by Pryce, Vicky
Prisoners in general are statistically more likely to be from backgrounds of social exclusion and poverty and an unexpected additional child may tip the balance and aggravate the hardship to crisis point. There is not enough information about how many of the initial kinship care arrangements break down, resulting in the child entering the care system further down the line. A small but shocking minority of women in prison have no knowledge or information at all regarding care arrangements for their children while they are in custody. The Revolving Doors Agency based in Holloway prison found in a survey of 1,400 women serving their first sentence that forty-two women (3 per cent) had no idea who was looking after their children. Within this cohort it was reported that nineteen children under the age of sixteen years were looking after themselves.4 Baroness Corston reflected that ‘quite apart from the dreadful possibility that these children might not be in a safe environment, this must cause mothers great distress and have deleterious consequences for their mental health’.5
In my case, after many extra hearings and two trials, I received a custodial sentence of eight months for accepting my ex-husband’s penalty points onto my driving licence some ten years earlier. This book will not dwell on the case or what went before it but will focus on the things I then learned about prisons, the prison system and the cost to society of sending people, particularly women, to jail who are no real threat to society.
And throughout it all I actually surprised myself. I told everyone that I was flexible and could cope with everything. Though I believed it, my friends and colleagues didn’t. One of the first letters I received in prison was from a friend who reminded me that I had just two nights earlier at our local Pizza Express sent my water back because it had lemon in it, sent the wine back because it was too warm and complained that the egg on my pizza wasn’t soft enough. This tale apparently caused a lot of hilarity among our friends who were trying to reconcile that incident with my assertion that I was ‘flexible’. Point taken! I think he may have made up the bit about the egg but the rest is probably true. But what I had meant by flexibility was being able to change expectations and adapt to new environments, regardless of what was thrown at me. And adapt I had to in many more ways than I might have imagined.
Again, I was lucky; I have generally had few health concerns of any sort in my life. Many other women entering custody bring with them an array of emotional and mental health problems, as well as traumatic experiences. Some 37 per cent of women sentenced to prison say they have attempted suicide at some point in their lives6 and 40 per cent have received treatment for a mental health problem in the year before coming to prison.7 Nearly all (97 per cent) have experienced at least one traumatic life event, while just over half (54 per cent) of female remand prisoners were addicted to drugs in the year before entering prison.8 Just under half of women prisoners have been victims of domestic violence and one in three has experienced sexual abuse.9 There are countless other statistics I could share to show that the women entering prison often come from chaotic or troubled backgrounds, severely reducing their ability to cope in functional ways with the pressures of imprisonment.
A week before the verdict I had gone to a ‘chattering classes’ dinner in Islington. No one there – including one distinguished QC and judge – thought I would be found guilty. And if the unlikely event occurred, surely a sixty-year-old grandmother with a spotless record would not be sent to prison. They confessed that they knew no one who had gone to prison and they couldn’t imagine what serving time might be like, though it turned out one friend present had been briefly imprisoned in Communist Poland for running money to the underground network of the banned Polish union, Solidarity. He had been caught and the police and judicial authorities explained they were simply doing their duty and upholding Polish law as it was at the time. But vivid as this experience remained in his memory, the story of sleeping twelve to a room on straw mattresses and toilets without loo paper was – I hoped – not relevant to British prisons. All I had to go by was a publication on the net by an ex-offender, giving useful advice on what prison was like, what to take in and how to cope.
My very good friends Nick Butler and Rosaleen Hughes expressed similar feelings as they offered a safe haven from photographers in a house not far from mine the Sunday night before sentencing. With the thought that I might not have a square meal again for a while, they cooked up apple crumble and cream, my favourite pudding. They also gave me books (to pass the time) and a radio so I could listen to the Today programme – they did not think it was possible for me to survive without enjoying John Humphrys flaying some shifty interviewee each morning. When I left my friends I could see that they were perplexed about this new category I was going to join: a ‘criminal’ and possibly about to spend some time in prison.
It is understandable that they should have felt that way. But now that I have experienced it myself I must admit that I am astounded at the misconceptions out there – not only about what makes a criminal but also about how one is treated. What I discovered in very simple terms is that first of all ‘criminals’ are very much like us and the people we meet in the street. In fact, as a result of a Freedom of Information request by the Press Association in early 2012 it was reported that at the time some 900 police officers and community support officers were serving with criminal records. Though most were for motoring offences, other crimes included burglary, supplying drugs and causing death by dangerous driving. Indeed there are 9.2 million people in the UK who have a criminal record and one in four of the UK’s working-age population has a criminal record.10 One in three males under the age of twenty-five is known to have a criminal conviction other than for a motoring offence. Even the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, revealed that when young and drunk, he was given community service in Germany for setting fire to a collection of rare cacti.11
The number of people committing offences each year is huge. According to Ministry of Justice statistics more than 1.8 million people were either taken to court or given a reprimand or penalty notice for disorder in 2012. This enormous figure coincides with a reduction in the number of crimes committed.12
But the real figures for people who have committed offences will be even higher. In the ongoing, highly respected Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, it was found that 41 per cent of a sample of males born in a deprived area of south London in 1953, today aged sixty, had at least one criminal conviction by the age of fifty and an average of five convictions each. More astonishingly, when asked, 93 per cent of the men admitted to having committed at least one of the following crimes: burglary, theft of vehicles, theft from vehicles, shoplifting, theft from machines, theft from work, fraud, assault, drug use and vandalism.13 This suggests that the real number of people who have committed at least one crime may be more than twice the reported figure. All of this is nothing new, of course. Back in the 1940s, a study in New York found that 99 per cent of adults admitted to having committed at least one offence. Even church ministers admitted an average of eight offences each.14 Other studies have shown that there is no relationship between socio-economic status and self-reported delinquency: middle-class kids break the law as much as poorer kids.15
In 2012, the British Crime Survey reported 9.8 million crimes against adults and children in England and Wales.16 Yet there were only just under 700,000 convictions.17 That’s just 7.1 per cent of crimes leading to a conviction. And that presumes that all crime is captured by the British Crime Survey, which is generally acknowledged not to be so.
If one puts seriously violent cases aside, the division between being able to walk down the street and being put behind ‘bars’ can be down to a single moment – a wrong decision, a wrong turning, finding oneself in the wrong place at the wrong time, being associated with the wrong people, a momentary misjudgement – something that people do all the time but usually without disastrous consequence to them and their families. In fact, 24 per cent of women in prison have no previous convictions.18 And for those convicted
a lot of it seems to be down to bad luck, often disadvantaged background and little education.
Luck seems to work both ways; it is generally accepted that only 3 out of 100 offences end up in court. That figure has been pretty constant for a while. There are a number of reasons behind this statistic: first, many crimes are not reported at all. Many sexual crimes, in particular, are only surfacing now that norms have changed, but change is slow. In addition many instances of corporate crime are dealt with internally and hushed up to avoid damaging a company’s reputation. Very few cases of corporate crime actually end up in court. Second, many crimes are not counted. In order to meet internal targets, police often classify crimes as non-crimes. They have to be convinced that the crime can be solved otherwise the rates of clearing crimes look low. Third, even if there are grounds for prosecuting the police may still just give a caution as it is easier and removes the risk of the CPS throwing the case out. And finally, the CPS might disagree with the police and throw the case out if they feel they don’t have enough evidence to secure a conviction. So what we are seeing is just the tip of the iceberg. It would be too much to say: ‘We are all criminals now’, but there is an astonishingly high level of crimes committed that go undetected or unpunished.
A few days after my release, I walked to a coffee shop with an ex-Home Office senior civil servant who had worked on crime reduction issues. As we covered the 300 yards from Clapham Common tube to Clapham Old Town, my friend remarked that on our way there we had probably passed at least half a dozen people who had committed an offence and had never been caught and a similar number who had been convicted of an offence other than motoring and who may have been to prison. In his view, it was ironic that all the time that people were looking for retribution and punishment in sentencing decisions there seemed to be very little awareness in the media debate that the vast majority of people in prison will be released back into society at some point – and will be walking down the street, as I was doing, without others around them being aware of their past.
There also seems to be a worrying inconsistency in the treatment of individuals by the judicial system in this country. It gets you if it wants to or lets you go at the whim of a judge. There is evidence of a justice and sentencing ‘postcode lottery’ which defies logic and reason, and hence fairness and confidence in the justice system. In his book Crime, Nick Ross reminds us that life sentences more than doubled between 1994 and 2004 as a result of a toughening of sentencing rather than because more people committed particular crimes. So if caught during that period you would be likely to spend much longer in jail than before that date. But even then, data presented by the Howard League for Penal Reform to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Women in the Penal System at their annual general meeting in July 2013 showed the huge inconsistency in the sentencing of women offenders across magistrates’ courts throughout the country; Cumbria imposed almost four times more immediate custodial sentences for women in 2011 than Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Northumbria and Wiltshire.19 English justice is meant to be blind but it certainly knows the geography of England as these bizarre, inexplicable differences between sentencing in one county compared to another clearly indicate. What is more, even within a county the town you are attending court in may matter hugely; one girl I met later told me of her frustration at being sentenced to imprisonment in one city in East Anglia for possessing and allegedly intending to sell drugs (which she strongly denies) when caught in possession of a very small amount of cannabis when in any other court in a town more used to this type of crime she felt she would have been given, at worst, a suspended sentence or a caution.
A more lenient sentence would have avoided the negative articles in the press, which seems to be fascinated by any crime, however small, committed by a woman. The problem is, judges, juries and the press often react even more negatively towards women offenders because, in their view, committing a crime, however trivial, goes against a woman’s very nature. Ann Lloyd explores this in her 1995 book Doubly Deviant, Doubly Damned: Society’s Treatment of Violent Women. Women with criminal convictions, she explains, have not only broken the law but also offended people’s ideas of womanhood. Yvonne Jewkes, Professor of Criminology at the University of Leicester, argues that ‘the media tap into, and magnify, deep-seated public fears about deviant women, while paying much less attention to equally serious male offenders’.20 Many of the women I later met in prison believed they were given custodial sentences for offences that a man may have been given a suspended sentence or a caution for instead. It is hard to prove this but the feeling resonated and was expressed not just by the women but also by many of the staff.
Inevitably as an economist and former joint head of the Government Economic Service I had spent a lot of time looking at cost–benefit analysis of government interventions and had written peer reviews of many government departments’ analysis. But I was acutely aware that I had never looked at Home Office and Ministry of Justice policy appraisals with the care they deserved and though I was vaguely aware of some of the work done on the costs and benefits of keeping men in prison, I was pretty sure that the work on women lagged behind. In fact I recall thinking that a lot of the evidence relied on studies carried out in the US. Well, as the judge handed me an eight-month custodial sentence, I was about to find out a lot more.
Thoughts of economics gave way to thoughts of short-term survival as I was led down to the holding area in preparation for the transfer to Holloway soon after sentencing. Just before, during the break after the mitigation presentations by the two sides and before the judge passed down the sentences, I had rushed to the loo and on the way back noticed my friends Stephanie and Philip Maltman and their neighbour Kate sitting disconsolately on the benches outside the court. I can’t recall the exchanges now but they told me afterwards that after they asked how I was, I had answered, ‘Never mind that, how do I look?’ Yes, that was probably true. Looks are important as you cannot afford to look despondent and beaten in front of the photographers and the court artists, who exaggerate any negatives to make a point. I had taken good care every day to appear smart and coordinated and relaxed. Not easy. But at least now the cameras couldn’t follow me downstairs. Thinking that my bracelets would not be allowed with me I handed them to the legal assistant who the press, seeing me hugging her in the morning, immediately described in the pictures that followed as one of my daughters – another to add to the three I have already!
The process of enumerating and cataloguing what I was taking with me so that it would all arrive safely in Holloway took a bit of time. I was taking a suitcase full of clothes and toiletries, many of which I suspected would not pass the test of acceptability once in Holloway, and a black handbag which had to be searched and bagged in a plastic carrier bag but with all the valuables in it enumerated. So started a rather long search through it to establish how much money I had on me and therefore what I was taking with me as a ‘float’, which might keep me going while inside. People from the outside as I discovered could easily add to this by sending cash in. But many girls I came across had no one – or their relatives were too poor to send money and they were relying entirely on the wages they received in prison for the work they did to survive. Most prison services such as cleaning, giving support to incoming prisoners, library assistance, cooking, laying and clearing tables, and other routine work are done by the inmates for usually a paltry sum of rarely more than £20 a week. The money is used to make phone calls to their loved ones and to buy things like tobacco from the ‘canteen’ – some ‘mythical place’ that brought in basic supplies and possibly a few treats like chocolate once a week, assuming you had any money to spend. So going in with enough money was important. I never knew that.
I had no idea what was in my bag. The past few weeks had been rather unusual. I had gone to the bank to get cash on a few occasions on the way to the crown court, mostly intending to leave it with the children to cover the cost of running the house if I was sent away for any length
of time. I also used it to buy various things – coffee every morning from Starbucks outside London Bridge station, which became my trademark as I was photographed carrying one cup with the name of the coffee franchise prominently displayed each morning (I hope they were grateful for the free product placement), and a vast number of unhealthy croissants and muffins from the crown court trolley. Obviously in those days I was not thinking particularly rationally. And although I thought I was in control that morning before heading to court, I had in fact forgotten that I had been hoarding cash and had written the kids cheques instead. So we started counting what was in the bag: tons and tons of coins which had been weighing me down for some time, nearly £100 worth, lodged at the bottom of the bag or inside various zipped compartments (there were many). To my complete embarrassment but the huge amusement of the security guard, there, in between diaries, packets of tissues, chequebooks, loose credit and store cards, letters, newspaper clippings (it was a big bag) and a red rose that had been given to me earlier as I was entering the court by some lovely gentleman who had come to my trial every day, we started collectively to bring out a tenner here, a £20 note there, even the odd £50 note, a few fivers I had been given as change. As we were transferring the bag’s contents slowly into a plastic bag for the journey we found more and more – and more. By the time we finished some half an hour later all the other officers on the ground floor next to the exit where the Serco van was waiting to take me to Holloway had come to watch and could not believe their eyes as we finally established that I was going to prison with a total of £1,490 in cash. Instead of the cheques, this was cash I should have left at home that morning for my children. In the end I was grateful for my mistake. The very expensive phone calls alone during the entire period I was in prison cost around £400, much more than my prison earnings over that period. Perversely, counting out these notes and coins set the scene for what was to come as it actually allowed for a much more relaxed and humorous atmosphere to develop, which had a very calming effect on me and stood me in good stead for what would otherwise have developed into a horrendously tense evening. I had heard of people (particularly women) breaking into tears once they were in the cells downstairs after sentencing and I think that incident and the kindness and humanity of the guards proved to be a life saver for me.
