In the opening episode of Jimmy McGovern’s new series ‘Time’, we find Jodie Whittaker’s character Orla O’Riordan has fiddled the electricity as she struggles to support her three children.
From the moment she is handed down a prison sentence, her life painfully unravels, as her children are taken into care and her employer refuses to hold her job open. Orla sums up the series in one line: “When I came in here, I had a house, a job, and a family. Now I’ve got nothing.” And when Brenda heard these words, her own experience of a short prison sentence came flooding back to her.
“Women lose everything in prison,” she says. “Those short sentences end up in a cycle of despair. The woman loses her children, then they take her flat. You can’t get your children back because you have to have a flat. To get a flat, you have to have your children.
“They say, ‘she can’t provide for her children’, when her crime is related to her children being fed.”
A scene from Time, the BBC prison drama including Bella Ramsey, Tamara Lawrance and Jodie Whittaker (BBC/Sally Mais)INSPIRATIONAL
It is 15 years since Brenda went to prison following a fight in a nightclub after her sister was violently attacked. She was one Ofsted-inspection away from becoming a childminder, but instead spent her 22nd birthday in prison for GBH. After discovering a talent for poetry in jail, Brenda has since rebuilt her life as Lady Unchained, a spoken word artist, musician and author.
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As well as hosting an award-winning show on National Prison Radio, she created and runs Unchained Poetry, a platform for artists with experience of the criminal justice system, and delivers inspirational storytelling workshops inside prisons. “I was given a two-and-a-half-year sentence and I did 11 months inside, and five months on a tag,” she says.
“I remember that feeling, that I had lost everything. I didn’t see myself finishing that sentence alive.” In her poetry, she calls prison “a war zone of broken minds”. She says: “When I was in there things were very rocky. I became suicidal. The constant screaming, no one tells you about that – women who scream constantly at night reliving trauma. Suicide is a thought that appears.”
HMP Holloway Prison (PA)Worse was to come. Despite having lived in the UK since the age of five and being a British passport-holder, Brenda was sent to HMP Morton Hall in Lincolnshire – at that time a prison for mainly foreign offenders – and wrongfully threatened with deportation to Uganda, the country of her birth. “I’m British,” she says. “I’m South London. It was like a nightmare. They told me I am going to be deported to a country I don’t know. This was long before the Windrush scandal came out, but it was already happening – and I know that because it happened to me.”
She was only sent back to mainstream prison to finish her sentence after going on hunger strike. “I thought that if I just became a ghostly version of the aggressive black woman they have decided I am, make myself small and timid, they will see this vulnerable person inside,” she says.
“I didn’t see then that this was self-harm.” Brenda served the final weeks of her sentence at the low-security HMP Downview in Sutton, Surrey. But when she got out, she found she had lost everything. Her plans to be a childminder were in tatters, and she had missed the enrolment day for a university course she had been accepted on.
King Charles during the recent King's speech (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Brenda welcomed the announcement in the King's speech that the Government plans to see short sentences served in the community (Getty Images)Life spiralled when she lost two of her closest friends to sudden illness and death within two years. “I was angry,” she says. “I resented losing that precious time with them while I was in jail.” Prison began to seem preferable to a life outside that was fraught with debts, deaths and depression. “It becomes tempting to think, I’ll go back to jail because out here is hard.”
McGovern’s drama has drawn attention to the devastation short sentences given to women struggling with poverty and addiction can cause. As Whittaker herself has said: “People are leaving prison and they’re being given a tent. You go into prison not a criminal, essentially, and you come out with nothing. You’re literally given the streets to live on.”
So, Brenda welcomes this week’s Kings’ Speech announcement that the Government plans to see short sentences served in the community – even if it is a more of an attempt to tackle the prison overcrowding emergency rather than a sign of more forward-thinking prisons policy.
But other desperately-needed reforms and, crucially, funding needed to tackle the justice crisis were missing from the Kings’ Speech. “The whole system is a mess,” Brenda says. “The prison system is broken.”
McGovern’s drama, ‘Time’, concludes on Sunday. “I hope it tells the story of what comes after,” Brenda says. “Otherwise, it’s just another trauma drama. Where’s the story of what you can do when you get out? No-one’s telling this story.”
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Despite everything, Brenda never went back to prison. As she says, she “chose life”. Today, she is a woman with a mission – “to prove there is life after prison”. To show people that Orla O’Riordan was wrong.
That she did have something – herself. “In the end, it’s about a change of mindset,” Brenda says. “Understanding that the struggle is building you up to receive your blessings.”
- Lady Unchained, ‘Behind Bars’, is published by Hachette
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