Heledd Melangell imagines a future where the carceral system has continued to expand at its current pace.
Content warning: This piece contains some references to self-injury, sexual assault, prison and suicide.
‘You’re being moved to that new prison in Wales,’ the screw casually told me, as if it was nothing. After a year and a half of living in this cluster of cages – I’m being evicted.
She opened the heavy iron door of my cell and cast a glance over my cell. The walls had an assortment of words and letters etched into them, and specks of what looked to me like blood. With a grimace of disdain, she left.
I was only just starting to settle here. Were the other Welsh girls being moved too? Would I ever see them again?
I’d heard about it on the radio. HMP Gwenllian. Named after the daughter of the last prince of Wales who, ironically enough, my uncle told me, had spent her life imprisoned in a nunnery. They said it was the first of its kind in Europe, based on the American ‘eco’ mega-prisons. They said that prisoners would be the answer to the climate disaster that had been the defining crisis of the past three generations.
The first women’s prison in Wales. The Welsh nationalists thought it would ‘cement Welsh nationhood’. The liberals said that it would help us stay connected to our ‘support networks’ and children. One right-wing guest thought this would still be too good for prisoners, but overall everyone agreed it would do us good to be put to work.
A quarter of a million people are in prisons in the UK. It was on the radio. Manufacturing, call centres, recycling, waste, farming are all industries now powered by prison labour.
The thing is, the girls I knew personally in here are not a danger to anyone, except themselves. I did shifts as a listener on the Samaritans’ phone line in here. The things I heard would make your blood run cold. All the violence these girls experienced. It struck me that no one’s first experience of violence is their own. We were a colony of the traumatised.
What all these women needed was peace, real peace… And they wouldn’t get it being bullied by childish screws or shut alone with their memories at all hours of the day. There is no peace in being alone when you have been ripped away from your children, your parents, your friends.
I wondered what this new place would be like. ’Cutting edge,’ they said. Our prison’s been getting a lot of bad press lately, with girls mutilating and killing themselves. Two babies had died in birth since I’d been in this prison. Their mothers stuck in cells with the little bodies for hours on end before any help came. One was on my wing. I knew I’d never forget her screams for help as long as I live. We all started screaming with her, begging the screws to go to her. They didn’t.
Apparently, technology was going to put an end to these issues at HMP Gwenllian.
After gathering my things I awkwardly scrambled into the meat wagon, my joints aching. I hated these. It felt like being in a coffin.
We slid past the endless countryside. Vast bogs and lakes interspaced with patches of trees and grass, scorched hills from the annual summer fires. There were a lot more lakes and marshes now than there used to be, or so they told us at school.
How I wished I could feel grass beneath my feet. The thought took me back to childhood, being left with my cousins all day long to run wild in the fields while my uncle sheared sheep with his neighbours. We would drink out of big bottles of pop and jump on the trampoline-sized wool bags so they could fit more wool inside them.
The sheep condensed into a small pen. Waiting in turn to be taken and stripped of their winter coat. When they’d be let back into the field they would give a sort of jump at the absolute thrill of being released.
I had such hiraeth for the living things of the world after being in a cocoon of concrete for a year and a half. I hadn’t seen the horizon in all that time. Looking into the distance gave me nausea now; in jail you never saw more than a few feet away from you. Between the hiraeth and the nausea I resolved to just look at my feet. Touching the ground pulled me towards reality.
The hard plastic chair, my arthritic pain and the tight handcuffs on top of my general distress made me feel like a constellation of discomfort. My eyes scanned the narrow metal box that had enclosed me. Scratches etched around the metal box. The impulse to claw at the container, visible. It made me think of animals.
What would my new ‘home’ look like? How would my Mum get there? The new prison was somewhere I’d never heard of and the buses and trains were awful. You could tell it was middle-class people who’d thought this location would be easier for families – of course, they’d assume everyone could drive.
***
I held my breath as I was led out of the van. The prison was an angular building that looked as if it was made up of layer upon layer of solar panels fanning out to cast a shadow over the marshy valley.
‘It doesn’t look that big,’ I remarked to no one in particular. It was meant to be a mega prison that would also make up for the shortfall of women’s prison places in England. Apparently, it would hold up to 8,000 women and non-binary prisoners. There would even be an accessible wing for disabled prisoners to be caged. How considerate of them.
‘Most of the prison is underground.’ Kelly said with a wince.
As we walked inside handcuffed, we were ushered into the induction suite – where we were informed that we would be strip searched.
My heart started beating like a drum as the feeling of panic rose up my body. This always happened when I knew they were going to strip-search me.
‘Take your clothes and underwear off ladies’ The screw stretched out her fingers into a blue latex glove. She was stout with glasses, and a stony face that reminded me of a teacher at school. I felt sick.
I started to drift away. I lost all sense of where I was and separated from my body.
***
As they led us down the corridors it felt like we were heading deeper and deeper into a labyrinth. We walked endlessly past the clinical-looking cells. It was eerily quiet. In HMP Westwood Park, there was always noise. People crying, laughing, talking, screaming. It felt as if we were getting closer and closer to the monster at the centre.
The building felt like a cross between a spaceship and a hospital. The dizzyingly bright strip lights made everything I saw seem hyper-real. The screw’s radio and baton squeaking in its holster. Kelly’s ‘DNR’ tattoo scrawled across her neck. Do not resuscitate. I wondered about what hell in her life that prompted her to get such instructions scrawled across her neck.
I reached into my pocket and held on tightly to the embroidered handkerchief my Mum had hand-stitched with cats for my tenth birthday. A gift, from when she didn’t have the money to buy what I had asked for – an actual cat. I loved cats and the details were beautiful. I never used it to wipe my nose. It had been kept untouched in a drawer most of my teenage years. I never imagined I would treasure this bit of cloth so much. I hadn’t appreciated it at the time. I missed her so much.
My mind raced over everything from the induction speech after the search.
‘Our state of the art cells are safer than ever before’.
What they meant is that they had put us all in padded cells. To stop us from killing, slashing and mutilating ourselves. This was why they’d made all the cells in the same material as a toddler’s soft play. There were no windows, but the overhead light was meant to replicate natural light. A synthetic sun.
What worried me most was our new work schedule. HMP Westwood Park was old school. Our jobs basically meant we ran the prison – I was in laundry and I volunteered on the Samaritans’ line. Some people did some manufacturing work. We all got pennies a week.
Here, there was a vast underground hydroponic farm sprawling out under the earth’s surface in narrow veins that went on for miles. Not much food is grown outside these days, only obscenely expensive organic stuff people with money eat. The rest of us feed on lab-grown proteins and hydroponic, genetically modified fruit and vegetables.
After the earth got hotter, the seasons blurred into each other. The soil was depleted of nutrients from years of industrial farming. Artificial hydroponic farming became the norm, but this needed space which wasn’t available in the old-fashioned prisons. So they built new ones.
We would be propagating seeds in the workshop in a production line, for them to be painstakingly planted by others along the length of the tunnels. They would then need to be tended to and harvested when ready. There was also a recycling plant. All the things the rest of society didn’t want to do.
***
Apparently, there were no volunteers to man the Samaritans’ lines here. They had an AI bot with access to our medical records and legal files talk to us through an intercom in our cells instead.
Was this really going to stop all these girls from killing themselves? When someone really wants to die, they always find a way.
I missed my Mum so much. Every time I lost myself, when the world chewed me up and spat me out I would go back to her. I know it killed her seeing me destroy myself. Once she slept on the floor of my bedroom, wanting to be there to save me in case I choked on my own vomit in the night.
I had a psychological report before the trial, a way of trying to get a bit of leeway. They said I had developmental trauma. Truth be told, I don’t remember most of my childhood. My Mum was always there, but so was her string of boyfriends. All of them made me feel uncomfortable in my own home.
***
In the induction they told us that, because of a new law, we could get time added to our sentence if we didn’t work. This could also happen if we didn’t hit productivity targets. Something about making the new prisons better value for taxpayers’ money.
It hasn’t really sunk in. Could I be stuck here indefinitely? I look down at my hands rigid with arthritis.
How is my Mum going to handle this? I can see the pain searing through her eyes through the glass when she visits. It was bad enough for her to live in Aberperis knowing that everyone would gossip about the fact that I was in jail. I can tell she is cut up about everyone seeing that she ‘failed’ as a Mother.
I lay down in the dark, uncertainty about my new life gnawing away at my stomach. I thought when I returned to Wales I would be returning home. My eyes welled up with all-consuming hiraeth. Please let sleep take me. Sleep is my only escape from this place. Dwisho Mam.
This essay is part of a series commissioned in collaboration with the National Infrastructure for Wales.
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