Prisonomics

by Pryce, Vicky

  During roll call that Saturday morning, I had the opportunity to get rich quick. Anyone who worked in the house during the week always had the weekend off. The staff in the kitchen and farms still needed help during the weekend – mainly to take the animals out, do the laundry and kitchen work – so there were always shifts available. And, to my amazement, women are messy. I thought until then, from my experience at home, that it was only men that made everything untidy. Well, ESP soon changed that. Women ARE messy – in fact, they are unbelievably so. My housewife/mother instincts came to the fore and I would get people to throw things away properly, wash their trays, tell them off when they left mess on the tables – no one got upset with me; they just ignored me!

  There was always cleaning to be done. So everyone who was around for roll call on weekend mornings and ‘idle’ was given a two-penny job which consisted of emptying particular bins, washing showers, cleaning bathrooms, sweeping the smoking area, hoovering particular bits of the building, washing floors. Yes, 2p. No one had any great enthusiasm for these tasks but they were done and we kept the place going, just about until the following morning. I only did it twice as from the following week, once induction was over, I got the job of cleaning the dining room after breakfast and lunch, making sure cereal dispensers were full, trays disinfected for next use, floors cleaned and coffees and the rest filled up. But I actually ended up working every day, including at the weekends, to cover for my co-workers who were often either in education and unable to work or on external visits. They were happy to let me take charge – I must admit I became quite obsessed with cleanliness and tidiness, which apparently is something that happens to many women in prison. The laundry girl told me that she couldn’t rest and fretted all day if she hadn’t folded a sheet exactly so and someone who was constantly ironing had an obsession with seeing her shirts and sheets with no creases at all.

  But after roll call and before cleaning duties on Saturday, a treat. One of the first inductions was to the gym, which was built in a barn originally used for horse displays in the past before the building was turned into a borstal and then a prison. We had two trainers who we also shared with the nearby men’s prison Blantyre and we spent some time being taken around the various bits of equipment and told how to use them and how to stretch to avoid any injuries. I had never been to the gym before – actually, that’s not strictly true. Twenty years ago, we at KPMG were given subsidised membership of a gym nearby. I had just given birth to my rather large youngest son and as a result I was rather large, too. I knew from experience (he was child number five) that given time that extra weight would go away and I would be back to my rather thin self but I bowed to the pressure from my colleagues and went for an induction. I bought some sports gear and kept it in plain sight. As the weight dropped off, colleagues commented on how right they had been and how successful the gym regime was proving. I would nod wisely and leave it at that – except of course I never went to the gym once!

  But I had to try and keep fit; there was no running around as I usually do at work or walking up and down the five flights of stairs in my tall, narrow home. In any case, exercise has been proven to reduce levels of stress, depression and anxiety in low-security prisoners, so it could only be a good thing.80 Also, nice music was played, which was worth attending the gym sessions for alone, and I had company from girls I got to rather like. Of course, being a hater of gyms I had to find something that was relatively easy and relaxing, so I took up rowing, which I am told is the best thing. I would row gently for half an hour – nothing intense, so horrified was I by reports that the journalist and newscaster Andrew Marr had incurred his stroke while rowing rather fiercely. And I came to depend on this gentle exercise. We would beg the trainers to come as often as possible so that we could open the gym as it was obvious that exercise was making a big difference to our mental well-being. The girls were also all conscious of their figures and there was constant weighing going on while the gym was open. But it was open only a few times a week and increasingly less often as the weeks wore on due to cuts in that area (something occurring across the prison service) and the retirement of one gym instructor who was now part-time and wasn’t being properly replaced. We had hoped for a risk assessment that would allow the gym, like the IT room, to stay open all the time as there was very little harm that could be done by the use of the equipment except for the machines with weights, which we were all happy to see disappear if we at least had the rest of the equipment available to us for longer. But despite hopes that this would indeed be granted and a number of discussions with the governor, it still had not been implemented by the time I left.

  After the gym induction, we went for a walk – there was always meant to be one at 9.45 on Saturday mornings, for which I hurried my obsessive dining room cleaning to ensure I could always take part. That soon became the highlight of my week. A number of us would gather (too few in my view) outside the gym and borrow boots from the farm changing room – the first week I was lent the governor’s boots, so wet was it outside, but usually we would borrow boots left by the farm workers who were only at the farm for an hour on weekend mornings. The walk was just marvellous. Come rain or shine, we would leave the big house behind, and walk through a gate that said ‘out of bounds’ (itself a great pleasure), then climb over gates and ramble through a series of fields full of horses, then sheep with their young lambs (which took a great interest in us to the great concern of their mothers), then over a few more fences until we arrived by the side of a rather big lake, all belonging to ESP. Then we’d trek up towards a little woodland, with the big house in the distance on the left, spotting some pigs higher up along the way. Fairly exhausted, we’d walk round to the yard at the back of the house and stop to look at the view of where we had just walked. It made you feel human, being allowed ‘out’, and the journey was quite a magical one, or so it seemed to me. We’d walk in rain and snow in the first few weeks and then as the weather improved towards the very end of my time there, in brilliant sunshine. I truly believe that those walks kept me sane and still united with the outside world. I tried to encourage as many people as possible to come but there were far too many girls, probably exhausted from a week’s work, who if they were not going out went back to bed after roll call and the 2p jobs. But some were as inspired as I was. One of the girls who always came had started a degree in horticultural landscaping and was just finishing year one of her course at a local college. I only saw her at the weekends and during those walks as she was out at college all week and working for her studies every other moment while in ESP.

  Saturday lunch at ESP is called brunch – and it was cholesterol-raising stuff: eggs, bacon, sausages and what I thought were called hush browns. This was the first time I’d come across them and when the kitchen lady mentioned them I said that the only hush something I knew were Hush Puppies, to the great amusement of everyone. But they were delicious and I always took the maximum two you were allowed, I enjoyed them so much. You’d also get mushrooms, baked beans and fried bread. I’m surprised we didn’t all die of heart attacks after eating such a meal. Porridge was on offer too and though I gave it a miss on that first day I soon started ordering it and taking it back to the dorm for my roommate, who would often miss brunch because of her morning activities. The truth is that I grew to like it, too, and often ended up having it myself as late night pudding cold on Saturday evenings – this while we were all watching The Voice on TV, which was definitely the most eagerly awaited programme of the week by my roommates, who preferred it to Britain’s Got Talent on the rival channel, which most of the rest of the residents preferred.

  Some people argue that you only understand prison if you have been in for a long time. I don’t agree. It seems to me you get the feeling and the ensuing claustrophobia after being in prison for just one night – and you become institutionalised very quickly. I found the change of regime in ESP after just four days in Holloway astonishing. For me it was all very welcome. But there were
a number of people I spoke to who had come from closed prisons and for whom the transition was a difficult one as they had forgotten how to share (room sharing was just not popular) or how to interact with others. Frankly, for some it was also hard to start making decisions on their own in an environment which leaves you to get up on time, attend the early morning roll call downstairs, show up for work, get out of the prison if allowed and get back on time through your own efforts and manage to fill your time with your own initiatives. It transpired that a number of girls who had been in closed conditions for some time had on arrival asked to go straight back to closed prisons because they couldn’t cope with the albeit limited freedom.

  For me those were the very reasons why places like ESP are absolutely essential. I find it hard to understand how people can be put straight back into the community and expect to survive and find jobs that they can keep when they come out, even after short periods, from closed conditions and find that there isn’t anyone to tell them exactly what they should do at every minute of their lives. One ex-prison governor is adamant that the resettlement process is an absolute must with prisoners beginning voluntary work first, and then paid work while still in prison, all in preparation for the outside world. Some offenders may never have held a job before but the educational opportunities in prison would have made them more employable. Being able to get up in the morning and keep a daily schedule of work was very beneficial. In the town housing one of the prisons the governor had been working in, the local private buses were mainly driven by offenders. And I doubt whether many of the thousands of passengers they were transporting knew this – would they have objected if they had? Boycotted the bus route? Possibly, although that would be sad if it were true.

  The retired governor also pointed out that in a number of prisons, as I discovered was also the case in ESP, offenders could have their own cars parked outside and use them for transport to and from work. The challenge of course was to obtain car insurance and that in itself was another way of encouraging offenders to take responsibility for their own lives and their own future. I did point out that the meagre salaries, usually just minimum wage and with the prisons keeping up to 40 per cent of whatever was earned, would not leave them with enough cash to do all that, but anyway, the idea was clear: offenders should interact with the community before their release for more positive results.

  I could see how constructive this regime was for the women; it gave them a sense of responsibility, belonging and self-confidence which they needed. I also realised as I was writing to my friends and family that no one on the outside realised what goes on in open prisons. For me, though by no means perfect, what open prisons did to reintegrate people in the community was an eye-opener. And yet there are only 228 open places for women in the whole of England: 100 at ESP and 128 at Askham Grange in Yorkshire. What is more, even those places seemed to be under threat from the review of the women’s prison estate taking place in the summer of 2013. ESP was to be subject to an official review visit the week after I left but it was then postponed to early June.

  At the time of writing, we are still awaiting the publication of the government’s review of the female custodial estate. Yet, both Juliet Lyon of the Prison Reform Trust and Frances Crook of the Howard League for Penal Reform have expressed concern about how effective any proposed changes may be. They raise as a particular concern the distance that women are held away from their home or release area, and argue for a radical transformation of both the sizes and locations of custodial estates to meet women’s needs. As noted earlier, the distance of prisons from family and communities is more acute for women, who are on average 57 miles from their home, more for the Welsh women who must come to an English prison to serve their sentence. Larger prisons, holding offenders from many different locations, also face difficulties coping with the women’s transition to probation and release; they must coordinate with services from numerous different areas. The House of Commons justice committee gave an example: ‘HMP Eastwood Park works with eight probations trusts, seventy-two local authority areas, fifty-two drug and alcohol teams, and a complex network of healthcare trusts, social services departments, and third sector organisations.’81 The committee also emphasised that the scope of the government’s probation services review is particularly limited in that it takes the size of the women’s prison population as a given, when other strategies could be used to reduce this population vastly, thereby affecting the relevance and validity of any proposals the government may produce.

  Within the generally positive move to place greater emphasis on rehabilitation services, there is some concern about what this means for the work being done inside prisons and with offenders on long-term sentences. Giving evidence to the justice select committee, which reported in July 2013, Nick Hardwick felt that ‘giving responsibility for through-the-gate services to reduce reoffending to new providers under the Transforming Rehabilitation proposals had the potential to neglect the role of prisons themselves’.82 This is on top of a service which is already falling far short of its obligations: ‘A prisons inspectorate survey found that 38 per cent of women in prison did not have accommodation arranged on release, and that only a third of women who wanted help and advice about benefits received it.’83

  The concern therefore for me remains what will happen to ESP. A number of organisations that deal with both of the open prisons have, overall, a positive view of them. A former senior probation officer who worked in Holloway for many years and had dealings with the two open prisons agreed that they are a good thing. In her view Askham Grange in Yorkshire has had an excellent reputation for many years, particularly in relation to improving family contacts in planning for release. However, it is true that both Askham and East Sutton Park have struggled a bit because of their ‘remote’ locations and she reported that when she was at Holloway many women on longer sentences resisted moving on to ESP, mainly because they were Londoners who had never ventured out of London and whose resettlement plans remained focused on London.

  Both the ex-probation officer and I encountered some young women at ESP who had never seen a cow before arriving there and who found life in the depths of the countryside quite ‘spooky’. Others complained that the costs of visits were prohibitive for their families and they had moved with great reluctance. Some in fact resisted a move but that only results in a negative on their prison record. One girl I met halfway through my stay at ESP moved from Peterborough to us for the last three weeks of her sentence and was very upset as her family was in Scotland.

  The ex-probation officer wondered whether the open prisons would survive the Transforming Rehabilitation plans for resettlement prisons located in the ‘right’ places where supervision of offenders’ ‘resettling’ would be outsourced to firms under contracts that would reward them by how successful they were in reducing reoffending – the so-called ‘Payment by Results’, tantamount in the eyes of some critics to ‘privatisation through the back door’. Whatever happens there will be real challenges for those currently undertaking the review of the women’s estate to come up with appropriate regimes and prisons for women who may have received quite lengthy sentences but need to progress to settings with lower security. It will be important of course when looking at alternatives to see whether they might make open prisons less important in the structure of the women’s estate. But with regard to alternatives to custody such as women’s community centres (which seek to address the complex needs of isolated women in particular, and to enable them to comply with community-based sentences and treatment programmes), the general belief of those I spoke to seems to be that these should not pose a threat to the concept of open prisons – even if those who may have received short sentences get sent elsewhere. It is also worth noting that reoffending rates for those given community orders in 2009 were 7 per cent lower than those given short prison sentences.84 In addition the former official suggested that there will still always be a need for those serving sentences of longer than four years a
nd who progress through various programmes and are deemed to have become ‘lower risk’ to be ‘tested’ in more open settings for parole or other purposes.

  The former probation officer told me that often women’s prisons are viewed by the system as being too expensive – they do indeed cost more because of the complex needs of the women sent to prison but there can be a tendency to almost ‘blame’ women for being difficult and costly compared to men, rather than looking at their specific needs and designing prisons to fit those needs. And there could be savings if that is true, as many believe there is a strong argument that women just don’t need such high-level or very expensive security as men do. But people I spoke to think that it is possible that the MoJ and the NOMS will see reconfigured ‘resettlement’ prisons as fulfilling the purpose of open prisons. There is some talk about prisoners staying put in one prison throughout their sentence, being (relatively) near to home and undergoing a more open regime towards the end of their sentence. If they do go down that route, one might guess that it would be tempting to ‘sell off’ the nice bit of ‘real estate’ that an open prison like ESP represents – ‘realising’ assets to pay for the ‘new’ approach. I was told that this might indeed be in the minds of the reviewers, who may subscribe to the view that for some reason open prisons are always thought as too expensive. They should not be, given the much lower staffing and regime requirements on the security front. While I was there all the work was done by the residents and the staffing was minimal. The farm seemed to be self-financing though of course relying on rather cheap labour. And I’m sure a lot could be done to improve the revenue of the estate.