Tag Archives: prison

33 Reasons. 

23 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by in Emotions, Life

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We have fundamentally been doing it all wrong. Our approach has been flawed. We need a change in our justice system and it needs to happen soon. We are putting often the most vulnerable people in our society into places where they can never be expected to change, to thrive. We need to rehabilitate these children, these adults, not induct them into a life of unending criminality. We need to ensure that they are given opportunities for education, for employment, for change. To rehabilitate. 

Obviously for a few this may not be possible but for most it is. 

Our justice system should be less about just banging people up, and more about rehabilitation, re-education. It makes sense, and it’s about time that we stop keep saying it, and actually started to do something that will begin to achieve it. A shake up of prisons and children’s custody, away from just punishment, moving toward change. Hope, education; rehabilitation.  

I know this absolutely. I know this because I have experienced it. From both sides of the fence; as a criminal, a habitual offender who found herself locked up in one of these establishments; and also, perhaps uniquely as one of those who has the keys, literally, to assisting in that rehabilitation. 

If we were to meet today, I would introduce myself as Kate, a successful career woman. A mother of 3 with ambitions and goals and a plan as to how to achieve them. You would see a smartly dressed, probably crazy haired, confident woman, literally holding the keys to a prison in my hands. 

Had I met you 11 years ago it would have been a very different story. I would have likely been introduced to you as a prisoner within that very same prison. A heroin addict, with 33 criminal convictions; shoplifting, theft, possession of class A drugs. 26 years old, weighing 5.5 stone, I would have looked a very different person to the one I am today. 
In my early teens I began to take drugs and swiftly found myself  with a heroin addiction. Crime was my way of life and I was a repeat offender, with no hope of anything really, certainly not of ever living. 
At the age of 25, after 33 convictions I finally wound up in prison, just for a few weeks, but I was lucky. In those few weeks I was nurtured and helped and I found an idiom of peace. A snippet of chance that things could be different. I was offered respite from the continual drudgery of crime, and drug taking and I glimpsed a different life. 

I volunteered to help people. I optimised Big Society. I helped set up a charity and I found work. I got a degree and my life continued in an upward trajectory. Today I find myself responsible for the substance misuse needs of large groups of vulnerable people; adults and children. I run a budget of many millions a year. I hold keys to the prison I was once locked up in. I am rehabilitation personified. 

So it absolutely pains me to tell you that whilst rehabilitation is the key to changing lives for the better, there is a fundamental flaw. People in the UK today cannot be rehabilitated and move forward, away from their pasts. They can absolutely be rehabilitated, but there is no point in rehabilitating them because, as it stands they can never be seen to have changed. Their past haunts them like a shadow in the night; threatening at any point to pull it all away. I know this because I have experienced it myself. 

Part of my recovery and rehabilitation has been to help others. I went to university, I got a degree and a post graduate certificate, I gained a teaching qualification, sharing what I have learnt with others. I spend my days demanding the best services for the patients within prisons that I am responsible for. I trained as a first aider and gave up my weekends setting up and then volunteering on an SOS bus,  helping those who were drunk or ill, making sure they were safe. I followed on from this by training as an Emergency Care Assistant and working one day a week on frontline ambulances. I love it, I’m good at it. So you can imagine my devastation when I suddenly found out that I wasn’t able to do a job that I love, might not be able to again.  The reason? A renewed DBS check which this time (not sure how they missed it last time) they had seen my 11-20 year old criminal convictions. Never mind that I have a demonstrable track record, much more recent, of being a stand up citizen. Never mind that in my full time job I hold a position of significant responsibility. Never mind that I regularly walk in and out of the prisons that I am responsible for using the keys I am trusted to hold. No; convictions, from what feels to me like another life, indeed are from over a decade ago appeared to supersede it all. I can no longer work in a job that I am good at, that I love, because I made bad decisions at 13 years of age. 

And so whilst I wholeheartedly agree that rehabilitation needs to happen, that can work, the sad truth is that society is not currently set up to see it that way. We rehabilitate people and then cut them off at the knees when they try to apply for any decent job, because employers don’t see the rehabilitation. They don’t see that someone has desisted from reoffending because they have changed; what they see is a six page long DBS check giving them 33 reasons not to employ that rehabilitated ex offender. 

And so whilst I believe wholeheartedly in rehabilitation, I think that we are in danger of setting people up to fail if we don’t address the issue of how we recognise that rehabilitation as a society. People can change, but only if we let them. 

Sick and tired. 

21 Saturday Mar 2015

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 I got onto heroin around my mid teens, my first ever serious boyfriend introduced me to it and within weeks I was hooked. The circumstances leading up to the decision to try it are long and complicated. I distinctly remember when I first tried it thinking that I didn’t have the time or desire to get addicted. I was stronger than that, I could try it and leave it alone. That was day one. 14 days later I had used everyday and the gear finally ran out. I couldn’t sleep, L decided that if we got some more it would help us sleep. We bought some more. My next proper recollection is sitting in my kitchen 6 months later. I was withdrawing, I recall sinking down the cupboards to the floor and saying out loud “I’m a heroin addict. I’m a fucking heroin addict” I nervously laughed at this realisation. I don’t quite understand why. 


From that point on my life changed. My childhood was gone. I was thrown into an existence of survival. Something which I learnt I was pretty good at. I could start the morning without a penny to my name and within hours be sitting there with £1000 of drugs. I couldn’t see the point of doing things in a small way, so I threw myself into my life of crime.  I sold drugs, a lot of drugs. I was unrelenting in my quest to obtain more drugs. Enough was never enough for me. 

Gradually, over the years things in my life changed. My partners changed. L turned into S and then my eldest sons dad P, then J. They all had one thing in common; they were addicts, fully ensconced into their addiction. They were broken people and the one thing I have learnt about broken people, is that sometimes you end up being cut on the shards of their lives. Each one of them brought something to me at the time that I couldn’t find in myself. 
L brought me into the peer group that had previously shunned me. He gave me an, albeit fragile, position in the society of my youth. S gave me a more grown up and sophisticated facade, he worked up town. He held down a good job, he helped me to make believe that my life was moving on, as I had always anticipated that it would. While with S, I worked in London at a solicitors office, I presented a view to the world that I wanted them to believe. 

P came into my life and gave me control. By gave me, I mean he arrived at a point when my life had spiralled into chaos, and he took control of me. Totally and absolutely. It took me years to escape his clutches. The control I craved turned out to be stifling and unhealthy, instead of taking control of my own life I had no control at all. 

J came after this, and he was kind and he helped me to like myself again. To see that perhaps, with a little work, I could be worthy of love. 

Throughout this my drug taking continued. At some point I added crack cocaine into my daily medication list. I don’t quite know when or how. It just seemed to have slipped in. An essential ingredient in the recipe of my life. 

My weight dropped drastically as my health deteriorated. I was 5.5 stone and I felt like the living dead. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. Battling daily to survive, literally, took its toll on me. My veins were collapsed, and my arms, hands, feet and legs were bruised and bloodied from the numerous attempts to inject into them. I nearly wanted to give up. Only I couldn’t, you can’t give up on life. What are yoru options. Live or die? Well much as it looked to the contrary I didn’t want to die. I’d been inadvertently committing suicide for many years with my addiction but dying was never in my plan. I just didn’t know how to live. 

Going to prison probably saved me. It was god awful and painful and scary but it came at the right time. I will never forget the day, a few weeks after I arrived when I walked into my cell and realised that I was able to just lie there in peace. No worrying about being ill. No pain. I needed a safe haven and I needed respite. I needed time to recoup my strength and determine a new path. I needed to clear the space to grow new seeds of life. Prison gave all that to me. That is one of the reasons that I work hard for my clients. Everyone deserves an idiom of peace. 

The thin red thread. 

16 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by in Friends, love, Relationships

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I went to my ex partners wedding last weekend. J invited me months ago and immediately I knew that I would go. It was 600 miles away, no problem, I’d drive, pick up his son on the way, it wasn’t even a consideration really, he invited me, I was totally honoured, of course I was going to go. Nevermind that I’d never met his wife to be (luckily she didn’t mind) nevermind that I hadn’t seen him for months and before that years. 

 J is someone who I’ve known for all of my adult life, we first met when we were in different relationships, both drug users with other drug users. We lived in the same house for a while, him with his partner, me with mine. Then our partners fell out and do we moved on, our paths crossing occasionally. 

Roll forward a few years and I was in hiding from my new partner, the father of my son, I was living in a refuge and I was desperately unhappy. I was alone, and withdrawing from heroin and I needed some kind of human connection and there, when I was most desperate, I bumped into J, walking down the street. It was as if I was drowning and someone had thrown me a lifeline. I believe that he saved my life. Not in a literal, physical way, but emotionally. I had spent a considerable time in emotional hell and he appeared and he put no pressure on me and he was there when I was alone and lonely and desperate. He was exactly what I needed at that point in my life. 

Life rolled on, we stayed together, we made bad choices, we took a lot of drugs but throughout this time he was the rock that I hung my life upon. He was gentle and in truth he soothed my soul. He treated and lived my son as his own. We weren’t the best parents but we tried our best in difficult circumstances. 

I’m sure that during this relationship, my family thought that we were making each other worse. But what they didn’t realise is that J was the one rooting me, stopping me from going over the edge. I like to think I did they same to him. I have to admit that without his undoubtable love my son wouldn’t be the child he is now. 

After few years life changed for us. J went to prison for a significant time and my life just kind of escalated off the scale of chaoticness. J tried his best from behind the prison walls to get my life back on track, he arranged for people to take me to NA meetings, he wrote to me about change about how life could be different. I never truly believed it. I ended up in prison myself. Somehow, even in there J managed to convince the authorities to let him call me. He spoke to me from his prison to mine, told me that this was an opportunity, that it was the best thing to happen. I didn’t believe a word of it. 

I got out of prison and moved in with my Dad. I realised that I needed to move forward and I cut J out of my life. Looking back, I was vicious to the one person who had been there for me. At the time it was survival. 

As I was getting better, J was left alone. His life continued in a spiral of drugs and crazy women. Occasionally I’d bump into him, or actively seek him out to make sure that he was alive, ok. I felt guilty that my life was getting better whilst his stayed the same. 

So it was fantastic to hear that he had finally managed to extricate himself from our old lifestyle. That he had met an amazing woman and planned to marry her. And most of all that she was sure enough in their relationship to want me to join them in their celebration of their marriage. I’d have understood it if she hadn’t but it meant a lot that she did. She understood the link between us and didn’t feel threatened by it. She had no reason to, life was different now to 14 years ago. 

There is an old Chinese proverb that  says an invisible red thread connects those destined to meet, despite the time, the place, despite the circumstances. The thread can be tightened or tangled, but can never be broken.  in life we meet up with people, they might be there for a while, they might go and sometimes they may reappear at times when they either need someone or you do. J has always been one of those people in my life. That is why I drove 600 miles to celebrate his wedding.  I will always consider him one of my closest friends, I wish for him and his new wife all the joy in the world. They both deserve it.