by Pryce, Vicky
It was clear to me in no time at all that female prisoners were troubled by the very things one expects women to worry about. Their children and their families were their first priority. Prison visitors and ex-governors I have since spoken to confirm that what they encounter in female prisons is completely different to what they observe in men’s prisons. Men are focused on getting through it – to quote a senior Home Office ex-civil servant: ‘men look down and don’t engage, women, once they become more familiar, which happens very quickly, start to chat and gossip with you’. Ex-governors described women’s prisons as feeling much more like mental institutions, but with a lot of chatter and friendships, not violent like the men’s; on the whole, the most danger the women posed was to themselves. As one ex-governor said, ‘You could bring the walls down in a closed prison and the women just wouldn’t leave!’
13 MARCH
Up at 7 a.m. again and the same routine as the day before. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom, however strange my new environment. It seemed to me that if one was determined there were lots of ways to survive it, at least for someone like me who was fortunate enough not to be coming to prison from the sorts of chaotic, dysfunctional backgrounds that many of the women had endured. Indeed there were also moments of fun in the chaos that seems to be Holloway.
It looked like I might miss the chance to get out of my cell and do my intended induction course for education and the gym this week because planned visits from my legal team and my children were coinciding with the few times that the induction sessions were available – and you weren’t allowed to start those courses until you had done the inductions. Nevertheless, with the help of some inmates and a kind guard, I somehow managed to get into the right queue and sneak my way into what looked like a very well-functioning library on the ground floor at the end of the ‘movement’. When I was recounting this later to Nick Hardwick he told me that it is these sorts of things, the help given to make life bearable behind bars, that measure how well a prison is functioning – not statistics.
I signed in at the library and picked a couple of books I thought I might borrow – they were crime thrillers, which seemed to be the main genre available there. And then, what luxury, I watched a movie for a couple of hours (the week’s showing – I was lucky to have chosen that day). I had already seen the film, Nowhere Boy, but it was an unexpected pleasure to sit in a more or less normal setting, surrounded by books rather than my cell walls. The place was packed. But on closer inspection it wasn’t because people were keen to watch the movie; the real attraction of the library as far as I could see was that it served as a place for the inmates to spend a few unsupervised hours quietly snogging their girlfriends.
I watched the library staff handle all sorts of requests expertly and it only dawned on me two hours later that they were in fact all inmates. After the film ended and I approached the counter to have my chosen books signed out I was greeted with a ‘Hello Vicky’ from one library assistant, who turned out to be an ex-senior police officer convicted for talking to a journalist just a few weeks before my case came to court. It was the first time we actually met but many inmates had mentioned her name, Liz, and assumed that I would probably be moving to her landing in D0, which was for ‘enhanced’ or low-risk prisoners, if I stayed in Holloway. Not knowing what would happen to me and not counting on being moved quickly to an open prison, I enquired how I could get a job in the library. She gave me a form to complete, which I did on the spot and left it for the attention of the external librarian in charge. Soon the library was frantically getting ready for the afternoon event, which consisted of Martina Cole visiting to do a reading and distribute books. The prize was a signed copy of one of her books. She apparently went down very well as the girls felt affinity with a writer who grew up in the East End, seemed like one of them, understood about crime, was streetwise and had done well for herself.
As I left the library women were queuing to attend the reading but only thirty could be accommodated and most were turned away. Liz told me later that given the huge interest, the event could have been staged in the church – in fact, two churches in Holloway were linked and therefore able to provide a large L-shaped meeting room as a result. Unfortunately, because of the way the ‘movement’ works, every diversion from routine puts an extra strain on security. The movement itself, other inmates told me, can be very intimidating. Processing through the corridors, the movement is stopped at each gate as the guard unlocks it, and the movement continues on through. I was told a story of expert locksmiths/burglars who could look at the keys from a distance and, from memory, draw them and get their mates from the outside to reproduce them. This led to a number of escapes so now the officers no longer walk in front of cells with the keys dangling from their belts but keep them safely hidden in pouches around their waist, and turn away from inmates before unlocking doors and gates. I don’t know whether this is true but I was told it on good authority. Anyway, the ‘movement’ swells as it moves from corridor to corridor with each woman attempting to get to a gym or a class or a health appointment. It is up to each inmate to spot their destination and if they miss the exit they aren’t allowed to go back; the movement just keeps going forward. One friend I made had the added problem of trying to avoid an inmate who, for some unknown reason, had singled her out and would heckle her in the most disturbing manner as she passed through her corridor. The result was that this rather experienced and strong person in every other way managed to miss her health appointment twice as she spent most of her time on ‘movement’ trying to avoid the woman. She finally got to her appointment on her third try.
I luckily had no such problem that day and after lunch made it through the movement to ‘visitors’ without incident to meet my lawyer, Robert. We spent a couple of hours discussing various matters and Wednesday afternoon was taken care of. Again, it was better than spending it locked up in one’s cell. Incidentally, ‘time out of cells’ is seen as a high priority as far as HM Inspectorate of Prisons is concerned. Their expectation is that prisoners should spend at least ten hours out of their cells each weekday in order to carry out important rehabilitative work and other purposeful activity, although the system as a whole rarely manages this. Particularly bad are local prisons, where 27 per cent of prisoners spend less than two hours per weekday out of their cell. Even resettlement or open prisons only achieve the target just over half of the time.52
It was my first meeting with Robert after my sentencing and I think he was pleased to find me calm and composed. He actually arrived late! But the guards gave us extra time, which was really good, and we had a very respectable small private cubicle to ourselves. I have since learned, however, that access to legal advice can vary dramatically from prison to prison. Some prisons only allow legal visits to be arranged on one or two days per week. One has no room for legal visits, thus preventing confidential interviews. According to a recent survey, only 43 per cent of prisoners say they can easily contact their lawyers and a similar number said confidential legal mail had been opened without them being present.53 And yet legal mail is supposed to be exempt from the usual checks, under measures brought in to protect prisoners against the misuse of authority by prisons. My rather small survey of two prisons showed compliance with that spirit – letters from my solicitor were given to me sealed and then were opened by me in front of the officers, not for them to be read but only to ensure there was nothing forbidden hidden in the envelope among the legal documents. I would then take them away and read them in private. There were also big notices by the phones saying that although all private conversations were being recorded those to approved lawyer numbers were not. I assume they kept to what they promised.
Robert relayed to me the news from the outside, particularly his contact with my family. Obviously there was a lot to discuss – what the press was saying, should we appeal or not – but I was more concerned that he should talk to the kids and ensure that everyone knew that I was OK and accepting my situation calmly. V
ery importantly he also gave me a list of my contacts, which he’d printed out from my mobile. It wasn’t complete but it proved a godsend. On the immediate practical level we agreed that he would urgently post me some stamps and envelopes that very evening.
I showed Robert the note that the guards on my landing had given me detailing my Home Detention Curfew (HDC) date, which was 12 May, and my unconditional release date, which was 11 July. At the time I had no idea whether HDC was granted automatically but soon discovered that it was unless there was a problem with the address you were going to. That was good news and at last gave us something to work towards. We also dwelt on what would happen next and where I might be transferred to. I was until then not fully aware of the various levels of prisons that existed. Places like Holloway for women and Pentonville for men are ‘holding’ prisons where remand prisoners are held and where sentenced offenders are usually sent until they are classified in terms of their risk of reoffending. They are then sent to specialist ‘training prisons’, some of them being ‘working prisons’, around the country to carry out their longer-term sentences. When they near the end of their sentences, men are sent to ‘resettlement’ prisons, of which there are two: Blantyre House near to East Sutton Park in Kent and Kirklevington Grange in Yarm, near Stockton-on-Tees. If they are perceived as a low risk then they are sent to open prisons. In both cases, they can start to do voluntary and then paid work outside the prison. In the case of women, because of their lower numbers there are no resettlement prisons but only open prisons where most people, including lifers, go to progress towards the end of their sentence. Open prisons for both men and women also house short-sentence prisoners who need not be kept in expensive closed conditions. My lawyer was pleased when I told him that I had been classified as a category D prisoner, low risk, and therefore was in line to move to East Sutton Park, one of two open prisons for women in the country. Robert warned me, however, that in his experience much depended on whether there was space available in the open prisons and more crucially whether they could get the transport to transfer me there – and that could take a few weeks. Lord Taylor, who communicated with me after my release and who had himself recently spent time in prison on the grounds of false accounting, told me that in his view there is very little reason why offenders cannot be classified immediately in terms of risk just as the sentence is passed to avoid the extra cost of closed prisons including that for transferring prisoners and starting many things all over again. I could see the point as it certainly would reduce the overcrowding at Holloway at a stroke.
14 MARCH
In the morning a female guard from a different floor, who had come to see how I was on behalf of the governor two days previously, told me that there had been discussion for me to move to D0, the enhanced wing on the ground floor, but that it probably made no sense if I was going to be moving to an open prison at some stage. I told her I was happy to stay where I was for the time being. Frankly, I had already become friendly with the girls on my landing and had no wish to move and then move again. And I had learned quite a lot of things from them. How to put a pin on the latch door and pull it shut, or almost shut, from the inside if someone had left the hatch open and the lights on in the corridor through the night – and also to cut out noise. It strangely gave you a feeling of being in control, which was welcome. At the same time they showed me what to do if an overzealous guard had locked the hatch door and there was no one there to unlock it – the back of the plastic spoon worked very well as a key.
Girls in different prisons learn different things. Rachel, who had been at Peterborough before transferring to ESP, told me how they used the freely provided tampons to block draughts on the grills of the windows or used a piece of paper, like an envelope, to stop the cold air coming through the vents in the middle of the ceiling. Ways to survive in prison.
I joined the ‘movement’ again and went to healthcare, which, what with the wait, took the entire morning, just as I had hoped. My luck was in again: the waiting room was showing a movie. This time it was the Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman film The Bucket List. We were locked in from the outside when one particular officer was in charge and the door was only unlocked to let in a new arrival wanting to see the nurse or doctor or to let one of us out for our appointment. When the officer went for a coffee break, however, strangely the door was left open and a young male assistant slid in and gave me a copy of a tabloid paper which had a story about me going to Holloway with the pictures they had taken of me in the transport van. The room was comfortable with chairs arranged in theatre style and the wait was long but most welcome. I had missed a bit of the beginning of the film but the other girls filled me in. I was able to see the tear-jerking end and noticed that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
For me another morning spent outside my cell, given the horror stories of very long lock-ups endured by many prisoners, was a relief. When I finally saw the lovely nurse instant friendship developed. She filled in my personal medical history details, checked my blood pressure (which had gone down sharply after a couple of nights in Holloway – I arrived with a blood pressure of 175/100 on the Monday night and by Thursday lunchtime it had gone down to 124/80) and then suggested I should have a hepatitis B injection. I was mystified as to why I would need it and at first refused as I don’t much like needles but she explained it was for my protection in case an inmate were to bite me. She pointed out that it made sense given that there are a lot of drug addicts in prison who may be carrying the virus from infected needles. (I was later told by other inmates that it is also to prevent people getting hepatitis B from snogging or through other ways of passing bodily fluids.) After her explanation, I did not hesitate for an instant. And she did it so well and painlessly (other injections, equally painless, followed in ESP to complete the course as my medical records moved efficiently with me when I left Holloway). As I was considered low risk she let me keep aspirin and blood pressure tablets in my cell locker.
And then my children came that Thursday afternoon for an hour. It was a tightly supervised setting, but it was brilliant. We had to sit opposite each other after we kissed and I reassured them that I was OK. There were strict rules about moving around so we had to stay in our seats except for them (I wasn’t allowed to do it myself) to get me a much-needed cup of coffee – it was the first I’d had since I went into Holloway, quite a treat for a coffee addict… As we were chatting, suddenly a lovely lady visiting another inmate across the room came over to my chair and gave me a hug – the guards had no time to stop her but soon took the lady back to her place and very firmly told her such behaviour was not allowed. But it was done in good spirit and only to show her solidarity and support.
Actually, support was quite forthcoming. A lady from the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB), which is made up of independent unpaid volunteers from the local area and features in every prison and immigration centre, came to my cell and spoke to me through the open hatch to check I was OK. What do you say? I am fine, really, thank you. And someone from the Christian chaplain’s office gave me a Christian diary, which in fact proved to be very useful throughout my stay in prison as mobiles and electronic diaries were not allowed. I am still using it. And then the letters started arriving. On Wednesday I received some twenty letters, causing the officer in charge to profess that in all his time at Holloway he had never seen anyone receive so much post in one day. The girls all came to my cell to marvel at the number of letters on my bed – and also to see whether there were any unfranked stamps that they could peel off and reuse. They were all experts and I soon learned how to do it too. It’s amazing, actually, how many letters do arrive even at my home unfranked. I had never noticed this before I went to prison and met those girls. If they noticed any, the prison authorities would draw a line across the unfranked stamps so they would be worthless to the inmates but I found that rather cruel. For many girls stamps were the most precious property they could acquire to keep in touch with the outside, which was so impo
rtant.
I soon realised that stamps, at least in women’s prisons, had become the new parallel currency, functioning like cigarettes used to. There is a lot of interest in parallel currencies at present and how they may work – witness the development of an internet ‘virtual’ currency called ‘Bitcoin’. Tim Harford, the economist and journalist who writes the ‘Undercover Economist’ column for the Financial Times, recently quoted Robert A. Radford, an economist himself who had studied at Cambridge in the 1930s and who spent half of the war in a POW camp in Germany. Radford had published a paper he wrote in the summer of 1945 in the journal Economica entitled the ‘Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp’ on the development of market institutions in that environment. He observed that everyone at the camp started in roughly the same way, i.e. with nothing, and depended on receiving the same-sized rations from the Germans and Red Cross parcels. Given that needs and likes and dislikes differed, a market then developed and trading became rife. Bartering began to take place. Say, for example, I wanted my hair cut in exchange for some coffee or chocolates. I would first need to find the person who combines the characteristics of liking coffee, being short in it and also knowing how to cut hair well. Even if I am able to source the right person, I don’t quite know what price I may have to pay for the haircut: how much coffee do they want? A few spoonfuls, half a pack, the whole pack?
