Life in a Bail Hostel
This is a collection of my and other's opinion of Bail Hostels, Probation
Hostels, combinational Hostels, and any other types of Hostel thought
relevant. It has become necessary to do this to unite miscellaneous content,
and to stop irrelevant content leaking onto other formalised pages, such as
personal experiences on the Directory of Open Prisons; not an entirely
helpful mix.
The Big Brother contrast is partly because of all the surveillance and
custody involved, and partly because while I was inside, it struck me how
similar the experience was to Reality TV:
- I happened to be imprisoned for 9 weeks, the same length as the
programme.
- There were CCTV
cameras filming us everywhere.
- There was a Diary Room, complete with resident psychiatric/sociological
analysts.
- We were cut off from the outside World, including contact with
friends/family.
- Punishments, Rewards, Work, and Tasks were handed out.
Typically:
- Punishments: Denial of meals, Category B Prison for a week.
Cat. A for me, since the local prison for my area happened to be that.
- Rewards: Chocolates, staying up late to watch TV, lighter work.
- Work: Light cleaning.
- Tasks: Playing other Hostels at Bowls (in a public Leisure Centre) and
Pool (at their Institution, which had a professional 'Table).
Hostels have a curfew around 2300 to 0700.
There is 24Hr staff cover, and
strictly/stupidly enforced house rules. Breaking the rules results in
warnings, or a Breach [of Bail], which generally means prison for a week. Eg,
late trains are an imprisonable offence, but not for the rail operators, for
the passengers, if they're on Bail.
This is of course a serious attitude problem:
If you break the rules, you go to prison;
if someone else break's the rules, you go to prison.
It's all wrong...
When I was in a Hostel, I was threatened with imprisonment for a
staff member losing my keys (wrong peg), they did apologise though. Also for
eating my own biscuit between mealtime
(sic), because it was against the
rules, which they didn't apologise for: People shouldn't be sent to a
Cat. B for eating a biscuit.
More information, with a
typical
daily routine.
There exist further types of hostel, such as YMCA/Salvation Army ones
for machostic members of the general public, which are not prisons, or at
least not intended to be prisons. There are also Domestic Violence and
Torture "refugee"-type shelters, which technically speaking are a
type of hostel, but since these have a strictly voluntary attendence, they
are not prisons and not included here. The fact that their locations are
secret, and have to be, in order to operate, is not relevant to why they are
not included: If we did find any secret prisons to which people were dragged
off against their will, we damnwell would publish their details: Fear not [on
both counts].
Disclaimer
This logo is intended to be a parody of the NPS logo contrasted with the
Big Brother logo in the sense of the Novel 1984.
It is not a direct copy of the Big Brother/Endemol® logo,
rather an independently generated impression, and is does not indicate
association of any kind with Endemol® or the
Big Brother television programme. No approach has
been made to Endemol®, since this is probably not required. An approach
to the NPS probably is required, but since they are the same people who
wrongly locked me up, they can take a running jump if they think They
are offended... I doubt they would be anyway, atleast not until they read
that last sentence.
Back to expanded-contents
page.
