If you like a good movie and a can of beer, let’s hope you don’t end up in C Block because, after months of perpetual broadcast, you probably won’t feel like watching it ever again.
If you prefer, you can go straight to Breaking Through the Wall of the Story.
D BLOCK: SELF-DOUBT
D Block is a model ‘corrective facility.’ The warden has taken his duty to ‘correct’ the ways of his wayward prisoners so seriously that he’s turned correction into a fine art. There are cameras and microphones everywhere in D Block, so that guards can monitor the prisoners’ behavior and then offer feedback on how to improve. They offer such feedback via the medium of the walls: they’re able to transmit their comments about each prisoner to specific walls in the prison. So the walls surrounding the prisoners provide a continual feedback system for the required daily behavior.
Wayne has been in D Block for just two months. When he opens his eyes in the morning, he’s able to read some feedback about his behavior the evening before on the wall.
Wayne, we suggest that you improve your reading material. All you ever read about is sports. If it’s not baseball, it’s golf. If it’s not golf, it’s tennis. How can you hope to educate yourself if you don’t read something more challenging?
That morning Wayne goes to the D-Block library and takes out a couple of novels – crime novels about life in gangland. He immerses himself in the first one and has finished it by lunchtime. He likes this fiction and can’t wait to start the next book. He’s chuffed.
But while he’s having lunch, a message flashes up on the wall:
Wayne, is that the best you can do? Reading about the disgusting criminal exploits of other people like you? We suggest you read something that might help lift you out of the stinking criminal mire you’re currently in.
Wayne is deflated. He always tries to respond positively to the feedback he’s given. After all, they’re constantly reminded that:
Prisoners, we give you feedback for your benefit.
Or:
We’re here to help you improve.
Wayne wants to improve. But it’s hard being given such negative feedback all the time.
Jane is a model prisoner. She’s in D Block for swindling hundreds of people out of millions with an elaborate investment scam. She walks with her head down and keeps to herself. She’s just trying to get through her time inside without getting into any trouble. But she’s started to dread seeing her name on the walls.
Jane, we saw you beat Paula at chess last night. Are you sure you played by the rules? Paula is a very good chess player. We will be examining the footage to make sure you didn’t cheat.
The guards have a habit of subtly referring to the prisoners’ convictions. They’d find fault in anything and somehow link it back to the original crime:
Jane, you didn’t wipe down the sink after brushing your teeth this morning. Do you have no consideration for other prisoners?
One thing that has to be said for the guards is that they give all the prisoners equal treatment in their feedback comments. Here’s a look at some of what’s written on D Block’s walls at this very moment:
Samantha, don’t let us have to tell you again to put your tray back in the rack after meals.
Manuel, do you have a comprehension problem? Can you read? You need to speed up with those daily tasks. Old Cyril used to do the rounds quicker than you do.
Ben, you may think you’re God’s gift, but we know better. Now put away the hair gel and concentrate on doing something to help in this place.
Gillian, what do you think your cell is, your teenage bedroom? Keep it tidy.
Davina, a smile doesn’t cost anything, you know. In fact, if you don’t start smiling a bit more, we’ll dock your allowance and then not smiling will start to cost you something.
Andrew, we found the porn.
If you prefer, you can go straight to Breaking Through the Wall of the Story.
E BLOCK: LACK OF CONSCIOUSNESS
E Block is a mess. It’s probably how you’d imagine a prison in a developing country to be: walls crumbling, damp everywhere, litter-strewn corridors, rusty bars, filthy bathrooms, a canteen that sends three prisoners to the sanatorium every week, a sanatorium that sends one prisoner to the morgue every month – a morgue that would make a more pleasant home for most sane people than E Block.
Not that E Block’s prisoners would notice.
They don’t even notice that many of the other prisoners aren’t human. It started as an experiment 20 years ago – an experiment that worked… in certain respects, anyway. The warden noticed that prisoners on E Block seemed to be more malleable than the average prisoner in other blocks: they didn’t think much about what they did or why they did it, they rarely caused trouble, and they never tried to escape. They seemed to be very influenced by what other prisoners did, just followed what others did, whatever they did. So the warden started simply: she filmed an actor dressed in prison garb, just sitting on a bench, reading quietly. The movie wasn’t action-packed. And it wasn’t long, just ten minutes. But a continuous loop of this footage was created and then projected onto a wall of the prison, life size, to create the (rather unrealistic) effect that a prisoner was sitting on a bench, reading quietly. But, as unrealistic as it was, the reading prisoner was imitated. Within days, dozens of E Block’s prisoners were sitting on benches, reading quietly.
This encouraged the warden to create more little movies of prisoners doing innocuous activities, or conscientiously doing what was required as part of prison life. Over the years, the number of projections around the prison increased; the quality of the ‘acting’ improved; and the realism of the projections improved, too. The current warden was now experimenting with hologram projections of obedient prisoners. But this was just fine-tuning. Because the whole experiment was, on the whole, working. There were as many projected prisoners as there were real prisoners. And the real prisoners had lost the ability, if they ever even had it, to differentiate between the real and the projected fellow prisoners around them. The day-to-day life of E Block was a somewhat strange sight, with prisoners roughly mimicking the activities of the looped projections around them. Or were the projections now live footage of the prisoners? Split half and half, were the projections faded shadows of the live prisoners, or were the live prisoners 3-D shadows of the projections?
It was hard to tell. And certainly no one on E Block could ‘tell,’ or would even consider starting the process of telling.
E Block didn’t produce interesting people: prisoners who reformed and went out into the world and made a difference. It produced obedient automata. And there wasn’t enough evidence yet about what these automata would do when dislocated from their programming (the projections). There had been some nasty incidents – stabbings, slashings, and killings – when the projector system went down once. The prisoners lost it. But there are crimes in every prison. They are, after all, full of criminals.
But, overall, it works; E Block prisoners are generally an obedient lot. And E Block is very cheap to run – the cheapest in the whole prison. In fact, not one guard is employed on E Block, or one cleaner. The three projected cleaning prisoners are sufficient to ensure that the bare minimum of half-hearted cleaning is done by the actual prisoners. And that, for E Block, is enough.
If you prefer, you can go straight to Breaking Through the Wall of the Story.
F BLOCK: PERFECTIONISM
The warden of F Block is himself a perfectionist. He’s driven to create the very best prison block with the best statistics on prisoner behavior and rehabilitation. He is always watching the other blocks’ figures and is very tough on his team of guards to make sure that F Block stays ahead. And F Block does perform very well. His idea has always been to instill the same desire for excellence in his team and his prisoners. He wants everyone to feel that they, too, can be the best, and take pride in doing a great job. He wrote all of the wall posts himself. And if one of them isn’t motivating enou
gh, it’s soon replaced with something better. He didn’t just want the posts written on the walls like other blocks either: he had signs made by a local signage company, so they look smart. He had a very clear idea of what he wanted for each of the lines; he even did the designs himself. If the signage company didn’t create these ‘signs’ exactly to his brief, he sent them back. Inevitably, he argued with the owner of the signage company, who believed they’d fulfilled the brief adequately and was reluctant to throw away the sign and start again. But the warden insisted, and got his way eventually. He usually does. And they do now look rather neat on the prison walls:
Be the best you can be.
The good is the enemy of the best.
He particularly likes this one. And he actually imagines a ‘good’ army fighting the ‘best’ army. He enjoys watching the best army slaughtering the good army in his mind’s eye.
Nobody remembers the runner-up.
Quitters never win and winners never quit.
Reach for the stars and you won’t come up with a handful of mud.
He’s even created a whole scene on the wall for this one: a star-speckled background to illustrate the idea.
So, it all seems to work: F Block is the top performer, its prisoners the model prisoners, its statistics exemplary.
But if you wander along the immaculate corridors of F Block, adorned by the sparkling, inspirational wall signs, you hear some rather unpleasant exchanges between the prisoners. Let’s enter the kitchen, where the inmates are busy preparing lunch for F Block. Oh yes, in F Block, no catering staff are employed. Prisoners cook. Why? Well, prisoners took over years ago when they became unhappy with the quality of the food and decided they could do better themselves. And indeed they do. In fact, the food on F Block is famous in prisons the world over. The food has been featured in magazines and TV shows everywhere. Some of their best chefs have become celebrities and – once released – have gone on to become illustrious chefs. The most famous, Billy Gulliver, a very tall, tough Scot, established the hugely successful Michelin-starred restaurant in London (and now New York, too), called ‘F Block’ (the ‘F’ for ‘food’, you see).
So we’re in the kitchen and the current chef is shouting at another prisoner: ‘What the f**k are you doing there? Are you feeling ill or something? Because it looks like you’ve puked into the pan. I wouldn’t give that to the warden’s dog. I’d prefer the dog to lick my balls than have to give him a plate of that shit mix. Throw it away and start again. And if I don’t taste something from you that makes me cry with joy before lunch, I’ll get YOU to lick my f**king balls.’
Not pleasant to hear. Not pleasant to watch. And it must be hell to be on the receiving end of that tirade, even if no ball-licking is ever involved.
But when you sit down to lunch an hour later, any distaste at the scene you’ve experienced instantly evaporates. You have never tasted anything like it. You actually start to contemplate the crimes you could commit to get yourself into F Block. You’d even be happy with a life sentence.
If you prefer, you can go straight to Breaking Through the Wall of the Story.
G BLOCK: LACK OF IMAGINATION
G Block is a quiet and relatively civilized place, as prisons go. If Prince Charles turned his ever-active mind to the architectural design of a prison, this is where he’d end up: classical and backward looking. It’s pleasant enough, as prisons go: everything is orderly and neat. You know where you are in G block (not that you’re likely to forget you’re in prison). In fact, you can’t fail to know where you are in G Block because there are little maps of the block everywhere for emergency procedures, just like they have in hotels and restaurants. In fact, these small maps are the only things on the walls. Unlike all the other blocks, there’s no writing on the walls of G Block. When originally asked by the architects what they would like to write, the reply from the G Block prison team was –
‘They’re walls. Why would you want to write on them?’
They said it as if the architects were stupid. So the architects went away to write some more great headlines for the inmates of B Block, which was much easier and more fun anyway.
The prisoners in G Block do what’s required as part of the prison routine: wash, eat, go into the yard for some exercise and fresh air, and watch some TV. Generally though, they just sit around, not saying much, looking into space. You know those people on the bus or the train who aren’t doing anything – not reading, or playing with their phone, or chatting to someone, or looking out curiously at the passing world outside. They’re just staring into space. But not in a Zen way, not in a ‘I’ve normally got my head so crammed with stuff, with things to do, with ideas for what to do, that it’s nice just to sit here and breathe, like a lovely little meditation on a bus.’ No. There’s nothing going on in their heads. And NOT in a good way. I mean in a nothing-going-on kind of way. It’s not a welcome pause in the play or fast-forward button of a full life. It’s like the movie hasn’t started. In fact they can’t even find the DVD, as there is no DVD because the movie hasn’t even been made… or thought of. Maybe because the person who could have thought of that movie is this very person – full of potential, but with their lights switched off.
They’re all like that in G Block. There’s deadness here. It’s not the peace and tranquility of a… er… peaceful and tranquil place. It’s the peace and tranquility of a graveyard. And I don’t go to graveyards for peace and tranquility. If I go, I go to visit dead people. Welcome to G Block that’s full of dead people, but on some kind of miraculous life-support machine that makes them look and act alive. But they’re not. Not really. They lack imagination. They don’t have the imagination to see that there are other things they could be doing. They don’t have the imagination to picture anything beyond what’s in front of them, no matter how dire it is. Like frogs that boil to death as the water gets warmer and warmer, they don’t even have the imagination to see there’s the option of jumping out. So our prisoners in G Block have never even considered there’s the possibility of escaping from this prison, and so none of them ever try. It makes life for the guards pretty easy and boring. They too, in fact, sit around looking into space.
STOP PRESS
Or at least stop the process of writing for one moment please, Parkin. I got up this morning to write the next chapter and read this in the Guardian newspaper, under the section ‘Prisons.’
Inmate used plastic forks to dig through 5ft wall
A prisoner who dug through a 5ft- (1.5m-) thick wall using plastic forks was caught when brick dust was seen on the ground. Simeon Langford made tools by removing screws from his desk and taping them to plastic forks, then spent weeks chiseling the mortar from the wall of his cell in Exeter prison. He used papier-mâché to cover the hole. The escape attempt was foiled when an officer spotted a pile of debris beneath Langford’s window. Langford was being held on remand after attacking three warders at another prison four days before he had been due to be released from an earlier sentence.
Now I haven’t mentioned this yet. But it seems like a good time. There’s a risk with using this prison metaphor that we fall back on the clichés of prison life we’ve taken from film and TV. My view of prison is probably part The Shawshank Redemption, part Porridge1, part Escape from Colditz, part Escape to Victory. And then the numerous movies with some prison scenes (off the top of my head: The Italian Job, The Silence of the Lambs, American History X, etc.). The only prison I’ve stepped into is Alcatraz, and that closed down in 1963. None of them represent either a modern or accurate representation of what prison life is like in 2012. So if you’re reading this in prison, or you know what prisons are REALLY like, please don’t be put off by the inaccuracies and lazily ransacked clichés. We’re not writing a book about prisons. We’re writing a book about freedom. And this prison metaphor helps us to see how we can become free. In fact, our average reader might well relate more to our prison references than a more realistic representation of the true gritty
reality of prison life – because our references are probably their references, too.
Now, when we were planning the chapters of Breaking Through the Walls, we originally came up with a list of ways to get out of prison such as ‘tunneling,’ ‘escaping through the sewer,’ etc. that we could use as analogies to describe therapeutic techniques to break through your walls. We had one escape ‘using a kitchen knife.’ It’s in The Shawshank Redemption, isn’t it, where Tim Robbins scrapes his way through the wall, then puts up poster to cover the hole. And that’s what came to mind. He used a small hammer, which he kept in his hollowed-out Bible. But we thought a kitchen knife would work.
Of course, no self-respecting prison, when you think about it, would have metal kitchen knives. I was thinking that it’s difficult to hurt yourself with a relatively blunt eating knife (we’re not talking about vegetable chopping knives or carving knives here, of course). But it’s probably very easy to hurt someone with even a blunt kitchen knife if you plunge it into their abdomen rather than just try to cut through a tough bit of meat. So, lose the metal kitchen knives. What do they use then for cutting meat? Plastic kitchen knives? Well, I’m not absolutely confident you can’t do damage with the serrated plastic edge of one of those, either. Do they only supply plastic forks then? What do the prisoners then do with slices of meat or an undercooked carrot? Do the guards come around and cut the prisoners’ meat into pieces for them, as you would for a child? When you do it for a child, the most comfortable way is to stand behind the child and put both your arms around them and then cut up their food? Can you imagine the guards doing that? It’s just not going to happen, is it? Ah, maybe they only serve minced meat. Maybe they have someone checking all the vegetables to make sure they’re not undercooked. Maybe a guard checks every food item with a plastic testing fork (he’s called ‘Head Forker’) to ensure it’s possible to be eaten comfortably with only a plastic fork. Or a spoon. They must have spoons, too. Otherwise, what would they do with soup? Yes, they must have spoons.
F**k It Therapy Page 6
