the Prison Triptych

 

 An Elegy to desistance theory?

By Lottie E. Allen

 

Dedicated to the gates of Her Majesty’s Prison Wandsworth[i],

And to the School of Criminology, Sociology & Policing, at the University of Hull,

On the eleventh anniversary of Early Release Day, 25 April 2025.

 

Footnote no. i (for Footnotes matter): In the Spring of 2014, it was Her Majesty’s Prison Wandsworth.

 

Triptych I: The Prologue – The Paddy Wagon

The unforgiving wheels of justice,

on my white prison bus,

career through the frightened night.

Fleeing Southwark Crown Court.

Padlocked into my single dark cold white cell.

I listen to the boys,

screaming innocence and for their mothers.

Through tough illiterate windows,

glimpse night cold South London.

Fleeing freedom,

through, we swing,

Wandsworth’s grimacing turreted Prison Gates.

 

Triptych II: Incarceration

The cell is my mind,

a refuge from the clanging noise.

The mind is my room,

a sanctuary from the smell of fear.

The sound of fear is real in

the prison of my mind.

The dictionary is in my mind.

“Words are all I have”[ii].

The mind is my prison.

The mind is my home.

There is a place,

special, safe,

in the cell that is my mind.

It is the Prison Gate.

Fear free.

Through it I walk into

the library in my mind.

Down the endless avenues of books,

shelved in my vulnerable heart.

Facing out my fear of ignorance,

and the tyranny of my bullies.

I meet my guilty innocence

in the liberation of my prison cell.

For I carry my cell

in the eternity of my mind.

It is a vast city.

Its imagination,

evocative, boundless, free.

 

Triptych III: The Epilogue – the Hinge on my Prison Door

Footnote no. iii (for Footnotes always matter)

In an English dictionary when we dismember, with pain we tear apart.

When we remember, we rebuild[iii]. We remake.

 

[Crescendo]

“There is a river”[iv].

Where I,

dismembered,

handwash,

my maternal Grandmother’s

Wedding White Linen Napkins.

Where I

remember

handwashing

My Cotton White Underpants.

 

Looking up at my high cell,

narrow prison window.

Through which I cannot see my trees.

In my treeless prison courtyard.

 

[Quietly]

Today, I plant

endless avenues of trees.

Birthed in the fertile crescent city,

of my imagination’s gateless cell.

 

 

© Lottie E. Allen

The eleventh anniversary of Early Release Day

The Feast of St Mark the Evangelist

25 April, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Five.

Footnotes

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[i] In the Spring of 2014, it was Her Majesty’s Prison Wandsworth.

[ii] Beckett, S. (1953, p 166) L’Innommable. Les Editions de Minuit.

[iii] In an English dictionary when we dismember, with pain we tear apart. When we remember, we rebuild. We remake.

[iv] Psalm Forty-Six, verse four (New Revised Standard Version, updated).