URBAN STORIES: Prison! What’s the point?

Daryl Casey?

I heard them call my name, but I wanted to take as long as I possibly could... you know, feed their stereotype. After all, I’m supposed to be ignorant, hard to reach, insecure, unsettled, changeable… wild!
That’s what it says in the report.

Eventually, they see me.

I take the last drag of my fag before stepping out onto my stage of dreams.
They think I’m stupid.
But I’m not stupid.
There’s a method to my madness.

They want to know if I have anything to say before they sentence me.
This was it: this audience of suits and briefcases is for me. I’m finally going to be given the chance to play out every scene, every act, every performance I have always wanted to and tell it like it really is.

All the boys are here.
The ‘man dem’ from the street.
I’ll be sorry to lose ‘em, sorry to see them go, but they’ve done all they can for me. Kept me alive.
Kept the streets from gobbling me up.

“Yes, your honour. I do have something to say…

At night, I’d go to sleep listening to the tap drip.
It used to freak me out, but then it became my only friend.
If I could hear it, I was still alive. Thinking about it now, if they really wanted to punish me, they’d have tightened that tap.

He’d get angry. My dad. Or at least that’s who she told me he was. He’d smash the TV. Pull the pictures off the wall and break Mum’s ornaments, then send us to bed without dinner.
He’d beat my mum, me, and my sisters, and no one would know why.

Then he’d switch and be nice as pie.
Tell us all he was sorry.

It freaked me out because up until that point, he was cool.
One day, he beat me so bad I was in hospital for a week.
Mum took me by bus because dad had ripped out the phone so we couldn’t call anyone and he refused to drive us.
On the way, Mum asked me what I’d done to make dad so angry…
I cried, and I couldn’t honestly tell her.

She said I had to tell the doctors, and anyone else who asked, that I fell off the garden shed.
We lived on the fifth floor of a block of council flats.
She was crying.
I was eight.

I felt sorry for her, so I did what she said.

I was the child with a hairline fracture, internal bruising from where the bannister broke my fall. And there I was, feeling sorry for her.

I couldn’t lie forever.

As I grew older, Dad lost his job, and I guess, his will to be any kind of a decent man.
We ate only when he hadn’t gambled the income support.
We smiled only when he was gone for days.
There was nothing else to smile about.

Over the years, feeling sorry for Mum became the norm.
I’d feel sorry for her and her sleepless nights.
Sorry for the early mornings when he’d bring friends home, get high, and blast music.
Sorry, when the neighbours complained at 3am.
Sorry, when she pulled my sisters into her bed to make sure they weren’t touched.

Sorry when she fell asleep… and they were.

Sorry when she woke up tired and bruised, unable to take us to school.

Eventually, we had to move.
The solicitors said Dad was a violent risk to our well-being.
Imagine that, your dad becoming a violent risk to you.

It’s like something snapped in him.
Mental health, the doctors said.

I felt sorry for her the day she finally left him.
Felt sorry for her during the barren years when the bottle took control.

I felt sorry for her when I came home from one of my rare days at school and found her asleep on her favourite sofa.
With a quiet smile on her face.

Suicide, they said.

I guess her mind couldn’t carry her past anymore.
Her body looked at peace.
The lies, excuses, and shame she could no longer justify were gone.

I was twelve. She looked young again. Younger than I’d seen her in years.

So, Your Honour, there’s nothing you or anyone else can do to me that I haven’t already experienced, heard of, or felt before.

I know what living on the streets means.
I’ve been out there for four years, hustling for my next meal.
Yeah, I snatch bags and steal cars. I’ll do anything to survive.

Who’s gonna give me a job? You?

The court orders… Referrals to this team, then that team.
All of them are filled with people who can’t help themselves, but claim they can help me.

They keep trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
I don’t fit.
Maybe I never did.

Where were the truant officers when I didn’t attend school for months?
What happened to each of those endless reports written by police officers, social services, and worried neighbours?

Four years!
And now you class me as a continual offender?

You are the ones who’ve continually offended.
Against me.
Against my rights as a child.

My family didn’t protect me.
You didn’t protect me.

What was I supposed to do?

I took from the streets in the only way I knew how.
And don’t you think this is some solo sob story.
I can give you lists of people with stories just like mine.

We don’t choose the streets.
We’re there because it’s the only option left open to us, and it doesn’t involve someone else telling us what to do.
It’s no magic trick that we keep getting into trouble.

Like it or not, a thread running through your courts hangs us up like a child’s mobile, spinning us around for all to see.

Like puppets on a string?

Your Honour, we’ve been here before.
You probably know more about me than I do.
But you need to know one more thing:

You lock me up and think you’re punishing me.
But where I come from, that only enhances my reputation.

The penal system requires me to have something to lose for it to work.

Well…

I’m sixteen now.
No family.
No prospects.

What have I got to lose?

I go inside, and my family are in there.
I get three meals a day, more than I get sometimes on the outside.
Out there, I’m a small fish in a big bowl.
In here, I rule the roost.
I’m a man to be respected.

So, go ahead, lock me up, Your Honour.
Tell them I’m a menace to society, a scourge on the good people of the community.

And when I come out, revitalised and re-invented,
With no other qualification than to offend again…

I’ll ask you, ever so politely:

What is the point of prison?