Three Prisons, Three Levels of Pain! - Part 5

I struggled to adapt to the wing, I cannot blame the other girls, they tried thier hardest, but the barrier between language was too hard.1

I do remember a Jamaican girl, everyone called her Mama,who took me under her wing for the brief time I was on the induction wing. She would tell off anyone else who laughed at me or tried to wind me up. I remember even the screws seemed to have respect for her. She once told off an officer after he started taunting me saying things like "Cat got your tounge" etc. I remembered the amazement I felt when he turned to her and said "Sorry Mama, I was only having a laugh", I just couldn't understand how she had managed to get such a status for herslef, that an officer was willing to apologise to her like that.2

Within days, because I couldn't verbally vent my feelings and anger, I began to do it through other means. Eventually one day, my cell light was flickering and as I was quite sensitive to such things as that, I was beginning to panic. As one officer came into my cell to do a cell check, I tried to communicate to him what was wrong, I pointed to the light, but he couldn't understand me and instead chose to use my lack of communication as a joke. "Yeah pet, its a light, Do they not have them in your little world like?"3

I tried to get it through to him, using my hands to indicate flickering, But it was to no avail, as he moved onto the next cell, I tried my luck with another prisoner, maybe the fact that the flickering was only slight, she too could not understand what I was saying. So the only other choice I had was to turn off the light, But as we were locked in, an officer used the light switch on the other side of the door, to turn it back on, so I could be seen from the door.4

When I showed my frustration at his actions, he just walked of calling me a "Fucking little retard", by this point I had, had enough. I picked up the only movable piece of furniture I could lift, a metal chair and lifted it high, standing on the bed, I banged it hard against the light, to try and break it, I heard officers running, and knowing I had little time, I put one last burst of energy in, and the light seemed to explode in front of me, electricty shot up my arms, and I dropped the chair and feel back to the bed with the force of the electric shock. I had forgotten that the light would give off a current while still on, and the metal chair hadn't helped. Everything went black.