When it came out, the first season of Time was hailed as a masterpiece. Set in a men’s prison, it depicted Sean Bean as a first-time inmate in a system that was creaking at the seams – and won praise for the accurate way it showed life behind bars.
Needless to say, expectation was high for season two, which takes place in a women’s prison and stars Jodie Whittaker, Bella Ramsey and Tamara Lawrance as inmates Orla, Kelsey and Abi as they attempt to navigate their sentences.
But which bits of the show are real and which are taking considerable liberties with the truth? We decided that the best person to answer these burning questions would be Jane*, who went to prison for fourteen months a few years ago and has since received support from Working Chance, a charity that helps women with experience of the justice system to find jobs.
Needless to say, Time spoilers follow.
Being ‘sent to prison for fiddling the leccy’
When we first meet Orla, it’s in a prison van, completely aghast at the turn her day has taken. “I shouldn’t even be here,” she says repeatedly: her crime is “fiddling the leccy”, which is tampering with the electricity meter to reduce the cost. It’s come as such a shock that she left the house in the morning not having told her children where she was going.
According to Jane, Orla’s crime is not a usual one. “I've definitely not come across that offence,” she says. That said, “many women were in for non-payment of fines. But if you think about how biased that is on women: someone comes around knocking, asking for money, it's the women who are in looking after the children. Where’s the man? Out.” Indeed, much of women's offending is driven by poverty, and many turn to petty crimes such as shoplifting to make ends meet.
The predicament Orla finds herself in – sent to prison with no warning – is also, sadly, not uncommon. “Someone left the house that day and a thing happened, and they go to bed in prison: that's quite a common thing,” Jane says.
She also cites a story she heard about a girl who went to court, “expecting a fine. She went with her mum, her child was in school, her dog was at home... and then she came out with a three-year prison sentence. So her mum all of a sudden has a child to look after and a massive dog to look after in a home that she doesn't live in.”
Back behind bars again
As the series progresses, we see just how much the odds are stacked against Orla: released from prison without a job, house or her children, she takes shifts in a local bar to try and make ends meet and ends up stealing money from the till to save up enough to put a deposit down on a house – needless to say, she soon ends up back behind bars again.
Is reoffending common? “I did see a few people, particularly women who were in for drug offences, because they were users,” Jane says.
“There was one girl who was 19 when I was on the induction wing in the first place... she'd been in 19 times and she was ‘celebrating’ the fact that [she’d had] 19 prison terms and [was] 19 years old. Yeah, we call it just the revolving door because for some people, it's impossible to get out of unless someone gives you a break.”
Orla’s cry for help
Orla has some of the series’ most violent and upsetting moments: in episode two, she is told by another inmate that the best way of seeing the prison governor is by cutting herself for attention.
This happens a lot, says Jane, especially considering that a shocking 82 per cent of women in prison report having mental health issues, as opposed to 52 per cent of men (according to statistics from HM Inspectorate of Prisons). “The self-harm rates in prison are astronomical, particularly for women… a lot of it is done for attention. And when I say that, I don't mean in the playground kind of way. I mean, literally women require attention and they're not getting it if they're not screaming and essentially cutting up, which is awful.”
In Time, Orla gets to speak to the prison’s deputy governor as a result of her actions – sadly, this is less likely to happen. “You're likely to get attention that way from perhaps an officer. You're never going to be able to speak to the governor.”
Understaffing
Many of the problems that Kelsey, Abi and Orla face are caused by understaffing – such as the moment when Orla, finally meeting the deputy governor, is told that the prison failed to pass on vital information about her children being taken into care.
It’s no surprise to hear that understaffing is absolutely a real-life problem: after all, it’s been in the news for months.
“It’s a huge problem,” Jane says. “But what that means is that everyone's just locked up… and you know, most people were fine with that. You’d just have some colouring books, and everyone was doing crochet.
“A genuine insight to prison, and what prison is like would be so very boring, which is why I think Time didn't do that because literally everyone is just doing crochet… literally that's what people are doing to pass the time. Because prison is very dull. And there is a lot of bang up. And that's because of staff shortages.”
Holding another prisoner hostage
At the end of episode two, Orla causes a full-fledged crisis at the prison, when the phone cuts out in the middle of a delicate conversation with her estranged son. The prison officer refuses her repeated requests for another phone call and taking a metal can lid, she proceeds to hold another prisoner hostage – causing officers in riot gear gather outside the cell as the prison officer attempts to talk her down.
According to Jane, though, this is stretching the limits of credulity. For one thing, there aren’t that many riot squads around the UK, and there almost certainly wouldn’t have been one at the prison Orla, Abi and Kelsey would have been at.
The more realistic scenario, she says, “is that one way or another things would have just calmed down or officers there would have done the best that they could to separate those two, bring the other character out, and Orla would have just been banged up and [had to] wait until the squad could arrive.”
Drugs
Drugs, in Time, are everywhere: Kelsey enters prison with a serious heroin habit and proceeds to get high in the cell she’s sharing with Abi and Orla. Though she then gets clean, danger is everywhere: she’s regularly passed packages of heroin during family meetings with her boyfriend, which she then hides in her vagina to smuggle past the guards – before being attacked for the ‘brown’ she’s cheated off some fellow prisoners.
Is this accurate? To put it bluntly: yes. “They were just everywhere,” Jane says. “I was offered heroin so many times… it's so much easier to find yourself in prison than it is on the street, out in your life. It's just there.”
She recalls one occasion when she was assigned to a cell on a corridor full of spice (synthetic cannabis) users. “I would get to the top of the stairs and I would feel lightheaded. Not because of the stairs, but because upstairs it was just spice.” When she raised this with prison guards, there wasn’t a lot they could do.
“One of the prison officers said to me, ‘I've got to leave this building at the end of the day. And I've got to get in my car. Do I think I'm safe to drive? What happens if I don't get home safe?’ We were all very much on the same page about it, but it was a huge problem. And then there were other officers, who sort of had the opinion of, ‘as long as the women have got their drugs, typically around Christmas, everything's a lot calmer.’”
How did the drugs get into prison? Like with Kelsey, often via family visits with their partners. “I saw a couple who were being really quite obvious about it. Like dangerously obvious, and then I saw officers literally watching and then turning a blind eye because of the paperwork involved.”
“Also it sounds kind of a bit conspiracy theory, but either officers or other staff are involved in it coming in [too]… you kind of had an idea about who might be involved in that, so you'd give them a bit of a wide berth.”
Prisoner attacks
A lot of Abi’s time in prison is spent dodging brutal attacks from her fellow prisoners after it is revealed that she is serving a life sentence for murdering her own baby whilst struggling with post-natal depression.
On one occasion, she is slashed across the face with a homemade shiv – on another, another inmate defecates in her food. Does this kind of stuff really happen in prison? No, says Jane: violence is rare.
“Why does everyone on prison TV have a shank? I saw three fights over the fourteen months I was in prison,” she says. “One was just a good old-fashioned punch-up because someone owed someone something… and the other two were awful. One was, I don't think it was directed at the officer but the officer got the brunt of it. It was hot water and sugar.”
As far as most attacks are concerned, though, “people have too much to lose, so they don't want to do stuff like that.”
“What I thought was brilliant on a really wrong level was someone was really pissed off with someone and they wanted to show them that, so they bought a [tub] of table salt from the canteen… and they just chucked this whole thing of table salt in this person’s bed. You're only allowed to do laundry once every two weeks, so they just had to deal with salt in their bed.”
Giving birth behind bars
Not all prisons have mother and baby units, but the prison Jane went to, like the one in Time, did, although the pregnant inmates were kept completely separate from the rest of the prisoners.
Like Kelsey, many mothers also end up having their babies taken away from them. “Maybe not in that specific way, but there's definitely separation, maybe at the point of birth. And that's, you know, dreadful. We never really had any interaction with the women who were on the mother and baby unit, they were kept completely separate from everyone else.”
And the part of the show where Kelsey gives birth in the recreation area of the women’s prison? Not entirely unrealistic: as Jane says, one inmate gave birth in the prison reception. “It was a rumour, but it was told to me by one of the officers, so I think it was true, because the officer was really warmed by the fact that on the birth certificate, the address didn't have to be the prison,” she says. “The local vicar said that the address they gave on the birth certificate, the place of birth could be the church."
Leaving prison with a tent
The trial of prison doesn’t end when the prison sentence does: “it’s getting harder to find places for people out of prison,” the officer tells Orla as she approaches her leaving date. “We haven’t got anywhere for you, Orla, all the hostels are full. We can give you a tent.”
Galling as this is, it’s depressingly real, too: 46 per cent of women who left prison last year did not have stable accommodation to go to, which in official speak, translates to not having any accommodation at all.
“I remember I was in reception one day, I think I'd just gone to change some clothing or something. But I was there when a woman was leaving,” Jane says. “It was a relatively new officer, and she just had to hand her over a tent… I went up to the officer and literally just said to her, ‘are you okay?’ And she just burst into tears, and she went, ‘that's not all right, is it?’
Seasons one and two of Time are streaming now on BBC iPlayer. For more information on Working Chance, which supports women with convictions, click here
