Scotland: “A state of permanent hyperawareness”

I was first incarcerated in Shotts remand prison, moved to Polmont young offenders prison and later to Edinburgh prison. Over the years, I kept being moved from one prison to another: Addiewell, Greenock, Castle Huntly…

I remember the conditions in Greenock being particularly bad. While I was there, we had to choose between attending education classes or getting one hour of fresh air in the yard. The yard is a football pitch with no equipment - just 50 people walking around in circles.

One day I hurt my knee playing football in Addiewell prison and needed to go to an outside hospital appointment. It took about up to 18 months to arrange transport.

Addiewell is quite a violent prison, with a lot of prisoner-on-prisoner violence. I could not defend myself if anything happened, I was left really vulnerable for a year. The prison did not give me clutches or anything. I was always hoping that other incarcerated people would help me to go to visits, because the staff wouldn’t help me.

While all this was going on, I was lucky enough to begin my first degree in social policy and criminology that I continued and eventually completed across different prisons.
In Castle Huntly prison, I was the first incarcerated person allowed to attend an outside university. For a year and a half, I would leave the prison every morning and go to the local university. As far as I know, after me, no one in that prison has ever been allowed to go and study outside again. People are allowed to go to work, to clean the toilets, but they’re not actually allowed to go and study.

I had decent access to higher education, but it is not the case for most incarcerated people in this country. At the time of my incarceration, only 44 out of 6500 people in prison were doing a degree. This figure has slightly risen: according to a prison governor that I spoke to very recently, there are now about 150 out of 8000 people in prison who are doing a higher education degree.

In Shotts prison, I received a weekly allowance of £12 for education. Out of the 600 or 700 people incarcerated there, only eight of us received it. This money helped me a little to call my family.

Still, staying in touch with my family was a constant struggle. Phone calls in prison are expensive, and they don’t give you any free minutes at all.

My family would always send me money to put on my phone. There were a lot of people whose family couldn’t do that, and who couldn’t keep in touch with their family.

Prison wage is about 8 pounds a week. With that, you have to choose: call your family, or buy soap. In many prisons, neither is provided for you. In some, you only get one toilet roll a month.

Because calls were so expensive, I managed to get mobile phones from time to time to stay in touch with my family. It is prohibited and they caught me several times, I was then immediately transferred to another facility for “security breach”. They just kept moving me from one prison to another. Until one day I was transferred to Glenochil prison, which is like 100 miles from my family. There was no public transport in my area and my family members did not drive, so I did not see them for a year and a half.

It was actually quite common for incarcerated people from my city to be moved to Glenochil prison as punishment, so that they would not be able to receive visits from loved ones because it’s far and there is no public transport.

On top of that, the relationship with the staff in this prison was horrible and made everything harder. It was a daily struggle to just get things that you were entitled to. I remember one day when I made a request for visitation time to see my family. They drove two and a half hours to Edinburgh only to be denied entry. A guard had thrown away the form because of a disagreement three weeks earlier.

The 18 months I was incarcerated in Glenochil prison were easily the worst period of my sentence.

Being incarcerated is being in a state of hyper awareness, all the time. When you’re inside, you don’t really notice it. You think that’s just how life is, and you adapt to it.

When it really affected me was once released. I couldn’t really function properly, to be honest. I got really anxious.

I went to university, I was trying to turn my life around. I tried to tell myself that going out of the house was ok, but I was constantly scared that something bad was going to happen. I thought it was just normal to be hyper alert all the time, and that everybody was as afraid as me. But it was really something I had developed in prison, a sort of impending feeling that something really bad was going to happen at any moment. I still feel it today.

When I was in prison, I had no trouble sleeping. I would just go to bed and fall asleep, and if something happened, I would deal with it the next morning. It was really one day at a time. Since my release, I can barely sleep, and it really affects my mental health.

I have been diagnosed with a complex PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). I might have had it before going to prison, but the daily violence and constant threat of violence activated something in me that I have never been able to switch off. Years of counselling and therapy still haven’t reversed that feeling. It’s been six and a half years and it’s still something I struggle with daily.

Today I live in a quiet, middle-class area, I take my kids to the park, go to the shop, I do ordinary things outside. And still, this feeling of threat is always there. I feel like I am always being watched, as if the police, the prison staff, are always there.

The therapist told me that the anxiety will probably never go away. “After 20 years time, it might be less”, he said, “but it will still be there. It’s just who you are now”.