knit One, Purl One had lent them the wrong video. The neighbours took the horrendous video to the police and the couple were arrested. She got
12
years for what she had done to her daughters, and when I was on H-wing with her she was applying for access with those girls. Social services were even bringing the children up to see their mother.

I couldn’t put myself into the same equation as those people who were sent to H-wing. I wasn’t a first-stage lifer, vulnerable prisoner, troublemaker, Category A prisoner or ‘danger to society’. I was none of those. I didn’t think I was danger to anyone or a threat to national security. I could barely tread on a spider.

A male member of her family had abused Mary until the age of

four. She was taken into care for the rest of her childhood, while the man remained within the family and carried on abusing the female children around him, so at age
22
Mary went to see the man with a carving knife in her hand. She looked him in the eye and told him he was about to die and promptly stabbed him once, straight through the heart. She told me she had not done it because of what he had done to her, but because he had continued with his perversions and she saw no sign that he was intending to stop. She is currently serving a life sentence for premeditated murder.

Whenever anyone went anywhere in the prison they would be escorted by two officers and a guard with a dog. Rarely was anyone taken off H-wing, but if they had to go to the dentist, for example, which was up at the medical unit inside the men’s section, they were given an escort.The parade of guards and dogs would bring the men up to their cell windows to watch and shout at the spectacle being escorted.

The hierarchy in Durham was obvious.The governors and the officers were the bosses. The male prisoners were next in line. They had extremely low status, but they had more than the women. Monkeys in the zoo, that’s what we were. We were nothing. Prison life creates its own hierarchies and women were at the bottom of the pile.

fourteen

Jailbirds

Dear Mum and Dad

Here is like a slow torture, kept alive to suffer.They get most upset though if anyone tries to end their suffering and go to great lengths to prevent anyone doing so…

Sandra

Letter home, January
1999

Night became morning and then night again. Then morning. Then night. I found myself staring at things in my cell for minutes or hours; never quite sure how much time had passed. I had no strategy for dealing with time. Some days I would confront it head on and other days more covertly. Either way it almost drove me insane.

There are many consequences of putting women in cells, under strict supervision and even stricter control of their movements. Everything in a female prisoner’s life becomes dependent on someone else – often a man – and that is difficult to come to terms with. Invariably, most women who have ended up in prison have done so as a result of their involvement with a man.

The self-esteem of the women in Durham was almost zero.We were fed, clothed, told when and where and how to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’.We were required to walk when ordered, sit when ordered, and stand when ordered. The natural spirit of independence is usurped and the prisoner becomes dangerously like a child,

invariably a volatile one. In most cases, women in prison have their natural roles reversed. It is a radical, anonymous cleansing.

When this happens, inmates attempt to put some degree of control back into their lives. I was no different. Amidst all this chaos of feeling completely and utterly insecure about my future ability to cope with my sentence, I gradually developed a friend- ship with a security-cleared, male member of the prison staff. I will call him Chris.We became close friends.

Chris was interesting, fun and, surprisingly, completely normal with a great many feelings and opinions. When the opportunity presented itself, we talked and talked about everything from current affairs to our various ideologies and he seemed to care about the things that mattered most to me.

He also believed me when I told him about my transfer to H- wing and how unjustified I thought it was. This was wonderful. For the first time in years, I thought that maybe they were all wrong about me, and maybe I wasn’t really so very bad after all. Chris restored some of my faith in human nature and, at the same time, re-established a sense of normality in my prison life. I had fairly regular contact with him and, after a while, he wasn’t simply a member of the prison staff, but a friend. Each time I saw him we spoke about how I was coping with prison life, both physically and emotionally, and he listened attentively and reassuringly. He told me about his life outside, shared his interests and dreams with me and I would return to my cell after seeing him, already looking forward to our next conversation.

At this time I was so down and depressed that I could barely remember the last time I had an interest in living. It was still diffi- cult to rise in the mornings, and I couldn’t be bothered going for hot water for coffee, something that I previously had done almost religiously. My letter-writing had grown infrequent; rarely did I make telephone calls. I just couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to do anything.