Prisoners for Reuse
What is hidden behind “the laws and rules that apply in a prison”
My daughter is holding on to my jacket sleeve. I am leaning into Grandpa’s car, trying to say goodbye. We have been together. Paddled, fallen into the water, played, told bedtime stories. Now Daddy has to go back.
She looks down. A quiet “Daddy … Daddy …” comes out. I rest my forehead against hers. Cheek against cheek. We stay like that. When, after a while, I try to gently pull my arm towards me, she tightens her grip.
I cannot wrench it free. I cannot hurt those little fingers. I cannot make her feel that Daddy is tearing himself away from her.
Twenty minutes had passed. Grandpa said Grandma was waiting at home. There would be sweet buns and cuddles. Later, she could see Daddy again.
But she wanted Daddy to come with her. Nobody could replace Daddy.
Keep that hand in your mind as you read on. Because somewhere in the system, our relationship can fit under a heading called family circumstances. From there, the case can be processed, passed on and left waiting. She has to live it while it waits.
Before we got to the car, we had been on a trip with CRUX. We had stood on paddleboards and both fallen into the water. Paddled kayaks, hunted for treasure with the metal detector and fished for stinging jellyfish. She learned to cast the lure so far that I had to film it. I showed the clip again and again. Look at her. Look what she can do.
She sat on my shoulders and was the tallest person on the campsite. In the evenings, we told bedtime stories until she fell asleep. That is what our bond looks like when it takes physical form. Not a bullet point. Not an assessment. A child who knows where to find her father.
I had promised her I would leave my phone alone when we went to the indoor play centre. Before, I had sat in the café tapping away while other people followed her around. I had been there without being there. Now I was going to stick to her like a horsefly. I pretended to be one and gave her arm a gentle pinch. She laughed. Then she darted off, and I had to follow.
Two metres of Daddy. A hundred and twenty kilos. Four hours chasing a seven-year-old through the play equipment. She slipped through; I squeezed after her. At one point I got stuck, and she had to help pull me free. I was too heavy to join her properly on the trampoline. I could put one leg on it and help her bounce higher. Higher jumps. Louder laughter.
I got so out of breath that I nearly threw up. The food break came at a convenient moment. I pretended it was mainly about how much slush she had earned.
It was not a presentation about rehabilitation. It was a father trying to keep his promise. You can be two metres tall and stuck in a play tower and still know that this is exactly where you are supposed to be.
Two and a half days we should have had together were taken from her. The pick-up and drop-off had been arranged. We were going to play, play the piano, draw and read. All the ordinary things that become so damned big when the days are few. The planned periods of leave for the next three months were revoked. I had seven days to appeal. She was seven years old.
While the appeal waited, the days we had looked forward to passed. Nobody had put them in a drawer until the case was finished. They were used up. A lawyer can correct a decision. Nobody can put a lost piece of childhood back into the calendar.
A child feels the absence before she can understand the reasons. She knows Daddy was supposed to come. Then he does not come. That is where the decision lands. You can describe it as a question of prison leave, progression and whether it is safe and appropriate. She has to work out what to do with how much she misses him.
I have my own mistakes to answer for. I have let people down by running away from what hurt and being absent when I should have been there. That is part of my story too. I am not asking anyone to erase it. That is exactly why I have tried to build a life in which I can stay. Education. Treatment. A goal that does not disappear with my mood: I will be the father she can rely on.
A child cannot live on a promise that her father will become better sometime later. She needs change to turn into action. A phone call. An outing. A hand on her back as she rides her bike. An evening when Daddy actually sits on the edge of her bed and carries on with the story.
This is what you interfere with when you cut off contact. It is also what you can destroy as a source of motivation. I have described how much she means to me. The prison itself cited the importance of my daughter when it justified a step towards lower security. You knew what kept me going. You had written it down.
That is why it cuts so deep when the documents for the child welfare case become inaccessible, when leave disappears, when I cannot defend myself against what is written about me. All your little cases end up in the same place: with her.
I believe this is deliberate retaliation. That accusation will stand here, and the grounds for it must come to light. I had spoken to the press and encouraged other prisoners to tell their stories. Then what mattered most to me was hit. That is the connection I want investigated. Not just how loudly I shouted afterwards.
Because the body has a history before the report begins.
When I was imprisoned in 2023, I had flashbacks on A West. Violence by adults in the child welfare system came back to me inside the cell. I was in a situation where other adults had complete control over my body, and the old experiences were there again. Force. Being stripped naked. A security cell. As I experienced the sequence of events, the coercive treatment led to self-harm. An ambulance was called.
There are reports that must show what they did, what they decided and what came afterwards. I want them brought out. I want someone to read the whole incident before the word “management” is allowed to close it.
In October 2024, there was another breakdown. This is a different incident. My reflection stared back at me in the cell. The walls breathed and moved closer. The cell grew smaller. My body wanted out. I fought a door that would not give. In the security cell, I was naked and bleeding from my hands, knees and elbows.
In the end, I had nothing left to fight with. I cried until there was nothing left.
That was where I decided to undergo the assessment and take the medication the doctor thought I needed. I wanted the racing thoughts to stop. To find enough calm to hold on to a direction. When I was given the medication, it felt as if the centrifuge in my head finally slowed down. My daughter. What she needed. The example I wanted to be. This was what would guide me.
But deciding to live differently does not erase what the body has learned. It does not make you immune to being locked up, to power, or to the feeling that nobody hears what you are trying to say. You can work on yourself and still panic. You can have a goal and still pace back and forth because you cannot sit still with what is happening inside you.
I have told them about the PTSD. So it must be possible to ask what the prison does with that knowledge. How do you respond to an episode? What do you do to avoid making it worse? What do you write about what triggered it?
When I think about the strip search I have described in the book, it is not a legal provision my body remembers first. Three men in front of the bed. Black gloves. They were looking for a mobile phone. I had just begun to hope that my conversation with the officer from Bjørgvin might lead to an examination of how I had been portrayed. The words poured out as I took off my clothes. Perhaps someone would finally listen.
Then the boxer shorts had to come off too.
The security cell came back into my mind. I had leave with my daughter two days later. What would happen to it if I refused? I took off my boxer shorts and held my hands in front of my crotch. No. Arms out. I turned around. No, the other way. Then I stood naked in front of them.
Afterwards, you can discuss the procedure. But understand what I am asking for: an assessment of a person must also include what that person is subjected to. The body does not lie there calculating which side of the wall it was on when it learned to be afraid. It remembers. And the next time the voice falters, it is this whole person you are meeting.
I have used ChatGPT because I have had so much in my head that I could not get it out. Documents, dates, things I need to explain, things I need to find again. Little by little, over months, I have tried to bring it together. It is my story. I have lived it. The tool has helped me express what I cannot say when stress takes over.
Anyone who wants to know what I mean must accept that I need help putting it into words. My thoughts do not belong to me any less because I finally find a way to hold on to them.
When access to the computer was shut off, my work was inside it.
I had 484 pages from child welfare in Digipost and three weeks to respond. At the same time, deadlines were running for NAV, the Norwegian Tax Administration and the prison. Four cases. One computer for 48 prisoners.
Think about the task before you judge my behaviour. I had to read the documents, understand what they meant, find what could shed light on the case and put together a response. Not just write that I disagreed. I had to show why. Which attachment belonged with which claim? Where was the email that could explain the date? What had I said before, and what had they written that I had said?
But first I had to be allowed to sit down at the computer.
It was slow from the moment it started. Slow opening documents. Slow on the internet. Word crashed. The minutes I had fought to get ran out while the equipment sat there thinking. There is something awful about watching time pass on a machine when the deadline does not care that the machine is standing still.
At the next shift change, I had to explain myself again. Why was it so urgent? Why should my case get a slot? Out came child welfare. Out came the fear of losing contact with my child. Out came the most private things, in front of yet another person I did not know. I had to expose my life to get a few minutes to try to hold it together.
Trainees and new employees could stand there deciding whether the reason was good enough. On my side of the counter were a deadline and a child. On their side was a question of how much time to allow. We stood in the same room and lived by two completely different clocks.
I was not sleeping. I tried to read, remember, understand and get it done in time. Eventually it tipped over into what I experienced as an anxiety attack. Then, suddenly, there was something that could be described briefly. He does not regulate himself. He does not comply. He has little understanding of the restrictions.
The machine did not have to regulate itself. The queue did not have to explain itself. The deadlines had no diagnosis. The whole burden could disappear, leaving my body as the problem.
That is why I do not accept “computer use” as the name of this case. It was not a desire for a screen that kept me awake. It was the responsibility to respond before it was too late.
On 13 August, the computer was removed. I had written about the computer equipment and sent my criticism to the press. KDI, the Norwegian Directorate of Correctional Service, had received it too. Now the old access was to go, and Kompass was to come in.
Two days later, I explained that I needed the documents for the court hearing about my daughter and for the child welfare case. I asked for printouts. An officer could control the mouse. I could point. No new letters to the newspaper. No new complaints to KDI. Just my papers.
I had reduced my request to this: let a staff member remain in control. Let me get out what I need so that I can attend my own case prepared.
That proposal must be included when you tell the story of what happened. There was a concrete attempt to resolve the situation. I was not asking anyone to hand over the key and go home. I was asking them to use it while they sat beside me.
I still did not get the documents. On 26 August, I appeared in court without the material I had worked to obtain. My child could not wait for the prison to sort out access. The hearing went ahead. The decision came.
A website called Digipost is not the same as having the documents I need. A tab for NAV is not the same as being able to find the attachment for the NAV case. It must be possible to hold two things in mind at once: I may be able to open a service and still be shut out of what I need in order to use it.
That is why I want Kompass examined alongside the restrictions that came with it. Which tasks could we actually complete before and afterwards? Could we retrieve, read, compare and send the documents? Could we get help understanding them? Or did someone get to tick the box for digital access while the work remained stuck?
As I remember the conversation with the senior officer, I was told that the complaints with all their laws and legal grounds were bringing the system to a halt. I could not use the prison’s computer to send things directly to newspapers and KDI. I had to understand that.
Chew on that explanation. I was trying to use the law to respond to what was being done to me. The problem was that I was using so much of it.
I believe access to this tool disturbed a balance of power they wanted to preserve. That is my accusation. Bring out the decisions, the timing and the reasons, and let them answer it. Show which alternatives were considered when even my own court documents were locked away. A general explanation about security does not answer why an officer could not control the mouse while I got my papers out.
Then you can read that I do not understand “the laws and rules that apply in a prison”.
Look at what that sentence contains. A child. A father. A court hearing. Documents that exist but that he is not allowed to retrieve. A deadline ticking away while he stands there asking. Remove all of that, and what remains is a prisoner pestering people about the computer.
I ask again because the task is still unresolved. There is less time now. I have to respond. I have to show what I believe matters. When my voice can no longer stay calm, it is easy to find a word for it: pushy. Angry. Threatening.
That is where the report can begin.
The person who said no moves on to the next task. I am left with the same deadline, the same daughter and even less opportunity to do what I am responsible for. If my reaction is going to be used to assess who I am, this must be there too. The whole sequence of events. Including what you did.
I have spoken to many prisoners and read decisions others have shown me. This is the pattern I recognise: the description starts at the point where the person cannot take any more. Then the reaction looks as if it came from nowhere. He must be difficult. He must be dangerous. That assessment can then be used to impose new restrictions, and those can trigger more of what is already being used against him.
I have to share my sentence with that person on paper. He enters the office before I do. The lawyer has met him before I have a chance to open my mouth.
I can sit there explaining that I am not him, while that is used as yet another example of my refusal to accept the assessment. How can I get through if my resistance to an inaccurate description is allowed to serve as proof that the description was accurate?
This is where I want you to stop. Before the next reference. Before the next decision. Go back to the incident. It is actually possible to investigate what happened.
Take the corridor at Bjørgvin. Take the hand that was placed on my chest. Look at what actually happened before you decide what that hand supposedly prevented.
The staff were standing down by another room. Between where they stood and the room of the fellow prisoner I was visiting were four rooms: another prisoner’s room, two more rooms and mine. My own room was the last one before his. So I also had to walk towards the staff to get to my own room.
First I went into the other prisoner’s room. He followed from the television room. Then I went out again, saw the staff down the corridor and called out to them. I was having an anxiety and PTSD episode. I paced back and forth outside his room. He came out and tried to calm me down.
I took one or two steps towards the staff. I had not even got as far as the space outside my own room. Then he gently placed his palm against my chest from the side.
I stopped completely. Straight away.
He immediately took his hand away, patted my shoulder with the other hand and asked me to come back into his room.
I did not lunge through his hand. I did not struggle against him. From the angle at which he was standing, I do not believe he would have had the strength to hold me back if I had actually been about to attack anyone. I allowed him to calm me down. That was the whole point of the hand.
Later I spoke to the officer about what she had experienced. As I recount the conversation, she agreed that the step could also have been towards my own room. My voice had made her nervous. But her nervousness could not tell her what I had intended to do.
I asked whether I had continued forwards. Whether I had lunged through the hand. No. I had stopped and gone into the room. She advised me to raise it with a lawyer and the senior officer and ask for fresh interviews, including with the other prisoner. As I remember it, she did not know that he had not been allowed to give his account.
Now look at what happens if the document keeps the palm on the chest and removes everything else: the immediate stop. The hand that was taken away. The pat on the shoulder. My room, which lay in the same direction. Suddenly, a hand that reached a distressed person can become evidence that an attack had to be prevented.
That is a different incident.
The hand remains on the page, but it is given a new job. Where, in my account, it is calm contact that works, in the serious portrayal it can become the opposing force that only just prevents something dangerous. Then it is not a small detail that has disappeared. The incident has changed meaning.
Ask the man who stood beside me. Find out where everyone was standing. Walk the corridor. How far had I gone? Where was my room? Where were the staff? What did we do when the hand was taken away?
You do not get to put an intention inside my head and then use it to decide my future. An anxiety attack is not a blank cheque to write the worst thing you can imagine into a step.
If a staff member becomes frightened, that should be possible to describe. The feeling is real. But fear does not grant access to my thoughts. It must be possible to distinguish between what you saw, what you felt and what you think I intended to do.
Where were you standing? What could you see? What did you hear for yourself? Did you hear the whole conversation, or did you arrive afterwards? Was the door open? Why was the other prisoner not allowed to give his account before the description was used?
These are questions that can determine what remains on record about me. Yet the first description can travel from document to document. A new reference to the old one. Then another. The pile grows, and it looks like more evidence. How many times has it really been the same allegation coming out of the printer?
It does not help that it has a new letterhead. It does not help that a new person has read it if nobody has investigated what it rests on. I want to know where it began, who was in a position to observe it, and what has happened to my objections along the way.
Here sits the potter with the clay. Norway’s laws can be bent around a story that has already lost what might have contradicted it. The reaction becomes risk. The risk becomes a new intervention. And underneath it all lies the sentence meant to make us stop asking: the laws and rules that apply in a prison.
But you cannot decide that my room was somewhere else. You cannot let a reference move my body further down the corridor. There were people there. There are accounts to obtain. I want the concrete questions answered before abstract words are allowed to do the rest of the work.
I asked a trainee at Bergen Prison how much education you needed before you could start working there. A pleasant man. I had no complaint about the way he treated us. He told me about the part-time route he had chosen: two days of teaching a week, and after a month he could begin working in the prison as a trainee.
Eight days of education before you can start working in a prison.
That is the threshold I am talking about. He was describing the start of his part-time programme, with further education alongside his work. But we are the people standing in front of him while that happens. People in panic, in grief, in breakdown. Trauma that does not show itself until the body is suddenly back in something it never escaped.
Picture a twenty-year-old who has barely got through the peer pressure of Norway’s end-of-school celebrations. Put him in front of a man whose life story is far beyond anything he has experienced. The man paces back and forth, speaks too quickly, cannot get out what he is trying to say. It can look intense. It can frighten the young employee.
Then he gets to write.
What the hell has he had time to learn about this power in eight days?
Not just how to lock a door. How to understand the person on the other side. Which questions must be asked before body language is assigned an intention. What he needs to record about his own part in the situation. How he can be sure that what he perceived was what happened. And what he should do with what he is not sure about.
He is the one who needs training, guidance and experienced people beside him. I am the one who may have his reaction written into my life. My child may feel its effects at home. We cannot put the nervous system or childhood on pause while someone learns the difference between an anxiety attack and criminal intent.
A report is not harmless because it was written by someone who is still learning. It can find its way into decisions about prison leave, contact with family, education and parole. The employee goes home after the shift. The words can remain around my neck long afterwards.
Who reads them critically before they are used? Who goes through the incident with the new employee and asks what came before it? Who makes sure his own fear does not become the entire map of an unfamiliar person? Who follows the uncertainty through the chain, all the way to the person who decides the case?
That responsibility belongs to those who hire, supervise and use the text. It cannot be pushed down onto the trainee and end up as yet another burden on the prisoner. The young employee must be allowed to learn. But there must be a system that actually prevents the price of those lessons being charged to a child who has never set foot in that corridor.
And when you know how much pressure the people in here can be under, that knowledge must change what you do. It cannot be something you speak proudly about on a course, only to write “threatening” when you encounter the reaction itself.
Then I read the recommendation Bergen Prison sent to the regional administration on 16 September. There is the assessment I am trying to answer. The prison maintains the refusal and writes that it finds no new factors that change its assessment.
“We do not consider it realistic to go into the level of detail in the decision that the prisoner appears to expect in his appeals.”
Those are their words. My question is which details you believe can be left out. Is it the information that I needed documents for the court hearing? Is it my room in the corridor? Is it the fact that a hand was taken away immediately because I had already stopped?
I am not asking for every sentence I have written to be copied into a decision. I am asking you to investigate what could change the understanding of the incident. There is a difference between a detail that makes a text longer and a piece of information that casts doubt on the conclusion.
The recommendation describes records concerning tone of voice, shouting, frustration and demanding behaviour. Incidents described individually as less serious are used together to demonstrate a pattern. In the light of the offences I am serving time for, the prison believes this indicates increased risk upon release.
There is the chain, written down. From my voice to my future.
Then every link must stand up to examination. If several records describe reactions to the same unresolved obstacle, that obstacle must be included. If they repeat an earlier allegation, you must show that. More sheets of paper do not automatically mean more independent incidents. And more reactions do not mean the cause has stopped being relevant.
The recommendation also says that the police reports carry weight in the overall assessment, even if they are not decisive. In the prison’s view, the fact that the matters have not been resolved by the prosecuting authority is not decisive. I read this and return to the corridor. To what I want investigated in the account from Bjørgvin.
You cannot answer that objection merely by saying that the prison considered the incident serious enough to report to the police. It is that very account I am challenging. What is being checked if a police report gains weight from the fact that someone chose to file it?
When I say the case has been constructed to confirm itself, this is the craft I mean. It must be possible to open up the connection between the first words and the final decision. Asking what it rests on is not the same as denying that an assessment may be made. It is a demand that the assessment concern what actually happened.
And while I try to get this across, time passes.
I have written about appeals left waiting for months. For the person processing a case, this can be described as a long processing time. For the person inside it, it is life continuing under the decision he is trying to have corrected.
A period of leave can be used up before the appeal reaches the top of the pile. A place in education can be lost while the reasons are examined. Contact with a child can change while everyone waits. If the eventual answer is that something was wrong, nobody has held the world still in the meantime.
I have received letters from the Parliamentary Ombud stating that the regional administration must finish processing the appeal first. The supervisory council does not step in and resolve my individual case. So I wait for those who are supposed to investigate the people I am complaining about, while the people I am complaining about continue to make decisions about me.
That is the distance I want to show: between the right written in the letter and the help that actually arrives.
Another prisoner told me about a transfer decision at Oslo Prison. He was to be sent to a prison away from his family ties. The decision was delivered as he was about to be locked in for the evening. As he told it, the appeal deadline expired one hour before the door was unlocked the next morning.
He was locked in with his appeal deadline.
When the door opened, the outburst came. He was sanctioned for it. According to his account, the cause had disappeared there too: the letter at the door, the deadline through the night, the opportunity that was shut away while time passed. Only the man who reacted was carried forward.
I recount his story because it shows what needs to be investigated. Get the letter. The time. The deadline. The report about the outburst. You do not have to choose between believing every prisoner and believing every employee. You can actually look for what happened.
That is what I need someone to do while there is still something to save. A right of appeal that only takes effect after the intervention is over can leave us with fine words about harm that nobody stopped.
I know rehabilitation exists. I know the people who make it possible. The school, the workshop, the health service, the psychologists, Wayback and CRUX. Staff who see us and try to help. They give their time. They make me push myself. They see work that continues over months, not just the voice I had when I could not take any more.
I have submitted information about negative drug tests, treatment and education. About people who have seen my progress. About my daughter as a source of motivation. I want to know what it actually counts for when risk is assessed. How much does a person have to do before what he does now is allowed to change the image of who he was before?
A relationship with a child can keep you working on yourself. An education can give you a path to follow. Someone who helps you can make the difference between carrying on and giving up. If you tear at these connections, you also tear at what was supposed to make life outside possible.
That is why a stroke of the pen can do so much harm. It does not enter a vacuum. It can strike work that other people and I are already in the middle of. The teacher trying to help me move forward. The treatment meant to help me understand my reactions. The child who needs to experience that I actually turn up.
If you want to use my worst moment to explain all of me, you must also explain why everything else gets so little space. Rehabilitation cannot just be something the prison shows off when someone asks what works. It must count when the prison has the power to stop it.
There is another kind of learning in here too. Shut up. Swallow it. Do not protest. Do not defend yourself too loudly. Do not give them more to write about before you are assessed for release. If you see someone else being mistreated, the safest thing may be to look away.
The dog stops barking when the stick has been poked into the cage enough times. Then it goes quiet. Some may call that progress.
Come closer. Look at what had to be broken for you to get that quiet.
I want to teach my daughter to stand up for herself and help others who need it. In here, that lesson can come at a high price. What kind of person are you training me to be if the safest thing is to see the injustice, understand it and pretend I do not see it?
I believe you know where you are striking when you stop me from looking after my relationship with my daughter, and then use my desperation to justify the next intervention. I believe the retaliation teaches the rest of the wing something too. The other prisoner does not need an explicit threat. He can see what happens to the one who speaks.
This is a way of building cases that can feed itself. Put the person under pressure. Remove the pressure from the description. Use the reaction to apply more pressure. Then you keep getting new signs that he is not functioning. Eventually the breaking-down itself can look like the evidence that you had to continue.
Prisoners for reuse.
That is what I accuse you of producing when you tear at the connections that were supposed to sustain a person after prison. The relationship with a child. Education. Work. The belief that doing something right makes a difference. There is not an endless reserve to draw on before a person stops believing there is anything to come out to.
That does not absolve a person of responsibility for what he does afterwards. I am responsible for my actions. Precisely for that reason, your actions must also be open to examination. A new mistake by the prisoner must not be allowed to bury the question of the first intervention. Otherwise everything that comes later can be used to make it impossible to correct what started the chain.
The snowball grows. A reaction gets a new document wrapped around it. Then a new restriction, new despair, another report. Eventually there is so much to explain that the person asking to be heard seems unable to stick to the point. But the case has eaten its way into his entire life. Where do you want him to begin?
I began with my daughter’s hand. I want you to remember it when all the paperwork tries to make you forget what is at stake.
One day the door opens. We come out to join you. Neighbours. Colleagues. People you meet in the shop. The walls do not come with us. What has been built up or torn down comes with the body. If imprisonment makes us more frightened, more desperate and more full of hatred, that is what you get back into society too.
You pay for the meat grinder. You will have to live with what comes out.
That is why this story concerns you even if you have never visited a prison. Society needs us to be able to live out there. Then it must demand to know what is being done to us before the gate opens.
That is why I demand more than an apology for the wording of a decision.
Start with the incident. A report must include what came before the reaction, what the employee did, the specific words and movements. Distinguish between observation, feeling and interpretation. Let the prisoner give his account. Hear the witnesses who were actually there. If the accounts differ, that must be investigated before the most serious one is allowed to govern what happens next.
Give new employees training and guidance in trauma, crises and accurate reporting. Let an experienced person examine the basis before a subjective experience is used to stop contact between a child and a parent. The first report must stand up to questions. It should not take six months of fighting to get them asked.
Make sure appeals can be dealt with while there is still something to save. A child does not get another summer because the answer was wrong. An appeals system must be able to intervene before the leave is gone, the deadline has expired and the place in education has been lost. There must be a real route to an independent assessment while the intervention is ongoing.
Give us workable access to our own documents and to tools that make it possible to understand and respond to a case. Time, equipment and actual help. Measure whether the task can be completed. The state cannot demand a response by a certain date while treating the means of responding as a favour for which we should be grateful.
And investigate the patterns. Put the cases side by side. Follow the allegation back to the first report. Look at what disappeared, what was corrected and what nobody asked about. Protect the personal information of those who tell their stories. The public material must not expose children and relatives all over again. But protecting privacy must be compatible with investigating practice.
I want the media to get inside the documents. A television camera can show an officer speaking calmly. Open the file too. Follow the case after the camera is switched off. Ask which rule was actually used, what it permits, and who checks whether the boundary has been crossed.
Let other prisoners and relatives recognise the sequence of events and know that they can tell their stories. Even when the story is about the person who stopped responding, the family that fell apart or the person who took their own life. It must be possible to investigate what happened when they asked for help. No description of a procedure should be allowed to settle that question on its own.
I write to have these practices exposed and tested. If anyone wants to respond to my accusations with a claim for damages, I will present the grounds and have the contradictions examined. A job title must not keep them outside that scrutiny. The image I use is the mafia’s lawyers: legal knowledge used to get the shit through the door with the paperwork in order. Then we have to look at the craft. Who wrote it? What did they know? What did they remove? Who let it continue?
I think of Rosa Parks on the bus, and of the people in the movement who refused to let her stand alone. That is the part of the image I need here. One man, one cell, one complaint is easy to let disappear. We must be able to stand together to get the documents read. Every claim must be traceable, every pattern must withstand questioning. Then we follow the responsibility, the money and what the system rewards.
The next person who speaks up must know that someone on the outside will stand their ground.
I picture my little girl on the slope outside the nursery. I had returned from sea. She was trying to climb up to me. Slid down. Took hold again. I stood above her and showed her where to put her foot and hand.
One tuft of grass at a time.
She gritted her teeth and kept going. In the last few metres, I could see how determined she was. Her tongue briefly appeared between her lips, just as mine does when I am concentrating on something I am trying to do.
At last she was sitting on my arm, smiling. She had done it.
I wanted her to take that feeling with her. Before anyone taught her to stop because she had tried hard enough. She had slid down. She had taken hold again. Now she was up.
I cannot teach her to hold on and then give up on my own promise. I will be there to catch her. That is why I keep writing. That is why the hidden parts of this story must come out, all the way through the walls and to those of you with the power to demand change.
She must be able to call, “Come on, Daddy, look.”
And Daddy must be there.