The Devil You Know

by Gwen Adshead

  At that time, the number of women in prison in England and Wales stood at 4,320, out of a total prison population of around eighty-four thousand. By 2019, according to a report by the Prison Reform Trust,1 that number would double to nearly eight thousand women (although still about eighty thousand men) – a very lopsided gender ratio, and one that is broadly similar around the world. The individual populations of our female prisons number in the hundreds rather than the thousands, with over 80 per cent of inmates serving sentences of less than twelve months for non-violent crimes, chiefly theft. The fact that they are assessed as less risky means female prisons in the UK are not nearly as restrictive as those for men. As opposed to the overcrowded male estate, which is dominated by several Victorian-built monoliths with antiquated facilities, the women’s prisons I’ve worked in are modern builds, with some amenities that might be surprising. As I made my way to my first appointment of the day, I heard the rattle and clink of cups as I passed the staff café, mixed with the varied tones of lively chatter between the prisoners who worked there. Further down the corridor, I caught laughter and argument accompanying the buzz of hairdryers in the prisoners’ beauty salon. I always marvelled at the elaborate styling and manicuring that went on in there and felt rather dishevelled by contrast.

  I worked my way through the complex, checking my notes for the right wing and cell number, and occasionally calling to someone ahead of me to ‘Hold the gate!’ or ‘Wait for me!’ to save on some of the laborious locking and unlocking that punctuates all movement through a prison. I prefer not to see people in their cells if I can help it, but there were no available meeting rooms that day, so having checked with the staff that it was safe, I had decided it was better than not meeting at all. It was morning and most of the cells in this area were unlocked, with many of them empty as people went out to eat, work or exercise. The door to the cell I approached was firmly shut. I knocked and waited, checking my watch to make sure I wasn’t too early, but I was right on time for our appointment and I hoped she was expecting me.

  The woman who opened the door was a portrait in grey. She frowned, greeting me with a blunt ‘Who are you?’ Her hair, which might once have been a vibrant auburn, was faded, frizzy and shot with wiry white strands. Her eyes were a watery blue, her skin sallow. Her face looked untouched by sun or wind, signifying a life spent indoors. Her loose trousers and sweatshirt were equally drab, and I felt my clothes were jewel-bright by contrast. I try to dress for work so that I look unremarkable and therefore harmless, but I suspect I don’t always get it right, not least because I can’t know what lens other people may look through. ‘Charlie?’ I’d been told that was her preferred name. ‘I’m Dr Adshead. I sent you a message to say I was coming?’

  ‘What do you want?’ she said, her voice as flat and colourless as her appearance. I explained that I was working with people who were in prison past their recommended release date, and I hoped we might have a chat. When she was nineteen, Charlie had been sentenced to life for murder, with a tariff, or minimum sentence, of ten years; today, with judges imposing longer and longer tariffs, that might have been fifteen. But by the time I met her, she had spent thirty years inside. The notion of overstaying one’s time in prison may sound odd, but as I’ve touched on in other cases, a life sentence doesn’t have to mean being in prison for life. People can apply to be released once they have served the tariff imposed by the judge, provided they are no longer seen as a risk to the public, although they can be recalled to prison at any time if necessary. This had been true for Charlie, whose antisocial behaviour in the community while on parole had seen her sent her back inside three times over. It’s expensive to keep people incarcerated, and over the last decade increased efforts have been made to break this logjam, including additional resources to fund mental health teams like the one I was working in at the time.

  I had no idea what she would say. I’ve been met with a lot of hostile responses to the offer of therapy in prison, ranging from ‘I don’t want to talk to a fucking shrink’ to ‘What are you going to do to fix me then?’ I could engage with those kinds of responses; the worst was to be met with silence. I asked her if we could talk for a bit. She shrugged and turned away, leaving the door ajar. Hardly a warm welcome, but I’d take it. I stepped inside. Like most prison cells, it was small, maybe eight feet square, with a bed bolted to one wall and a shelf serving as a desk opposite. There was a window with a view of a bit of cloudy sky, and a half-screened toilet area – ‘in-cell sanitation’ is the norm in newer prisons and in the female estate. I noted that the space looked tidy because it was lacking all the mess of pictures and objects that indicated personality, family ties or other interests. There was a stack of books on the desk, and I squinted to try and make out their titles, without success. Many women have nothing in their room, not even a single book, so I was interested to see what she was reading.

  Charlie hunched on the edge of her bed saying nothing, allowing me to fuss about with the only chair, talking to myself with that cheery self-talk that professionals tend to use to fill a silence. ‘Right, well, where shall I go … just here? That all right with you? There we are, that’s it …’ I could see that Charlie looked disconnected, almost absent, and I tried to make eye contact as I launched into an explanation of our project and its aim of helping women like her break out of what appeared to be a pattern of returning to prison. ‘So,’ I said, offering a favourite question of mine that rules out a yes or no answer, ‘what do you think about that idea?’

  ‘About what?’ She sounded tired and bored, and I felt annoyed. At the same time, I recognised that my reaction probably reflected her own irritation that I was there, uninvited. We were both middle-aged but, for a moment, looking at her I was reminded of myself at fourteen or so, sitting in just that posture, hunched on my bed with arms folded and head down, full of ennui and attitude when asked to do something I didn’t want to do. Boys do this too, but there’s a special kind of contempt that has been perfected by adolescent girls. As we sat there in a silence made all the more awkward by being at such close quarters, I noticed that one of her mismatched socks had a hole in the toe. It struck me as a tiny but insolent commentary, a refusal to mend.

  I could have asked her to tell me more about herself that day, but I decided against it. Experience had shown me that it was best to establish a rapport first, especially when someone had not yet agreed to work with me. I had been given a précis of her original offence in the referral from the prison’s mental health unit: she had been part of a gang-perpetrated homicide in the late 1980s which sounded pretty horrible. I’ve discussed how unusual homicide is in our society, and ‘joint enterprise homicide’, when several people collaborate to kill someone, is particularly rare, especially when the victim is a stranger to those involved. The fact that this group was so young – all of them under twenty – and included females made it even more of an anomaly.

  Eddie was a homeless man in his sixties living rough on the streets in Charlie’s neighbourhood. He would always beg for food and cigarettes while intoxicated. Sometimes the police would move him on but, like a lost cat, he would always find his way back to his favourite spot in the local public park. I’m sure we’ve all seen many Eddies, growling or chuckling on a bench, smelling of urine and beer. They do no harm to anyone, but mothers steer their children out of these men’s path and people avoid their gaze as they hurry by. One summer’s day, Charlie’s group were in the park, lying on the grass in the sun, evading school or work, drinking and taking drugs. As twilight came, they moved off in search of food and came across Eddie at the edge of the park, relieving himself in a sheltered spot out of sight of the main road. As they approached, a few of the boys and girls jeered and started to harass him, calling him names and throwing beer cans at him. He tried to run away but stumbled and fell. In that moment the group pounced. As I read the police reports of the beating, of the broken bottles and stones they used to hurt him, along with their fists and feet, I pictured a
whirling Hydra, terrifying in its many-headed force and malicious energy. Eddie was no Hercules and offered little defence.

  Later, Charlie was identified as having blocked Eddie’s escape as he managed to struggle to his feet, head bleeding and begging for mercy, according to a passing jogger who testified at the trial. She and another girl had shoved the old man back on the ground, where his head struck the asphalt with an ugly crack. The autopsy put the cause of death as ‘internal injuries sustained by multiple contusions to the head and abdomen and a haemorrhage in the frontal lobe’. The gang scattered into the night, by all accounts laughing and whooping as they ran, but were soon rounded up by police. Eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence made the criminal case straightforward.

  After their conviction for joint enterprise murder, many of the co-defendants were sent to various juvenile prisons, since some were as young as fifteen. When they reached eighteen, they would be moved to the adult estate. They all received life sentences, with an average tariff of ten to fifteen years. I’d been informed that the others had long since been released into the community, and only Charlie was still inside. I thought I’d begin there, by asking if she knew this, and why it was so. She just gave a little ‘couldn’t care less’ shrug. I would try something else. ‘Charlie, I know how unusual it is to kill a stranger. I’ve worked with other people who’ve done this.’ That caught her attention, and she peered up at me from behind her frizzy fringe. ‘Why?’ Good, we’re conversing now, I thought, that’s a start.

  ‘Anyone who ends someone else’s life also changes their own life forever,’ I said. I’d heard many people say in therapy that they had never thought of themselves as someone who could or would kill anyone, and how it can make you a stranger to yourself. I added that I had seen how people who had killed needed help to start thinking about the unthinkable, and how important it could be for them to articulate those feelings. Unlike many other big events in life, there is no how-to manual for life after homicide, no sources of information or guidance to follow. It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that some people found it incredibly hard to figure out what to do, how to make progress or how to handle a new, alien identity as a convicted murderer. Therapy gave them some tools to do that.

  Charlie followed every word I said, but when I finished, she blurted, ‘I don’t want to go over all that shit again. It makes me upset, you know.’ She shifted her position on the bed so that her back rested against the cell’s grey wall, her legs jutting out, dirty-sock holes facing me. I had a brief thought that in some cultures, showing someone the soles of your feet is considered highly offensive. But in this case, I suspected she just needed to put more space between us. ‘There’s nothing for me out there, you know,’ she mumbled. ‘And I took a life, so why should I have one?’

  This was a singular and intriguing comment, implying a metaphor of life as an object of value. I hadn’t generated that idea for her, and I was heartened that she had offered it. It was a potential sign that she had words for her experience – the first step in the verbal dance of therapy. Despite her outward signs of reluctance, Charlie might just want to engage. Before I left, she confirmed she would meet me again and even smiled briefly when I responded with an over-hearty ‘Excellent!’, as if we’d done something momentous together. I guessed she was thinking of me as a nice-enough idiot, and there were worse ways to pass the time. I paused at her cell door, indicating her book collection. ‘I see you’re a reader.’ I pointed to one of the books, a fat hardback, asking what it was. She turned the spine around to remind herself. ‘A Suitable Boy – by some Indian bloke.’ ‘Ah,’ I said, intrigued by her choice, and as I glanced back from the doorway I saw she was leafing through the pages as if curious about what I thought it revealed.

  I wasn’t making any particular assumption about that book, but everything has meaning and the objects we choose to have in our personal spaces are always a kind of communication; they aren’t called ‘interiors’ for nothing. Novelists tend to use metaphor, which is a literary form of ‘transference’, as my mentor Murray Cox liked to remind us when we were trainees; it is always significant when a patient uses a metaphor in therapeutic discourse. And as children’s author E. B. White said, reading is a sign of an alert mind, which is crucial for effective therapy.

  I made my way down to the prison’s probation unit, which held offenders’ records, to ask for Charlie’s file, including the trial reports. I felt a rising curiosity about this woman, and I wanted to discover more. But as I read through the documentation, my heart sank. Her depressingly familiar life story left me feeling helpless and angry. Charlie had been in local authority care on and off from the age of seven, when she was first removed from her drug-addicted mother’s home by social services, due to physical abuse and neglect. She did not thrive in foster care and was verbally abused by one foster parent, then rejected by the next.

  Presumably because no one else wanted her, she was returned to her mother’s care at the age of ten, where she was faced with a new stepfather and two older stepbrothers. Home 2.0 was no improvement. The adults fought, attacking each other and the children, and the brothers bullied and harassed their weaker sibling. As she approached puberty, their abuse developed a sexual component. One social worker’s note stated that Charlie had complained that her brothers would ‘grab her all the time’, touching her breasts and genitals.

  School may have seemed a comparative haven to her. Although she could be loud and aggressive at times, both in class and in extracurricular programmes, she did well at English and art. She told one teacher she hoped to work with disabled children when she grew up. As she moved into her teens, she struggled with exams and homework, and got into physical fights with other students. She was finally suspended from school and ran away from home at the age of fifteen, taking to the streets with other children like her. They were not officially a ‘gang’ in the criminal sense, more of a unified organism moving in the same direction – mostly away from authority. A therapist at the time noted how much she seemed to enjoy the paradoxical combination of identity and belonging she got from the group, and the anonymity of moving in a pack, writing, ‘She says she felt braver as part of a group.’

  Belonging is a precious thing if you’ve never experienced it at home, and the sometimes abusive pressure in a gang to stay loyal and join in with criminal activity is a low price to pay. The trouble is that at such a young age, when people are still forming a sense of their independent selves, boundaries can blur between their identity and that of the group. If you’re not sure where you end and others begin, it can be hard to know exactly where the boundary of reality is too. In later life, or indeed in prison, this lack of selfhood and individual thinking can have dire consequences. Disinhibiting drugs and alcohol exaggerate these feelings, as does the adrenalin involved in some gang situations. I noticed that Charlie had also told her previous therapist that she ‘had a rush’ when the group went out and successfully shoplifted or stole a car for joyriding.

  She had spoken to social workers at some point about how protective she felt towards younger girls who joined the group, acting like a big sister and giving them advice about avoiding sexual assault on the street. Unfortunately, she had not been able to protect herself. Not long after she turned sixteen, she went to score some drugs from a local dealer on behalf of the group, and the man – who was twice her age – overpowered her and raped her. Charlie was so enraged that she took an unusual step: she marched down to the local police station and reported him. Rape has, unfortunately, long been one of the most under-reported crimes, and Charlie’s response was all the more surprising in this case because she was regularly at odds with the law.

  Charlie’s complaint went no further. The rape had occurred some thirty years earlier, and I believe that reforms to rape investigations and prosecutions would make that less likely now. The only result was that she was taken back into a care home, where she stayed until she was eighteen. She settled well into the facility and manage
d to present with some positive attitudes, talking with support staff there about her ambitions to work with disabled people or perhaps do something to help animals. But she was also cautioned by police several times during this period for minor offences, including criminal damage and petty theft, and she was regularly taking drugs and abusing alcohol.

  It would be easy to see her life as one long period of small advances hampered by repeated disappointments and obstructions, a kind of Snakes and Ladders game she always lost. When her eighteenth birthday came around, she lost her care placement, which meant that she left a secure environment while still vulnerable and unprepared for the adult world. Although Charlie knew it was coming, on the day she had to go she refused to say goodbye to anyone and on her way out smashed all the glass out of the front door of the most stable home she’d ever known.

  This was not her first or last destructive outburst. They continued throughout her time in prison and were seen as more evidence of her ‘failure to progress’. Before our next meeting, I heard she had done it again. This time she had wrecked her cell, creating as much havoc as she could in that small and barren space. In a sudden tantrum, she had thrown her few possessions around the room, tearing pages out of books and breaking things, and when prison officers rushed in to restrain her, she screamed and fought, saying she wished she were dead. All of this was apparently triggered by something minor, a frustration that would have been familiar to her and which she had apparently tolerated without a problem many times before: a member of staff had told her she would have to wait for approval of a request slip to visit the prison library.