I was 21 and I’d just got married. When I was on my honeymoon, I got a message: ‘Can you urgently ring your dad?’. I rang him, asking: ‘Is everything alright?’, and my dad told me that mum’s been arrested. My mum? My mum doesn’t get arrested. It’s not her thing. She works at the post office, she’d always had a job, and she did charity work. But she had been arrested, for stealing money from the post office.
When you look back, there’s previous trauma. My mum lost her parents in a house fire. I was ill as a child; there was lots going on. She was on antidepressants, but it’s something that as a child you don’t really know about. And over twenty years ago, it wasn’t often spoken about.
My brother was 11 at the time, and he didn’t really know what was happening. He knew that she’d been arrested: people in the local area talk. Just before the court case, my mum and dad told me that they had thought about killing themselves.
We went to court, and they sentenced her, which was probably the worst day of my life. My mum went to prison for 6 months. She had a really rough time because some of the other women could see that she was vulnerable.
You don’t forget all those bits. That first visit…it was awful. It was like a blur at first. You don’t know what to expect. It’s that excitement of seeing your mum, combined with the anxiety of looking after yourself, and your dad. It was weird. I felt like I was queuing up at Alton Towers, being filtered through in a narrow line. Once I’d seen her, I can’t remember if she even looked like my mum. It just went in a flash. The worst bit about it was leaving. As you walk out, you can see them walking back across the yard.
I wasn’t really concerned about what people thought. It’s more the attachment of losing your mum. People talk – they’ll see a newspaper clipping, which obviously wasn’t good. But they don’t unpack everything that led up to it. Good people do bad things. My dad probably protected us from certain things, but we were too busy worrying about mum and looking after dad to be worrying about anything else.
It was tough, and I was trying to support my brother too. As mum was being released, I thought: I’m going to do something about this. I decided to work in the prison service, and I stayed there for 16 years. I started in operational support, and left as prison governor grade. As I went in one direction, my brother went in the other. He started using drugs. My wife and I had to step in and coordinate with his school when he got into fights. In 2009, my brother turned 21, and was convicted of wounding with intent. While I was a senior manager at the prison service, he was sentenced.
Mum going to prison was a catalyst for me professionally. The process didn’t look after her. She struggled and didn’t feel listened to. And I thought, I’m not having that. By the time I finished working there, I was writing policies, so I had a say over how things were done, and the way that people were treated culturally. I always remembered why I was there: it wasn’t about judging people; it was about helping people. It funnelled me to where I am now. I kept that drive and that passion. I realised I could make a real change there.
I think it just shows that you can go different ways with traumatic events. My brother hasn’t gone back. He’s done really well. He’s got two girls now, and he’s not in trouble.
You can underestimate the impact of trauma. There are loads of things that you brush over, that nobody talks about, because it brings out hurt. It’s that early help that’s important. We know the statistics, and yet we sit back and intervene later. If you put the support mechanism in early, it stops the wheels falling off. The system waits for somebody to ask for help, as opposed to offering help. Everything is reactional. We should reinvest at the right point – we know what the triggers are, and who the kids are. The children get labelled because mum or dad are in prison, and they’ve got no role models or boundaries. Why don’t we put some things in place for them? Why don’t we cut them a bit of slack, and help them out a little bit?
To children in a similar situation: be kind to yourself. Things will be alright. Talk early. Tell people how you feel. It’s ok to feel sad, angry, or lost.