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Diary of A Secret Prisoner: The first thing I did here was to try to hang myself

The shame of prison existence was so alien to the way I saw myself at first – and then I learnt there are deeper, more scarring deprivations

As Britain is gripped by a prisons crisis, The Telegraph is publishing dispatches from an inmate at a Category B jail – the second highest level of security – to discover what life is really like inside. Recently, the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) found the jail to be chronically overcrowded and understaffed, with self-harm and drug use rife.
The inmate, a British professional and entrepreneur on the outside, is on remand awaiting trial charged with non-violent crimes which he denies. To protect his identity, he is not named. Other names and nicknames have also been changed.
Last week, I wrote about why I loved jail, but now I have to be honest about the miseries of incarceration. The first thing I did after arriving at prison was to make a ligature.
Then, I learnt that the prison officers are trained to cut you down very fast, so you thereby fail to achieve strangulation. The risk was being resuscitated as a paraplegic, which I thought to be too high.
I have also since learnt that there are other ways to kill yourself in here. But I no longer want to. When I came here, I thought that – whatever the justice or injustice of my captivity – I had brought the greatest conceivable shame and disaster upon myself. Prison existence was so alien to my concept of myself that I did not want to endure it.
But now I think differently and I would even say that I could survive a long sentence. I say this because I think prison is far less effective as a deterrent than people imagine. And I am in no way special – I am actually a bit of a self-pitying, sulking wimp. But I think you too, reader, would find the experience equally endurable. Thousands do: my experience is typical, I would say, rather than exceptional. We need less than we think we do, and we are tougher than we believe we are.
But still, there are deep, scarring deprivations. The greatest is family – I strongly miss my children. For the first four months, I wrote to them everyday. Then I discovered that if I did not think about them – stopped myself from doing so – it wasn’t so bad. The tears and the rage subsided a bit and then entirely.
The vandalism of human beings, relationships and meaningful communication is what the criminal justice system specialises in. You have to get over that. And you adapt. You give away so many of the things that, in truth, align with your dignity, identity and independence, but which you are forced to accept have been stripped from you, possibly forever.
We have hardly any natural sunlight; that is a precious thing to lose. I am first out in the yard at 8am and last back in half an hour later. Our west-facing yard in Wing A gets no natural sunlight at that time of the morning between September and March, so I have already felt the last direct sun I will see for months. We are prescribed free vitamin D pills because it is recognised that we would otherwise be deficient, barring the small number of us lucky enough to get outdoor work in recycling or gardening.
I raised my children to love cycling, walking and swimming. I love nothing more than being in the mountains with them. As a family, we were always happiest in the Lake District, and the single biggest blow I’ve experienced was finding out that they went there without me this year.
You can’t play tennis in prison (though you can play badminton) and you can’t swim. I enjoyed being one of those slightly boring middle-aged men that trawled up and down the lane in sports centres.
Outdoors – the sea or a cold, fast-flowing stream – is the most wholesome and exciting place to swim. The idea of the sea is always with me here for the curious reason that a prison can sometimes feel like a ship, or an old-school hulk: three decks, metal railings, a suicide net that looks somehow rather nautical and cells like cabin doors, with little portholes behind which men don’t sail anywhere, except perhaps through time.
At midday, when the overhead sun casts shadows down the landings, you can climb to the top floor if you’re out of your cell and lean out, maybe catching a bit of warm light. Like a forbidden pleasure, you can close your eyes and imagine the views – vast, oceanic distances, the beach and lands you’ve left behind receding even further.
Next week the Secret Prisoner writes about the relationship between prisoners and their guards.

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