Christmas Day is quiet in the prison. There’s a tree in the chapel, and a few bits of tinsel on the wings, but the air is not celebratory — it’s subdued. The men eat their processed turkey alone, or in pairs, in their cells, while images of happier Christmases flicker tauntingly from their TVs. There are countless people in the outside world who spend a lonely Christmas, too, of course; but on Christmas Day in the prison in which I work as a chaplain, there will be 700 lonely men under one roof. On the first Sunday of Advent, I give a sermon on the significance of the Advent candles: the purple ones for penitence, the pink one for Gaudete Sunday, and the white one in the middle for Christmas Day. This year, the men sat through it attentively enough, but last year they were restless. I found myself employing strategies I had learned as a schoolmaster. First, I fixed the chatterers with a frown. Then I tried the pedagogue’s parenthesis: ‘Let us pray (and when I say “us”, I include those gentlemen sitting at the back).’ Finally, I stopped the service to explain that if they didn’t shut up, I would invite one of the supervising officers to remove them. They fell silent. Afterwards, I was inwardly congratulating myself on having kept order, when one of the officers said to me, ‘How many purple candles did you say there were?’ Flattered that he should have been listening to my sermon, I replied ‘Three.’ ‘So where’s the third, then?’ Someone had nicked it. We got it back, of course: I told them that if it didn’t appear immediately, they would all miss their lunch. Within seconds, it was rolling down the aisle towards the altar. One of the prisoners at the front said to me, ‘There are some terribly dishonest people in here, you know!’
After the Christmas Day service a couple of years ago, a prisoner who spoke no English pressed something into my hand as he left. At first, I thought it was a piece of rubbish he was giving me to dispose of. Only after he had gone did I realise that I was holding not a ball of fluff, but a length of thread that had been plaited into a tiny cross and chain. The cross was less than an inch long, its arms the thickness of a pencil lead, but it had been so finely and tightly knotted that it was inflexible. It was beautiful. Heaven knows how many hours he spent making it. When I was next in the prison, I went looking for him to say thank you, but he had just been released. It’s one of the nicest presents I have ever received. The other time I found myself holding a piece of prison ropework, was rather less pleasant. I had been called to the wing to visit a prisoner who was lying with his face turned to the wall. The landing officer said he had been like that for days. I sat with the young man for the best part of an hour. Just as I got up to leave, he stopped me. ‘You’d better take this, guv,’ he said, as he reached under his bed to hand me a homemade rope formed into a noose.
When people ask me what sort of men I meet in prison, I say, ‘Most of them are just like you and me.’ You and I aren’t serial killers, fraudsters or sex offenders, but nor are many prisoners. Some have done some truly wicked things, of course, but others have been more stupid than evil, and an awful lot are mentally ill. Over the years, I have met five ex-pupils of mine in the prison, two of them prison officers. I once opened a cell door to find myself facing a man I had last seen at university, 35 years ago. It struck me that our roles might easily have been reversed. When I mentioned the encounter to a prison officer, she told me that every time she saw a van delivering new prisoners, she thought to herself, ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ Amen to that.
A little kindness goes a long way in prison, and I see little kindnesses everywhere I go. One of the men I have been looking after has bought three Christmas cards to send to an elderly lifer so that it won’t be obvious that he has no friends or family. Prisoners buy Christmas cards on their ‘canteen’, the weekly shopping that they order by ticking items printed on a list. They don’t get to choose the design; they tick ‘Christmas card’ and take what they’re sent. Last year, some of the men got me a card of quite spectacular gaudiness: a fluorescent snowscape tinged with purple and gold. The first of the signatures was ‘Geordie’, who had written in brackets ‘Apologies for the card!’ On the left-hand page he had written, ‘Have a drink on us. Sorry it’s nothing stronger!’ Underneath it he had glued a tea-bag. It was a little joke — and a little kindness, too.
When I got home in time for lunch with my family last Christmas, one of the presents under the tree was a copy of the diaries of Dorothy Day, who had spent time in prison for her pacifism. On 29 June 1938, she wrote: ‘It makes one unhappy to judge people and happy to love them.’ That would make quite a good motto for prison chaplains. Come to think of it, it would make quite a good motto for all of us.