Parker Five Women

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30427-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 196 Seiten, Gewicht: 176 g

Five Women, first published in 1965, was Tony Parker's fourth book. Its intended subjects had emerged from Holloway prison for women on the same cold spring morning in 1963. Between them they shared 73 criminal convictions and nearly a hundred years 'inside'. Parker intended to interview each of the women about their lives, hopes, intentions, fears; and to arrange follow-up conversations in due course. But one disappeared immediately, and six months later two of the five were dead, two more back in prison. The scope of Parker's project duly changed, but not its purpose - to record the experiences and thoughts of women mired in the cycle of habitual offences and custodial sentences.

Tony Parker was born in Stockport on June 25 1923, the son of a bookseller. His mother died when he was 4. He began to write poems and plays in his late teens. Called up to military service early in the Second World War he declared himself a conscientious objector and, in lieu, was sent to work at a coal-mine in the North East, where he observed conditions and met people who influenced him hugely. After the war he began to work as a publisher's representative and, voluntarily, as a prison visitor - the latter another important stimulus to his subsequent writings. After Parker happened to make the acquaintance of a BBC radio producer and imparted his growing interest in the lives, opinions and self-perceptions of the prisoners he had met, he was given the opportunity to record an interview with a particular convict for broadcast on the BBC. The text of the interview was printed in the Listener, and spotted by the publishers Hutchinson as promising material for a book. This duly emerged as The Courage of His Convictions (1962), for which Parker and the career criminal 'Robert Allerton' (a pseudonym) were jointly credited as authors. Over the next 30 years Parker would publish 18 discrete works, most of them 'oral histories' based on discreetly edited but essentially verbatim interview transcripts. He died in 1996 (though one further work, a study of his great American counterpart Studs Terkel, appeared posthumously.)

Autoren/Hrsg.

Parker, Tony

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

ON a cold spring morning in 1963 five women came out of Holloway Prison. They all had long records: between them they had been convicted seventy-three times, and had spent a total of nearly a hundred years in prison. An administrative change brought them unexpected remission and immediate release from Preventive Detention, a sentence given to habitual criminals not so much for a particular offence as to protect society by keeping them in prison for a long time.

The subject of habitual offenders and long sentences was one I had become particularly interested in while writing The Unknown Citizen*; and I was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation to write a radio-programme about these five women preventive detainees. I hoped to interview them as soon as possible after their release, and talk to them about their hopes and intentions and fears; and then get in touch with them again after a few months had passed, and try to find out how their experience of reality had matched their expectation of it.

Although five were discharged from prison that morning, I was able to meet only four: the other immediately disappeared. No more was heard of her until several weeks later when she appeared in court charged with shoplifting, where to her surprise she was put on probation by a magnanimous judge. Yet even then I was still unable to meet and talk with her: within a fortnight she committed a further offence, and when she came to court this time not unexpectedly she was sent back to prison.

I met the four women, individually and on different days, at the offices of the Women’s Division of the Central After-Care Association in a quiet mews near Victoria Station. With each of them, as with every other prisoner released after a long sentence, the only subject at first was prison. After a time we were able to move on to a discussion of their past criminal activity; and finally we could begin to talk about themselves as individuals, and to make the, recordings. I had about an hour and a half’s conversation with each, and arranged to meet them again in about six months’ time.

‘The strongest immediate impression’ I noted at the end of the week in which I had met them, ‘was that they all seemed to be physically so small, although two of them were actually taller than I am. They seemed airless and crumpled, like only partially-inflated balloons; they filled-out very slowly as we talked. There was nothing about any of them that suggested a life of crime was ever anything but sad, dull and drab; nothing anywhere glamorous or romantic. Whatever men think of when they start to imagine “women”– sexual attraction, mystery, excitement, warmth, enchantment, pleasure—no longer lives at these addresses: they are hollow, pathetic, living as they do in deep separate wells of lonely bitterness. It is difficult to understand how anyone could ever have felt condemnatory towards them, or angry; difficult to feel anything at all for that matter now, or respond to them in any way. Perhaps it can only be done by looking long at each one and trying to imagine her as a person—as mother, daughter, sister, wife, mistress; by trying to imagine a relationship, and how one would feel if one were involved in any of those ways, tied by that sort of bond … How else get close and learn feeling for those who have forgotten how to feel?

‘Of the four, two are almost ruins physically, and sending them out of prison seems as irrelevant to their need and condition as sending them in to it must have done in the first place. They are not being set free by being released; they are turned out and rejected and abandoned. Of the other two, one is clearly a menace and freeing her also bears no relation to her true condition. Release may be an unavoidable necessity; but it is dangerous to society. And for the fourth also prison must always have been irrelevant. She seems almost to have wanted punishment throughout her life and to have sought it: no one seems to know why, least of all herself. And every time she has had it, she has been driven further and further back into herself, out of sight, out of reach. Punishment and resentment deepen and worsen her condition.

‘Meeting them at twenty-four hour intervals one after another, it was striking how alike they all seemed to be at the beginning of each interview. They have all been pressed so hard and so long in the depersonalising mould of imprisonment. It makes them all seem only slightly-varying copies of the same person. And perhaps, in a way, that is what they are.’

Beneath the notes I made a personal and completely subjective estimate, expressed as a percentage, of what I thought each one’s chances were of staying out of prison until we met again.

*

When that time came, only one out of the five remained; two had died: and the other had gone back to prison after committing further offences, rejoining the one whom I had never even had the chance of meeting.

The one who was left was in fact she whose chances of surviving I had estimated lowest of all, at 20%. For someone with a record as long as hers to remain out of prison and refrain from criminal activity as she had done was certainly unusual; and her success was due to a combination of factors which included among many others effort, luck and perceptive after-care supervision.

After the second meeting, and the subsequent broadcast of the radio-programme, I continued to see her. Often when we talked together I began to wonder … how it was that someone should live the sort of life she had done: what she had been like when she was younger—in her forties, her thirties, her twenties and teens: what so much imprisonment, given so frequently, had done to her: why and for what reason women at different ages came to be in prison, and what effect it had on them: who they were and what they were like…

What she herself had been like at different ages, it was no longer really possible to tell. She had spent over a third of her adult life in prison, and in common with others who have spent that much time there and more, she had no people anywhere with whom she had been in continuous contact for any length of time. She had no relatives living, and no friends; during the whole of her last sentence she had had no visits from anyone, no letters, no Christmas or birthday cards. No one knew her, and her past could now only be fragmentarily and imperfectly recreated by her own memory, which was faulty and confused. The girl and the young woman who had grown into what she now was had gone and were lost sight of, and could never be recalled.

But other women exist, at different ages and different stages of their criminal careers. I began to meet some of them. Not all will end their lives like she is now, almost completely separated from society, friendless and alone; nor did they have the same kind of beginning. But they are all, whatever their age, as she was—the sort of woman who is sent to prison. And we might ask ourselves one day perhaps whether it does them, or us, any good to continue to punish them in this way, regularly and consistently, at the rate of over two thousand a year. We should ask it not because they are women and should therefore be judged and treated differently; but simply because they are people. In women can be seen more clearly the marks of mishandling and suffering—the ‘stigmata’ referred to by Dr. Edward Glover. But they are inflicted also on men, in far greater number. We continue to imprison people, without real knowledge of what we are doing to them.

I met just over twenty women in all, over a period of two years, and this book is about a small number of them, chosen from different age-groups and at different points on the scale of experience of imprisonment. The first is only just beginning; she has been in prison once. But she knows its terrors now and is no longer afraid; what comes after can never be quite so bad. A few years older, the second has already been in prison three times; at twenty-four she seems condemned to a life of crime and can find no other way of living, though she struggles desperately. The third has now almost given-up. She has always been a reject, an outcast: what does it really matter what happens to her; and who cares? She asks, and hears no answer. The fourth appears almost inevitably destined to receive a very heavy sentence before long, because no one will be able to think what else can possibly be done with her if she gets into trouble again. And the fifth is the woman from thinking about whom the book began: she is old, she is hidden, she has taken all the punishment we can give. In experience of imprisonment she might almost be the sum of all the others; and they all, perhaps, in a way be part of her …

There is, finally, a sixth person. She is a girl, not a woman; and she is not at any point in a criminal career. In fact she is not a criminal, and never has been. But she is included because she has been in prison; and it is not as widely known as it might be that girls do go to prison who have committed no crimes.

*

Without the help of the Central After-Care Association (which has since been assimilated into the newly-established Probation and After-Care Service) it would have been quite impossible to write this book. Miss Mary Stone, the Director of the Women’s Division of C.A.C.A., has been a friend for several years and an adviser from whom I constantly learn; I owe her much more than I can ever express. Miss...