Category: mobilities

Jason Warr

“Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light”

Milton: Paradise Lost (lines: 432-433)

I once spoke to a member of the INLA who said that he had been tortured by the British military in the six Counties. He said the hoods, the sensory deprivation, the shouting, the beatings, the white noise were bad but the real pain, the blot out everything but the very fibres of your body pain, came from the stress positions. Being forced into cramped and crouched positions for extended periods of time so the pain built and built and became all consuming – even after being allowed to move. As I sat there in the cramped Perspex and metal box, knees painfully wedged against the ridged front, arse numb from the hardened seat, broiling in nought but my boxers as the mid-morning sun turned the, only moments before, icy box into an oven, fighting the staccato and nauseating swaying, the caustic smell of ancient vomit, sweat, plastic, and fear burning my nose and throat this is what I thought about. Torture.

As I sit here in my academic office the echoes of that confined sensorium experienced 20+ years ago revisit me. I shiver. I don’t often reflect upon the embodied experiences of my decade plus incarceration, preferring rather to rationalise, examine, evaluate. I did then, and still do impose a distance between myself and my memories. I utilise them to inform research questions and interpretations of the contemporary prison. They are a filter. However, if we wish to explore the true nature of prison, punishment, and processes of social control (that is after all what my job as a prison’s researcher is) it behoves me to find the honesty in my own experiences. To no longer deny my embodied captivity but to explore it in all its sensorial glory. That it is what I have done in our book and what I do here. For the prison is an embodied experience, not just one of mind. The prison doesn’t just impose itself upon the ghost but the machine as well. The ‘penal’ is sensorially encoded into every constraint and restraint that you as a prisoner are subjected to. Bars, bells, bolts, bangs, and boxes – all are experienced through the senses; all communicate a symbolic message – thou art prisoner!

I don’t know whether the INLA man told me the truth about him being one of the ‘Hooded Men’. It mattered not. As I sat there it was that particular story that my discomforted mind dragged forth. Of course, I am not saying my experience was similar to the horrors of ‘enhanced, 5-point, interrogation’ but it was, nevertheless, what my mind conjured as the pain in my knees grew, my back began to cramp, and every thought narrowed to the nagging senses of my twisted and uncomforted body. I had never been inside one of these contraptions before. In the preceding years, though experiencing multiple moves and journeys doubled cuffed and squished between the sweating and nervous bodies of officers, I had been moved in singular roomy vans or cars. Yet here I was, for the first time, going fuck knows where, in a sweatbox.

An apt name. A box of sweat.

Long is the way and hard …

That morning I had been rudely forced from sleep as 4 officers had burst into my cell. Panic. Fear. I had jumped out of bed, sleep blinded, clad in just my boxer shorts, and had swung at the unknown, amorphous, and blurry bodies in front of me. Thems the rules in prison. The hard lessons you learn in Young Offender Institutions – people burst in on you, you fight. There is no choice but to fight. Connection. Crunching impact as fist impacts with something. “Ooogh”. Hands reach, bodies swarm, lights flash, shadows dance, uniforms glimpsed, grips take hold. Pain. Sharp and intense. Arms going one way, head another, kick in the nuts. The swing may have been a bad idea! “What the fuck Guv? What’s going on?” Grips loosen. I’m told to calm the fuck down and comply. I do. I’m told that I’m being moved. I cry that I have a visit that day. I complain. Grips retighten, twisting. Pain. I’m told that my mum will be notified when the wing officers come on in the morning. I struggle but it’s no good. I’m being ghosted.

Ghosting … old prison slang for being forcibly and unexpectedly moved from hosting prison to somewhere else in the estate. A laydown or permanent move. You know not. I did not know why I was being ghosted. I was told that it was for security reasons. I didn’t know where I was being sent. Security reasons. Laughingly they told me I was heading up North. What the fuck?? Ghosting is one of the more pernicious aspects of being in prison. The discombobulation. The anxiety. The stress. The not knowing. The deprivation of certitude. It ruptures what ontological security you may feebly cling to. You do not warrant security; you gave that up when you came to prison.  It creates a schism between you and the spaces you inhabit. Nothing is solid. Nothing permanent. No place is yours. Transportation has a long history in carceral practices. The process itself is designed to both physically and symbolically cast you as an outsider, no longer a member of this society, you belong outside, over there, away from us. Any sense of belonging, of community, is to be denied to you, your civic status revoked. That loss is encoded into the very embodied experience of transportation. Of course, in my ghosting, I am not saying that I am some Jim Jones being sent o’er seas to Botany Bay[1] nor a Sarah Collins heading for Van Dieman’s shore[2]. However, the forced movement, and the status and powerlessness it reinforces, are microscopic instances of the same power being imposed for the same reasons.

So, there I sat, in my boxers, sweating, in pain, rocking and banging about as the vehicle ran roughshod over pothole and bump. Heading to where I knew not in the barren North. Cramped, nauseous, muffled, a world of green blurring by, no comforting concrete to be seen. Wilderness. The interminable minutes stretched into hours. The heat and funk rose as the plastic of the booth, the miniature cell, closed in and compressed the air around me. The stench of me combining with that older undertone of vomit and detergent and heat to make my own self a source of disgust. The roar of the tyres and the diesel engine, pitched to the point of visceral white noise, intruded into my mind; occasionally blocking out the pain emanating from my lower limbs and back. My thoughts, when they came, were bloody and black. I raged. I wanted to hurt anyone associated with that experience. With every passing, torturous mile I became more feral. With every passing mile I shrank, I became less. To survive I needed that journey to end. Even if all that lay at the end was another cell and countless years.

Long is the way …

[1] MacColl, E and Lloyd, A L (1957) ‘Jim Jones at Botany Bay’, Convicts and Currency Lads, Australia: Wattle Records.

[2] See old English Ballad Female Transportation: https://digital.nls.uk/english-ballads/archive/74892349?mode=transcription