Anna in prison

Imagine working in a library where several hundred people queue outside your door before it opens every Saturday morning. Imagine readers who love your library so much that after they have been there a while a security guard has to ask them to leave so that more of those outside can come in. Imagine staff who are so keen to work in your library that they work for you for forty hours a week for ten pounds fifty total pay. Today I went with my local library addicts support group to visit a prison library. The dynamics of the place gave a new meaning to the concept of a captive audience. The prisoners are locked in their cells from eight at night until eight in the morning with nothing to do so the resources offered by the library are all desperately sought and appreciated. The first thing that struck me was the flowers. There was no huge swinging gate, but rather a front door. Once we passed through that and through a series of heavy doors with huge locks, we arrived in a large compound of modern brick buildings that reminded me of a Marryatt hotel. The windows were barred, but not the sort of round iron poles I expected, rather they were fitted with steel bands that looked like an extra middle bar to the window, so that the windows were comprised of three architect designed slits. Flowers of all descriptions spilled from neat flower beds. The librarian was surprisingly young and beautiful; she had just finished library school when she got the job three years ago, she explained. She was small and thin with long dark hair, as well as being compassionate and sensible. She must have adorned that prison, and it spoke well for the prison authorities that they had chosen her to work there. There was hardly anyone in sight, but a few ducks. The librarian explained to us that the Marryatt Hotel type buildings were prison blocks. Each prisoner had his own cell, except for on the block where they arrived, where they were doubled up to support eachother and prevent suicide. One block was for those about to be released in four months, one was for sex offenders, one for drugs related criminals and one for gang members. I wondered whether it was wise to segregate the population in this way, but concluded that at least the prisoners would feel surrounded by the sort of people they were used to. There were ducks walking around the grounds. "Unfortunately ducklings don't survive long here," the librarian explained. "The prisoners are very hard on animals." We walked into a large building. "There is the gym and the education block," she motioned as we passed. We were taken down a series of long corridors with windows on one side. The brieze block walls were painted magnolia. Every few feet there was a painting painted on the wall. The paintings were all in trompe d'oile painted frames. Many were exact likenesses of famous classical paintings by Rembrandt and others: the last supper, Jesus casting the money changers out of the temple. There was a very bright painting labeled "the honourable Heile Salassi," indeed all the paintings were in rich colours. There was no grafitti anywhere. We were briefly shown the prison chapel: standard chapel chairs, wall hangings etc. "There is a curtain which is hung across for Muslim prayers," she said, and "victim reconcilliation groups meet in here sometimes, and we have concerts. The accoustics in this room are amazing." It reminded me very much of the chapel in the hospital where I work. It struck me that these surroundings must have been much more beautiful than the places where many of these prisoners lived. I remembered my cousin's saying though, "Hell is other people." "You wouldn't want to be in the queue on a Saturday morning," the Librarian explained. "If prisoners are old or sick they get too intimidated by all the loud pushing mob." We entered the library. It was quite small, but apart from that was exactly the same as a school library. In fact, the whole place reminded me of pictures I had seen of American high schools. There were talking books, cd's, and Xbox games hung on the wall decoratively. The Cd covers had been removed and instead black and white photocopies were put in the cases. "We found that the readers stole the coloured covers to decorate their rooms, so we just put photocopies in instead now," she said. "They destroy art books too so generally we don't buy art books any more. One day I got called to a carpentry workshop and shown that a man had made a beautiful frame to send to his wife and in the frame was a picture he had torn out of one of our art books. He got a strike for that- we are very hard on people, we have to be, it is the only way to stop bigger things happening," she said. I thought I would find it very annoying to have to be hard on someone who created a beautiful thing with what he had to hand and stole a picture to give to his wife. "The prisoners are allowed x-boxes and cd players in their rooms" she said. There were jigsaws for loan too and board games; apparently these were very popular and helped to while away the time. There were seven hundred prisoners, three hundred staff and the library issues twenty-two items a year. she said. "There is an education block too. They have two large rooms with banks of computers. They also have that little computer room next to the library," (she motioned to a room visible through the glass in a door.) "The room used to belong to the library, but my predecessor signed it over to education and now I can't get it back," she explained. What sort of lunatic would do that? I fumed to myself. Probably a woman in horned rimmed spectacles and a bun who can't stand the sight of a computer and doesn't want to have to staff the thing. She obviously didn't realise that empire building is an institutional manager's raison d'etre. She obviously didn't realise that computers are all that counts these days. The sensible librarian explained that she had just negotiated five computers to be used for word processing. Apart from that there was only one computer in the room for viewing dvd learning tools etc. The prisoners were not allowed to use the Internet ever and nor was she. "What about online law resources?" I asked. She explained that she was allowed to spend three hours a week off site using the Internet somewhere else. "How many staff do you have?" I asked. The others looked at me aghast, and I realised she must have said that bit already while I was busy thinking hard. "As I said, I have two part-time assistants," she said. "And the orderlies of course." Apparently many prisoners apply for the post of library orderley, for which you work in the library all day and get paid ten pounds fifty a week. "Each orderley can only stay for eighteen months. It's so we don't get too attached to eachother, which is right," she said. "They are my colleagues to all intents and purposes, and often they start telling you all about their families and homes, and saying they don't have anyone else here who they can talk to." She explained how the Librarians buy most of their books from Gardners and they arrived fully processed, but recently they were given five thousand pounds to spend in a local book superstore and when they got back the staff had to process each item themselves. "The orderlies were very good at sticking covers on," she said. Similarly when she first got the post there was a security system on the door, but they had waited for a librarian to arrive before testing it. The librarian turned the system on, and then realised that not a single item in the library had yet been security tagged. The staff had to quickly sit down and tag every item, as you do. I was obviously gazing into space at the point when she said how many items there were, but I estimated it at about ten thousand. She showed us the library management system. The library used the Alice system. Paid staff had different access rights to orderlies: apparently one orderley had pressed the 'stockcheck' button in an idle moment of experimentation: this had the effect of marking every single item as missing and necessitated checking them all in again. It also meant orderlies had restricted access to personal details. "Do you ever hear from the prisoners after they've left?" I asked. "Oh, yes, they write to us sometimes, especially the orderlies." she said. "One wrote that he had spoken to the father of his friend, the other orderley, and heard that the friend went running on the beach every day." The librarians eyes lit up as she thought of her ex-colleague happily running along the beach. Apparently the readers particularly liked crime novels and also wanted a lot of legal information. Child abusers liked reading what she called "misery lit." - biographies of those abused as children. "Sometimes when people order things I'm not sure whether it's wise to give it to them or not. In those cases it's not me who decides- I just pass the problem on to the Public Safety and Security Department and then it's up to them to decide. There was some foreign language material: apparently things were bought on demand for the very few numbers of foreign speakers, to ensure that the items bought would be those wanted. The overall library budget was nine thousand pounds. There were guidelines written by the Library Association, and some statutory rules for prison libraries laid down by government officials, which said that each library had to include access to certain basic directories etc. Prisoners were in theory charged fines, but carried no money so this was never deducted. If they failed to return a book after three overdue notices they were charged for the book, andit was assumed to be destroyed, since there was nowhere it could have got lost. The loan period was two weeks and prisoners can borrow five items at once. There were two newspapers that the readers particularly liked: one semi-official one, the government newspaper for prisoners, and one called 'ConVerse.' The librarian explained that ConVerse was edited by an ex prisoner and invariably took an anti-establishment stance on everything. The prison staff had tried to ban it, but the editor had taken them to court and won, and now they had to stock it. Five piles of copies of both papers arrived each month and they nearly all went. The same prisoner had published a perfectly boring directory of prisons, which all libraries stocked. "They must demonstrate the two sides of his personality," I said. "We send the old editions to the public library in the nearest town," she said. "Most of our prisoners get released to that town so there is a high population of ex-prisoners there. " I suddenly saw the ultra-respectable market town in a new light. "We find it quite hard to get staff," the librarian confided. "nobody wants to work here. We advertised a library assistant post recently and got one applicant, and we advertised the other half of my post. One person came for the interview but after they'd seen the place they didn't want to come back." "That seems strange to me," I said. She had already explained that she had never felt at all threatened, and that there had only once been a fight in the library. I know lots of public libraries that are worse than that, I thought. I realised a bit more on the way out. As we left the prisoner's area and passed once more into the entrance building I saw the notices posted on the wall for all staff to read. There were photopicks of particularly nasty prisoners with details of things to watch out for underneath. I did not snoop on them. You could get the general impression though. As we rounded a corner we got another shock. There was a wall and on the wall were mounted about twenty different makeshift weapons. "We call this the wall of terror," she said. "It is to remind us that we have to be careful." There were all sorts of weapons imaginable, and each had been found in a prisoner's cell. Two rolled up newspapers wrapped around with brown tape and linked to each other by the most novel use I have seen for archival tape formed a very nice little tool for strangling someone with. There was a nasty looking stanley knife, a wire contraption which joined the two ends of a toothbrush in a worrying way, and a block of wood carved into the peaks of a makeshift knuckle duster. "Thankfully there have been no new additions in my time," she said. It struck me that the people who made these were probably profoundly scared rather than aggressive, but the two can amount to the same thing of course. We left through the white wire gates and passed through the reception building again. We had to go through a sort of airlock to enter or leave the prison: one gate slides behind you, you wait five seconds, then another slides open in front and you walk out into the sunlight.