My whole world has been turned upside down. After a month at the Channings Wood therapeutic community, I feel expurgated, exhilarated and exhausted. The idea of creating such environments inside the conventional prison system has been talked about for years. At Grendon Underwood in Buckinghamshire, they actually set one up as early as 1962. Alas, I was expelled from that Adlerian island of enlightenment for apparently using my "highly developed intellectual skills to devalue and de-skill the officers when they attempted to perform their therapeutic roles." That was 10 years ago. As I am now approaching 40 and the last few months of what has been a long and difficult sentence, I thought maybe I had mellowed enough to give life in a TC another shot.
The model unit now up and functioning here was designed for heroin addicted Korean war veterans by the Phoenix House Foundation of New York. At Channings Wood there are places for 112 prisoners, but to date we are just 48 "residents" assembled from gaols throughout the land, in a pocket of lush Devon countryside.
It was Ann Widdecombe (the unlikely heroine in sacked prison boss Derek Lewis's anti-Howardian polemic Hidden Agenda) who spoke of the need to get inmates off hard drugs through education, counselling and, where appropriate, "treatment." Taking her lead from across the Atlantic, she decided to farm out this work to independent agencies, "because of their proven expertise in the field." The outfit which successfully tendered for the Channings Wood contract already runs centres in places such as Peckham and Tower Hamlets. But bucolic Devon is a world away from the east end of London. When I first met the staff with their ethnic fabrics, runestone talismen and New Age bangles and beads, I wondered whether pagan sacrificial expeditions into the woods behind the prison were coming next.
In fact every morning at nine o'clock sharp, the whole bleary-eyed community meets on chairs set in a circle to welcome in the day. A resident reads out a "philosophy," another charts the weather and a third enlightens us with a horoscope (this is an American programme). Then there is a community game to contend with. Since my arrival we have played pass the parcel, musical chairs, charades, hang man, Chinese whispers, pin the tail on the donkey, Simon says and much else besides. It's a bit like a scout meeting without the neckerchiefs and woggles. Last week, determined to join in the spirit of things, I led the boys in an uplifting two part rendition of Gingangooli gooli gooli gooli watchit. It was a great success and the "shawalliwallis" still rang out as the community was marched off to their work parties.
Behind a lexicon of psychobabble about antecedents, concomitance, maintenance, predisposition and enabling systems, the mainstays of the therapeutic process appear to be "the structure" and "the encounter." Any request or complaint has to be put through this structure-a hierarchy of cons, one placed on top of the other. It's all about delayed gratification, and believe me, it takes forever to get anything done. If you do anything wrong-anything that adversely affects a fellow resident-you'll find yourself "encountered" at one of the tri-weekly confrontation groups. No violence. No threats. No getting up from your seat. The rules of the encounter are recited at the start of every session. Woe betide anyone who breaks them.
Now all this is a far cry from the "survival of the fittest" philosophy that rules in most prison communities. Yet I've ceased to be surprised by anything I see on my penal travels. Alice Through The Looking Glass has nothing on your columnist's peregrinations through the penitentiaries. Thankfully, I can return to my bunk bedded cell every night, and take solace in the dry humour and lilting Welsh accent of my latest cell mate Tobo. He is what's known within our happy little house as an "expediter" (or among the proletariat, a "terminator"), a sort of prefect whose business it is to police the corridors, and "solomonise" on internecine squabbles and minor infringements of discipline.
"We're supposed to be the eyes and ears of the community," he told me when I moved in. "But don't worry. My duties stop the minute that cell door closes behind us. Your confidences are safe with me."
That was nice to know at least, but on the question of confidences, there's something else to be said. I have been writing this column for long enough now to get confessional, and no doubt many readers will be wondering what on earth I am doing in a drugs therapy unit in the first place. The truth is that for the last 18 months I have been battling against a heroin habit acquired inside prison. There now. I've said it. I've come out of the closet.
The good news is that, despite several relapses, I finally appear to have expunged the devil's dandruff from my system. The results of my first voluntary drugs test came back to me (through the structure) yesterday. For the first time in I do not know how long I read the results with an open, happy face. Cannabis -negative. Benzodiazepines-negative. The big H-negative. I rejoiced, in anticipation of an early Easter. Onwards I go with my head held high. The buds are on the trees in ancient Channings Wood.
