In an interview with APT, Lady Unchained shares her powerful journey from prison to purpose, highlighting how creativity, faith, and family support helped her heal and reclaim her voice. As a poet and advocate, she sheds light on the urgent need for trauma-informed justice systems and the human cost of neglecting rehabilitation.
Hello Lady Unchained, it's a great pleasure for us. We are very grateful for you to take some time to have a conversation with the APT. Could you please introduce yourself and also share a bit about your background?
So I am Lady Unchained. I am a poet, award winning broadcaster for National Prison Radio. I am a facilitator as well. So I go into prisons and facilitate creative writing workshops with men and women. And I'm the founder and CEO of Becoming Unchained, which is a creative mentoring program for artists with experience in the criminal justice system and, of course, an advocate for life after prison.
You've spent about eight months on bail and about 11 months in prison. How did it feel to be charged and sentenced to prison?
To be honest, I had no previous convictions before this. I had not even a caution to my name. So, to be convicted for such a long time for defending my sister, honestly, I felt like my life was over. I felt like they would no longer be a me anymore. If I'm honest, it felt like each month that went on I was losing a piece of myself and it didn't make it any easier when I got to prison, I realized that I'm really in prison as a 21 year old girl who had plans for the future. So I would say it was a nightmare.
You describe the prison term as the end of your life. So could you share, if you want, some of the emotions and realizations that you experienced during that time?
I would say during that time, I decided that my life didn't matter. Being on bail, it feels like you're in limbo and you kind of have no idea what's going to happen. Whether you want to go to prison, whether you're going to get off, whether you know you're going to be given a community sentence or whatnot. I think, in that moment, each individual goes through the most stripping part of their life.
It's like something has been ripped away from you, especially if you've never had any experience of the criminal justice system. It's a place where you should be fearful because, you know, TV tells us, it’s a very dangerous place. I would say for me, my emotions were all over the place. I was angry mostly at myself. I had no understanding of the deep rooted racism within the criminal justice system at the time.
So all I had to blame was me, you know, why couldn't I do better? Why couldn't I try harder? But unfortunately for me, I did everything in my life up until the age of 20 to avoid prison, to stay on the straight and narrow, to find a career, to follow a journey. And I still ended up in prison. So it did feel like the end of my life because college diploma as any qualifications I had received were irrelevant in prison.
Despite the hardship of your time, you’ve also spoken about this period as the beginning of a better life. What sparked that change? And would you describe the journey of healing as well?
So I have a quote and it is “My life ended and began with a prison sentence. Those metal doors awoke the faith in me.” And it is that literally those metal doors awoke the creativity in me. They awoke the faith that I had as a young child when I was in church, you know, in the choir, they awoke so much.
But I would say for anybody that has been to prison, or experienced prison, even working within the system, you understand that it's a dark under any place. It's a place where, if you don't find something, if you don't have maybe a mother or sister or something that you can hold on to on the outside, prison can break you.
And if it breaks you, it breaks you continuously. And this is why in the UK we will say revolving door, because prison is like a revolving door. If you don't have the right tools, unfortunately you will be sucked into that system and it will eat you alive.
Did you receive any support-legally, emotionally -at the community level during or after the sentence? How was that?
Before prison, my support system was my family. I come from a very strong family of care, so that was my support. I would like to say that the police wasn't as supportive during the time while I was on bail, I felt like I wasn't being heard. I felt like I was being continuously attacked by other people and trying to ask for help from the police was not helping me during the time in prison.
I would say again, the support of my family, the support of my friends, knowing that there are people outside that know I'm here but also care that I'm here. You know, they haven't judged me. They haven't forgotten about me, you know, because in prison you had that fear of being forgotten. I would say when it comes to after prison, that is the real sentence.
And that, yes, prison is a hard place, but navigating your life after prison is the hardest thing to do, especially if you've had no convictions before. You now have a new identity. You are now the ex-offender and ex-offender who has to declare this to work. Declare it to family members that didn't know. To partners. These are things that somebody that had no conviction will find difficult to do.
And for myself, it took me a long time to even tell the job centre that I went to prison because I was embarrassed. I was ashamed of it until I found the power of me, that pen that I found in prison, that writing. And today I started to discover that maybe this is something I can use to tell my story.
Because, after jail, it's hard. It's hard to think about how people would judge you. You know, it's hard to explain your story without getting angry. You know, my sentence was a life changing thing for me. And to be able to explain that without getting emotional or without getting angry, you know, I had to find a new way. And again, I would say support-wise: family.
I did find organisations that could help me, but I found them. I had to go and look for these services. I had to go and be seen and be heard. Sadly, for loads of people coming out of prison, they don't know how to find these services. They are used to not being seen. They’re used to not being heard.
They’re used to speaking about the same thing over and over again and not getting the support that they need and ending up in prison. So luckily I have family. Luckily, I come from a background where I always wanted to speak out and do something with, you know, they sent me to prison and I had never experienced it before.
And then I, I woke up to what prison really is. And I wanted people outside to know what that was. So my family supported me, my friends supported me. But in regards to charities, I would say I went and found that but not everyone can do that.
We work on torture prevention and what we do is try to address the risks that people who are or may be deprived of liberty face and we try to ensure that their rights are fulfilled. So as someone who has faced the justice system firsthand, why do you believe that torture prevention matters?
I think in the world we live in, so many people have suffered from abuse from a young age. You got women in prison who have been abused from day one, from the day they were born. They're born into families of abuse. And then they go into relationships of abuse. The prison system is a place of abuse. It doesn't nurture, it doesn't rehabilitate.
It doesn't support a woman or man to actually rebuild. In fact, what it does, it highlights some of those traumas, some of those pain that they've already been through. It highlights them, but doesn't give them a way to express them. Prison is a form of torture. And, unfortunately, if we allow people to be thrown in there, we are going to continue to torture them, which means that we are not allowing people to heal.
We're not allowing people to find that voice that says, actually, I was her as a child. I was abused in a relationship. You know, I never had a mum and they're not allowed to do that. And prison just allows you to just sit there and identify these needs, but not get help for it. So if we can create a place where there's true healing, then a lot of people wouldn't end up in these systems of torture, pain, because actually they've been helped and healed before the whole prison experience.
I think a place of torture is a mental health hospital, a secure units, you know, prisons. These are places that people are meant to go to get support, to get help. But if we don't change the way that they are built, the way that they are run, if we don't put people who are trauma informed advisors or, you know, solicitors or, you know, legal people, if you are not trauma informed, you will not understand that the woman sitting in front of you or standing in front of you just wanted help, maybe from the age of five, but that help was never given.
As a person with lived experience of the criminal justice system, what message would you give to change makers to improve the justice or prison system and ultimately to prevent torture and ill-treatment?
I would say, give people a chance, listen to all needs, treat people as individuals, not one. Do not send women with severe mental health issues to prison. Get them the right help that they need. Going back to that trauma informed kind of way of living, we need more of that because, if we don't have that, what happens is we're continuing a cycle of women who have been abused, creating children who are also going into a system that is an abuse, care systems.
I would say especially in the UK, we need our care systems to care for the young people. So give people a chance, let them heal and maybe, just maybe, they'll find their voice and become a contribution to society, a contribution that probably a lot of us are waiting for.
And somebody out there who is being tortured and being controlled and monitored and, you know, told they are not allowed to speak about something. That person is probably the person that can come and create a change that we all need, but they haven’t been allowed to be heard.
So give people a chance to be heard, give people a chance to be seen, but allow people to heal from that trauma, from that pain. And maybe, just maybe, we'll have a better world.
