A bit of a shock to us all

I've done some work! Some actual leaving the house, being given money for it work!
I was reaching the point of being all done with the agency and saying no thank you, no more work, there are other things I want to do with my time. But then they came along yesterday morning and said "could you work at the prison for a few days?" and I said "yes please" (admittedly with several provisos on the timing and so on...) So I've spent the last two afternoons and will spend a large chunk of next week working in an office "behind the wire" and above "the yard". I was super keen because I thought it might help with the volunteering that I will soon be starting in one of the prisons around here and because the work is more interesting than a lot of what the agency gets - and it (reasonably) fitted with Husbink's shifts.
So yesterday, I drove up and saw a real life prison for the first time in my life. So many TV programmes and films show prisons that I hadn't contemplated that I'd never actually seen one before. I was shocked. I can't really tell you what shocked me. I think I'd just been rather naive. It is ugly. It is tatty. It is scary. I have to go through heaps of security to get to my desk. It includes a point where I go into a "cage". On my first trip through this point I got (very briefly) stuck. Less than a minute between the guard closing the first gate and opening and second but it was scary. I didn't think I was stuck, I didn't think anything bad would happen but I did get just the most fleeting sense of what it must be like to be "inside".
Even though I'm working there extremely briefly and just doing admin, I am really excited about some of the things I've heard about happening in the prison service - the opportunities given to prisoners to give them real life skills to help them avoid reoffending, efforts to improve the systems and decrease chances for "custodial mishaps". Clearly, it isn't all happy happy fluffy fluffy. Clearly. But although still quite nervous about it, I'm pretty excited about the volunteering.