by Pryce, Vicky
It was this sort of kindness from both officers and fellow prisoners that made a huge difference to me throughout my time in prison. Professor Alison Liebling, a highly respected prison researcher based at the University of Cambridge, has written at length on how values such as trust, respect, fairness, order and well-being contribute to making prison life less distressing, less dangerous and more survivable. 21 Nick Hardwick, the current Chief Inspector of Prisons, later told me that, from what he had seen, the officers’ understanding of what is important to you as an individual – even little things like getting a drink or having access to a hairdryer when you need it – goes some way to ‘make an unbearable situation a bit more bearable’.
I had a quick chat with my legal team who came down to see me and I was able to keep a book to read, my notebook and a pen to make notes as I was whisked into what is known as a ‘black Maria’ (actually a white transport van) alongside a girl who was on remand being taken back to Holloway after her court appearance. We were put in separate cubicles in the van and started our journey. It was still daylight and as we exited the basement car park I was not prepared for the photographers who were banging their cameras onto the vehicle’s window to try and get a picture of me as I was leaving. As we stopped at some traffic, more of them did the same thing, much to the consternation of the girl I was travelling with and the guards, who thought it all appalling. There was a bit of calm as we drove through the streets of north London, past the Arsenal football stadium, which I knew reasonably well, but it quickly ended as we drove into Holloway, with more photographers waiting, more banging on the side of the car, more flash cameras pointing at my face through the window of my cubicle. Once we went through the prison gates, there was peace at last. And so began my nine weeks of prison life: four days in Holloway and then just over eight weeks in East Sutton Park open prison for women.
CHAPTER 2
HOLLOWAY
When asked whether my experience arriving in Holloway was frightening, my answer was simple: no. Many people think that prison must be a terrifying place with lots of violent women locked behind bars. It isn’t. I must confess that my arrival at Holloway was smooth, humane and expertly carried out. Quick fingerprinting and BOSS chair (Body Orifice Security Scanner, essentially a metal detector). No strip search. The little information pamphlet handed out to me on arrival comprised a mere eight pages, with page 7 taken up by a crossword and page 8 by two sudoku puzzles. It was all very different from the environment that had greeted David (now Lord) Ramsbotham in December 1995 when he went to do his first unannounced review of Holloway as the then new independent Chief Inspector of Prisons. He was so shocked he stopped the visit the following day and didn’t resume it again for six months. A lot has happened since and after many starts and setbacks under numerous governors, prison director generals and secretaries of state in the Home Office and later the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), the place now seemed to be reasonably welcoming.
But there are rules. It was clear I had brought in far too many clothes. I was allowed to keep just twelve tops (shirts, T-shirts and jumpers) and six bottoms (trousers, tracksuit bottoms and pyjamas). No toiletries were allowed but I was given an emergency bag with prison issue and I bought a ‘welcome’ bag for £2.99, which would be subtracted from the cash I brought in with me. It contained a bottle of orange squash, biscuits, a bar of milk chocolate, deodorant, toothbrush and toothpaste, a comb and some tea bags and sugar. I had the choice of that or a smoker’s bag. But I could take in my books, all eighteen of them and many given to me by my children, as well as my writing pads and a couple of pens. The rest stayed in my suitcase and the handbag which had also accompanied me. I would retrieve everything again when I left for East Sutton Park (ESP) a few days later.
A reception officer took down my details and told me where I was going for the first night and that she was putting me down for a single room; a doctor took my blood pressure, which was dangerously high (no surprise after the last few months); and I was met by a welcoming group of prisoners, an innovation which I am told ex-governor Tony Hassall introduced, whose job it was to answer my questions and ensure I got something to eat (chilli con carne and some pudding). It was certainly not what I had expected.
Then the welcome group and prison guards helped me and some other new inmates move our personal belongings, which had now been transferred into transparent prison plastic bags, to landing A3, the reception landing, which ended up being my home for the next few days. The lovely girl who had secured the food for me told me on the way that she had two more years to do but enjoyed doing the reception work because it kept her out of her cell until quite late in the evening.
Early 2013 was experiencing a very long winter (I had often walked to and from court in the snow) and that bitterly cold night I soon realised that the windows in Holloway cells do little to keep the chill out. At first I was shown a cell with no curtains and my helpers tried to fasten an orange blanket onto the railings, without much success. Fortunately there was another single cell available with curtains, this time near the guards’ office, but the TV was not working so there was another quick changeover. Then it was obvious that one thin orange blanket on the bed was not enough. Soon the girls were at my cell door with extra blankets even though that was apparently not normally allowed; within a few minutes I ended up with five and had to turn down the offer of a sixth. And then extra fruit and sandwiches that they must have had in their own cells started arriving and shampoo for the shower and extra toilet roll for the loo in my cell. I couldn’t believe the kindness of them all. When formalities were completed and I had spoken to the children and my lawyer using my free phone calls and my door was finally locked, the girls kept coming back and asking me through the hatch whether there was anything else I wanted. Many have commented about the solidarity in women’s prisons – yes, there is bitching and some bullying but there is also a lot more demonstrable empathy among the women prisoners than in a men’s prison.
They say that when that first lock-up happens and you are left alone in your room, reality finally takes its toll; when they finally lie in bed most new prisoners turn their heads towards the wall and start crying. Within the first seven days of prison, 20 per cent of all prison suicides occur22 as well as a disproportionate amount of the overall levels of self-harm.23 I had had such an exhausting few weeks that none of this happened – not on the first nor any subsequent night. I watched the coverage of my case on TV and fell promptly asleep.
12 MARCH
I was woken by the guard the next morning around 7 a.m. The cell door was unlocked at 8 a.m. (9 at the weekend). Breakfast was at 8.15 but let’s not get too carried away: the meal consisted of toast and butter (no jam) though later, at lunch, we were given an individual cereal portion, tea bags and a small carton of milk. I don’t normally have breakfast but I had been advised that whenever food is offered in prison I should take it; as such I started to eat breakfast and continued doing so in East Sutton Park, where at least jam was served with the toast. I also took the opportunity to smuggle a few slices of toast back to my room to see me through the morning.
Most women in closed prisons lose an incredible amount of weight either because they won’t eat the food (it tends to be ghastly) or because the portions are so small that they go constantly hungry – unless they are lucky enough to be able to supplement their meals with unhealthy biscuits bought at the canteen every week. Indeed, the best thing on the menu while I was in Holloway was in fact the toast. One of my roommates in ESP told me later how she had gone into Holloway a size twenty just ten months earlier and was now a size fourteen. She looked really good in her new size but I wondered how I would have fared having gone in as a size eight.
We all know how important healthy eating is but, interestingly, in his 2003 book Prisongate Lord Ramsbotham refers to evidence from clinical studies in many countries that proves that ‘correct nutrition is a cheap, humane and highly effective way of reducing anti-social behaviour’.24
He refers in particular to a study by Bernard Gesch of National Justice (a research charity investigating the causes of crime). Gesch and his colleagues conducted a trial that showed that a group of young offenders given healthy food supplements compared with a group that took a placebo saw a 37 per cent reduction in violent offences while in detention.25 The results were accepted but the recommendation to provide supplements across all prisons was never implemented even though it would have cost, according to Ramsbotham, just £3.5m a year from a prison budget of some £2.8bn. Indeed, nutritious food could be prepared without great cost. Chef Al Crisci trains prisoners at HMP High Down to work in a gourmet restaurant called ‘The Clink’, which he started in 2009 and is open to the public.
Prison food [at High Down] is wholesome, low in salt, fat and preservatives, fits within the five-a-day fruit and vegetable guidelines, and only costs £2.10 per prisoner, per day … It makes sense. Why serve rubbish for £2.10 when you can, with a little more effort, and within the same budget, cook food which helps improve behaviour?26
His call is one that echoes Jamie Oliver’s campaign to improve student behaviour by providing high-quality school meals.
After breakfast, I almost missed what is known as the ‘movement’. Described in the induction notes, the ‘movement’ was essentially a twice-daily great exodus of women from their cells and a supervised walk through the prison to the various places of education, exercise, healthcare and so on. I had gone to the shower and on returning to my cell found a guard waiting to lock me back in. Over breakfast, the girls had told me there was a daily walk in the prison yard, and I managed to persuade the guard to allow me to run behind the trail of women with my wet hair so I wouldn’t miss out. Fortunately, the movement was quite slow that morning and I soon caught up. I discovered that as I followed the others I could step into the various offices that lined the twisting corridors (built like a hospital, each part of a prison corridor has a guard office so the guards are able to see and control the few cells in front of them). To my surprise, each office had a hairdryer (among other things) that prisoners could borrow on production of their prison card (I had been given mine at reception when I entered the previous night). Indeed, as Chief Inspector of Prisons Nick Hardwick told me, these are the little things that make life in prison bearable. Being able to borrow a hairdryer from an officer in this way also allows a woman the opportunity to chat about how she is worried about her kids or discuss other matters on her mind. According to Nick, anything that might jeopardise this general interaction is a worry.
By the time I went outside my hair was only slightly drier; thank goodness I had put my hat in my pocket when I left my cell. My daily exercise out in the yard from then on (unless it was raining) consisted of a very brisk walk for half an hour, going round and round with the only other woman bothering to walk. Everyone else would stand against the walls smoking or chatting or generally being quite rambunctious with each other and with the guards.
It soon transpired that no one seemed to think I should have been in prison at all and throughout the next few days, wherever I went following the ‘movement’, girls would shake my hand and offer support. During the outdoor walk, as I tried to exercise my legs and breathe in some fresh and very cold air, the girls would tell me how surprised and pleased they were that I was not snubbing them but actually was prepared to mix with them all – and then told me their own stories, which got me thinking about how vulnerable so many of these girls and women were.
In fact, I was shocked at the number of cases where indeed the girls had done something wrong but usually for, with, or forced to by their husbands, boyfriends, brothers or fathers. These girls needed help, I thought, not incarceration. Indeed, according to people I spoke to later, senior officers have been known to say that out of some 460 women prisoners in Holloway no more than around sixty that pose a threat to society should remain in prison, and the rest shouldn’t be there at all. According to the Ministry of Justice, and not including courts and policing, each prisoner in 2011/12 cost on average some £37,648 a year in direct prison-related costs. That figure becomes higher still if one adds expenditure met by other government departments in areas such as health and education. One must also consider that women and longer-term prisoners cost a lot more. There could be significant savings from lowering prisoner numbers.27 No doubt costs would be incurred elsewhere, for many of the women in prison are vulnerable and need some sort of help, but it is argued that Holloway and other prisons like it should not be performing the role of an amateur psychiatric unit, which should really be the job of other organs of the state and society and the community at large.
One particular concern, which people are becoming increasingly aware of, is the significant numbers of foreign females in British prisons who may actually themselves be the victims of human trafficking. Their traffickers may have forced them to commit crime, or they may be in custody because of offences related to their immigration status, such as deception, fraud or use of false documents. A 2012 study looked at the cases of 103 foreign nationals in prison for offences relating to immigration status and identified forty-three of the women as victims of human trafficking. Many will have suffered highly traumatic experiences such as repeated physical abuse, rape or being forced into the sex industry. Past experiences of corrupt officials and repeated abuse leave many too afraid to tell their full story.28
The difficulty foreign prisoners face cannot be overestimated. Serena, a highly educated woman I met when I visited the library in Holloway, told me of having been approached by a Brazilian girl who was sharing a cell with another Brazilian woman who had been in Holloway already for four months and who seemed to be at a loss as to why she was being kept in prison. She was in a high state of anxiety as she only spoke Portuguese and was lucky to have eventually found another Brazilian and was therefore able to explain her situation. With the other girl acting as interpreter, it emerged that the Brazilian lady had been arrested on charges of kidnapping at the airport where she was trying to fly to Brazil with her daughter. The lady and the child’s father had been living in France but he had moved to the UK. After she let her daughter visit her father he had refused to let her return to her mother. After a time the Brazilian lady obtained a court order against the father for kidnapping, came to the UK, found her daughter and tried to leave the country with her. The child’s father contacted the police and the woman was apprehended.
Apparently it turned out that the Brazilian lady had not in fact committed the offence of kidnapping when she was arrested, as she hadn’t actually taken the child away for the requisite amount of time for an offence of ‘kidnapping’ to have been committed. After a long letter on the mother’s behalf was written to the CPS by Serena explaining the situation, the lady was released. As far as I understand it the Brazilian mother is reunited with her daughter and all is well. I could not believe the system allows such injustice to take place, but mistakes will always happen and frankly it is not surprising that with such large numbers going through the system and the chaos that seems to prevail there will be cases that slip through the net.
But the importance of prisoners being able to communicate is key, particularly if they are foreign. With this horror story in my mind I later suggested to Helen, who I met in East Sutton Park and who had managed to transfer from what she described as a ‘dreadful’ and ‘dangerous’ Brazilian prison, where she was serving time for drugs, to Holloway and then to open prison, that she should brush up on the Portuguese she learned while there and offer her services in prisons or at the court as translator and mentor once she got out given the large number of Brazilians in the UK at present. I wonder, though, whether current rules would allow an ex-offender like Helen to be employed by the prison system – in my view they should make sure that experiences such as Helen’s are put to good use for the benefit of society as a whole, otherwise what is the point of sending people to prison?
After the morning walk, I shared a table for lunch in the ‘din
ing’ space of A3. This was a grim unfriendly room with a few basic old but functioning armchairs, and a hatch from which the food was served to you by other inmates, led by a lovely if troubled Welsh girl who was in for grievous bodily harm after one incident when out drinking. You had to form an orderly queue, your name was called and your choice of food served (vegetarian or otherwise – I had not had a chance to make a choice so ate what I was given). Water was available from a drinking tap and you could sit and eat on one of a handful of white plastic tables and chairs, which were rarely used as most inmates took their food into their rooms in time for evening lock-up. Recognising me, however, a number of the girls, mostly quite young, came and sat with me and chatted – and the chats were extraordinary. They told me of some women who were in for low-level drug trafficking, and who clearly were on drugs themselves, and how they were having a very difficult time adjusting to prison. They would wander around mumbling to themselves and girls who slept in cells adjacent to those women could not sleep at night either because of their moans, cries or in one case loud singing every night.
