What a difference a year makes!

I sit, in a coffee shop, near to my city centre apartment, typing upon my laptop looking out on a rather rainy Manchester day.

I come here fairly frequently, so much so, the barista knows my order and has brought me the darkest of americano's - no milk. Cue polite chit chat as to what I have on the books today and what sort of bits and bobs I have to tackle in my little jaunt out of the house to maintain a healthier remote working lifestyle than that I had adopted last year.

2022 was tumultuous, like a boat thrashing and splashing upon a turbulent ocean, it was all I could do to come up for air this time last year.

If by chance you are a first time reader of my work, a synopsis of recent relevance and circumstance. Grave mistakes and outrageous behaviours, misguided intentions culminating in a variety of fraudulent misdeeds circa 2015, mental breakdown and drastic interventions all round in 2016, not many of you will know this, but at the end of 2016, I took a job in care, working as a mental health support worker - why? Because in the burning of TheBarkerBaker, I wanted to know I could, that I was capable of putting other peoples needs before my own, I wanted to do a job with authenticity, based on hard work and tenacity, integrity and grit. I wanted to give back some of what I took in decency.

So I wiled away working in care, bringing in a menial minimum wage, but it was honest, and it paid the bills, of which there were mountains. Chasms of chaos and debt, and letters that looked like Father Christmas' grotto in the North Pole, only a less positive diatribe, wish lists aplenty from a creditor too many.

Somehow, I scraped my way through the banality of it for a year or so and with therapy, support from friends and family, I pulled myself together, post-apocalypse and evaluated what I wanted and needed my future to be.

Education. All that was good, all that was pure of TheBarkerBaker ideation, was the teaching, was the sharing, was the educating and empowering. It brought me joy to facilitate, engage and inspire, with the rudimentary philosophy of what it was to make a loaf of bread - taking nothing and turning it into something. I was adopting that philosophy whole heartedly within my own regeneration and rehabilitation.

Cue re-education and upskilling, a deep dive into professional development and learning, and lo', with the support of my new found employer, I began my transformation from bread maker and law breaker, into educator, authentic, passionate and grateful that my hard work was beginning to pay off.

A few years into my new role, with the qualifications to justify and quantify what I already knew - I was; am, a damn good teacher, with statistics of successful outcomes for learners to boot - an email.

GMP. Detective from GMP. This wasn't small potatoes PC calling. This was the big dick and he was coming for me.

"An informal chat," how many of us entangled in the justice system have fallen into that trap? Knowing full well the extent of our misguided misdeeds and mistakes, all too often, walking into a good cop, bad cop and falling foul at the first hurdle of any hopeful defence.

It's 2019, I've been married just 4 months. I've been in my job a couple of years. I've got stability that I have never ever known. Critics of mine, victims of mine, will say it's undeserved, that it's at their cost.

Walk in my shoes as I have tried to walk in yours, perhaps then the criticism may be welcome, but as has been the case for the past 7, nearly 8 years now after the fact, I tire of the daily diatribe and character assassination and attempts to destabilise. I did then, in 2020 and even more so now, as I sit, in 2023.

It's 2020, Covid-19 has stolen the year from us all, and I am sentenced to 27 months custodial sentence.

Off I go to HMP in peak pandemic, to wile away my time behind bars in a system that has ground to a halt, no education, no visits, no meaningful activity and conditions that have since been found and documented to have met the threshold for Mandela's definition of "torture," 

And so from closed, then open, then tag, then home.

Home, end of 2021, on tag until the end of January 2022.

Hence, here I write.

Less than a year since having my GPS tag removed from my ankle.

In full time employment. Sustained for 6 months. 

Having launched my pilot project with incredible women behind me, supporting, driving and guiding it's trajectory with me - if I'm honest, to ensure it's integrity and longevity, for fear of how TheBarkerBaker having another crack at social change may come across.

Always aware, always suffocating under the imposter syndrome, the proven so "ideas bigger than her bank account,"

Terrified that the project, whilst so desperately needed and so perfectly suited and guided by me, having lived and breathed the systemic failures of the prison system, would suffer under it's founders name.

But tenacious and gregarious as ever, to the distaste of some, but beautiful reception of others - Coming Home was born.

But why?

This time last year, I was at a crossroads like no other. None more tantamount of the direction my life could go.

Based and bound by ptsd, trauma bonded relationships, unhealthy in their origin and dependence and yet curated and maintained like some sort of addiction and necessity of familiarity and comfort. Misguided.

I was willing to throw it all to the wind and hide in my prison persona, for fear of trying to be the old me, the new me, what did that even mean?

Fran who tries, who thrives, survives, smiles - that Fran had been hired and fired 3 times in the space of 3 months post release; all, despite disclosing my criminal convictions and having those conversations, victim to the press and run of google that had branded my fraudulent acts through a less than truthful or accurate lense; a sensationalised fall from grace story, the hookwinder, fraudster, monster of many who had defrauded friend foe family, whoever the press could shake a stick at.

So January 2022, in my blur of "who am I? What next? Why bother?" - a little self wallowing lets be honest and still in some post prison haze.

I broke.

Staring at oncoming traffic over the princess parkway, wondering if it was kinder to jump with no traffic so as to avoid other victims I might create.

Despite having been a ghost. An arse. A shadow of my former self. My friends rallied, as they do, to support, save and protect me. From myself.

Babysitting, watching, holding, and piecing me back together. No questions asked. No apologies needed. Just love.

And so I'm here, today in 2023. Despite my close brush with the end.

Today, a piece I wrote about sex trafficking was published in the phenomenal Inside Time, my third piece non the less. Wonderfully received and accepted, all with my hope and vision to drive forward change and visibility surrounding the issues women in prison face.

Today, I was shortlisted and broadcast across social media as a nominee for "Mentor of The Year," award.

2022 saw the launch of Coming Home. Successfully attended by what is now 15 participants in it's pilot phase.

The first cohort of women all of whom have achieved incredible things following successful mentor pairing, work experience opportunities, job interview line ups, further education offers. More than that, with the support of incredible people behind the scenes, I managed to create a safe space for women like me - who need and want to comfort of other people who have been to prison, but not the sometimes tainted and toxic relationships that can come from those environments.

A place without judgement but always with accountability.

My wonderful wife, who I have found my way back to with passion, dedication and shared hope, optimism and love, continues to drive forward, making miraculous impact in her work at The Christie. 

We embark upon our fertility journey with tenacity and hope. Again!

We build upon the ashes of what was, to regenerate and flourish like a phoenix from fire.

Is it easy?

Never. Every day is hard. For any woman coming out from the shadows of prison, it's about rebuilding your identity, authenticity, purpose.

For most women, it's a struggle to get out from under the past, the guilt, the press, google, the ripple effect; or in my case, the incessant, persistent, constant surveillance and my victims determination to take aim at my life, my employment, my wife, my financial stability, my identity. 

Imagine, to have achieved the things I have in a year and be terrified to share them for fear of them being torn down, belittled, undermined, eroded, compared to the Fran of past lives, and measured against my mistakes, forever.

Well, it's 2023. And I am SO proud of who I am, how far I've come, the work that I do, the life that I live, the friends that I have, the family I have built, the women I know.

I am proud.

I work like I have something to prove, I do, to myself. That I am more than my mistakes and that I can learn from them and use them as positives to shape a stronger, safer, kinder future.

Have you heard it all before? I suppose thats the problem.

I'm taking each day as it comes and starting and finishing it as I mean to go on.

In anyone's recovery, in anyone's journey, that's the fairest outcome

More than that, it's what everyone deserves.

It's not about second, third, fourth chances.

It's about faith.

The devils gate

I didn't realise

I didn't know

That I had let the wrong one come home

That my shadow had cheated me

And set foot in my life

Come home to my wife

But it wasn't me

It was a shimmer

Slimmer

But distorted from the time away from home

Hidden behind the facade

Of prison

Emotionally resilient

And hyper vigilant, hard

Cruel really

Lost in the fear

Like my place wasn't mine to fill

So whoever came home

That wasn't me

Whoever was set free

Came home to liberty,

But lacking identity

Integrity and bravery

Still tied into the prison system slavery

It's too easy to say

"Prison made me,"

It didn't

It shamed me

You saved me

In the solitary of just me, myself and I,

It was easy to be caught in a lie

To survive

To feel something

To feel alive

But I didn't

It's like being dead inside

Because you shut down

So you don't drown

If you're in there,

Who you were before,

Doesn't make any sound

Doesn't want to be found,

And then you find yourself laughing,

You find yourself crying,

You find your people,

And they close ranks 

And you forge your barriers together

Locked in, 

Locked hands,

Locked lives,

To survive

Drive 

To the finish line

To hold eachother together

Your family on the inside

The one you take out with you

And hope that when you wake up from the nightmare

There's still that love

And if you're lucky, as I am,

They're them, and you're Fran

And you emerge from the cocoon of incareration

Of reintegration

And you laugh again,

And you find your friends,

And you build you lives,

And you share the reality

Without the hostility

The danger

The suffocation

And you love life fire

With loyalty that will last forever,

Because if you can ride into hell

With the people on the outside and the in,

Loving you,

Holding you together,

Then the devils gate becomes a breeze

And you zoom on by into the vortex

That is real life

And you don't just survive

You thrive

Because these people have kept you alive

And it will always be ride or die

Chapter One - senseless

One earring out, two now, in the palm of a strangers hand. My hands are sweaty and pale, shaking. 

"Rings," she growls.

"No," I reply, my first push back against the prison system has begun, and I've only just left the dock. She grips my poorly packed "might go to prison bag" in her bullish fist and slams it on the table in the small room in which we stand.

"Rings," with a tap on my left hand.

"You'll have to take that wedding ring off my cold dead body," I say with defiance that will be eroded with every step I take beneath the surface of this building. 

She rolls her eyes in exasperation, yanks open the packed bag and proceeds to list my dismal items packed so naively and in retrospect, arrogantly, on the words of my solicitor - who, plot twist, and a story for another day - turns out to a disbarred solicitor and as inept as his flailing representation behind an equally dubious barrister. The irony of my fraud conviction, is that I'm likely represented by two men abusing the legal aid system to line their pockets and have me empty mine - here in this room.

An assortment of boxers and knickers, I couldn't decide on what was prison appropriate underwear, my gender fluidity sprawled across the desk before me. French knickers assigned for the eyes of my wife and not the masses of HMP Styal and boxers that scream "lesbian," and I am now increasingly aware, that regardless of what cloth clads my derriere going forward, it will be seen by one and all in a women's prison in a variety of humiliating environments, this I know. This was indeed what came to pass.

From leather holdall, to perspex plastic, my worldly good are zip locked and labelled and banged in the van that waits at the bottom of the cold, stone staircase. They're not ready for me, so I'm taken to a holding cell.

How Victorian. Often one walks past Minshull Street Crown Court and marvels at the architecture and the history, the misery, the knowledge of who and what goes on behind the high stone walls and foreboding iron bars, and here I sit. I wonder, who has sat in this cell before me? Murderers? Monsters? Paeodofiles? And me, the barker baker, the barker faker. Considering my fate. Twisting my wedding ring on my finger.

It will be ok. We are going to appeal it. The solicitor promised me that much through the glass as they took me down. It's Thursday, which means by close of business tomorrow, we can have movement before the weekend. I'm sure I'm his priority. He promised. Suspended. "Get a bottle of wine in for dinner Fran," he said.

Silver light flickers in my eyes as the heavy metal door creaks open

"Barker-Mills," he drawls, like this is mundane work for him, and I'm just another body on the conveybelt now. It's true. I am.

I stand, legs buckle, and follow him, onto the prison van. No handcuffs, no chains, and I'm put in a box, like a horse on the motorway, shut behind a metal door with a bottle of water rolled underneath it. It's small, claustrophobic, I've never been caged like this, but the monster is penned, ready for the zoo, and the engine fires up with a jolt and the city lights blaze through the porthole of horror.

I see Manchester fade, my life disappear, in moments of street lamps, Christmas lights and it's gone. For a year at least, it's gone.

And no-one knows I'm here. Everyone is checking their phones, to see how it went, to cheer the grace of time, that 2015 was a different life, a different world, a different Fran and that 2020 is a married teacher lady, with friends and family and work, and hope, and babies and trust and integrity and and and and.....

I cry, an uncontrollable cry, so intense, I can hardly breathe, I'm caged in here, I can't escape. What the fuck is happening?

I'm sick, on my beautiful leather brogues. They didn't take my laces? Are they not supposed to take your laces when they take everything else?

Proper shoes for court, and a crisp black suit, I'm clad in my winter coat. Sarah calls it my teacher coat, because it swishes like The Matrix when I walk down Oxford Road to the office in the Manchester weather, with my laptop thrown over my shoulder, ready for a days teaching.

My students, my god. Tomorrow is Christmas jumper day at work and I promised a prize to the most ridiculous jumper. They will turn up, for 9, they will sit and wait and I won't be there.

They will ask, my boss won't understand what happened, this was going to be ok, work supported me, gave me references, they have my back, they will have to explain.

Oh god, the papers. The only way people will hear of my demise is the shitrag MEN, the world's most clickbait, fuckwit, crossed arms, Greggs sold me half a pasty drama filled faux journalism.

Will they believe that trash that was said in court? Is that how this will all play out? Does it even matter now? I'm on my way to HMP Styal. The irony.

Engine rumbles, radiator hisses, lock clanks, and I'm back outside in the cold December air.

Into reception to be processed.

"Could you stop crying and look at the camera so we can take your photograph please?"

I can't so I look up like a puffy ferret with red eyes and makeup stained beauty fading.

Flash - it's printed, A303*** prisoner number assigned.

Prisoner number. 

Prisoner number.

I sit down, trying to steady my weight. The retrospective hilarity of understanding that the place I choose to sit is in fact the body scanning chair, that most people entering prison try to avoid, and here I sit, freely crying my heart out, with not a sheet of spice or bag of heroin stuffed up my hu-ha!

Some girls inside would say it's a missed opportunity. It's as beautiful and untainted as it went into prison thank you very much!

I get a phone call, I need to call Sarah and tell her what's happened, tell her where I am.

I call "this number cannot take your call right now," - she's turned her phone off, she doesn't want to know me, it's over, she hates me, she will never forgive me, she doesn't even want to know what happened.

I cry hysterically.

"It's off, can I call again please?" They let me as they can see my clear desperation. The same automated response. 

"Can I call my sister please? It's the second number down?"

I am clasping a crib card, I had written a few numbers down that very morning just in case - a crib card I have a stack off in my desk at home with digital marketing geek facts and quiz questions on for sessions, my Christmas jumper quiz... 

Again, they let me, my hysterical shaking and crying is persuasive and concerning in equal measure.

She answers "Donna, I'm in prison," - she laughs, she thinks I'm joking and asks how I really got on.

They have given me 1 minute for the call, I tell her I don't have time to explain what a shitshow it was but that I needed her to tell Sarah I was in HMP Styal, I got 27 months, and was going to be spending a year at least in jail.

(Turns out I had written Sarah's number down in my haste and she hadn't turned her phone off, I was calling a wrong number)

However, in my vunerable and disoriented state, I was convinced it was all over. End of days.

I clasped my bag of items once they had been sorted through by the prison - they took most of it, I still don't know why - the internet and my knowledge and lived experience now tells me, I was allowed them but to hell with my whitening toothpaste, proper toothbrush, and stamps. Instead, prison issue toothbrush and toothpaste, and a plastic bowl with mini soap and shampoo sachet and oddly enough, a washing powder tablet.

Confused, I carry them through the darkness, walking through the prison compound, following the prison officer who is taking me to the cell block.

She takes me to my cell, and it's everything I imagined and worse, Dickensian, metal, old school prison cellblock wing, like Bad Girls, but filled with real bad girls. A mixture of the lost, the loony and the fuck ups (I'm in good company)

"It's not as bad as it seems, and you're a first timer, you seem like a nice girl, you will probably get out on tag in 12 months," - this prison officer has kind eyes, she's young, clearly in this job for the right reasons and after a year in jail, I came to learn, prisoner officers like this are few and far between. The majority fall into two categories - disenchanted and frustrated and therefore disdainful, or, the worst, powermad, egotistical, small men and women who enjoy the hierarchy of prison to feel superior and revel in the misery of those "beneath them," - those kind of officers also fall into two categories, downright narcissists, or sexual predators.

And to think, the majority of women I meet here have been victims of men, abuse, violence, sexual exploitation and are now being herded, controlled and subdued by men of a similar temperament - remind me why prison DOESN'T work?

She shuts my cellblock door, heavy metal, loud. I knock on it from my side, she opens the little door flap.

"What's the bowl for?"

She opens my door and shows me an itinerary with my name on it. Covid isolation 14 days.

Shower day 8.

I read it again

Shower day 8.

The bowl is for washing. Washing oneself. Ones clothes, knickers in particular and even more dignified following those two things, ones plate, cup and cutlery.

So this is life now.

Like an animal in a zoo. Shower day 8. Exercise outside, day 5.

The strip lights flicker on the ceiling, I ask how to turn them off. 

She smiles and tells me, because I'm high risk and on an ACCT, the lights will stay on for the first few nights as the officers will need to observe me every hour.

I laugh.

A suicide risk, yeah I can see that. I have literally been surveiling my cell for options and opportunities since she opened the door, and they are LIMITED.

I have nothing to live for. No wife, no life, no job, no home, no family, no friends, no dignity, no integrity, no honesty, no hope.

So of course, I wonder, why waste a year? To maybe get tag? I can't do this. It has to end tonight.

Bedsheets. That's what they do in the films. But where can I tie it?

I deliberate as she leaves.

I make my bed, this isn't the Hilton, and bless my soul since coming home, the making of a prison bed has benefited my real life as I am now a superstar at bed changing at home.

It's bedsheets or nothing. The bars on the windows are clad with glass, the window doesn't shut and the cold winter air rattles it open and closed, clanging and banging. Combined with the lights on full, sleep is out of the question.

Besides, the woman in the cell next to me is screaming, and the rest of the cellblock are screaming back and telling her to shut the fuck up.

I concur but wouldn't dare join in the chorus.

I think the pipes are the best bet. Perhaps the telephone wire.

This is what prison does.

It sends women who have broken the law, who can and should be rehabilitated and supported in the community to maintain their employment, relationships, homes, and commitments to recover and do better, it sends them away, in the dead of night on a thursday in december, for a year, to deliberate how to kill themselves, because none of it makes sense.

Sending women to prison like this for short periods of time in the name of justice and punitive punishment is cruel, senseless and a waste of tax payers money.

Next story : How many days did HMP Styal let me stay banged up in my cell without my citalopram? 10? 20? 54?

What a difference a year makes

 Last night, I sat, outside, on a warm Manchester evening, the sun had set, and as I held my wifes hand, I looked up and saw the imposing skyline silouette of Manchester Minshull Crown Court looking back at me. The juxtaposition istion of that building sitting like a spectre of a past life, overshadowed by rainbows a-plenty and the competitive music barrage from every bar dotted down canal street.

That building will haunt the paths I walk through the city forever, and I often change my route if I find myself in close proximity to it. Just looking at it makes me lose my breath. The Victorian and draconian high walls, with the closing gates where the prison vans lurk. Just thinking about it makes me feel sick.

So you can imagine the confusion within me looking over at the building that saw me lose my freedom and disappear into the winters night, whilst sitting and laughing with the people who love me most.

And it occurred to me, I left my life, like a soul leaves a body. I left it. 

And it's only recently I came back to it, and fortunately for me, it was still here waiting for me, but it was only ever waiting for me. Not the shadow or spectre of who I was that came home from prison.

I caught a glimpse of myself a few days ago, on a microsoft teams call, the way we all do, we see our little faces in little boxes, and it was like the Fran I lost, and had been waiting for, came home.

I was chatting away in teacher mode, waxing lyrical about coding, exhilerating a new cohort of students, and I felt altogether myself, no missing pieces.

Bit by bit, prison eroded the person I had become, the strength, pride, resilience I had made my whole, the woman I had become to overcome the person who I was before. 

It was a short period of time, relative to the time I have no been home, but day by day, it took something. Not just freedom. Pieces of me. That pride, that strength, that resilience, evaporated, for every day I was outside of my life and I hadn't realised how little of me was left until I compared the person I was before and after.

When I came home from prison, I was selfish, I was souless, I was focused on all of the wrong things, building my new house on sand, with no foundations. With no depth. No purpose.

The echoes of who I was, lingered. And those around me tried to pull me back, wake me up, remind me I was home and home was all I ever needed - but in a very Fran obstinate way, I knew better.

Prison is a strange place, where you can be your purest self but daren't be, because it's a place where vunerablity is a dangerous thing. You open yourself up and don't realise the danger you've put yourself in and you create and forge bonds of foreverness in some misguided notion of solidarity and connectivity. It's nothing more than a survival mechanism. Prison creates an unhealthy codependence and erodes reality. It creates a selfish souless bubble where the person you were once, exists in a warped version and you feel like you have it all figured out, you know who you are now, who you need to be on the other side, because you go to prison feeling like you have to change, you have to be more, be better, because otherwise, what was it all for?

I spent days and nights lamenting my conscience, my choices, myself. My punishment has always been of my own making, but prison exacerbates our ability to destroy our sense of self. It dehumanises you and the relationships you build, the relationships you have.

And somehow, we are supposed to leave rehabilitated, reformatted, reinvigorated for life after?

The woman prison made me, and the woman I allowed myself to become, for the sake of punishment and penance, set me back a year.

I lost a year of my life to jail, I lost nearly as much trying to regain my sense of self, my purpose, my soul, my relationships.

But I spent a weekend with the people I love the most and who love me unconditionally, the people who wrote to me, called me, let me know I was in their thoughts and hearts every single day I was away, and I held their hands, danced like the sun wouldn't come up, drank more beer than any 35 year old woman should.

We celebrated pride, we celebrated love. We celebrated me being home. And I felt it.

I lost time, I lost myself, but thank god for patience, persistence and the wonder of friendship and real life.

Prison is a bad dream, and I woke up.

And I've never felt more free.

Roe vs Wade

What a sad day it is for women.

The ultimate silencing of a woman's voice, a woman's choice. 

When the discussion surrounding Roe v Wade being overturned came into the public forum, I found myself quite triggered, and I had a little downslide in terms of mental health. I couldn't quite explain, although I tried when my wife asked me what was weighing on my mind.

Abortion comes with the biggest "what if" you will ever face in your life.

For me, in 2007, it wasn't even a question in my mind, it was a must. When I found out I was pregnant, entirely by chance, having been admitting to hospital for other reasons, my only question for the nurse was "can you do an abortion here?"

And I remember the look on her face, like I was some silly student who had dropped her knickers and not thought through my life choices. It's that flippancy, it's that assumption that makes abortion such a taboo. Let's set aside the pro life, the religion, the bastardised religious zealousness that comes with the territory (forgive the pun) - if's not god's judgement that brings about the friction, it's other people's opinions on someone elses body, mind, circumstance, that has no place in society.

If I had not had the right to make my own choice, and take ownership of my own body, after somebody had taken ownership of it for me, and taken my choice from me, if I had had my voice silenced and my freedom of choice taken from me, I would have given birth in 2008 to a child I never asked for, a child I never wanted, a child I believed because of the horror of circumstance, I couldn't love. Those were my feelings and my rights to feel that way.

It would mean that the man who took my body, took my choice, also took my right to live my life on my own terms, in the way I wanted, in the way I planned.

As a second year politics student, I had no intention of having a child at 19, nor did I want one.

As a gay woman, I had no intention of having a child with a random man, not a rapist, not a one night stand, not a cock in sight.

As a woman, I had no intention of having a child at 19 because I had worked for my education and wanted to build my life in the way I had hoped and planned, to go to university, to get a good job, to build a life, find a wife, settle down and live happily ever after.

It is only these days whilst infertility runs rampant through our lives and has taken over our marriage and hopes of procreation that my mind occasionally allows the "what if" question to enter my head.

For every "what if" I have had since 2007, I never thought I would see the day, I would feel grateful for having those moments, for having the choice to have them. That 19 year old me had the freedom to make that informed choice. Backed by doctors, therapy and an operation.

I don't regret it. It was what was right for me at the time. It was right for my body, my mind, my hopes and it shaped who I am.

I don't have qualms over religion despite being brought a good catholic girl. I live my life firm of mind that my choices have concequences of my ownership. Thats true of all my decisions, good and bad.

But to lose the ability to have that choice? To be forced to live with such a penance?

I can hand on heart in 2022 say with all honesty and integrity. If in 2007 I could not have had an abortion to rid myself of the foetus imposed upon me by a rapist, a monster, to live with a constant reminder of the violence and horror of that night.

I would have killed myself. It would have been my life lost with whatever cells I was carrying with me.

Women NEED, DESERVE and MUST have the right to make decisions about their bodies.

Today's decision will lead to deaths, through unsolicited, underhand, opportunistic, dangerous abortions and loss of life of the women who can't live with the choice they've been left with, none.

What next America?

The LGBT+ community best prepare for the overturning of gay marriages, Trumps legacy of hate and ignorance lives on and Joe Biden is still trying to find his balls in Hilarys handbag.

God help us.

Morrisons Cafe

 

I am currently sat in a Morrisons café.

I bloody love a Morrisons café. But I love this Morrisons café more than most.

I sit on a Thursday afternoon in the Merrion Centre in Leeds. The first time I sat here, in this exact seat, was almost a year ago, on my first day of work. Hardly the most magical narrative you’ve ever heard from me, I’m sure, but this table, this coffee, hold particular nostalgia in my mind and heart.

A year ago, I was residing at her majesty’s pleasure, many miles from here, a long commute, but what a thing to be able to do. A commute.

In my bright pink shirt, my bright pink fleece, my shiny name badge bouncing upon my bosom chasing a bus down the A64 to make sure I got to work on time, and by on time, I mean early, early so I could grab a coffee. At this table. In this seat.

So much has changed since then.

 

It was my 34^th birthday. Day one at Max Spielmann, which meant day one out of the prison gates. Day one in society, community, reality. But a prisoner who went to work and returned home to not a homecooked meal or a Sarah or a cat called Gordon Ramsay, but to what had become my prison family. Where by pals would pick up my dinner at the 4pm role check, and keep hold of it for me so that I didn’t have to go and ask to be let into the kitchens to collect it after a 12 hour day out of the prison. I would leave at 6am, return at 8pm, eat my dinner on a picnic bench with the girls, drink coffee at a time of day I haven’t dared do since returning home, because in real life, who does indeed drink coffee for fun and conversation after 8pm? Unless out for dinner?

I realise how middle class and paradoxical that sounded.

My 34^th birthday, I hopped on the bright blue coastliner, having walked miles to get it, a level of fitness that grew with time, and many a bus chase. On that bus, I would sit, I would call my wife, bright and breezy, and she would wake or be at work, always making time to talk to me. Whether sleepy or with cancer specimen in hand – mornings fast became our time of day. No prison phones, no recorded intimacy, no “I love you’s” spoken to half the prison population listening to conversations between married couples.

I had a birthday cake on my birthday – despite being in prison. In this very café. And it was free! The lovely man who worked here was fascinated by my choice of mini Victoria sponge for breakfast at 8am on a random morning in May, I told him it was my birthday, he brought it to my table with a coffee and wished me happy birthday and the level of kindness, for a woman on day release from prison, warmed even my cold heart.

I ate that little cake in wonderment of my new found freedom. Hours out of the prison compound to work, like a regular person. To work. I had missed that sense of purpose, drive, dedication more than many of the other aspects of real life – now as a free-ish woman, it’s an exhausting narrative of hamster wheel behaviour we all exist to maintain and sustain until the government lets us while and wither away with the pennies our pensions allow.

Here I sit, typing on my laptop, with my smartphone plugged in, emailing clients, writing up proposals, checking social media, checking in on friends, taking calls from my wife.

What a bizarre 12 months.

If you had asked me this time last year where I saw my life in a years time, I would not have been able to give you this answer. I don’t know what my answer would have been. Many of the assumptions I had, that I would leave prison and work hard to regain my career for example, were naïve and idealistic and perhaps a little over reaching – and how depressing a realisation, that just 10 short months out of society and behind bars, whether nice bars or suffocating ones, the loss of liberty had come at a high cost to many, and to me. Crime doesn’t pay my friends. But I knew that in the moments after my misdeeds, as I do so many years later.

I love Leeds. It’s a city that makes me feel free. Because it’s a city where I was free. I was born here in a way. In my bright pink shirt, I was just Fran, day release prisoner, who worked minimum wage, in a photo shop, who had the opportunity to eat real food, talk to real people, live a real life, and then return to the penance I had to pay.

This city has part of my heart. In more ways than one. It was where I found myself, a new version of myself, a version I wanted to hold onto when coming home. So clear, calm and collected, without the people pleasing necessities I had spent 30 years trying to outrun. Prison is a place where judgement is for a the judge, as soon as you’re in that white van whizzing down the M6 to your nearest HMP, judgement evaporates, because you’re all in the same boat, in the same place, suffering for your disgrace.

Together.

I write, because it drives me, inspires me, and has always been my emotional exorcism. My necessary therapy and familiarity. To write today, in this place, this space, has made me feel so many things all at once.

New beginnings. That’s what this place was last year. And that is what it is today. The cathartic cleansing as past becomes present becomes future. Taking only the worthwhile into tomorrow.

Morrisons café, creating emotive epiphanies since 2021.

Disclosure Closure

Whilst in prison, the employment department within the jail asked to see my CV. I duly had my wife send me a copy so that I could show them, this is a CV that began back in the day of senior school years; the first ventures into Microsoft application in 2003 when preparing for my GCSE's.

The much maligned and tentative steps into "employability skills" before you even know what you want for breakfast, let alone what you want to do for the rest of your life. Where your maroon folder "Record of Achievement," is supposedly your life long bible, whereby your 25m swim in 1995 is an essential proof for any future prospective employer - whilst the maroon folder remains in the lofts of many parents, the fact that paper will dictate your life and career choices is a sad fact that remains. Alas, in 2022, the digital age has ensured that alongside your bits of paper collated over years of education and employment, you also have a remarkable and very accessible digital footprint, that if, like me, happens to cite your indiscretions, will speak louder than any undergraduate degree ever could, or ever will.

Now, I'm not shy to say, I'm a woman of immense privilege, correction, I had a very fortunate upbringing in a way that brought about excellent education, private schooling, grammar school sixth form for bright minds and then university and a job in London swiftly followed. I ticked every box of the ambitious and well-moulded middle class white girl.

Those who read this blog, those who know my story, the story of Francesca Barker, who was indeed once TheBarkerBaker will know that amongst the shine and pontification of privilege was a childhood marred with trauma, abuse, assault and every real life tick box that every single prisoner I met had also come a-cropper.

It is this chequered past, and this road of many missteps that lead to a chaotic and cataclysmic decade of hope, try, fail and steal to try and fail again. 

But equally, it is a decade of chaos that lead me to calm, a calm that brought about my getting back into education, to train, to learn, and to teach. To be the person I wanted to be and to live it with every waking moment.

I was reborn, through friendships, relationships, trust, hope, and hard work. But most of all, I found my integrity as a human being, my authenticity as a person, and what so many of us hope to find and often find it all too late and usually when the world has gone to shit - our identity.

I found myself, my true self, when all I had was eroded, erased, removed and lost as I disappeared into a life behind bars, I left my life on the outside and all of those who love me, holding it together by the seams.

One bang of a gavel, meant the job I had retrained for, relearned for, reclaimed myself for, gone in an instant. My reputation, rebuilt, now in ashes. My relationships, hurting and feeling like a death had occured and a mourning period had begun. It was like I had died, because one minute I was in my life, and then I was gone.

In a pandemic prison era, I landed in the justice system at possibly the worst time, when everything was shut down and the exploitation of the degradation of womens rights, dignities and liberties behind bars were decimated all under the guise of covid. Humiliation, degradation, all designed to break the hopes and dreams, and quiet the voices of those in cages waiting to get out.

I almost lost myself. I spent my first night in a prison cell in HMP Styal evaluating the different ways I could commit suicide, bedsheets on barred windows, tied to a bunk bed up high. A sad affair and motivated by one thing - what will people think of me?

My first morning in prison I pressed my cell call bell and asked the prison officer who appeared at the metal grate in my cell door "Am I in the paper?" 

Oh yes.

The easier question would have been : which one?

All of them.

The mug shot from when I was a drug addict 11 years ago rolled out in 2020 like that's who I was despite a decade of recovery and clean living - drug free, but not issue free.

The pap shot long lense of me walking into court, in my favourite "teacher coat" carrying a bag I didn't think I would need because my legal team had assured me it was an open and shut suspended situation.

I even made the New York Post, a compliment, I laughed after it all fell apart at the irony of always wanting my writing to reach print press like that, and it turns out, my story hit their pages, but not my words. Oh no, none of this has ever been my words. It's always been theirs.

My words were in court, in apologies and reparations and they fell silent. The only noise that came from that room was that of the media, who perpetuated their version of events to maximise the exposure and clicks of the once great Barker Baker. The paper that made me, enjoyed their time to shame me. It got more coverage, so well done to that reporter - your writing was poor, your facts were weak, and I write with more grace and poise than your shit rag could dare to dream - even with a phrase such a shit rag my friends, I carry more power in truth than you grasp with your click bait misery.

This is who we are in 2022, a society that revels in the sorrows and shame of others because we live in a world where we are so obsessed with mirroring the success stories and the shining lights, that to rise above our own sadnesses, sometimes its easier to revel in others. It's a sign of the times and not necessarily the misguided morality of who we have become.

I digress.

Today, I sat at my little laptop, at my kitchen table, a change of scenery on a Monday morning, not at my quaint home office desk setup during lockdown, pre-prison, you could never knock me for my work ethic, I graft and I always have, no pun intended readers.

Coffee, sign into outlook, see what monday brings, locked out. Odd. But familiar. Sign into teams. Locked. I know how this story ends, for just 6 months ago, I had a similar state of affairs and the tingling in my throat knows how this is going to play out.

I email my boss to let him know I can't access the systems. No reply. I email HR, no reply. My phone rings at 10:30, I sat down to work at 8:30.

The recruiter who sourced me for the role, setup the initial interviews and introductions and laid the breadcrumbs that lead here, to this - Francesca Barker-Mills, Marketing Manager.

"Fran I've been asked to give you a call and let you know that your employment has been terminated with immediate effect. It has come to light over the weekend that you have a criminal history that wasn't made fully aware,"

- Interesting. Throughout my recruitment process, through the recruitment agency, the employer, the employers partners, I was never asked about any criminal convictions, never asked about any criminal disclosure or necessity. Never made aware of any potential issues regarding criminal history as it was a post that required no vetting or DBS.

The law in this country is : Unless an employer asks you to disclose, you don't have to. As it happens, in the second line on my CV - the CV that made its way through the hands of the recruiter, the CEO, the marketing director, HR and partnerships person, cited intrinsically under the section I have aptly named CORE SKILLS because as far as I'm concerned, my lived experience of the justice system is a huge part of the my work ethic, my morals, my drive, and my skill set and I am proud to own it and stand by it - more than anything, because of the way the world works, it's best to air your dirty laundry in a positive way before it's waved from someone elses garden.

The exact wording on my CV is "Lived experience - exoffender custodial sentence, lead by example of empowerment, education and hard work," You asked me, I told you. Cordial chit chat.

I had assumed having been offered this job, taken up this job, worked my ass off for this job, that one of the key attributes of them hiring me was my excellent CV, more than that, my impeccable interview skills - interviewed several times, by several tiers of management, and then reference checked to the hilt. Previous employers, previous freelance contracts, personal refereee alongside this.

All wonderful endorsements of the one absolute fact that negates any bullshit press coverage : I am damn good at my job, because I have worked hard for it, I have educated myself to know what I am doing, I have worked for companies that have empowered me to build a fierce reputation and skill set than make me formidable at what I do.

Imagine then, as an empowered young woman, fresh out of jail but finally feeling more like me than I have since coming home, on the cusp of regaining some proper financial stability and regularity for my wife and I - now more important than ever, we had the joy of our first IVF appointment just 3 days ago. Imagine, on a Monday morning feeling grateful for the life you live and the path you walk now, to have the rug pulled so ungraciously from under you.

And why?

Because I have a criminal conviction. Yes, and if you had dared to ask me plainly, I would have told you, actually, I have two.

Neither of which define me as a person, and certainly not as a marketing manager.

The law denotes I didn't have to - you didn't ask, and I had assumed you knew, having poked around in my Linkedin profile which cites its very very blatantly, and indeed references this very blog. The fact I talked prolifically in my interviews about my passion for criminal justice and my political lobbying and work in the womens charity sector and why and where that comes from should have been a fairly transparent approach to - I WENT TO PRISON?

Discrimination? Perhaps.

But let's be honest. 

I don't have it in me to fight for the injustice of it. I feel like I'm banging my head against a brick wall. I strive, I work, I succeed but it's always with the almighty taste of "gratitude" that any opportunity that comes my way is one born out of risk - I'm not a risk - if we are getting pedantic, statistically according to my probation and OASY risk assessment, I'm 0.02% likely to reoffend again.

I'd bet on that horse.

I'd bet on me.

I do every day.

And more fool you for not doing the same.

Shame on you for making me feel anything less than fucking brilliant.

Because I know who I am and I know my worth, and I am not A3039EP of HMP.

I Francesca Barker-Mills, and I am more than you know.