There are more female prison officers now than there ever has been. It’s music to my ears and this is why.
Author Gen Glaister
I was 23 when I became a prison officer and one of the first questions people would always ask me was ‘in a women’s prison, right?’ It always confused me. I was raised by my mum and my sisters and there was no such thing as red jobs and blue jobs in my house - so I never knew anything other than women being capable of everything from running businesses to fixing the sink.
Perhaps even more surprising to people than a 23 year old woman working in an adult men's prison though, was the fact that I was a 15 year old public school girl when I set my heart on joining the service. I was the type of teenager who relentlessly sought out trouble too, but as I battled to change my ways I found myself entangled in a revolving door, where teachers expected me to misbehave and so I made a point of living up to my reputation. So even at a young age, I felt drawn to people in prison, other people who were trapped by a label which acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In hindsight, it was a very female instinct which drove me to use my own ‘rehabilitation’ into a fully functioning adult to support one of the most discriminated against populations there are, but until I became an officer I never really considered how my gender was relevant to my chosen career.
Little did I know just how much my womanhood would interact with my role as a prison officer.
It first struck me in training. As we wrestled with learning to restrain our 16 stone instructors, it became clear that us women were going to have to rely on technique rather than strength when it came to restraining prisoners. An advantage, our thick necked instructors assured us, restraining someone with strength alone results in broken bones and lawsuits but if you learn these techniques, you’re just as capable as someone twice the size of you. It was a wildly empowering thought, but as I looked at the bruises up and down my arms from a week of rolling around on gym mats, I wasn’t yet convinced.
In reality, it took me a while to discover the strength of being a female officer. In the early days, I could tell that both officers and prisoners would take one look at my scrawny self and assume I wouldn’t put up a fight, but that was ultimately what became my biggest strength. I began to notice how my larger male colleagues arriving on the scene of an agitated prisoner could quickly escalate the situation into a physical one, whereas my female colleagues were much better equipped to calm an incident down.
It’s not to say that female officers don’t find themselves in their fair share of brawls - in fact that was something else which gave me huge strength. Once you know that you can be flung into a wall trying to break up a clash between two gangs, trampled on and still get back up to keep fighting, you gain this ability to maintain a serene calmness even in some of the hairiest circumstances. I found it to be a feeling of empowerment like nothing else when I got to the stage where I could stand just feet in front of a man who was practically beating his chest with rage and feel a calm assurance that my words would get him back into his cell rather than my fists.
In fact, it’s a quality which prisons all over the country are coming to recognise. Whilst spots in the segregation units used to be reserved only for the burliest of male officers, they are now being swapped out for slight female officers with excellent negotiation skills and high levels of compassion.
Determined to tell the story about the side to prison which no one else was talking about, I set out to write a book about what it was really like being a female officer in a men’s jail. The Prison Officer, is the story of my journey getting to know, and so often, coming to like and respect a group of men which we are encouraged to fear and avoid. Ultimately, I wanted to share with the world the privilege I had of getting to know the men I met inside. Because from the most impressive man I met to the most frightening, I am a stronger and more compassionate woman for having met them.
Gen Glaisters latest book The Prison Officer (The Inside Story Of Life Behind Bars) is out today on Penguin Paperback priced at £8.99