Greetings, prison newspaper.
I am writing to you from the Metropolitan Remand Centre just after lock in at approximately 5pm.
I read your paper the night previous, and a part of me that previously was dead or dying suddenly felt alive and connected to others with similar struggles and trauma.
I am 28 years old and come from a single mother with three other step siblings. My mum had me at 21 and at an early age, I was given a Criminal Reference Number. I have spent two years out of prison since the age of 19, roughly 8 years. I feel like there is no future for me until I read an article in your paper about post release stress disorder that lit a light of hope in myself that previously no one else could. I have been incarcerated for two weeks now, and awaiting sentencing in three months time. The reasons for these offences I put down to mental health issues such as PTSD, PRSD, depression, anxiety and an extremely poor peer support network and so on and so forth, lack of housing, drug substance abuse that all seemed to feed each other and when I live like this, it is impossible to find the one thing that could save me a proper healthy relationship. They say loneliness is like a hunger, and though my life was shit, is shit, I feel like the law of attraction brought the worst of people and situations. So I just want to say thanks for your newsletter/prison paper.
Zayne
