I am the one in prison. I am the one wearing the number, the one being counted, locked, checked, and forgotten.
But somehow it is my family who feel the weight of the sentence just as heavily—maybe even more heavily—because at least I know what each day holds. At least I can see the walls clearly. They are trapped by distance, by health, by a system that pretends to allow family life but designs every obstacle possible to prevent it.
They are not behind these bars, yet they carry their own version of imprisonment: the kind built from worry, silence, and miles of road they can’t travel. Because what good is a visiting order when you can’t even stand long enough to get into the car? What use is Article 8 of the Human Rights Act—the “right to family life”—when the government that wrote it treats it like a scrap of paper, something convenient to wave around in theory and ignore in practice?
I lie awake most nights asking myself that question.
Where does the right to family life come in?
Where does basic humanity come in?
Where does compassion come in, especially at Christmas, the hardest time of all?
Christmas always used to feel loud—busy, messy, warm. The house smelled of spiced candles and too many people squeezed into too little space. There was always someone laughing, someone arguing, someone burning something in the oven because they’d had one too many glasses before noon. It was chaotic and real and ours.
But Christmas now is an ache.
It’s a reminder of all the losses folded into December: my nan, my great niece, my father.
Three chairs permanently empty.
Three names that feel too heavy to speak out loud.
And now there is a fourth absence—me.
The prison has decorations strung along the wing, cheap tinsel that falls apart if you look at it too long, and paper snowflakes taped to the notice boards by the lads who volunteered for “festive duty.” The officers try to act like it’s cheerful, like it means something, but to me it only highlights the silence. It makes the place feel more hollow, more artificial, like we are being reminded of everything we don’t have.
It is torture, not seeing your loved ones at the best of times. But at Christmas? It’s a kind of quiet cruelty that digs under the skin.
And so the story continues…
The Visit That Never Comes
The worst part isn’t the waiting—it’s the hope.
Hope is dangerous in here. It stretches time, makes the hours cruel.
When I first arrived, I used to count down the days like a child waiting for a holiday. I’d imagine my family walking through the security doors, imagine their faces lighting up when they finally saw me. I would plan what I’d talk about first, how I’d make them laugh even though I wanted to break down crying.
But after the third cancelled visit—some due to health, some due to the distance, some due to the prison itself—I learned not to count anymore. I learned that hope hurts more than hopelessness.
Still, sometimes, on days when the sky looks a certain shade of grey, or when the officers seem less tense than usual, I find myself listening for my name.
A name shouted down the landing.
A name that means someone is here for you.
A name that means you’re remembered.
But it rarely comes.
Instead, the minutes drip by like cold water. And with each minute, I imagine my family sitting at home, feeling guilty for something that isn’t their fault. They didn’t choose my sentence. They didn’t choose their illnesses. They didn’t choose a system that scatters people hundreds of miles from their support networks.
And yet they are punished all the same.
I’ve met men in here who’ve done awful things, things I’ll never understand—yet their families visit every week because they live ten minutes down the road from their prison. I’ve met others who have children but won’t see them until they’re grown, purely because they were sent to the other side of the country.
It’s a postcode lottery of punishment.
The politicians call it “operational necessity.”
I call it cruelty in a suit.
The Christmas Card
Last year, a single Christmas card from my mum made it through the system. The envelope was bent, damp, and opened by security, but the handwriting was hers. Familiar, careful, shaky.
She wrote:
“We miss you every single day. We are proud of how strong you are being.
I wish we could come, love, but we just can’t manage the journey.
Please don’t think it’s because we don’t want to.
It’s because we physically can’t.”
I swear I read that card a hundred times.
I read it until the paper started to soften.
And then I folded it away because I couldn’t bear to see the guilt between the lines.
That’s what hurts most—that my family feel responsible for the distance someone else chose. That they apologise to me when they’re the ones who can barely walk, barely breathe, barely get out of bed without help.
The government loves to talk about rehabilitation.
They talk about family ties reducing reoffending.
They talk about “social support networks.”
And yet they do everything possible to sever those ties, to fray those networks until there is nothing left.
How can you rehabilitate someone by isolating them?
How can you expect someone to rebuild their life when the people they love are scattered miles away like forgotten belongings?
Article 8 might as well be fiction for all the use it is here.
The Christmas on the Wing
Christmas Day on the wing is a strange performance.
Some lads try to make it cheerful—cracking jokes, singing songs loudly and badly, pretending they don’t care. Others hide in their cells, refusing to come out because the day hurts too much. Some kick off, letting anger mask the grief.
The officers walk through trying to appear festive, their paper hats crumpling on their heads, their faces tight with the effort of pretending this is normal.
Last year we were given a special lunch: two slices of turkey, a spoonful of stuffing, and a mince pie that tasted faintly of cardboard. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t about the food. It was about the hollow ritual of it all, the reminder that life continues outside these walls in a way it doesn’t here.
After lunch, I went back to my cell and lay on the bunk, staring at the ceiling. The sounds of the wing drifted under the door—the laughter, the shouting, the clattering footsteps. Someone was crying, quietly enough that they didn’t want to be heard but loud enough that they couldn’t hold it in.
I thought of my family gathered around a table with empty chairs.
I thought of my mum trying to stay cheerful while her heart was breaking.
I thought of my father, my nan, my great niece—names spoken in the past tense now, memories wrapped in grief.
I thought of how the world keeps spinning even when your life stands still.
And somewhere between those thoughts, I made myself a promise:
When I get out, I’ll rebuild what’s left, no matter how damaged the pieces are.
Because that’s what my family deserve.
Because that’s what I deserve.
Even if it feels impossible now.
What They Don’t Tell You About Prison
They tell you prison is about punishment and rehabilitation.
They don’t tell you it’s about loneliness.
They don’t tell you that time behaves differently here, stretching and shrinking until you lose track of who you were before the bars closed.
They don’t tell you that sleep is never solid, that noise is constant, that silence is rare and precious.
They don’t tell you how small you feel.
But the biggest thing they don’t tell you is this:
You are punished far beyond your sentence.
You are punished every time a visit is cancelled.
Every time someone you love is too ill to make the journey.
Every time you receive a letter that smells faintly of home.
Every time Christmas rolls around and you realise you can’t hug your mum, can’t see your family, can’t sit together and remember the people you’ve lost.
They don’t tell you that the justice system will forget you exist, except as a statistic.
They don’t tell you that the government will cut budgets, move prisoners like pieces on a board, and call it efficiency while your life unravels quietly in the background.
Article 8?
Right to family life?
It’s a myth unless you are wealthy, healthy, and lucky.
The rest of us learn to live without the very thing that makes us human: connection.
The Phone Calls
There’s a routine I fall into. It’s fragile, but it’s something.
I wake, eat, clean the cell, and wait for phone time. The phones are always busy, always noisy, always smudged with fingerprints and frustration. But they are the closest thing we have to home.
Sometimes my mum answers on the third ring.
Sometimes on the first.
Sometimes she doesn’t answer at all, because she’s asleep or unwell or simply doesn’t hear it.
When she does answer, her voice sounds smaller than it used to. Softer. Like she’s aged ten years since I came inside.
We talk about little things mostly.
How the weather is.
What she watched on TV.
How the cat is doing.
We avoid the big things—the pain, the guilt, the fear—because neither of us wants to break the other.
But sometimes, when her voice cracks, I know she’s thinking the same thing I am:
This shouldn’t be happening.
We shouldn’t be 400 or 500 miles apart.
We shouldn’t be living through this punishment together.
But she never says it.
She just tells me she loves me.
And I hold onto that like a lifeline.
The Others on the Wing
I am not the only one here whose family is suffering from distance.
One lad, a young dad, hasn’t seen his daughter in two years because she has severe epilepsy and can’t travel. Every time he talks about her, he stares at the floor like the guilt is too heavy to meet anyone’s eyes.
Another man’s wife is in a wheelchair. She can’t get into the transport van even if she wanted to. He once told me that sometimes he forgets what her face looks like without looking at the photograph he keeps folded in his pocket.
There are dozens more.
Different names, different stories, same misery.
The system treats us like cargo, not people.
It moves us where there is bed space, not where we can maintain our humanity.
And then it wonders why people leave here worse than they arrived.
The Officer Who Saw Too Much
One day, an officer—a young one, new, still soft around the edges—stopped outside my cell and asked if I was alright.
Most officers never ask that. They assume you are coping because you’re upright and breathing. They assume silence equals strength.
I shrugged and said, “Yeah, I’m fine.”
Because that’s what you say.
But he stood there a bit longer, shifting awkwardly, and then said something I wasn’t expecting:
“I’m sorry your family live so far away. I heard about the cancelled visit.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Empathy isn’t common around here.
Kindness feels suspicious, like it must have a catch.
He went on, voice low:
“They don’t train us for that part—the families. They don’t tell us how much this stuff hurts them. They don’t tell us how it breaks people.”
I didn’t respond.
I didn’t trust myself to.
He wasn’t defending the system.
He wasn’t making excuses.
He was recognising the truth, and somehow that made it even harder to swallow.
After he walked away, I sat on the edge of the bed feeling something strange—seen.
Just for a moment.
But moments don’t last long in here.
The Weight of December
Every December, the memories get heavier.
The grief comes back sharper.
My nan’s passing was the first crack in the foundation of our Christmases.
She was the heart of it all, the one who kept traditions alive.
After she died, things felt colder.
Then came the loss of my great niece—so sudden, so unfair it left the whole family gasping for air. A child shouldn’t become a memory. A child shouldn’t leave that kind of silence behind.
And then my father.
His absence is a permanent bruise.
Christmas was his favourite time of year, which somehow makes it worse, not better.
And now another December comes, and instead of being with my family—helping them through the grief, sharing stories, crying together—I am trapped behind these walls, locked out of their sorrow and their healing.
I am missing the things that build a family:
Shared tears
Shared laughter
Shared pain
Shared resilience
I worry that when I finally return, I will be a stranger.
That time and loss and distance will have reshaped us into people who don’t fit together anymore.
But then I remind myself:
Love doesn’t vanish because of miles.
It bends but it doesn’t break.
At least, I hope it doesn’t.
The Truth About Corruption
People don’t like to hear it, but it needs saying:
The government and the justice system are corrupt—not always in the obvious ways, not always in brown envelopes or secret meetings, but in the quiet ways that destroy lives.
Corrupt in negligence.
Corrupt in cruelty.
Corrupt in indifference.
Corrupt when they ignore the human cost of their decisions.
Corrupt when they hide behind policy instead of compassion.
Corrupt when they pretend rehabilitation is their goal while stripping away the very things that make rehabilitation possible.
They talk about justice.
What they deliver is bureaucracy.
They talk about fairness.
What they deliver is inequality.
They talk about family life.
What they deliver is separation.
If Article 8 meant anything, this wouldn’t happen.
If justice meant anything, families wouldn’t suffer alongside the convicted.
If humanity meant anything, no one would be forced to choose between their health and seeing the person they love.
But here we are.
A Promise to Myself
Sometimes, late at night, when the wing is quiet and the darkness settles heavily around me, I make plans for the future.
I imagine the day I walk out of here and take a full breath of clean air.
I imagine hugging my mum so tightly she complains I’m crushing her ribs.
I imagine sitting around the table at Christmas—not the same table as before, not the same people, but something new, something healing.
I imagine rebuilding myself slowly, like stitching a torn piece of fabric.
Clumsy at first, but stronger where the repairs lie.
I imagine speaking out about this—really speaking out.
Not in anger, but in truth.
Not to punish, but to change something.
Because no one should be punished by distance.
No one should lose their family to geography.
No one should spend Christmas alone because someone in an office decided their postcode mattered more than their humanity.
I don’t know how long it will take.
I don’t know if the damage done can ever fully be undone.
But I do know this:
My story isn’t over.
My family’s story isn’t over.
And the system that tries to silence us hasn’t won.
Not yet.
Not ever.
Because as long as I can still speak, still write, still feel, still hope—I am more than my sentence.
More than the distance.
More than the bars.
And one day, I will return home.
And the people who love me will still be there, waiting in their own way, as they always have.
Christmas may hurt.
Distance may hurt.
Loss may hurt.
But love remains.
And love, despite everything, survives.
