When a friend’s husband suddenly died she was left with the horrific thought of ‘what to do?’ She needed to get a job and wanted to earn quite good money. The mortgage was paid off with the insurance but there was no other income. She had never worked in the business world, having married young and raised children. 
However, she had learned some valuable skills whilst managing her family. For example, finance skills had been learned from managing the family budget, project management skills from moving house and refurbishing the new property, management skills from resolving disputes between her children and organisational skills from managing community events with the children’s school.
All the options were considered and rejected until she looked to apply for jobs online and saw an advertisement for employment within the Prison Service as a Prison Officer. She applied for the post and received an invitation to come along for an interview and a physical test. This was quite worrying for her as she was unfit and couldn’t run, so many hours of free time were spent on the nearby field with friends practising running, laughing so hard because she could run only a few paces and didn’t know how to use her feet, or how to move her arms. She was completely non-athletic.
To the amusement of others, off she went to her first prison training session. The expectation was for the Prison Service to refuse her instantly. Apparently they were applying a beep test on her, which meant that she had to run a certain distance within the beeps. She did say afterwards that she didn’t quite manage it but they asked her back the following week. This gave her more time to practise. Two days later she was complaining that she couldn’t walk as her legs hurt so much.
After a series of written and physical tests she went off to the North of the country to an eight-week training camp where they put her through a rigorous army type of discipline. She had to get up early, be immaculately presented in her uniform, have her dormitory area inspected, eat a huge breakfast by 6.30 am and be out on exercise by 7 am. They fed her three hearty meals a day, and worked her physically and mentally throughout the day. There was classroom work and constant exercise where she was very quickly brought to the sweating stage, which is the stage where exercise actually begins work on her body. They also taught her the ‘control and restraint’ technique which is a difficult, unpleasant and physically exhausting thing to do, it involves tackling an offender, getting them to the ground and pinning them down. Each person in the team takes control of a certain area of the offender and works their area, and the team between them can manage to control an offender, get them to the ground and then restrain them. The prison officers are taught that this technique is to be used as a last resort, but they must protect fellow inmates and fellow members of staff and that their safety comes first.
Then finally, the training was done and she seemed half the size of the person that went up North just 2 months ago. It was amazing that she had no incentive for sport, was unfit and yet she had succeeded with this training and become super fit.
Immediately the training finished, the job offer came. Apparently there was a problem prison. There were a lot of young offenders aged over 18 years old who had been committing suicide by hanging themselves in their cells. There had been eight deaths in one year. What a shock. What a waste of a young person’s life. What a reality check. This is a real job. The Prison Service had handpicked her for that job based on her sunny personality, fairness and decency. They hoped she would soften the hardness of it all for the inmates and help create a better environment for them.
She started work and quickly found that the view of the prison officers is that most of the inmates have been in care all their lives and the damage has already been done. By the time they get to the young offenders institute they are lost, their only career is a criminal career without a hope in the world. It is so very sad.
And life in prison can be pretty grim. She reported, there are locks everywhere, heavy doors with tiny slide-flaps to talk through. Inmates are kept locked up most of the day, sometimes for twenty-three-and-a-half hours. The prison officers sit in an area on the wing which is elevated and surrounded by glass. They can see every cell door to the left, and every cell door to the right. They can see the association area, with the snooker table and table tennis. They can see every inch of the corridor and every inmate and what they are doing.
Walking around would be a handful of inmates, they would have either a mop and bucket or would be cleaning or carrying out some task. These were the inmates that had worked hard to gain trust and their reward was an increase in their “Trust Band” so that they could do meaningless jobs which would get them out of their cell. Then there were another handful of inmates, they were on ‘association’ which means they are let out of their cell for half-an-hour per day, they can play pool or table tennis, those sorts of things. The other inmates would be locked up for over twenty-three hours per day.
She said there are often fights between inmates, over items such as phone cards. And not to forget that offenders are in there for murder, one of her inmates murdered his wife and mother-in-law, another committed rape with violence. The Prison Service finds it essential that their Prison Officers know the background of any inmate who has a history of violence. This is so that Prison Officers can be aware and take care of themselves, other staff and other inmates.
She says this job makes her understand that prison does not work. It does work in the sense that violent people are taken off the streets and the public are protected. But for those in prison it is a simple cycle of being in and out of prison all their lives. She feels that it is much better to ‘spoil’ the offender, educating with holidays abroad, really good care and attention, but all this costs money and there is a lot of opposition to it.
As a job, she says she absolutely loves it. She feels she is making a difference by taking the inmates out on the football pitch, sitting around chatting with them, and giving them some social support. She brings in cakes from home, shares her cigarettes and tries to do the best she can for them. She loves the team working between the inmates and the prison staff and finds every day different!
Written by Jane Jakeman, a working mother of three who is currently working for webrecruit, an online flat fee recruitment agency and job finder service