On her first go to to HMP Belmarsh, Rona McCandlish acquired misplaced. The jail is in a sprawling, out-of-the-way Nineties property in Thamesmead, south-east London. It was November 2018 and McCandlish was on her strategy to interview for a volunteer place with the charity Pact, which provides recommendation and assist to prisoners and their households.
“I needed to dash half a mile in the long run to get to the jail,” says McCandlish, who's 63 and lives in close by Lewisham. She had acquired so misplaced, she confirmed up uncharacteristically late. “It helped me perceive how alienating and complicated visiting a jail for the primary time will be.”
On the time, McCandlish was feeling burned out. She’d labored as a midwife earlier than turning into a professor of midwifery, a midwifery adviser to the federal government, then a advisor in NHS maternity companies. “I used to be working 80 hours every week,” she says, “flying all around the nation, staying elsewhere.” She wanted to do one thing extra community-focused, at a slower tempo. “I used to be all the time dipping out and in of communities. Now I really feel a part of my very own. Volunteering is rather more than what you do for different folks. It additionally does a lot for you.”
Regardless of her tardiness, McCandlish acquired the place. She volunteers at Belmarsh’s customer centre, welcoming family and friends who're there to see inmates, and supporting them by way of the complicated and generally arcane rules that govern jail visits. Guests are forbidden from carrying ripped garments, low-cut tops, quick clothes, even watches. First-time guests who aren’t conscious of the principles danger being despatched away.
“Individuals really feel humiliated once they don’t have the correct garments,” says McCandlish. She and fellow volunteers have created Boutique Belmarsh: a rail of impartial, plain clothes they lend to any customer who falls foul of the gown rules. McCandlish takes all the garments house to launder between visits.
However McCandlish does rather more than simply facilitate visits. “Rona is an incredible girl,” says her supervisor, Pact’s Monique Joseph. “She makes an additional effort to know every member of the family by identify, making a haven once they’re visiting. What makes Rona actually particular is her potential to talk with folks from many various backgrounds, faiths and ages.”
McCandlish says: “It’s about listening to them, whether or not they’re harm or offended or feeling hopeless. They’ll say issues like, ‘Why didn’t I cease him from doing it? He was a great lad and I knew he was going off the rails’.”
A younger girl not too long ago visited together with her small child. Her associate had simply been given a seven-year sentence. “She was actually in plenty of despair,” McCandlish says. “She by no means anticipated her associate to be put away for therefore lengthy, and to must convey the infant to see dad in jail.”
It’s not all doom and gloom on the customer centre, although. “It may be a joyful place at instances,” she says. “Individuals don’t count on it to be OK once they come right here, but after they go to, they really feel relieved. They’re completely happy to see that the particular person they’re visiting is OK, and so they know they’ve performed the correct factor by coming.” Through the pandemic, visits had been paused and resumed solely in Could this yr. “That was emotional,” she says. “Watching guests come for the primary time in 18 months.”
All these years witnessing the dehumanising results of jail up shut makes McCandlish query why we spend a lot cash locking folks away, typically for non-violent crimes. “I really feel fairly determined generally,” she says. “There must be a concentrate on doing extra than simply constructing cages. It’s an ideal waste of sources to lock folks up and never supply significant training, rehabilitation, assist or remedy.”
McCandlish needs to convey a way of humanity to an in any other case drab and chilly place. Exterior the customer centre, for instance, hangs a tatty, withered plant that has seen higher days. For her deal with, McCandlish requests a contemporary one to interchange it, and a few low-maintenance houseplants to dot round inside. Neighborhood backyard centre the Nunhead Gardener offers McCandlish with a number of vegetation and flowers, together with a sansevieria “snake plant”, with its lengthy, upright leaves, and the shiny zamioculca.
“The brand new plant is big and wonderful,” says McCandlish of the hanging plant. “I’m barely nervous it'll fall down, as a result of it’s so large.” The response has been overwhelmingly optimistic.
It could seem to be a small change, however the vegetation signify McCandlish’s strategy to volunteering: discovering methods to convey the sunshine in and provides a private contact to an in any other case impersonal establishment. “I need to make the centre a stunning place to return to,” she says. “Not a tough place. The primary factor is for the folks visiting to really feel hope and connection.” There was some muttering about who would water the vegetation, however McCandlish, ever the volunteer, has taken full accountability: “Crops are good for us. They make our lives higher.”
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