Late one night, in my prison cell, I watched the Stanford Experiment on television. If you’ve never seen it, it was a documentary about a psychological study conducted in 1971 by Dr Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. It involved college students who volunteered to play the roles of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison environment. The experiment was designed to explore how social roles and power dynamics influence behaviour. I was laying on my prison bed, watching this small box TV which I paid for the privilege of having in my cell, watching an experiment on my television quickly spiral out of control with these gammon "guards" becoming violent, and at times, even sexually violent towards the "prisoners." Given the level of harm being perpetrated and the fact that the “prisoners” were experiencing severe emotional distress, the study had to be stopped after just six days, even though it was supposed to last two weeks. The study revealed, what I was seeing play out every single day around me in the prison, the awful ways that ordinary people would engage in harmful and violent behaviour when placed in particular roles and environments, and it raised important questions about authority, morality, and the human psyche. It highlighted the very real harm that absolute power and control can have when it is bestowed upon people who are able to wield it with impunity on those who are in captivity.
Tonight, I got to thinking about the Stanford Prison Experiment and what it revealed about the role of the prisoner. There’s something that happens when we’re placed in captivity—we start to behave like animals in a cage. I’ve seen it and lived it. The slow pacing along the perimeter of the yard, like tigers at the zoo, walking the same path over and over again. It’s not just about being contained; it’s about how that containment seeps into you. Michel Foucault wrote about how power operates, not just as something imposed on us but as something we internalise. We begin to discipline ourselves, adopting the gaze of authority, consuming its power, and making it part of who we are. In a strange way, we become both prisoner and guard, surveilling our own thoughts and actions, embodying the very system that holds us captive. Power doesn’t just control us from the outside—it shapes how we move, think, and exist in the world.
Then when we walk out of the prison gates, we are changed forever. They call it institutionalisation, but it’s more than that—we’ve internalised the power that was exerted over us. We’ve started doing the discipline for them. And it’s not that we become law-abiding citizens in some idealised way; it’s that the state’s grip stays with us, shaping how we move through the world, how we act, react and think and feel. We carry their narrative about us—that we are “bad”, beyond “redemption”, destined to fail, that we’ll inevitably “be back”. We start to believe that we can never escape the shadow of the salacious headlines that once defined us.
Even more than that, we learn to live on edge, hyper-vigilant, always bracing for the moment we might be sent back inside. We don’t trust ourselves anymore, convinced that we don’t belong in the free world. That we’re undeserving, disposable, outcasts cast out. The system’s power lingers in our minds, whispering that we’re not capable of making it. It impedes our progress from the inside out, keeping us trapped in its grip even after we’ve left its physical walls. It’s not just what they do to us—it’s what we begin to do to ourselves.
And these days, I find myself more and more aware of the ways people have power and control over me, and it scares me, if I am honest. It scares me to realise that parts of me remain so damned vulnerable to those who have self-deputised as judge, jury, and executioner. I’ve handed them that power by acquiescing to their thuggery—because that’s all it is in essence. They hold no formal authority, no badge or uniform, yet they wield the weight of my fear. And I hate myself for it. I hate that I fear inadvertently “upsetting them,” knowing that when I do, the axe will fall right across my neck. I hate that I’ve become this scared little puppy, helpless, defenceless, and so utterly alone in it all.
As a prisoner, admitting weakness or vulnerability was always unwise. It was a weapon that could be turned against you—also, a fatal mistake in any kind of warfare. But I don’t want to be at war anymore. At least not with these foes. I didn’t choose this battle because it’s not a fight between equals; it’s actually bullying, plain and simple. And the truth is, I am vulnerable. I live in a precarious position as a criminalised person, always on the edge, always with something to lose. And besides, there is honesty in vulnerability, and I can’t let others steal my truth. I can’t let them strip the truth from my chest just because they don’t want their ugliness laid bare. Their cruelty doesn’t deserve my silence.
So, what do you do with all this power and subservience, when it’s been trained into you, and there are people walking around wielding big sticks, with their followers behind them carrying flaming pitchforks, ready to knock your block off at any moment? What do you do when you’re skidding toward half a century of life, and you can’t be fucked with the games anymore because all you want is peace? Your life’s goal is liberation—not just for yourself but for everyone. You want to free us all from the prisons that hold us, whether physical or mental. Oh, and you wouldn’t mind not having to buy food at Foodbank anymore, but that’s a privilege, not a given. So, what do you do?
What do you do when there are so many cruel people in the world, and all you want to do at the first sign of a fight is fucking run, because you’ve been fighting for half your life, and you know fighting is what gets you in trouble. Fighting is what lands you back in the system, and you can’t go back there. You’d sooner die than be locked in that fucking cage again. And these people, these thugs—they don’t know the rules of the streets. They don’t know the rules of the cage. They hide behind their words, their degrees, and their lawsuits, because they can. Because their privilege gives them the time, the resources, and the audacity to harass and harangue. Their power is either handed to them or self-bestowed, as if they’ve deputised themselves with authority, they were never given but gladly take. They play dirty, and their weapons aren’t fists, elbows or knees—they’re bureaucracy, manipulation, and the illusion of control they’ve convinced everyone, including themselves, they deserve.
So back to the Stanford Experiment and how power corrupts, how it warps people—both those who wield it and those who are crushed under its weight. The experiment showed us how quickly people will embrace cruelty when given even the illusion of authority. But the flip side is that, as prisoners, we absorb that power too. It gets under our skin and seeps into our bones, training us to self-discipline, to stay small, to anticipate punishment even when no one is watching. And that’s the trap—they don’t need to be watching anymore because we’ve already done the work for them. It’s why I just want to run and keep running, to get as far away as I can from all of this. But running doesn’t change anything. There’s liberatory work to be done - work that demands our courage, our presence, our refusal to stay caged.
But how do you do that work when you have to keep one eye over your shoulder all the time? When you’re constantly waiting for the next blow, the next accusation, the next threat? It’s fucking exhausting. Power, even in its pettiest, most self-appointed forms, is exhausting to resist because it’s everywhere. It corrupts not just the people who wield it but the systems they build, and the people forced to live under it.
And still, we fight. Because that’s the only way forward. But God, I wish it didn’t have to be so hard.
Thank fuck for community—for being in community with other prisoners, with people who truly get it. This is why we have to stand with each other, shoulder to shoulder, because when they come for one of us, they come for us all. We can’t let ourselves be picked off one by one, isolated and broken by their tactics. We have to stand together, because power will crush us if we let it. But united, we are something else entirely. We are a force. We can hold each other up when the weight gets too heavy, remind each other of our worth when the world tries to strip it away, and fight for each other when the fight feels too big to take on alone.
Community is how we survive. It’s how we resist. And it’s how we will win—not just for ourselves, but for everyone who has ever been locked away, forgotten, or discarded.
Together, we can be unbreakable.
Together, we can work towards freedom.