I became a prison officer in 2012 at HMP Whitemoor, a high-security adult men’s prison in Cambridgeshire. It is small, housing only 400 men. It is relatively modern too, particularly when compared to the Victorian architecture of the more notorious English jails: Wormwood Scrubs, Pentonville, Wandsworth. Modern, small, but most certainly not without risk. Almost all the men inside Whitemoor are serving life sentences, some what the legal system euphemistically calls “natural life”, meaning they will die in prison. But considering the crisis that has emerged in British prisons over the past decade, the place was a comparable paradise.
During the time I worked at Whitemoor, from 2012-15, prisoners were out of their cells for up to eight hours day. They had access to activities including Open University courses, music production software and fully-equipped carpentry workshops. And when they returned to their residential wings, they were able to use the mini-kitchens, gyms and laundry rooms located there. This is not the norm. Most prisons do not have gyms and kitchens within the residential units. But then, most prisons are not Whitemoor. The significance of the men having so much time out of cell was not just about things they could do, but the people they could speak to. As officers, we spent a considerable period of time each day with the men on our wing. We got to know them, and they us.
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