What Prison Work Taught Me About Healing, Loneliness, and Being Human

Some of the deepest prisons have no walls. Ekta Prakash - Founder , Humanising lives

When I tell people I work in prisons, I usually get a very specific reaction. People instantly think of Bollywood movies or crime dramas. They ask about the high walls, the guards in khaki, the fights, or how rehabilitation is going. But after a few years of doing this work, I’ve realised it has very little to do with crime and punishment. It is about grief, loneliness, shame, hope, and the deeply human need to be understood.

When I first walked through those massive iron gates, handed over my phone, and signed the visitor register, I thought I was entering a world where people had simply lost their physical freedom. I was naïve. Over time, I have become less certain about what freedom actually means. I have met inmates who are more honest with themselves than many people I know outside prison. Clear-eyed about who they are, what they have done, and the consequences of their choices. And I have met people in the so-called free world who remain trapped by shame, fear, loneliness, and versions of themselves they no longer know how to escape.

There is a strange honesty to prison. It strips away much of the armour we wear outside.

Status, money, family background, and carefully curated identities lose their importance. When you are sitting in a community hall under a whirring ceiling fan, facing fifty other people, you are simply another human being. For many inmates, it is the first time they have had to sit with their thoughts without distraction, and that can be deeply uncomfortable.

We often tell ourselves that healing will begin when life improves. Once I get bail. Once the case is over. Once I go home. But some of the most profound shifts I have witnessed happened inside prison walls.

I have sat with grown men who spoke about their mothers and suddenly became children again.

I have watched a quiet man carefully fold a faded photograph of his daughter, handling it with a tenderness that seemed completely at odds with the crime listed on his file. I have listened to people recall the exact meal their family was cooking on the day they were arrested, holding onto that memory as if it were a lifeline. In those moments, the room often falls silent. You can almost feel the weight of every unspoken regret hanging in the air.

Some prisons are built from concrete walls and iron bars. But the hardest prisons to escape are often the ones built from memory, guilt, loss, and things we cannot undo.

Healing does not begin when circumstances change. It begins when we stop running from what hurts.

The loneliness inside prison is unlike anything I had imagined. It is not simply about being physically separated from loved ones. It is the crushing feeling of being unseen.

I remember sitting with a man who had been arrested only days after his child was born. Five years had passed. He sat staring at his hands, terrified of the day he would finally go home because he wondered whether his own son would recognise him. Whether a child could accept a stranger as a father.

It is the fear that if people truly knew the depth of your regrets, they might stop showing up altogether.

The longer I do this work, the more I notice that same loneliness outside prison walls. I see it in crowded local trains, corporate offices, distant marriages, and endless social media feeds.

We have never been more connected, and yet so many of us feel profoundly alone.

Loneliness changes people. Sometimes it makes them hard. Sometimes it makes them numb. Sometimes it convinces them that nobody could possibly understand what they carry.

The world prefers simple categories: good people, bad people, victims, offenders. But human beings are rarely that simple.

So much of the behaviour we judge is often a person’s attempt to survive pain they never learned how to name.

Childhood neglect, violence, abandonment, difficult family histories, and unprocessed trauma leave marks that do not simply disappear with age. Trauma does not always look like sadness. Sometimes it looks like anger, silence, addiction, self-destruction, or a man staying awake through the night because he has forgotten what safety feels like.

Understanding someone’s pain does not excuse the harm they may have caused, but if we refuse to understand the roots of suffering, we make it much harder to prevent it from repeating.

If prison work has taught me anything, it is that nobody heals alone. People do not always need advice or solutions. More often, they need a space where they can stop performing, stop pretending, and tell the truth.

The moment someone feels genuinely heard, something shifts. Their shoulders soften. Their voice changes. Something inside them settles.

Almost every workshop I facilitate eventually arrives at the same questions:

Can I ever be forgiven?

Am I only the sum of my worst mistakes?

Who am I when everything else is taken away?

Over time, I have lost interest in judging people. It rarely helps. I am far more interested in understanding them. Because whether someone is wearing a prison uniform or a tailored suit, most of us are searching for the same things: a place to belong, a sense that we matter, and the hope that our lives can become bigger than the hardest thing we have survived.

Maybe healing is not about becoming someone new. Maybe it is about making peace with the parts of ourselves we have spent years trying to hide.

Because whether we are inside a prison or outside one, none of us were meant to carry our stories alone.

About the Author

Ekta Prakash is a lawyer, social impact leader, and Founder of Humanising Lives. For over a decade, she has worked across prisons, mental health, trauma support, and social rehabilitation, creating spaces where people can heal, reconnect, and rebuild their lives with dignity.