Socks for Wandsworth Prison
'Chaplains appearing with a pair of luminous orange socks is a beginning of a friendship. It creates a feeling that there are people on the inside who will help a bit.’
The Quaker chaplain at Wandsworth Prison has reached the target of 14,000 pairs of socks to hand out to men jailed there.
Liz Bridge sent out the appeal with the aim of everyone getting two pairs of new socks for Christmas, ‘preferably socks that can survive the rigours of the prison laundry system’.
Although the items were handed out as Christmas presents on 21 December, socks can still be donated at the visitors’ centre.
Liz Bridge told the Friend: ‘The socks are going to be Christmas presents for the men, but we are a remand prison so we take about fifty men a day who have been badly shaken, because most people don’t expect to go to prison, and don’t expect it to be quite as miserable as arriving during Covid in a Victorian building. So any socks I get after Christmas I can easily give to the new arrivals, because that’s where men are most at risk of self harm. They are shocked and frightened, they know what they’ve lost, and they can’t see a road ahead. Chaplains appearing with a pair of luminous orange socks is a beginning of a friendship. It creates a feeling that there are people on the inside who will help a bit.’
The chaplain is looking for two sorts of socks: either brilliantly bright, or warm. Black socks are not needed as the rules forbid prisoners from wearing black or white clothes so they are not mistaken for an officer. Liz Bridge added: ‘When you have a desperate person in the prison, it’s amazing what small things will cheer them up, particularly as it isn’t a place of colour or softness. If we get desperate, and it gets very cold, we can use them as gloves.’
The appeal follows last year’s successful appeal for hats, which resulted in 16,000 being donated. ‘They never stopped coming,’ she said. ‘You can’t stop a knitting Quaker. So on Halloween this year, I issued another 16,000 hats, and I suspect that next Halloween, I will still be able to issue hats. It gives us an enormous resource, having quick warmth.’
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