by Nick Moss
Scout Szofiya Bolton wrote the poems collected here as reflections on the experience of serving a prison sentence, further to attempting to hold up a shop with a toy handgun while in the manic phase of her bipolar disorder. Scout had been misdiagnosed by the community mental health team whose care she was under as having Unstable Personality Disorder.
This misdiagnosis led to repeated hospital admissions and, ultimately, her index offence. Her GP had, as a further result of the misdiagnosis, prescribed her a high dose of fluoxetine, which is known to trigger mania in people with Bipolar Affective Disorder. All of this is set out with simple honesty at the book’s opening, where the pre-sentence psychiatric report from HMP Styal is reproduced.
Scout was already a published poet when she was sentenced to custody. Her book, though, has none of the distancing effects that you’d expect to be deployed by someone who would not perhaps have expected to go to jail at some point. This is a work produced as a response to a crisis, and it is unsparing in its dealing with that fact. It is also a book that shows beauty in the everyday solidarities of custody: the friendships, the encounters, the sharing that make being inside such a particular experience.
The sounds and smells of jail
One of the unique aspects of jail is that it brings with it a combination of sensory overload and sensory deprivation. There is the immediate stench of enclosure – of hundreds of bodies sharing space together (in Styal this would have been both heightened and at the same time diffracted by the accommodation of the majority of the prisoners in houses rather than on wings); the hyped up-noise (feet clanging on metal; the improvised bassline battles that occur when radios and stereos are cranked up to compete to be heard); the smells of talcs and soaps and aftershaves as cons get ready for visits.
Alongside this though is the loss of the familiar – family conversations, the washing-powder nostalgia of home; even the tedious familiarity of court holding cells, jurors’ faces, judges sneers, barristers’ expensive scents that have all mapped out the preceding weeks. Scout is great on all of this. She maps out the sonic and olfactory experience of jail with particular clarity. What she also does though – and what makes this book so special – is to put us inside the manic self, detail the high, the crash and the re-assembling of a life from all of this.
At the book’s opening, Scout is “at the end of myself” with “all my choices contorting like decomposing ballerinas/with flesh rotted.” There is, as most ex-cons will recognise, a bleak positivity in this – the worst has happened. You’re banged up. Now to make sense of it and live on. “The end is a periscope and what else? It’s a coast/with glowing beneath/something you remember/that was lively, sinful, recent, forgotten.” And a grittily realistic awareness: “I had hoped for a day in the sun, but when I got to the/ end of myself, all I got was this lousy plastic mattress.”
In the poem “Real Schizophrenic Simulator Not Clickbait !!!!” a phenomenology of mania is sketched out. “You hear a ukelele as if it were a harp, and you / write your own death-date on an Etch -a–Sketch.” The language then starts to run outwards from itself – to accelerate and disassemble and free-associate. “Your pain has a unique frequency, that’s why / your ceiling has caved in, it is a booming, sonic / lighthouse wave, hypodermic razor clams awash / on an oily shore / slick with grief and sticky with love / the psychic fault-line this house was built upon / can be accessed with symbols you paint on the walls.”
This feels like the eye-burning frenzy of a three-day crack binge – the hit, the high, the trying to push through invisible walls, the hit, the high again, and a dragging-down exhaustion that makes your muscles feel like stones in your pocket; and you’re swimming, drowning, then flying and all this all over again.
Words exploding like bomb-blasts
Scout’s words are sniper-precise though. She can bring to the page a whiplash symbolistic torrent, but all of it hits its mark. In this she reminds me of Fran Lock – that savouring of language as a way of gouging, carving out rage and pain and love in a tightly-controlled, but ecstatic rush. We are carried along, the words exploding like cluster munition, bomb-blast upon bomb-blast so that the experience of mania and disintegration is both mapped out for us, and we are derailed within the map.
This is poetry as Emily Dickinson has it: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Scout has contrived a work of power and beauty from a grim, degrading set of circumstances-by looking at it straight-on, and by refusing to be degraded by it. The world before jail was a world haunted by the “restless animus of poltergeists”, with home “a bottle graveyard thick with dust.” Disintegration is set down plainly and without unnecessary affect or hyperbole; “a rabbi told me there is no / self it is all in the being and doing two weeks / later I declared my undying love to a man I barely / knew imagine how awful it would have been if / he’d said yes”. And still the manic’s grandiosity that wills “To be Divine in the brigade, and turn / a sweatbox into a carriage.” (but doesn’t every prisoner need to hold onto some of this – to avoid being reduced to “a parody of what was supposed to happen” – “where women like me beat / their little heads against the doors”?)
Coming out the other side of the experience of custody involves recognising a commonality with the “women like me.” Prisons only function on the basis of the passivity of cons. But it’s also true that the experience of prison is constituted by small acts of looking out for each other that aren’t quite resistance, but represent a straightforward refusal to live like beasts. The helping someone write a letter, the not hogging the landing phone, the sharing a tea and some burn with someone who’s just had shit news from home, the morning nods on the landing to check we’re all ok and have survived to scratch off another calendar date.
Scout is spot-on in her capturing of this, in a world where “I’m not copping an attitude, sir, I just haven’t been / given my phone PIN yet. How would you like it/ If this were you? / Can you imagine? / Do you try to?” From one day to the next “the blue women: digging weeds, linking arms, sitting parole, making lists of interventions, present, failing to appear:” So much pain here , so much detritus of addiction and despair: “We have measured/our lives in incentives earned / and lost. Boyfriends dead and / not-so-dead; the iron walls of the heart.” The slow recovery of another fragment of self: “every day since I got here, I feel like muzak / slowing down, like I had a pet crow instead of a / personality and now the pet crow has eaten into / my face. The drugs kind of work.”
For Scout Tzofiya Bolton, prison worked, kind of. Without the Mental Health Team at Styal she wouldn’t have received a correct diagnosis and appropriate medication. She rebuilt family ties. Found work with National Prison Radio. But even the bits of jail which can work are fucked over by the fact of jail, which doesn’t work. According to paragraph 3 of the 1999 Prison Rules, “The purpose of the training and treatment of convicted prisoners shall be to encourage and assist them to lead a good and useful life.” Does a prison sentence help facilitate this? Does starving prisons of educational and substance rehabilitation resources assist? Does the impact of imprisonment on the maintenance of family ties help bring this about? What is a “good and useful life” anyway? Does it mean an independent and fulfilled life or just one where we are obedient bodies available to capitalism for exploitation?
The sweet fury that keeps you alive
This is not a book that ducks these questions, even in its recognition that some interventions at Styal made a real difference to Scout’s life. Jail is “A negotiation whereby we earn zopiclone / as a treat, where we role-play our / probation, have a safe word for arrest.” Jail is “a negotiation / whereby we maintain rights to / a sweet fury we brought with our own / degradation.” And maybe that’s the ultimate prison dialectic – holding on to the “sweet fury” that keeps you alive, while recognising where that leads you to crash the car of your life and learning to swerve or brake next time.
The book is structured as a progression through the disciplinary regimes of prison – basic, standard and enhanced, with each stage a moment on the journey from sentencing/breakdown to understanding/treatment and release. At the end, Scout is no longer (or not only) the person who “got so used to trying to die that / I soon forgot my true incentive.” She is aware of the “joy of saving a full day’s / wages for a long call home! Last night / I had a panic attack that life must, one / day, end.” She is grounded, rebuilding her relationship with her kids, “moored by a small child’s sticky / chubby hand.”
For those who have been, or are, banged up, this book will frame and help chart imaginatively an experience that can encompass trauma , recovery and revolt. For those who haven’t, it will make that experience real in all its kaleidoscope days – loud, sweaty, jagged, hooched up, sunbathing on the yard. As Scout puts it, she has “found remorse without shame.” This is a book that tells us “Jail in real life is like London in films / more whimsy and greenery than one first presumes.”
In writing the book, though, Scout shows that she still has a righteous anger intact. Since 2001, at least eleven women have taken their own lives at HMP Styal. One is mourned here. “A girl died last night. / The guards kept their key shaking / at a minimum, kept watch by the cadaver’s / door, afraid she would re-animate / or worse, re-offend.” This is a book that, from an initial catastrophe produces words that are bracing, angry, and possessed of a grim wit; that takes the experience of trauma and confinement to make its readers feel jolted alive. It also knows the difference between necessary remorse and complete surrender; is able to say both that “The thing from which I’m / running is never not me” but also “If I were to make a bomb, I’d make every wire the same colour to break the hearts of the disposal unit, is what I’m saying.”
THE MAD ART OF DOING TIME, by Scout Szofiya Bolton (BROKEN SLEEP BOOKS 2025) is available here
