Reflections on Interviewing participants

Santra : My thoughts/ Reflections

6 out of 8 participants who were part of our projects are individuals I have known from different walks of life. They all had different experiences within the prison system. Some of them who have to spend a lot longer serving their sentence than the others. Due to my relationship with the participants, as a group, we decided it is more appropriate that I conduct the workshop without the other group members to make them feel more comfortable. Lucas also had one individual who he conducted the workshop with, who was close to him. Majority of the members experienced the prison system in Singapore while others had their sentence in Turkey, Japan and Dubai. Participant 1 especially was extremely comfortable with sharing his entire experience in the prison with me other than taking part in the workshop. He also gave me the consent to share his experience with the others

Experience: He described his experience as highly unsettling. The guard bought him into the cellar blindfolded which he doesn’t understand why till this date, it might be a way to induce fear into him. The room was the size of roughly 3 by 3 meters long with a mat to sleep on and a urinal and one cup to wash up. The cellar was at the basement with no windows, no clock, no natural light in any form. Though there was a pale yellow dim light that was shinning through out the corridor. He described the air inside being stale and cold. They gave him only one meal in the span of 24 hours which was described as mushy in texture, with carrot and rice. After the first 30 minutes itself it became quite uncomfortable, he felt bored and then annoyed, the unsettling surrounding started to make him worried and gave him a “strange kind of pain”. In order to distract himself, he started to figure out the structure of the song “Let it Happen by Tame Impala”, he desperately wanted to write the song down somewhere, but there was no pen or paper which made him anxious. After a while, he started repeatedly reciting the poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg. After what felt like 4-5 hours of trying to distract himself he started to lose his mind. He told me he pretended to hang himself with the materials he found in the cellar mostly to have some sort of human contact and to get the guards attention. After this strange attempt, he was shifted into a padded cell with high security in a straight jacket. Where the only opening in the entire room was the size of a letterbox. He felt worse in there than the previous cell. After a few hours, they transferred him back into the other cell and he felt much better in comparison.

Some of the memories they described were not easy to listen to because of how much I know the experience changed their life. Few members decided to share something cheerful or one off wicked experience. I found that interesting since I know a huge chunk of their life has been unsettling.So when they decided to focus on memories that bought them joy was especially refreshing. Few of the calls lasted a lot longer, this is because i wanted to make sure I am there to talk anything through incase they are triggered in any way. When we were planning out the workshop as a group one of the main thing we focused on after the trial workshop was how to "offboard" the individuals from the workshop cheerfully. This is because we realised few participants during the Hourglass experiment especially shared unsettling memories, since it was the third and final workshop, ending the workshop abruptly after they had shared something personal that had to be changed.