Now there’s click bait for you.
So yes, I spent this morning in prison. To be precise, I was in Ashfield Prison near Bristol, which is a specialist prison for male sex offenders. I can see the TERFs rubbing their hands with glee at this “proof” that I am in fact a violent rapist.
Sadly for them I was actually there to do some trans awareness training. I was accompanied by colleagues from LGBT Bristol and Diversity Trust who gave presentations on our work, on hate crime, and on LGBT mental health. It was, in many ways, a standard gig.
The first major difference was that it took place inside a prison. It took us forever to get past security. As I joked to my colleagues, it was harder to get into prison than to get into the USA. The security rules were even more weird. No chewing gum, no mirrors, but apparently safety pins were OK even though they are sharp and pointy. We all had mugshots taken and got patted down. No one questioned my ID.
I’d not been much involved in the planning and I thought we’d mainly be talking to staff. There I was wrong. Half of the audience was made up of people from other local area services who were there as much to get some experience of the prison as to listen to us. The other half were inmates. And when we had finished our talks several of them did short presentations about the diversity-related work they do in the prison.
So we had someone from the age awareness group, someone from the disability group, someone from the military veterans association, someone from the BME group, someone from the interfaith group, someone from the foreign prisoners group, and of course someone from the LGBT group (which, given the population, is mainly a GB group, but they have had trans inmates).
Yes, you did read that right. The inmates of a sex offenders prison have organized diversity awareness groups of various sorts for their community. What’s more they told us that they think this is pretty much unique in British prisons. Several of them had come to Ashfield from other establishments, or had been in other establishments at other times in their lives.
How did this happen? Well partly it appears to be down to the hard work of Hannah, the prison’s diversity officer. Partly it is, of course, down to the Equality Act, which has made people much more aware of such issues. And partly it is good prison management.
As one of the inmates put it, if he was outside he’d be mixing primarily with people from his own social and ethnic community. Hating people who are different would be easy. But inside the prison he’s part of a population of a few hundred, only a handful of whom share his background. So he has to learn to get along with lots of people from other backgrounds that he might never have become friendly with otherwise. Teaching the inmates to have respect for each other’s diverse backgrounds helps prison life run more smoothly.
There is one final point too. Over lunch I was chatting to one of the inmates and expressed surprise that this amazing community had been started in a privately run prison rather than a government one. (Ashfield is run by Serco.) He responded that government-run prisons don’t have much responsibility to anyone, whereas Serco is firmly regulated by government and is required to show that it is following its obligations under the Equality Act, or it might lose the contract.
I have two caveats here. Firstly I am well aware that I saw only a small fraction of the total prison population, and presumably those that there most enthusiastic about the diversity program. Secondly I’ve seen first hand how large companies can and do avoid complying with equality legislation. You have to have people willing to actually obey such laws before they can work well, so there’s no guarantee that a privately run prison will be better. But, even with those caveats I was hugely impressed.
It wasn’t until after I had left that I realized that I had just spent several hours in the company of a bunch of convicted sex offenders, and the only time I had felt threatened was going through security to get in.
So, guess who is part of this, then?