ABSTRACT
A couple of months ago I met a 45-year-old woman who had been newly released from prison. She was totally depressed–‘unmotivated’ was how she had been taught to describe herself by her ‘key worker’ at the hostel where she had been living for three months. When I inquired about her American accent, she told me her story. Briefly, her family had emigrated to the United States when she was two years old, and she had never previously returned to England. She had been a drug user since the age of seventeen, in and out of prison for various thefts and minor frauds committed to fund her addiction. After the last sentence of twelve months, during which she had undertaken several programmes designed to aid rehabilitation upon release, she, never having obtained American citizenship, had been taken straight from the prison with her few belongings and deported to England, which she had last seen 44 years before. At Heathrow she had stayed two nights in emergency accommodation and then the campaigning organisation Prisoners Abroad gave her the fare to the north London hostel where she had been ever since. During the same period, of course, other foreign nationals were going in the opposite direction, deported from English gaols to Jamaica, Nigeria, and elsewhere–while English prisoners were returning to their own wastelands of homelessness, addictions and unemployment. Same old story–new global twist.
