Sims, 31, knows from experience how childhood experiences can colour the rest of a person’s life. She herself was an angry little girl (” I had a few psychological problems,” she says). At 13 she was sent to a behavioural unit, which she calls “full-stops and capital letters, because that’s all they taught you. It was slow”. A familiar story ensued involving falling in with the wrong crowd and drugs. It wasn’t until she was sentenced to life with a three-year tariff that she started to get her act together. “I used my time really positively, I learned to adapt because I knew I had to. I wanted to change so I applied for all my courses, did them and benefited from them positively.” Sims found the counselling and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which she applied to get to the root of the problem, most useful: “I wanted to change,” she reflects, “the problem with a lot of prisoners is they don’t want to change”.
Following her release, almost exactly three years after being sentenced and having proven herself to be a model prisoner, Sims got her first proper job, in recruitment. She was earning a good wage but because she wasn’t living on benefits, she says she was penalised: “Based on my income the hostel charged me £860 a month for a single room! I wasn’t polite about it, I called them all incompetent tossers and was called aggressive and was recalled.”
The second time in prison, things didn’t work out so well: “I was angry about what had happened, perhaps I didn’t deal with it in the right way. I always spoke my mind but inside you’re not allowed to speak your mind, they call it challenging behaviour. I was continually challenging and pushing boundaries and they wouldn’t release me.”