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Visiting a political prisoner in UK

 

July 2023

REPORT ABOUT MY VISIT TO MARCUS WHO IS SERVING OVER

ONE YEAR IN PRISON FOR PEACEFUL ECOLOGICAL PROTEST

www.instagram.com/marcuswithxr/

In late July 2023 I visited Marcus Decker in HMP (His Majesty’s Prison) Highpoint in Suffolk. I know Marcus from the STOP HS2 camps in 2020/21. I was a bit blown out with direct actions after several months’ involvement but Marcus continued relentlessly and became very active with Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and other environmental campaigns. In November 2022 Marcus and Morgan climbed the huge Queen Elizabeth II bridge on the M25 – the main motorway that circles London and then slung out a big JUST STOP OIL banner and lay in hammocks far above the ground - stopping traffic on “…one of the busiest motorways in Europe” (so the press called it) for 41 hours. Around a hundred thousand vehicles use that bridge everyday so it was a major disruption. He was arrested and given 2 and a half years’ jail sentence. Maybe the fact that the government are changing the laws to hand out such harsh sentences for peaceful protest shows that it is really rattling them – but it also means that peaceful disruption is being heavily outlawed. He will have to serve at least half of it and then be on probation and faces a very real risk of being permanently deported from UK. I tried to see him twice already but both times it did not work out – the first time I did not bring my passport (I did not know I needed it) and the second time the computer did not register my visit for some reason.

 

My brother Tom kindly drove me to HMP Highpoint, about 20 miles south of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. It would have taken me 5 hours to cycle and 4 hours by train and bus from Harwich. The visitor sign in room was mostly full of girlfriends and kids. I had to leave everything including my hat in a locker and was only permitted to take in a bank card and the visitor number on a scrappy old piece of laminated paper. In the waiting room there were only kids’ books so I read a children’s question and answer book about the bible. When I went outside a cheeky female visitor told me my trousers were falling down – maybe it was some kind of flirty joke.

 

The officer called us through to the prison where we were patted down and sniffed by sniffer dogs. As I waited in the line for the body search I read the many signs – one had a pair of sneaky angry eyes and the big letters reading DONT MAKE YOUR VISIT LONGER THAN NECESSARY - 2 YEARS FOR GIVING PRISONERS PHONES OR DRUGS. You are not allowed to wear clothes that reveal too much skin - shoulders must be covered and no very short shorts or see through tops! Most of the girlfriends got around that by wearing skin tight clothes. There was also a sign saying you must wear underpants but luckily they did not check me. 

After being searched and sniffed by sniffer dogs we were led into a large canteen where around 30 prisoners sat like tame dogs at separate large plastic picnic tables with four chairs all attached to a central table - I guess less things to throw if someone gets angry. I spotted Marcus at the end of the hall and after giving my number to the officer at the desk I went over and gave him a hug (Marcus not the prison officer). Like all the other prisoners he was wearing jeans and a striped blue and white short-sleeved shirt. They looked like a team of office lumberjacks. I really felt like I needed to be full of life and entertaining but it was hard not to be distracted by all the dramas happening around me - every table was a family reunion - hugs and kisses and expressions and gestures full of meaning: a people watchers’ paradise.

 

For the first 7 months of his sentence Marcus had been in Chelmsford jail which is a Category B prison which was a fair bit more strict. There you were only allowed a hug and a kiss when the visitor came and left. At HMP Highpoint (which is Category C) you are allowed to hug and kiss throughout the visits and Marcus has his own cell (unlike in Chelmsford) which is unlocked early in the morning and then locked up again for lunch time and in the evening. Marcus told me that in some countries they have conjugal rooms where couples can go for sex. That helps keep relationships together through prison time and people who come out of those prisons have much lower re-offense rates. Still with all the spacing and the prisoners not being allowed to move from their places it felt like I was visiting some community who were having their own little weird lockdown.

 

I blanked out the other reunions going on around me and concentrated on Marcus and was soon drawn in by his fascinating stories of prison life. They made my life outside prison seemed much less exciting (but probably more comfortable). Unless he is deported – which is the worst case scenario – he will most likely have to serve time ('bird' in prison slang) until march 2024. I was afraid I would not know what to talk with him about but our 120 minutes together flew past in a flash. I felt I could have listened and asked questions for hours.

 

I bought some potato wedges, tea and crisps (all alcohol is forbidden in jail) at the canteen and Marcus told me about prison life. In prison there are a bunch of jobs you can do. Some you can choose and some you are just assigned to. For one month he was forced to rip up sheets into rags for cleaning cars. They paid around 3p per kilogram - basically slave labour. Marcus’ Georgian prisoner friend calculated that if he worked 6 hours tearing sheets every day, by the end of the week he would have earned enough to phone his family back in the Georgian Republic for 10 minutes (phone calls being very expensive from the prison).  

 

Other jobs are more interesting – Marcus was paid to teach chess in Chelmsford. In Highpoint there is no chess-teaching role but he is still playing a lot of chess. He had also just found out that he could perhaps be the prison busker! The famous singer Peggy Seeger had heard about his imprisonment and donated a guitar for him but it had to be vetted before he was allowed to receive it and that process was taking ages – like a lot of things in prison. After 8 months in jail he had managed to get his hands on a guitar that another prisoner had lent him and then said he could keep. The same inmate had also given Marcus a radio which Marcus loved listening to – he is a big fan of classical music. Just the day before I came Marcus had been practicing the guitar in the prison yard when one of the other prisoners told him he could be the prison busker. It sounded like some kind of a joke but apparently the previous prison busker had just given up and the job was vacant! He would get paid 20 pounds a week for busking about 20 minutes every day in the corridors between the times when people move to their work in the morning and afternoon! Apparently, the authorities have seen how it really helps cheer up the other prisoners and defuses problems among the inmates.

 

Prison is very weird: on the one-hand they have prison buskers and he was taking a free art course which he loved. He made a lino-print of himself in the hammock on the top of QE II bridge to decorate his cell. On the other hand there are lots of terrible things in jail – like the bullying, arbitrary disruptive decisions, forced labour, depression of inmates, suicides, drug abuse inside and inhumanity. It seems a bit strange to me that inhumane and anti-social ways of treating people are seen as a possible way of making them more humane and sociable! Marcus was recently evicted from his cell at 6am and taken to a new cell for 2 days without any of his stuff and no reason given. It was like he was being arrested inside jail! Two weeks later he was told the governor suspected he had a mobile phone. Prisoners all have a phone in their cell with big buttons and no display and very restricted calling but some try to buy secret little mobile phones that are small enough to stick up your bum - something I have never heard of!

 

I told Marcus that all the visitors had been searched pretty thoroughly and he told me that after our meeting a couple of the prisoners would be strip searched and made to drop their underwear and spin around to check if anything was slipped to them during the visit. With visitors being so closely scanned the main way things get into jail must be through the guards. Marcus told me that on his way to the visiting hall just now he had passed a corridor that stank of weed. Prisoners are not allowed any money but they do favours for each other and use vapes as currency. If you save up enough vapes you can buy drugs that are sneaked in, or even a tiny mobile phone which are popular. You can phone for much cheaper with an illegal mobile phone than the prison phones and talk to friends whenever you want without being listened in to – which the guards do with some of the normal phone calls. The guards also read letters coming in and out but they don’t do much unless there are illegal plots being written about. Prison currency used to be cigarettes but our previous prime minister Theresa May had banned cigarette smoking in prisons allowing only vapes – her husband Philip May is a senior executive for Captial Group, one of the world’s largest and most powerful financial institutions, controlling $1.4 trillion in assets. Capital Group owns huge stakes in the tobacco company Philip Morris International who are switching to vapes. Prison gossip was that there was some conspiracy here but Phillip Morris are the biggest seller of tobacco as well so they would win either way. What shocked me about checking that fact was that Capital Group also have assets in defence giant Lockheed Martin and Ryanair - hard to believe in the sincerity of the governments environmental plan when the prime-ministers' husband is investing in these such companies. It would be nice if more criminal free people and political prisoners changed places.

Spice was also a popular drug in prison – a synthetic weed-like substance that gets you super stoned but which can be poured in liquid form onto a piece of paper. Smoking a tiny bit of this paper will mash you up big time into a drooling zombie. A pretty depressing drug. Because of that Marcus only receives photocopies of any letters that are sent to him. In the 8 months he had been in jail he knows two inmates who killed themselves. Pretty horrible!  

 

Looking around at the other prisoners I wondered what had got them in here – Marcus said a lot were jailed for ‘straps and food’ – prison slang for guns and drugs. There was an elderly middle-eastern man who looked very distinguished and had two beautiful daughters in their 30s and a handsome wife. They seemed very civilized and I wondered why he was inside but Marcus did not know. Maybe he was an experienced foreign doctor who faked UK qualifications to work here – but I don’t know. I do know that faking foreign qualifications is an easy thing to do. Some have been locked up for fraud or other white collar crimes – others for murder.

 

Prisoners have all fallen foul of the justice system. Some will be guilty – like the friendly Mexican brothers Marcus practiced his Spanish with. They knew they could only get maximum 2 months for working an illegal cannabis farm in UK so they flew over, make a bunch of money which they send home and if they get caught they spend 2 months in jail then get deported back to Mexico - no big problem! But you also meet all the people whose lives have been ruined by mistakes in the justice system – innocent prisoners or those who are over-harshly punished: Marcus told me about his friend who used to work as a bouncer. A guy waiting outside the club was high on cocaine and started a fight. The bouncer stepped in to do his job – get the aggressive dude off the premises but the fella threw a punch at him. The bouncer dodged the punch and punched him back. That is always a bad idea – people rarely die in movies from punches but they sometimes do in real life. This coked-up dude had a weak heart and died a few days later. Despite the CCTV showing that the bouncer had not started the fight and that the other guy was the aggressor, he got a life sentence for murder and after several years’ in jail he was released on licence. Someone complained about him and he was immediately re-detained without even any evidence of a new offence. Police came round and put him back in prison where he was waiting several months just to have another probation hearing to be released again. This regularly can take over a year!

 

Marcus asked me about my life and I told him about my break-up last November and how I moved to USA to recover and met another woman who seemed to have lost interest in me as well.  Nevertheless, I was going back to the USA to work as a musician because I could live there in a way I had not found was possible in London: playing gigs, living a bohemian lifestyle with other artists and musician friends, affordable life in a cheap room with a garden and cycling distance from all the gigs and having fun.

 

Marcus is obviously a big environmentalist but he was very gentle with his words when he reminded me how damaging to the environment flying is. He told me the XR deadline for climate action was 2025 – not a random date. It was the date scientists felt would be the tipping point when things would really start to collapse if nothing serious was done to stop climate change. He advised me earnestly to find my community and prepare for things to go very wrong because scientists were predicting just that! I subsequently checked NASA predictions on climate change. You would expect them to be quite conservative but even their best-case-scenario predictions were pretty apocalyptic. Marcus told me that the glaciers in central Greenland were melting and could raise sea levels by 7 meters which would mean the end of New Orleans for sure and many other towns around the world – London would be badly affected. I feel highly unprepared for that situation. There have always been doom-mongers but these days it seems to be the scientists and experts who are predicting the worst and not sandwich-board wearing dudes in robes.

 

I left feeling guilty for my recent flights. We can all make excuses – I could say I have been forced to fly this year because of visa restrictions only allowing me 3 months to visit USA, and that the easy destruction of the environment should be illegal or very difficult rather than relatively cheap, socially encouraged and very legal. But we have to take responsibility for our actions and I feel my excuse is wearing thin. Still I have no answer to where I want to be. Close to my family? But where will I live or what work will I do if I can’t live as a musician there? Even some very gifted musician friends of mine in UK often wonder if they can make enough to make the rent. With Brexit I feel the walls closing in – I can only go to Europe for brief visits and have limited rights to work. On the plus side I have a wonderful community of friends in New Orleans, Finland and a growing group of friends in Harwich and Suffolk – I am skilled at some things outside music and I feel I can learn and make a positive difference.  

 

I felt sad when I left but also self-conscious. I felt weaker and more emotional than Marcus. Here I was going out to freedom with tears in my eyes while Marcus was going back to his cell with his chest out and chin high. Over the last 10 years I found I cry very easily. There was something really sad to see grown men hugging their kids and loved ones and a guy in a uniform standing next to them telling them to separate. The woman in front of me was in tears… the same woman who had made cheeky remarks to me when I was checking in at the visitor centre. There was much more chatting between the visitors as we waited to be let out.

 

I returned the plastic number and got my hat and phone back and found Tom sitting in the garden area by the visitors’ centre looking a bit shocked. While I was in the prison he had reversed into a ditch and upended the car. He had been helped by passer-bys to get it back on the road. We parked behind the prison walls near where I thought was closest to Marcus’ block and played some music on trombone and clarinet for 20 minutes next to the sign that said – DONT THROW ANYTHING OVER THE PRISON WALLS! To my surprise no-one came to stop us. After a bit we drove to a nearby little Suffolk village and walked around looking at the beautiful houses until Tom felt much calmer. Then we got in the car and I told him about the visit as he drove back to Harwich – arriving in time for dinner.