To have one’s consciousness raised is not merely to become aware of facts of which one was previously ignorant: it is instead to have one’s whole relationship to the world shifted. The consciousness in question is not a consciousness of an already-existing state of affairs. Rather, consciousness-raising is productive. It creates a new subject – a we that is both the agent of struggle and what is struggled for. At the same time, consciousness-raising intervenes in the ‘object,’ the world itself, which is now no longer apprehended as some static opacity, the nature of which is already decided, but as something that can be transformed.
— Mark Fisher, “No Romance Without Finance”.
6th September 2025
“How long’s your journey? Going far?”
A man sits down next to me on the train and immediately starts chatting. I take off my headphones, bleary-eyed and unprepared for small talk. Looking down, I see a sausage dog in his lap sniffing at my elbow.
“I’m getting off at the next stop, actually.”
“Oh, I see. Visiting friends, is it?”
“Something like that.”
Hana’s parents meet me inside the main entrance of the train station and we hug each other. It is lovely to see them.
I have never been to this city before. My first impression of it – perhaps coloured by the circumstances of our visit – is that it is dismal. When this is over, I hope to never return here.
With an hour to kill, we look for someplace to eat. Finding a restaurant amidst a sea of takeaways for brunch, we talk about Hana over eggs cooked three different ways.
We talk about how much we love them, how we could have possibly ended up here, and wherever the hell we’re going next. We reiterate in person what we have spoken about so much already on the phone: we have all overcome challenges in the past, and we have been made stronger by each one; this is just one more notch to our bones.
But I am still in shock. I suppose we all are.
The drive over to the prison is mostly silent as Hana’s Dad navigates the unfamiliar concrete sprawl. It is a silence first punctuated by small talk, which we are unable to sustain for long. As the GPS draws us closer, the silence is broken only by deep sighs that we take turns to make.
When we arrive, we’re early. Getting out of the car, we are waved over by a ‘family liaison officer’, who ushers us into a small outbuilding. Hana’s mum is carrying bags of clothes and supplies that she will ultimately take back home with her. We will later come to recognise the pointless carrying of soon-to-be rejected bags as the telltale sign.
“First time?”
On the inside, the dreary outbuilding is revealed to be half-crèche and half-the-saddest-community-centre-you-have-ever-seen. It is filled with tired toys, self-help books and supportive leaflets, most of which ask difficult questions. “Are you affected by someone else’s drug use?” “Have you noticed a change in someone you’re visiting?” “Are you worried about unwanted contact from a prisoner?” Other leaflets on display are intended to help children and adults adjust to the new reality of having a loved one or parent in prison. The mere thought of children passing through this environment makes me deeply sad.
On every table, there is a copy of ConVerse, the prison newspaper, which is filled with bulletins about the prison and probation service. Flicking through it, I find law firm ads, lists of deaths in custody, and reports of inappropriate behaviour between staff and prisoners. It is nothing less than a tabloid testament to the system’s corruption and incompetence.
I am surprised to see at least one hundred copies of the newspaper stacked against a wall by the entrance, leaning precariously on top of a row of lockers where we will have to leave all of our personal belongings before we are granted entry. I ask myself why this system would so willingly and shamelessly broadcast of its own ineptitude.
A generous reading would be that institutional transparency is essential for accountability, but we have already seen how the system dodges accountability at every turn. On the whole, the prison system is so punishingly opaque, for those both inside and outside, with myriad rules unexplained until you unwittingly break them. Even then, these rules are not always followed consistently. It produces a feeling of constant confusion and disorientation that feels intentional.
I start to think that these stacks of newspaper are an added punishment in themselves. They are part of the system’s psychological warfare on all who encounter it, expanding the sense of shared punishment to include those who love someone incarcerated.
I go to use the bathroom, but there is no toilet paper. Maybe that’s what the newspapers are for.
When I return, I settle into a vacant seat at a square wooden table where Hana’s parents have already positioned themselves. We begin to ask the family liaison officer questions about the system we’ve spent two weeks being confronted by. She’s open, unassuming and relaxed, like the social workers I spent so much time around during my childhood. But she doesn’t seem to possess any of the answers we seek, nor we do know how to answer the questions she has for us.
Noticing our bags, she asks: “Have they put an app in?” The answer is: “We don’t know”. We don’t know how the system works. We’ve heard barely a word from Hana since they were arrested, but it seems that everything must come from them. Unfortunately, no one else will ever tell you what needs to happen, and even if you figure it out for yourself and do everything by the book, the system is still likely to inexplicably deny all of it.
Sensing our first-time anxieties, the affable officer starts by telling us how nice this prison is, compared to others she also works in. Then she begins to talk about how much corruption there is in the prison service as a whole, noting the prevalence of guards and governors falling in love with prisoners in particular. We all go pale and quiet. “That doesn’t happen that often,” she adds hastily. I think about how the newspaper on the table in front of me is filled with evidence to the contrary.
It is strange to watch just how comfortable the officer gets. She is clearly too used to all of this. We will come to find this jarring too — the ways that people normalise their embeddedness in a social nightmare. So many who work in the prison service see themselves as doing a good deed, or acting upon some innate desire to care for people. It is a hard rationalisation to swallow when true care would be not putting anyone through this ordeal in the first place.
We ask about the problems we’ve had sending and receiving messages. Another visitor, more seasoned, chimes in to say he only uses the eMates app, which lets you send emails to prisoners, in order to send pictures. Instead, he uses phone calls and visitations for all substantial catch-ups and contact. Having all travelled for over three hours to get here, it feels torturous. We’ve yet to establish any sustained contact whatsoever.
Before long, a prison officer arrives, dressed in black uniform with a weighty utility belt, to check our IDs. Identities confirmed, the family liaison officer gives each of us a wristband, before the other officer leads us over to the main gate outside the prison, where we flash our wrists before passing through the first layer of fortifications.
I feel like a host of Kafka characters all at once, both entering a castle and preparing for a trial.
We’re searched, with a little more intensity than any of us are used to from airport security, and are then sent into a large, featureless holding cell. Propped against one wall is an abandoned bulletin board. Pinned to it, there is more advice for parents and their children, as well as an information sheet about respecting the gender identities of trans people who may be held here. It all suggests a performative adherence to a minimum level of humanity and dignity, which we will never come to witness for ourselves in practice. In fact, the enforced heteronormativity is sharper here than it is on the outside.
We stand in the airlock for ten-to-fifteen minutes as the other visitors pass through metal detectors, show the insides of their mouths to staff, and have their shoes knocked around like puzzle boxes. Through a small window in a reinforced metal door that leads to the visits room, we see our loved ones enter and get into position on chairs they won’t be allowed to stand up from. All of us begin to crane our necks to catch an early glimpse of them through the porthole.
The door is unlocked with a heavy clunk and I walk over to Hana as casually as I am able. I hug them tight and then lean in for a kiss, which they dodge in a flash of panic. No one is sure what is and isn’t allowed. They apologise profusely for dodging my affections, then hug their parents. I don’t take it personally, but I sit for the next two hours across from them mired in a rumbling frustration. I am not allowed to love them in any way that I am used to.
We try to get comfortable as Hana’s mum heads to a tuck shop on the far side of the room to buy cups of coffee and a tray of snacks. None of us has any appetite, except Hana. They begin savouring a packet of Wotsits like a gourmet meal. “We don’t get this sort of thing in there!” they exclaim, grinning from ear to ear.
I feel myself staring at them. They don’t feel real. I tell them so, and they say, “I’m real, look!” But I don’t want to look. I want to hold them like I’m used to holding them. I stare gauntly instead, willing my eyes to become black holes that might absorb them from across the garish green plastic table that buttresses my knees.
There is so much to talk about, and we cover as much ground as we are able to without exhausting ourselves. Mostly, there is a gentle venting of all the emotional turmoil built up over the last two weeks. There is no anger; only the slow release of a fear valve.
The fear is not totally expended. I can’t imagine it ever will be. This won’t feel over until it’s over.
I am embarrassed to discover that I am the biggest sap in all of this. My eyes well up repeatedly. I am simply too estrogenised to handle this much stress without periodically bursting into tears. Hana and their family, to the contrary, display an incredible amount of strength, despite being so newly immersed in the traumatically unfamiliar.
We talk about how much we’ve been fighting for them. Their Dad commends me for all I’ve done to help so far. He tells me that they’re a family, and families stick together. He tells me that I’m family too now. I hug him instinctively, which I think catches him off-guard. I know he’s right. In their company, I feel at home for the first time in a long time.
I know already that this experience will change all of us. I can only hope, in time, that I am transformed into someone who is as strong as they are. I can already feel it beginning to happen. Although I hardly feel present, I feel my mind begin to unknot itself and sit more at ease.
Still, this won’t feel over until it’s over.
Hana begins to comment on some of the eMates messages they have so far received. I have been writing on the app daily and desperately, hurling missives into the void like so many messages in bottles. It is the first confirmation we’ve had that they are, in fact, receiving them.
I gently vent more fears, feeling the strain this has put on all of us, but also on our relationship, not yet knowing how best to relate to each other on opposite sides of a new obstacle, but wanting more than anything to persist. “My padmate has been in a relationship for six years whilst being in and out of prison,” Hana tells me. “And if they can make it, so can we.” I believe them, but first I need to process the grief I’m drowning in.
I tell them about the contents of a message sent the night before, which they won’t receive for a few more days at least.
Hi, my love. It’s around 8pm on Friday 5th. I can’t wait to see you tomorrow. I’m on a call right now with your Dad and the other families. It’s been nice to all touch base and be there for each other.
And that’s as far as I got before you rang me! It is always such a dream to hear your voice.
I’m sorry every phone call is full of tears. It’s still so new. I’m sure it will get easier.
I’m sure this will also be a strange thing to hear, but the overwhelming feeling is one of grief. The book your Dad got about surviving prison says something similar, because the bottom line is simply that you’re not here suddenly. It’s why this situation is so strange, because I know grief, and so it’s this deeply bittersweet thing to be able to hear from the person your body is grieving. It’s both miraculous and painful at the same time.
It makes me think about Orpheus. I don’t know if you know the myth. Here’s the quick version:
Orpheus is a talented musician on the lyre, who is set to marry Eurydice. He invites Hymen, the god of marriage, to bless the ceremony, but Hymen does not attend – an omen that their marriage is doomed.
Soon after the wedding, Eurydice is killed by a snake whilst walking through woodland. Orpheus, distraught in grief, descends into the underworld to find her, playing the lyre as he goes in order to anchor himself against the grasping of shades who want him to join them in death.
Coming under the protection of the gods, who admire his determination, they decree that Orpheus can bring his lover back to life, but on condition that she walk forever behind him and he does not turn to look at her.
Orpheus accepts the gods’ proposal, but comes to believe he has been tricked, and it’s not really Eurydice who walks behind him but another shade.
Unable to resist temptation, Orpheus looks back at Eurydice, who is then pulled straight back to Hades.
For the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, the myth was a good model for thinking through a patient’s attempts to reckon with grief and separation trauma. It’s fitting because the name Orpheus is thought to derive from proto-Indo-European words for ‘orphan’, ‘servant’, ‘darkness’, ‘fatherless’, or a word for someone who changes allegiances. Ferenczi also speaks of ‘Orpha’ as “organizing life instincts” that allow us to proceed through life without longing disastrously for a return to the womb.
‘Orpha’ can nonetheless be the source of great distress, as the ‘orphan’ is a figure who may never find the help and support they seek. But sometimes they do.
In his Clinical Diary, Ferenczi notes how one of his patients, “with the aid of an omnipotent intelligence (Orpha) … scoured the universe in search of help”, and “her Orpha is supposed to have tracked me down, even at that time, as the only person in the world who owing to his special personal fate could and would make amends for the injury that had been done to her.”
I’m feeling all of that right now, probably a bit triggered, but nonetheless stronger each day and more full of determination than I have ever felt before. If I’ve got any Orpha, they’re pulling me to you. I can feel yours pulling toward me too.
I can feel it because it’s happening! I’m going to get an early night because I’ve got to catch an 8.30am train tomorrow morning so I can come and give you a really big squeeze.
I adore you. Mattie xx
Before I know it, our two hours are up. I give them the biggest squeeze I can, but leave my body at some point during. It’s not long enough. It will never have been long enough. I can’t wait to hold them again without feeling observed.
As we turn to leave, I try to catch their eye and give them one final wave. They have turned around to share a moment with another prisoner instead, no doubt in order to blunt the pain of a lingering farewell. The other prisoner is someone I recognise: Lottie, one of the Filton 24.
Heading for the next train home, I am numb. I reach out to their friends and try to process the experience over message, but I can already feel the desperate need for sleep as some deep recess of the unconscious strives to start making sense of the ordeal.
I reiterate my feelings to them about the past two weeks, which have felt like someone has kidnapped the person I love most in the whole world. All I’ve been able to do is reason speculatively about the kidnapper’s would-be demands, ready to drop everything to prepare a ransom, whatever it might be.
It’s the only analogy that fits. One of their friends says that this isn’t an analogy at all; it is exactly what has happened.
Pulling into Durham station at around 8pm, my phone rings. I hold my breath through the prelude: “This call is from a person currently in a prison in England…”
“I’ll have more credit soon”, Hana says. “This is just a quick call to say goodnight.” I tell them how wonderful it was to see them, and I can’t wait to see them again soon. It is the sort of train-home phone call we’d have on any other night as a long-distance couple, turning the page on our last day together for some time. I start to feel calm for the first time in two weeks.
7th September 2025
I begin reflecting on the last few days, caught in a tug of war between a tacit acceptance and a refusal to normalise the baked-in inhumanity of the prison system.
In recent years, and like so many others, I have been taken by arguments for prison abolition, at least in the abstract. However, if someone were to ask me about the more complicated consequences of such a position, I would not know how to answer them. Maybe I’d mumble something about a “Nordic model” I know nothing about and then have little more to say.
Now, having survived the last two weeks, which have felt like an eternity, I feel I have learnt more about the British criminal justice system than I ever expected to. As is no doubt the case for most people, I had never given it much thought before. I never expected to have any contact with it. Prison was something that happened to other people. But right now, I am feeling its foreboding presence encroach on a life of freedom, because someone I love is not free.
It is a difficult situation to make sense of. Every thought, every ounce of energy, is being spent on concern for the welfare of someone I love deeply. They have been arrested for alleged involvement in direct action, in light of a set of political beliefs I share. But politics has also been the last thing on my mind. I feel stressed “beyond all belief”, crushed under the full weight of that banal idiom. I struggle to find my bearings.
A few weeks before their arrest, I sent Hana a draft of an essay [still forthcoming] I’d been working on about David Lynch. They said in a letter that they had been thinking about it a lot whilst inside.
In the essay, I reflect on attempts made by various commentators to claim a politics for Lynch, whether from the left or the right. I opt instead for the argument that what Lynch most often expresses is an
anti-politics, which complicates the illusory certainty of any political programme. Politics, in this regard, is of little overt concern to Lynch’s cinema – at least beyond his distorted mirroring of everyday ‘norms’. His films instead plunder the other side of politics, where the signs we all too readily ascribe a place in the symbolic order are free-floating and untethered from common sense. In this way, Lynch dramatizes the ambiguous interzones that we are all caught up in, irrespective of our political allegiances. His operative perversion lies precisely in the observation that we all occupy a world of horror and intrigue, where errant signifiers always remain open to interpretation.
Anti-politics is not the absence of politics. Anti-politics is like antimatter: it looks like politics, but moves with an ‘opposite charge’. Right now, I feel that negativity pounding in the space between every positive atom that I am.
I do not yet know what to think. How to make sense of a prison politics on the ‘wrong’ side of the system? If ‘politics’, generically defined, is a set of activities that seek to improve life and increase power, then what does it mean to find yourself so abjectly on the other side of it, where one’s life and power are drastically diminished?
Prison is political, of course — achingly so. But the fact remains that, when your face is pressed up against the system, it feels hard to access any politics under the immediate devastation wrecked upon the personal by its sudden presence. Indeed, the impositions of the prison system are felt so powerfully, Hana talks about how they now understand what Mark Fisher meant by ‘capitalist realism’ with a new intensity, feeling like they are now situated at its core but also at its limit. This is a nightmare, a trauma, and we are afforded no alternative to it under the weighty assertions of judicial-state power.
To sense the anti-political in this way is to be situated acutely in an old Marxist paradox. Frank Ruda writes how “the early Marx argued that one can only conceive of the capitalist system in its entirety from the subjective perspective of those who are essential for its reproduction yet — politically — excluded from it.” I come to recognise the imprisoned as a hyper-proletariat in this regard. Their treatment epitomises the underside of a sense of justice and morality on which “free” society rests. This is to say that prison is taken to be an institution of justice for those on its outside in the rest of society — a society that those who interact with the prison system are themselves now excluded from. For all the paltry progress our society has made, gesturing toward new equalities, none of this applies to the incarcerated. It barely applies for us either, who are pulled into its orbit.
It is a situation further complicated by the fact that Hana has been imprisoned for alleged involvement in the ‘wrong’ kind of political act — an act that aimed at improving the lives of others. The consequence of this act is the neutralisation of all politics. From out of this collision between political particles, anti-politics spools. Although we are going through the most politically significant experience of our entire lives, we all feel excluded from any capacity to act upon it and decide our own fates.
I hope that changes. For the time being, everything that is more than personal daunts me like never before. The news makes me feel sick. I wish the world would stop spinning because it’s not helping my head, which is now spinning in the opposite direction. I am shocked by a new kind of fear. I am embarrassed to hear myself whimper before it.
“Gratitude goes a long way, as well as acceptance,” Hana wrote in their first letter to me, reflecting on their first few days on remand. I try to close the gap between my experience and theirs. Of course they are trying to accept their current circumstances. What good would come from actively resisting an enforced passivity? But since I remain on the outside, I am accepting it far less easily.
The more I learn about the reality of imprisonment, the more it curdles my blood. I cannot imagine how they are able to reckon with the fact that, as far as the system itself is concerned, there is little difference between anyone incarcerated. All are deemed to have broken the law; the question of which law is largely irrelevant. Everyone inside is reckoning with the myriad reasons why they are in there. Camaraderie over a shared cause is a luxury afforded to very few.
Two of their co-defendants are being held in another prison nearby. In their communications with the outside, they’ve discussed how allusions to what they’re in for have brought them respect from some prisoners; less so from others. “The entire political spectrum is in there, from far left to far right,” a family member informs us on a group call. Apparently, the guy who cuts people’s hair is a white supremacist. “They won’t be getting any haircuts any time soon.” Thankfully, others more sympathetic to their cause are looking out for them.
It is a much stranger position to reckon with for those of us on the outside. Almost everyone in our personal lives knows what our loved ones are in for, but I feel incapable of talking about it or declaring my own position publicly either way, out of a fear that any commentary might harm them or me in some way. We are reassured that, at the very least, we should feel free to talk about our collective experience of prison itself. But I struggle even with this.
I try to reassure myself that Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights must still apply: I have “the right to freedom of expression”, and “[t]his right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” But the second clause of Article 10 nonetheless gives me pause:
The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
Where we stand in relation to all of this is unclear. In truth, the uncertainty of the present has dissolved all familiar reasoning into a soup. Struggling to embody all of the principles I hold dear, I feel disembowelled. Every valence of the word ‘abolition’ is felt at once in the context of incarceration. I can’t help but get Hegelian about it.
In Hegel’s philosophy, the term aufhebung is used in a positive and negative sense, meaning both to “‘clear away’ or ‘cancel,’ [and] ‘to preserve’”. Due to its complexity, it is a term that has been translated into English in a number of different ways – for example, as ‘abolition’ or ‘sublation’.
What becomes of the person who must abolish their politics, that is, both clear away and preserve them simultaneously? Everything is scrambled by fear, and I soon understand that this too is the point. Although untouched, state violence becomes a more ambiguous force that leaves me feeling bruised all the same.
I feel the way in which the law becomes a weapon. I crumble in the face of judicial and political intimidation, fully aware of the seriousness of the situation. Were this any other moment, maybe my response would be less complicated. But right now, authoritarianism is unequivocally on the rise. I feel it biting at my heels. At the very moment we feel most implored to speak up, we are crushed under the fear of doing so.
How does one think about prison abolition in this context? In many ways, with more clarity. No matter what anyone is alleged to have done or has been convicted of doing, speaking from this painfully immediate experience, it is not a punishment I would ever wish to see inflicted on anybody.
This position might be unbelievable, as it is one seldom heard in public discourse. Talk of prison is always centred on protecting the public from the most dangerous individuals, but within the prison population itself, these individuals constitute a minority. The majority are traumatised people who are being subjected to further trauma. It fixes nothing. The notion that prison is a site of rehabilitation is made disgustingly laughable.
8th September 2025
Graham Linehan is in court today to answer for an online harassment campaign against a seventeen-year-old trans woman. Owen Jones, commenting on Linehan’s arrest and subsequent court appearance on Twitter, writes:
I think that Graham Linehan is beyond awful.
We should not be arresting people for hateful things they say online.
It’s not a solution to these problems and trusting an increasingly authoritarian state to be the arbiter of acceptable speech is a major mistake.
Jones comes in for the usual amount of flack, since his ubiquity on social media has often led to him being used as a punching bag for online commentators across the political spectrum. But I also know that he has experienced Britain’s criminal justice system up close, after he was assaulted outside a pub in 2019.
At that time, following his attacker’s sentencing to two years and eight months in prison, the BBC reported how Jones
tweeted that “prison is not a solution to far right extremism” as [his attacker] “will go to a prison a violent far right extremist, and probably leave prison a violent far right extremist.”
“There is no judicial solution to the far right: it is a political problem,” he wrote.
It was heartening to see Jones reiterate his opposition to prison and its uselessness when it comes to breaking cycles of political violence. Indeed, whilst I too abhor Linehan, it’s hard not to sympathise with Jones’ unequivocal opposition to the court system in this moment as well.
Reading the comments under Jones’ most recent post, I quickly find myself resenting all those savouring the schadenfreude of Linehan’s appearance before a magistrate’s court. He is undoubtedly an idiot and a fanatic, incapable of lucid thought. Instead, he gesticulates wildly, projectile-vomiting an ideological position fuelled by hate, denouncing the rights and basic dignity of all trans people. He too is all too easy to despise.
But just as Jones tweeted following the sentencing of his attacker – a sentence aggravated on the grounds that he was motivated by Jones’ “sexuality and political views” – Linehan too embodies a political problem, which cannot be solved by dragging him before a system that is unwilling to treat trans people with any dignity either. This is to say that the powers being enacted to curtail Linehan’s rabid expressions of hatred towards trans people – and I say this as a trans person – are being just as (if not more) readily applied to someone I love. None of those clambering to see Linehan punished for his undoubtedly grotesque pantomime of bigotry know anything of the fear we are currently experiencing.
Perhaps Linehan is an easy mark in this regard. With no family left to speak of, he is the archetypical ‘divorced dad’ with brainrot. But my principled opposition to his comportment toward trans people makes little difference in the eyes of the law. To watch the system sharpen its blade against him is little comfort when that same blade has cut through our lives already.
Perhaps some who read this will think I am blinkered. They may be right. Our struggle feels achingly particular right now, as I stand aghast before towering statutes of legalese. Is this really the world we live in?
I wonder how I might connect this feeling to something more universal. All attempts to do so feel like uncertain strides through the ruins of a world I once knew. My faith in this country’s various institutions was never assured, but any belief in the tacit compliance that founds a sense of ‘good citizenry’ has been utterly shattered. I do not see a way out of our current political climate that leaves any of these institutions intact.
9th September 2025
I hear a helicopter hovering overhead as I sit in the bay window of my flat in Newcastle. Craning my neck to see, my whole body twists through panic and nausea. It flies away after ten minutes or so.
It is not unusual to hear helicopters over Byker and the Ouseburn Valley. It is common knowledge that many individuals on the run take shelter in the valley’s woodland, which is home to makeshift camps occupied by the unhoused.
Recently, a patch of dense shrubbery, within which you’d find the remnants of campfires and tents, has been reduced to a brown patch of mud and rumble. Nature is decimated to remove what is perceived to be a hiding place for undesirables. What a response this is: to destroy a habitat with total abandon; a scorched-earth approach to moving on the desperate.
I think about a local man who I frequently helped out with cash and snacks whilst working at my pub job — a job I had to leave when this ordeal started. He was arrested and charged with murder earlier this year.
He had previously been in court for child neglect and abuse, and was acquitted on lack of evidence and/or due to the incompetence of the Crown Prosecution Service. I did not know any of this before his most recent arrest. Rumours nonetheless circulated, and I was regularly told to be wary of him by others. In my experience, however, I always found him to be a well-meaning man who was more desperate for human contact than anything else.
The more we got to know each other, the more comfortable I became in giving him a hug when he asked for one. Whoever he might once have been, whoever he still was in secret, and no matter how misguided and dangerous he was assumed to be by others, it seemed he never recovered from his experience before the courts. His alleged neglect of the humanity of another never made me feel like ignoring his own humanity was deserved.
He hadn’t come around to the pub in months, because he too was on remand.
I thought about him often when closing up after a long shift. Sometimes, during the witching hour, after switching off the lights and turning the keys in the locks, we’d wait for our taxis home to arrive in the dark, lighting post-work cigarettes as we looked out across the wooded valley below. In those moments, the valley was transformed from a daylight idyll into a nightmarish hunting ground, where the state occasionally played cat-and-mouse with those on the very edges of society. Not infrequently, we would watch a lightshow of police cars on a nearby viaduct, helicopters circling nearby.
When I finally catch a glimpse of the helicopter overhead today, I wonder who is being hunted and why. I laugh at my irrational prayers that it is not me. My proximity to Hana alone makes me concerned that there is a target on my back. Is love enough to found a sense of guilt by association?
10th September 2025
I don’t know how many times I’ve read Hana’s first letter at this point. I return to it again and again, drawing on their strength and wringing out droplets of solace for myself. “Just gotta cling to wherever you can find autonomy and feel worthy of dignity when the state is denying that for you,” they wrote.
I imagine this is strangely easier to cling to when the state has clamped down on you so absolutely. There is little ambiguity about what is a product of your own agency, when agency itself becomes a luxury almost entirely neutralised.
From my position on the outside, I still do not know where I stand. I fear I am going round in circles as I write the days away. What autonomy and dignity I do have feels precious. I feel the threat of it being taken away, after bearing witness to how easily this can be done. This threat is companied by another, as I continue to fear that any assertion of my own dignified autonomy and self-expression might damage Hana’s future in some way – no matter how remote and unfounded the possibility might be.
The space of writing has always been where I find my autonomy and feel worthy of dignity in the midst of life’s struggles. I reflect on whether the mode in which I am writing now will be seen as pretentious… Is it possible to express a pretentious amount of humility? Am I imbuing myself with a more fearful deference towards the state than is required? The taste of boot in my mouth compounds the nausea felt in Hana’s absence.
I turn to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, reading a short fragment entitled ‘From a Theory of the Criminal’:
Like the criminal, imprisonment was a bourgeois affair. In the Middle Ages incarceration was reserved for the offspring of princes who symbolized an inconvenient hereditary claim. Criminals were tortured to death, to instil a respect for order and law in the mass of the population, since the example of severity and cruelty teaches the severe and cruel to love.
For Hegel, heredity is an essential consideration within any dialectical movement. Children become social syntheses; combinatory vessels for the continuation of tradition and the seeds of all that is new.
I think of Hana as an inconvenient prince who has inherited a world in which happiness is hard won. Is it the function of prison to instil within its captives a love of whatever form of freedom they have previously been offered, no matter how superficial that freedom may have been? Isn’t it often the case that those past freedoms were not enough?
When reading the passage from Adorno and Horkheimer above, I am also not sure I understand what is meant by ‘love’ in this instance. Is love being attributed to the state here? It feels incapable of it.
The fragment continues: “Regular imprisonment presupposes a rising need for labour power. It reflects the bourgeois mode of life as suffering.”
When Hana’s parents return home from our first joint visit, they find a letter waiting for them on the doormat. Inside, Hana reflects on all that they are missing, and reckons with just how much they miss ‘normality’. It echoes the letter I received five days earlier.
Remaining true to their undeniable compassion for others, Hana keeps the suffering of those around them at the forefront of their thoughts:
It’s so important for prisoners to feel supported and motivated by something that nurtures them – many are deprived of that support. It can feel so dehumanizing.
Watching the news on far-right violence against the asylum seekers in hotels fills me with pain and anger and fear. The real problem is austerity and the deprivation of the working class and public infrastructure by the bourgeoisie and ruling class – seeking asylum is a human right.
I think about how they are desperately seeking asylum with us, just as we are desperately seeking to house them once again.
When I hear these people saying that migrants are treated better, it’s because they feel unsupported and have turned their frustration and misery collectively on people who aren’t responsible, who are going through their own struggle with a system that dehumanizes them, trying to find safety and dignity.
This is obviously related to why I’m here…
But I hold onto this version of the serenity prayer: “God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, the courage to change the things I cannot accept, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Reading of their resolve gradually shakes me from my shellshocked stupor. Resentment towards the state still grows as I increasingly feel like a prisoner of my own anxious thoughts. How much is this experience ungrounding my understanding of what love is? Not a love that the state seeks to enforce through fear and brutality, but a love that runs radically to the contrary. It is a new kind of love, perhaps already known in some sense, but taken for granted. It must now be enacted with a new purpose and intensity.
12th September 2025
I wake up an hour before my alarm at 5.30am. Five hours, two trains, and two buses later, I approach the prison on foot for my second visit. I am 90 minutes early, and sit outside in the rain waiting for an officer to arrive and unlock the outbuilding. I am surprised my loitering doesn’t raise more suspicions. I remember that, although I am at a prison, I am still free.
I sit on a wooden bench, slotted behind the outbuilding and an shipping container, which has been repurposed as some sort of shed for the groundskeepers. To my left, the prison, imposing and quiet; to my right, a vast field of tall grass and a few old trees. The vista to my right is beautiful, and I am aware that I am the only person currently around who has the freedom to take it all in.
The prison looks a lot like a school, albeit with additional 30ft high fences and barbed wire. From my last visit, I also know it smells like a hospital. Every time I am struck by the memory of another institution that the prison is reminiscent of, all I can think is that Foucault was right.
In his book on Foucault, Gilles Deleuze describes how he establishes a new ‘cartography’ of power, which is based on
a strict immanence where centres of power and disciplinary techniques form multiple segments, linked to one another which the individuals of a mass traverse or inhabit, body and soul (family, school, barracks, factory, if need be prison). The thing called power is characterized by immanence of field without transcendent unification, continuity of line without global centralization, and contiguity of parts without distinct totalization: it is a social space.
In one of Deleuze’s most famous essays, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, he makes the point even more sharply:
Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first, the family; then the school (“you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (“you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the pre-eminent instance of the enclosed environment.
Prison is only an acute enclosure, concentrating the general unfreedom of bourgeois life at the tip of a blunt instrument. I think about how the system’s cascading ineptitude is symptomatic of a failure to fully transform discipline into control. Deleuze continues:
We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure – prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors – scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door.
I think about Hana’s request for the writings of Mark Fisher; their commentary on the intensification of capitalist realism felt within the prison’s walls.
I think about an essay Fisher wrote for Gonzo Circus in 2015: “Only prisoners have time to read, and if you want to engage in a twenty-year long research project funded by the state, you will have to kill someone.”
It is a provocative claim, which does not hold up when compared to reality. Time is administrated with far more intensity inside than out. The mind is always a risk of atrophy. Hana will mostly read fiction and knit.
After about an hour or so on my own, some other relatives arrive to visit their loved ones. Three women show up with bags of clothes and looks of bewilderment. This must be what we looked like a week ago.
Two other women join shortly afterwards, accompanied by two children. Last week, the very thought of children occupying this space made me sad. The reality is worse.
One of the children needs their nappy changed, but the disposal unit in the toilet is full to bursting. The entire outbuilding quickly starts to smell of putrid shit. I try not to gag.
At 1.45pm, a baby-faced guard comes in to check our IDs against a list of names on a clipboard. The list is littered with typos, causing the guard to warn some of the families now present that, unless his boss gives the go-ahead, they might not be allowed in. Everything has to correspond and match. It gives the illusion of authority and stringency, but the litany of errors, the visitors exclaim, is due to prison administrative error. It becomes one more incident of the prison service openly displaying its cruel incompetence.
The two hours Hana and I get to spend together disappear in a flash once again. It is undoubtedly the weirdest date I have ever been on.
We still don’t know what is or isn’t allowed. We wait to be told, and so begin to test its limits.
Hana and I hold hands. We are tentative at first, stealing sensations, playing footsie, savouring the warmth of each other’s skin for brief moments, until we entwine our fingers without letting go. At the same time, we gaze deeply into each other’s eyes, reminding each other through insinuation about the last time we were freely intimate.
I tell them about how I previously found it difficult to hold onto memories of our intimacies. The amnesia may well have been wilful. Allowing myself to forget what it was like to hold them became as good an excuse as any to organise a trip down to London to see them. Today, I have never remembered those intimacies most viscerally. I hold onto them, remember them, and make them sharper every day, retreading neural pathways to make sure it all continues to feel like yesterday.
We laugh about it and edge ever closer. Roughly an hour into our visit, a screw comes over to reprimand the both of us. “We’ll need to lessen the touching.” I hate them for it.
The guards want to ensure that we are not passing drugs or notes between us. It is a restriction implemented purely to avoid the smuggling contraband – which, according to reporting earlier in the year, is one more thing the prison is utterly terrible at enforcing. Indeed, their vigilance feels misplaced. Drugs are apparently accessed so easily, but visitations are policed so excessively, it makes it clear that contraband is far more likely to be smuggled in by the guards themselves.
And anyway, for what it’s worth, we’re both sober.
We say goodbye and I hug them tight. They kiss my neck in our embrace and I feel myself melting into them. I try not to make the goodbye more difficult than it needs to be, and make my way to the exit.
18th September 2025
From my bedroom, I see flashing lights all around, refracted through the gaps around my curtained windows. Through the peephole of my door, I see cocked rifles and balaclava’d cops. I jolt awake at the very moment I am taken, having managed only one hour of sleep.
The last few weeks keep registering themselves as a trauma. I’m going to need so much (more) therapy when this is over, if I am ever going to get over this whole ‘kidnapped-by-the-state’ thing.
Later that morning, my ears prick, anticipating the sounds of the postman. At 10.45am, I receive another letter from Hana, alongside two books recently purchased: Dance in Chains by Padraic Kenney and Free Them All by Gwénola Ricordeau.
I open Free Them All in front of me with a pot of coffee and it immediately resonates with my experience so far. Ricordeau begins:
The day that prisons stopped being an abstract notion to me, I was convinced that they needed to be abolished. The idea of prison abolition did not come to me through theory, but through my gut; I did not really know how to go about it – nor even if others had considered it before me.
Ricordeau describes how her experience of having loved ones incarcerated was explicitly “a woman’s experience”, because it is “women, for the most part, who perform the outside tasks of material and emotional solidarity that are necessary for the survival of men on the inside.” It is strange how much I can relate to this. Prison both ignores and underhandedly affirms my transness. I quit my job to undertake these new labours. I too am a prison wife now.
Ricordeau’s ‘womanly’ experience is further sharped by her frustrations with the criminal justice system, not only as a relative of someone incarcerated but also as a victim of violence herself:
Due to the structural nature of the violence I was confronted with, whether interpersonal or from the state, I knew perfectly well that nothing had ever truly been resolved – even if defending yourself against a man and defending yourself against the state have very different implications. So I was far less interested in the idea of exercising my right in the legal realm than in contributing, in the political realm, to the collective dismantling of the conditions that had made this violence possible.
I think about the dissonance wrestled with a week or so ago, when thoughts of abolition first came to mind. I think about the difficulty of holding together tandem experiences of interpersonal and state violence as a trans person.
I take comfort in Ricordeau’s acknowledgement that there is no “simple answer” to the questions that arise from conversations around prison abolition. But in having these conversations regardless, we can begin to uncover
a few paths for reflection that suggest that in feminism, one can draw out a radical critique of the criminal justice system. Aren’t there at least as many reasons to combat “patriarchal” justice as “bourgeois” justice or “racist” criminal justice? And if one considers what the impact of “justice” is on LGBTQ people, can’t those radical critiques at least draw from queer thought?
I think about the layers of injustice being enacted by a system that abolishes all outside politics. Prison is, after all, where people are kept and ostracised in order for the rest of society to feel safe. Is Hana the same as these people? The answer is moot. The question that keeps me up at night is: ‘Are they safe?’ Because prison is not a safe place for anyone. I want to articulate new provisions that might protect everyone, both inside and out. I am left wanting.
The contradictions leave me dizzy. They are the sorts of contradiction that already unsettle an abolitionist politics in general, especially as it pertains to women’s justice. Indeed, an abolitionist politics calls the very concept of ‘justice’ into question. Within an abolitionary quest for justice, what are the elements of the ‘justice’ we know that are to be preserved, and which are to be cleared away?
Ricordeau writes how
penal abolitionism finds itself, along with several currents of feminism (as with certain antiracist or LGBTQ struggles), facing a real contradiction: the politics of recognition fought on the terrain of law and rights are naturally accompanied by activist calls to create new crimes (for example, linked to discrimination).
But we must remember that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house…
To be continued (maybe)…
