So it's no surprise that when we look at our prison system, we see an
overrepresentation of homeless people within the prison system. We're looking
at anything between 15% to 25% of prison population made up of homeless persons.
And it's very difficult to give an accurate count because of the way
in which the data is gathered. But on average, that's the number of homeless
people, the percentage of homeless people within prisons.
So we have this very clear relationship where of the 86,000 or so thousand
people in prison right now, more than 10,000 of those people are homeless.
And when you're on your own on the street and you're walking down to where
you think you know this person is going to be that you
know and all of a sudden, they're not there. Their stuff's there, but they're not there.
It makes you wonder what's happened. And next thing you know, you've heard,
oh, no. They've been arrested. Later on that day, you could hear another
two, three people that you know. They've been arrested.
You look at data that was released, actually, just again in August 2019,
and you look at the issues around women in prison. And one of the things that you
find is that certainly in the last year or so, whilst we had about 9,000 women
who were actually imprisoned or sent to prison during that time frame,
it's detailed by the government that somewhere in the region of 3,000 of those
people, 3,000 of those women were deemed to be homeless. So that's an
enormous kind of connection between homelessness for women
and imprisonment.
Prison is a type of environment that can
exacerbate conditions of homelessness. If you are housed before you go to prison,
it's unlikely you're going to be able to maintain that housing when you're in
prison because you might not be able to pay the rent, for example,
keep up with mortgage payments when you're in prison.
Your relationship might break down if you're living with your partner while
you're in prison. And so for those people who are housed
anyway and are in prison, it's unlikely they're housed when they come out of
prison. But a number of people who go into the prison system, go into the prison
system as homeless. And it's extremely difficult for those individuals to find
housing at the point in which they come out of prison.
You go to prison. If you're a worker or even if you're homeless, it doesn't really matter.
Once you go to prison, if you're renting a property,
and you're doing so many weeks or months, you lose your home.
Flat out, you lose your home. I've seen so many men come into prison, got
their kids, they’ve lost their kids, this, that, and the other. But when they're being
released, they're being released back out into the street.
Now they do say that they have a system in place in prison where
they have to have to house you. They don't have to house you. And
they don't have-- it's very rare that you'll find someone from in prison that's been
housed. When I last came out of prison before I sorted myself out,
I was, yet again, on the street for
two weeks. So I had no tent, no cooking facilities, no nothing.
All the shops were closed. I had nowhere to go, no one to turn to. Counsellors were
shut. Job centres were shut. So what do you do?
What we know is that about one quarter of prisoners who released end up being
homeless. So somewhere in the region of 25% of people released from prison have
nowhere to go, which just indicates kind of that prisons are never going to be
a particularly good way of actually dealing with the homelessness problem because
then people are actually going back and facing homelessness post release. But
more than that, it's also not a very effective way of dealing with their
illegalities. There was data released in August 2019 which indicated
that 2/3 of homeless ex-prisoners reoffended.
And it's just a vicious circle. Once you're back out on the street,
they won't house you. So what do you do? You go back and you become a prolific
offender. You continue the cycle. And you go back into prison.
You know, I put myself in prison a few times on purpose
to try and get housed, try and get off the street, because that's what I was told to do.
What criminologists do is they say, well, look at the backgrounds of these people.
Look at the homeless people. Look at people with mental health problems.
Look at people with substance abuse issues. Look at people who've been
excluded from school. and so on and so forth. And then look at
the people that are in prison. And of course, that is the group of people,
they are the people that we actually incarcerate,
those people who often have had very difficult life experiences.
And yes, they have done something wrong. And yes, they will have breached
the law. And they will have been engaging in some form of criminal activity. But
almost the middle section, the issue around the crime becomes relatively
insignificant. Lots of people will break the law, but only a certain kind of person is
actually largely dealt with by the prison system and
by the criminal process. It's not so much about the nature or the extent of the
illegalities that person has perpetrated. But more that the prison becomes almost
a vessel to house people who are on the streets. To assume that we're solving
the homelessness problem by placing people who are rough sleepers into
prisons, I think, is to miss the problems of incarceration.
So whilst it's very obvious to us, when somebody is sleeping rough on the
streets, that they don't have a home, that they don't have a sense of place, that they
don't have that appropriate mechanism for supporting identity formation or for providing
the basic nutrients that we need to grow as human beings.
Whilst that's relatively obvious to us and visible to us in terms of rough sleepers,
what's forgotten is that prisons are also institutions which do not have the basic
features of a home. They are not places which allow people to grow.
You're in your cell most of the time. There's a lot of drugs, a lot of violence,
a lot of debt, a lot of issues, depression, anger.
Different types of people that are in the prison, as well,
doesn't help with whoever is in that prison. Say, for example, you've got a murderer
or a rapist that's in there. And then you've got someone like myself that's just a
petty theft. And they'll put someone like me in with a murderer or someone with
anxiety or mental health issues. And that will cause a row, a punch up, and
everything else in the cell. And you get punished for that.
You know, I've seen people get into debt in prison for a pound, for one pound.
And it was over a bag Haribo sweets. And this bloke actually got stabbed for it.
Prisons are also institutions which are grounded in loneliness. They're grounded
in estrangement from close relationships. They're grounded in a sense of
isolation. They are places where there is very limited private space,
if any private space at all, just like we're on the streets. You could almost just look
at the two together and identify some of the continuities between what the
experience of homelessness is and what the experience of prison is,
because both of them share certain lived, affective or emotional aspects,
which are all about the deprivation of home. They're about the deprivation of
love. And hence, you can almost look at putting someone from the street into a
prison, that is not going to address the problems that have been on the street.
It's not going to address the homelessness and the emotional aspects
of homelessness. And when you put somebody into a prison, you're placing
them in exactly the same kind of emotional constellation.