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.
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