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Going to jail is frightening for all first-time offenders, but even more so for somebody who can hardly say a word and has the social skills of a ham sandwich. In the run up to my sentencing date, I felt as if my heart was going to beat out of my chest. I was as scared of standing up in front of a room full of people as I was of getting locked up. Fortunately, the judge didn't criticize me too heavily or spend a long time reprimanding me, which would have left me a gibbering wreck. He did, however, sentence me to two years in prison, which I thought was a bit excessive for a first-time offender who had been caught selling ecstasy, not crack or heroin.
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I put in for counseling almost as soon as I entered the prison, but didn't see a counsellor until at least six months through my sentence. I only ended up seeing him twice and, to be honest, he didn't seem to know a whole lot about mental health. He seemed like a random screw who'd been assigned the role of counsellor, not a trained professional.I was promised help with my anxiety when I got out of prison, but that didn't materialize at all. Despite having to attend weekly probation sessions and repeatedly asking about the treatment I'd been told I would receive, I was still never referred to the local mental health service. I could have done with some counseling, because it's hard adjusting to normal life again after spending years behind bars. I was used to being around people who talked about crime constantly, and struggled to revert to my former self. The few friends I had left soon drifted away as I bored them with stories about the well-known criminal faces I'd met and violent incidents I'd seen in prison. The other cons had talked almost exclusively about that kind of thing, but my mates were all university-educated and couldn't have cared less that I had worked on the servery with a local Mr. Big or seen somebody get beaten half to death with a can of tuna in a sock. It was weird and morbid to them, and not stuff they could relate to.For a while, I found myself hanging around with criminals and no one else. It was weird, because I'd cut off all contact with the people I met in prison for fear of getting caught up in their lifestyle, but gravitated towards other ex-cons a short time after being released. I went through a period of being completely cut off from mainstream society and only interacting with people who existed on the margins. Fortunately, after accidentally taking an overdose while on a night out with some crims, I decided that I was going to end up fucking my life up even more if I carried on being around people like that, and chose instead to plunge myself into a state of really intense isolation, where I had no contact with anyone at all other than people from online social anxiety forums. This was a really lonely, soul-destroying period, but culminated in me making a concerted effort to drag myself out of solitude and connect with some of my old law-abiding friends again.I've still got social anxiety today and have received very little help, which isn't great, considering the fact that I explained to the probation services that it was the root cause of my offending. I was only in two jails and can't generalize to the whole of the British penal system. All I can say is that if my experiences are reflective of the overall state of mental health services for offenders, then there's little wonder the recidivism rate among mentally ill inmates is so high. While I'd be lying if I said I didn't witness some good work being done to rehabilitate inmates—for example, the excellent vocational courses offered by the jails I was in—it's clear that when it comes to mentally ill prisoners, some are being released without the problems that led to their crimes being addressed. And surely, this can only lead to future offenses being committed.READ: I Was Relentlessly Harassed By the Media After Cutting My Own Penis Off