Prison Notebook

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!’