The Archers and prison visits

The Archers prison based storyline is interesting at the moment because it is focusing on the problems that families face. Matt Crawford is serving a sentence for fraud and spent a few weeks initially in a local prison. His partner, Lilian, had terrible problems finding out when she could visit and what she could send in, and then there were the panicky phone calls when she was desperate to hear that he was safe. Even now he has been transferred to an open prison, she has not received her visiting order and doesn’t know if she is going to get a visit on Boxing Day.

Families are normally only allowed to visit once every two weeks and the meeting takes place in a busy, noisy visiting room with fixed seating, for an hour or so. It is a strange thing to do, sit across a fixed table from someone you love for an hour and have to make cheering conversation when you know they are going to return to the isolation of the cell.

Fewer and fewer families are visiting family members; because of the stress and because prisoners are transferred hundreds of miles away. Many fathers, and mothers, will decide that it causes too much distress to their children to come on a visit and will forgo the right of a visit, but this can mean that a child can lose contact or relationship with a parent after months or years.

Phone calls cannot be made to a prisoner; they have to phone out. The cost is at national rate and when a prisoner has earned only £7 that week from which he has to chose whether to buy toothpaste and other toiletries or supplement his increasingly meagre food allowance, or make a couple of phone calls home.

We all know that the support of a loving family is one of the best resettlement plans anyone can hope for. Many prisoners are not so lucky to have a loving and stable family life, but many do, and the prison system seems intent on destroying the families who do their very best to support people through the sentence and on release.

I don’t know about the power of the soap opera to trigger change, but perhaps the cries of anguish and complaint from Crawford’s partner in the Archers might make some Radio 4 listeners think what it means to have a loved one inside, particularly over the festive season.

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December 16, 2009 Tags: Prisons, Radio 4, The Archers Posted in: Inside prisons, Prisons

4 Responses

Frank Talbott - December 16, 2009

Hello Frances;

Great blog prison visiting rights need to be more widely available. Looking at a recent Parliamentary question I think lilian is going to be struggling as there are no prison visits on Christmas Day, Boxing Day or Good Friday.

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Toby - December 16, 2009

Perhaps we should allow prisoners mobile phones, resplendent gardens in which to welcome daily visitors and some much needed privacy so they can onanate, defecate and procrastinate to their hearts content. And as for hoping The Archers prison themed story line is going to bring about an overhaul of the system, I think it’s a sure thing. I mean, look how Hollyoaks has brought about an end to date rape, not to mention how seamlessly Coronation Street has highlighted the downside of murder. If only the writers of The Teletubbies could be convinced to reveal that Po is a smuggled child sex slave I think we could safely lock the doors of amnesty international, safe in the knowledge that their work is done.

Top stuff.
oscar - December 17, 2009

I would just like to say that this situation is all to common in the prison system, and families become very stressed due to having to travel very far. Once they arrive they are subject to a search, sniffed by dogs and generally not treated to good by the prison staff its a wonder that they want to visit there loved ones at all.
Hugh - December 17, 2009

@Toby sarcasm ahoy!

Soaps are a good way as any of getting some tricky social issues out there to the wider public. TV programmes in particular have previously forced some real change – perhaps the best example being the 1960s film Cathy Come Home, which led to the founding of Shelter.

Frankly as any prisoner or prison staff member can tell you the more the public knew about what went on in prisons, the more they’d be shocked and want things changed for the better…