by Pryce, Vicky
Aanjay, who was at ESP for fraud, told me how her solicitor had to ring up continually over a period of nine months to find out what the police were going to do after she was first arrested. During that period she had been free to travel but her ability to work and look properly after her five children and her Italian husband was destroyed. And then she was put in jail as they thought that she might instead try to abscond. She was on remand for a further eight months. She pleaded guilty as she was told that at least that way she would be assured of a 30 per cent reduction in her sentence and therefore be reunited quicker with her children, a decision she now apparently regrets. It seemed that this was a pretty common occurrence and that by the time these sorts of women get to trial they have generally lost all their confidence, have maybe seen their children threatened with being taken into care or already in care or are just missing them terribly (as has been noted, the first time in prison is often the first significant period of separation women have from their children) and accept that pleading guilty is their only move.
It is welcome therefore that the Law Society has recommended that the period of remand should be capped at twenty-eight days to accelerate policing but also to safeguard the right of suspects who find themselves already in limbo and often having lost their livelihoods and who in any case may well be proved innocent at the end. And the state does not compensate for the loss of income and status and family relationships when the case finally collapses or when the woman is finally convicted and the overall sentencing perhaps fails to take into account the time spent on remand or bail. Remand prisoners are also not eligible for financial help following release if they do not receive a custodial sentence, which they often don’t, or help from the Probation Service when returning to the community, even if they have been on remand in prison for more than twelve months. They are forgotten by the resettlement system.75 The overall impact of such a long and difficult time has serious detrimental effects on the women in question and their families. In Angela Devlin’s Invisible Women, she quotes statistics that demonstrate remand prisoners were automatically assessed as being category B, in other words a risk to society, and should be kept under close supervision (my ESP open prison was at the lowest end – a category D prison).76 They are not risk assessed or assigned to the correct category until sentencing, which only adds to the hardship, particularly upon the women’s ability to retain contact with their children. Devlin also suggests that this is particularly harsh on women in general as only around 40 per cent of the women remanded in custody in 2009 were then sentenced and sent to prison – though they may have received cautions or suspended or community service sentences. Nearly half the women in Holloway in 2006 were on remand. In 2010, the figure was apparently nearer the 60 per cent mark.
What is more, proportionately more women facing a charge than men tend to be remanded in custody; the ten years between 1992 and 2002 saw an increase of 196 per cent in women on remand compared with 52 per cent for men. The numbers continued to increase and although they have reduced slightly in the past couple of years as of end September 2012 women on remand were accounting for 17 per cent of the female prison population.77 What is particularly disturbing is that women usually receive short custodial services and therefore don’t tend to spend a long time in prison. And yet remand prisoners spend an average of around forty days in prison – nearly four fifths of the time I served. What is worse is that for those on remand there are higher rates of self-harm, suicides and mental-health problems, and, worryingly, half of all women on remand receive no visits from their family (compared to only one in four men on remand).78
Being on remand can have additional complications. The system of Release on Temporary Licence (ROTL) entitles a prisoner to spend some time at an approved address once every month or so, granted after serving a considerable proportion of the sentence and undergoing a risk-assessment. They can spend, at first, two days and one overnight away, then three days and two overnights, then four days and three overnights up to a maximum of five days and four overnights. For Aanjay, however, she was struggling to demonstrate that the prison’s calculations of when her first ROTL was due were way off the mark as they should have started from when she first entered prison, not from when she was sentenced. We had to spend a lot of time consoling a very frustrated and tearful woman just trying to see her children and husband, as she was rightly entitled to do. It was not a very clever way to proceed.
Finally the risk-assessment board allowed Aanjay to return home every eight weeks under what is termed the Childcare Resettlement Licence (CRL); this allows mothers who have children under sixteen to go home no more than three nights every two months. It sounds good and it should be. Yet it is exercised in a way that causes resentment because it applies only to women who have ‘primary’ responsibility for their children, essentially single parents, and remain responsible for them even if the children are staying with relatives. If, however, a woman is still in a loving relationship with a husband, boyfriend or girlfriend and the child stays with them and is looked after by them in the mother’s absence, then they are not entitled to CLR. Many mothers could not understand why keeping a relationship with their child was not considered important if their relationship with their partner had not broken up.
Despite appearing calm for the most part, many of the women I met in prison were at breaking point. Some were facing confiscation orders as a result of their crimes and in some cases were losing their homes and their pensions; others were fighting residency orders from their husbands or divorcing or being divorced by them (generally, 45 per cent of all prisoners lose contact with their families while in prison, with many separating from their partners79). In some cases the husband, boyfriend or partner was also in prison and that complicated things no end, especially arranging times for supervised phone calls between prisons – a real logistical nightmare.
Being on bail for any length of time seemed to have affected many of the women I met. Another resident who arrived from a closed prison just before I left, Tracy, had been working as an administrator at a school for a long time with a £1m budget and was wrongly, she maintained, fingered for falsifying accounts and fraud. She disputed it, was on bail for a year and when it came to being committed to trial she was already hugely stressed, was eating too much and had put on 2 stone in weight. She was told that if she didn’t plead guilty she would get a five- or six-year sentence and be away from her kids for ages. So she pleaded guilty and got three. She bitterly regrets it now. The erratic, inconsistent and arbitrary nature of sentencing is especially hard on women who are primary carers.
Back in ESP, that first evening I made my first acquaintance with my fellow ‘residents’, as we were called. The term ‘resident’ was strictly used – the Tannoy messages that were used for both staff and for us always referred to ‘residents’ announcements’ if they were aimed at the girls and ‘staff announcements’ for the staff. There were only two times when ‘prisoner’ was used. The first was when one had to fill in the prisoner number in the ‘apps’ – not some sort of computer programme but rather the ironic abbreviation for the good old-fashioned handwritten application form. The other was on the inside rim of envelopes where the name and prison number needed to be inserted for identification purposes when sending letters out.
In that lovely dining room, I was given a plastic plate, bowl and cup, and a plastic knife, fork and spoon, and told that I could ask my family to bring me proper plates and cutlery at their next visit. In the meantime, I could borrow from what was left behind by departing residents in what was called ‘The Butler’s Room’ – it actually had that inscription on its door. That room was effectively an old scullery for the kitchen, with two big sinks, hot water for teas and coffees, a cold water machine and a fridge, and a place where the coffees, tea bags, sweeteners, whiteners and extra diet sweeteners were kept. But what was interesting was that in addition to all this that same room, where everyone entered constantly either to clear their plates and
wash trays after a meal or help themselves to a drink, was also equipped with an ironing board and three hairdressing salon seats (well, I must not exaggerate their quality) with mirrors and three hairdryers and hair straighteners attached to each set. It was actually extraordinary and obviously the place to hang around in if you wanted to chat and know what was going on around the prison. Among the residents there were a number of qualified hair-dressers who spent a lot of time doing other people’s hair – a sharply worded notice reminded them not to spill hair dye on the floor and if they did to clear it up.
There were occasional mishaps but on the whole it worked rather well. This relatively small space, its only redeeming feature being a nice view to the gardens from a set of big windows, was a hive of activity – girls queuing to throw food away and wash plates; a panicky resident ironing her uniform furiously before dashing to the car to take her to her afternoon shift at a hotel in Maidstone; girls fussing over their hair, girls plucking their eyebrows; black girls putting in the most amazing hair extensions; Aanjay doing pedicures using bowls and I, with hygiene in mind, refusing to let her empty the water in the sink but making her go to the loo and throw it there. All the secrets were discussed in the Butler’s, all the conspiring and complaining could take place there interrupted only when an officer – and sometimes even a governor – would come in to fill their flask with hot water, whereupon the rest of us either fell silent or joked with the officer, depending on who it was.
That first night my plastic plate and bowl were replaced with proper porcelain ones by a lovely South American girl, Valeria, who was probably the most beautiful girl in East Sutton Park. We got on incredibly well. She explained that she had already spent some nine years in prison and had been to eight separate prisons before deciding that she had to tame her temper so she could be sent to an open and start rebuilding her life. She was hoping for release within a year. She was generally keeping herself to herself but we seemed to click. Liz and I, who were allocated a seat at the same table next to each other, found ourselves becoming very friendly with her and went on to give her advice on her plans for the future, and to review her business plans that she had put together to request funding from external organisations so she could start a fitness training business for women of a certain age who were recovering from some major upset. She was in her late thirties herself with a fifteen-year-old son who lived somewhere in Australia with his father but with whom she had kept in touch. She confessed to us that if she hadn’t come to prison she would probably be dead by now from drug use but she was a very intelligent girl and had learned good English while serving her time. She was putting her experience to good use and had been asked by the governor to go to schools along with other residents and explain her case and why crime does not pay. She had been convicted of importing drugs – clearly the drugs must have been worth a lot of money hence her double-digit sentence (of which one tends to do only half except in exceptional circumstances). She had already started going out on day visits and home leave for a few nights every few weeks and was certainly streetwise already. I marvelled how ‘with it’ she was and pondered how much she must have gone through to survive so many years in prison already. We always advised her to keep her fiery Latin temper under control but other residents were wary of her and she gave back as good as she got. One learned quickly in prison who not to upset; particular care had to be given to the foreign girls, who might take things too literally or not understand the subtleties of English humour and therefore be offended by simple misunderstandings. But Valeria was clearly capable and determined – and quite a character. As she cheerfully told us: ‘See these boobs, they not real. See these eyebrows, they’ve been done. Everyone does it in my country, it’s so cheap. As soon as I get out I’m going back for more!’
While I was at ESP she managed to pass an interview and get a job as a receptionist at a large and busy hotel just outside Maidstone. We agonised about whether it was worth it and our dinners were dominated by the latest twists in the story. The pay was minimum wage, the train fare had to be borne by the resident, and once tax and the contribution to the Victim Support Fund were deducted it didn’t leave much. In this case the crucial difference was whether the prison was prepared to drive Valeria and a couple of others who also got jobs in the same place for free to the station and then pick them up at night – sometimes close to midnight – rather than letting them risk returning late at night in a taxi by themselves, something not only costly but also dangerous for these women. It was finally sorted out and though the net earnings were still low, for Valeria the most important thing was gaining experience that might then allow her to get a reasonable job on the outside as she was learning to use her interpersonal skills, work in a team and become familiar with customer service practices.
In my view that was the main benefit of ‘open’ – the fact that it managed, with all its faults, to move people towards permanent rehabilitation – but ironically you wondered what the purpose of actually staying in prison for people like her was. She was towards the end rarely sharing our dining room table except on the odd rest day; she worked five to six days a week, returning late to sleep at ESP, was up again at 8 a.m. for roll call, then exercise, made her packed lunch and supper and disappeared again for the afternoon – all this interspersed with days out and home leave. And this was the pattern for many. A beautiful girl, who must have been 6 foot tall, very thin and very bright, was doing an open degree in law and found no time to study as she was working on a voluntary basis at a marketing firm in Islington every day, which meant she had to take the car at 6.30 every morning. The bang of the door in the next room as she rushed out in the morning was a sure wake-up call for me in the unlikely event my other roommates managed somehow to sneak out to their jobs on the ESP farm at 5.30 a.m. without me hearing them.
And indeed there is the question of whether people should be kept in for so long if they are no threat to society, particularly when they have demonstrated that they can hold down a job and get back on time, do not abscond even though they have ample chance to do so (they can access the internet and contact who they want when they are on the outside and also use their mobile phone) and pass the mandatory drug tests if they are asked.
As well as Valeria, we also met Luciana, a Latin American girl, that first evening. I wouldn’t see her often during my stay at ESP because she worked a lot of the time but whenever she caught sight of me she would come over for a chat and give me advice on prison life as she had been in custody for very many years already. She told me that while in prison I shouldn’t trust anyone. I told her that outside prison the advice also holds. There was a world-weariness about her. I soon realised that her experiences were legendary and I became aware of rumours about what had happened to her while in prison and why she had had to move prisons a number of times. While reading ex-Brixton prison governor John Podmore’s excellent book Out of Sight, Out of Mind at the hairdressers after leaving prison, I nearly fell off my chair when I read in black and white what had only been whispered in my ears by other ESP residents. A prison governor in a women’s prison had taken advantage of a vulnerable prisoner and had himself received a five-year sentence in 2011 for improper relations with her – and from his description it appeared to me it was indeed Luciana who had been thus abused. I was amazed. She had been nothing but kind to me and had taught me more about how to survive in prison than anyone else. I will be forever grateful to her.
After dinner, Liz and I were introduced to the lady in charge of our induction, Barbara. The expectation was that the induction would run for a week or so, maybe more, depending on people’s availability. We were each given some nice green folders which had to be filled in and signed by the various instructors as we were going through. It included seeing one of the governors, which I was looking forward to. Back in my dorm, I chatted to my roommates, put my stuff under and around the bed, found space for the many books I had brought in and some pads and pens in the cupboard, put my toiletr
ies in the bedside locker, turned my bed around to face the other way so I could have access to the power point on the wall by the window to light my reading lamp, did my first roll call at 8 p.m. – and then went to karaoke.
Since it was Friday, bedtime was at midnight – by then the main lights and TV should be off. The officers do a further roll check by coming into the bedrooms with a little torch and counting the heads that are in bed – all usually asleep. They do the same at 5.30 in the morning, after which you are allowed to get up. One tried – and managed successfully most times – to sleep through them coming in as they tended to be quiet – except one night when they were clearly training (not very effectively) a new officer, who came in and counted us and then shouted to the officer who was outside in a very loud voice: ‘Three.’ We woke up. I wondered whether it was deliberate. I had heard a story in Holloway of one particular officer (female) who would turn all lights in cells on from the outside and leave them on all night on the level where she worked – luckily she had different shifts on different days and wasn’t always on at night or on the same landing so no one suffered for too long each time, but one does wonder what made people behave this way.
16 MARCH
For a first night in a new environment I managed a good night’s sleep. My roommates were very quiet and the only issue was they got up very early: one was a natural early starter, waited always for 5.30 and then went out for her first tea and cigarette; the other worked on the farm and minded the animals, even on weekends. Aside from that, I soon then discovered the joys of a potential lie-in if one were so inclined, as roll call on a Saturday was at 9 a.m. rather than 8 a.m. as on weekdays. Breakfast therefore was also later and more leisurely, though girls were usually preparing for their day visits to family or friends; some could go to London from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. or anywhere within a fifteen-mile radius of ESP from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. There was frantic activity the evening before as taxis were organised, agreements entered into, costs calculated. The girls made their applications for travel and cash warrants, as whatever was spent had to be approved by the officers with limits upon how much could be drawn out by the women from their cash balances. In the end, off they went on those weekend mornings, some on their CRL or ROTL; the result was that at times over a weekend the prison was less than half full. In fact, what did amaze me was the sheer number of people who were away most of the time.
