Don’t laugh, don’t look happy, he wrote in a letter home that was confiscated and kept on file, cos someone is looking at you on a monitor, deciding you’re not suffering enough, and that someone is deciding your sentence review.
Inmate moved to different cell every 28 days, a note on Wright’s file states, including strip searches and ‘cell turns’, to prevent the formation of gang-style relationships. Or any relationships, Manon thinks.
Paracetamol. Cups of tea. At one point she takes a bath. Perhaps she dozes off once or twice. But she comes back to the floor, the puzzle tessellating in white across her carpet.
The CIC report describes a brutalising regime in Whitemoor towards the back end of Wright’s sentence. Staff were distant, distrustful; violence endemic. Where previously high security prisons used to function on a known code – a gentlemanly agreement between the old lags and the screws – the modern, multicultural population of Whitemoor was viewed with intense suspicion by its staff. Prison officers were frightened by the growing Muslim population; while outside, in the run-up to a general election, the press and public were growing less liberal by the day. Prison should be for punishment, not rehabilitation. Offenders, particularly those convicted under the terrorism act, were having an easy ride. In response to these hard-line views, the Home Secretary cancelled rafts of arts and education courses inside Whitemoor.
Manon looks up. The printer is growling, turning over against itself. A red light flashes. Paper jam.
She gets up, opens the printer’s various drawers and flaps, pulls out an inky drum, fingers blackened, then can’t jimmy it back in again. She cannot locate the jammed paper. She slaps the flaps shut again, jabs at the button angrily, turns it off, waits, then on again. She roars in frustration when she sees the red light resume its flashing and thinks she might hurl it against the wall. Then she cries. Alan could’ve fixed it. Alan probably has a laser jet, which never jams because he checked its reviews on Which? And he probably keeps spare cartridges in a drawer. No one can help her with the printer jam. She is alone. And all this time they have misunderstood Tony Wright.
Back sitting cross-legged on the floor, she picks up another page of Wright’s IIS report. Tony Wright moved to B-wing, to the spur for prisoners on the enhanced level of the incentives and earned privileges scheme. Things seem to be improving for him. In 2005 he gets a job in the library. A note says he keeps his head down – a ‘loner’. Prisoner 518 focused on serving his sentence and leaving prison at the earliest opportunity. Wright has learned how to make life better for himself, plus he is nearing the end of his sentence, but in the truly repressive conditions of Whitemoor, he is living in a febrile atmosphere. In another confiscated letter, he writes: I keep my head down. I don’t talk to nobody. My personality’s out there somewhere, waiting for me to grasp it when I’m out.
On the same page is a note: Prisoner reading Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Material confiscated: violent themes.
Manon wipes the tears from her cheeks.
Along came Edith Hind: listening to him, trying to understand him. Asking how his day was, how his life was, what his plans might be, and whether she could help him. She must’ve been the first person to treat him like a human being in fifteen years. Even the words, ‘Hello, Tony, how are you?’ must’ve been like a long drink to a man dying of thirst.
She looks at her watch. It is 2 a.m. She pulls the blanket more closely about her shoulders, crawls to the last pages spewed by her now-paralysed printer. Page 258 of Tony Wright’s IIS file. Inmate returned to C-wing, Cat A status.
Manon is frowning. What has happened to cause a set-back like this?
Prisoner 518 involved in breach of prison discipline during altercation with prisoner 678 in the gym. Sentence review frozen. In light of prisoner 518’s involvement in this violent episode, consideration of parole denied until further risk assessment has been carried out.
Who was prisoner 678? Manon pushes at the papers around her on the floor. They slide over each other like water. She leafs, faster and faster, through the white sea, looking for an explanation for this about-turn after a decade of model behaviour. Then she finds it. IIS file page 259: Prisoner 518 statement, transcribed verbatim from a recording of an interview with prison staff, investigating the gym incident, 21 January 2009.
I was workin’ out in the gym by myself, runnin’ on the treadmill, when Prisoner 678 came and began working the weights next tae me. Dumb bells an’ that. We were nice an’ quiet, the two of us, no’ talkin’. I seen him about but he wisnae ma pal or nothin’. Anyways, a group of prisoners walked into the gym, white guys wi’ tatts. Hated the Brotherhood, these guys. Thought the Muslims had too much power. They surrounded the lad next tae me. I’d like tae use his name, no’ his number, if ye dinnae mind, because he’s a human bein’, ye ken?