Prisonomics

by Pryce, Vicky

  More broadly, many of those interviewed spoke of how the chaplaincy provided a place of respite from the dehumanising effects of imprisonment, and allowed them to ‘feel like a human being again’. They also gained a sense of peace from the idea that God, rather than the prison authorities, was in ultimate control of their lives.89

  Much of this mirrored what I saw at ESP. In our airy and light multi-faith room we were all treated with respect, there was discussion and debate and we were listened to as we voiced our various opinions and thoughts and discussed things, like the meaning of various passages from the Bible, in such a way that allowed us all to lift ourselves from our human conditions and move to a different level of understanding and feeling. There was also compassion and willingness to share experiences and listen to other people’s feelings and as such it was very liberating. I did not discover God, or at least I didn’t discover anything spiritual over and above what I already believed in, but I now think that these sessions were seriously therapeutic – I was not aware of the real difference they were making at the time but I always left with a feeling of well-being, and not just because of the excellent mango juice and chocolate biscuits.

  There is a long tradition of the church helping women in prison. It started in earnest with Elizabeth Fry, the great Christian philanthropist and prison reformer, who did a lot to highlight the conditions of women in prisons at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1818 she gave evidence to the House of Commons committee on the conditions in women’s prisons – the first woman ever to present evidence in Parliament. She had been instrumental in encouraging women to read the Bible as a way of getting them to help themselves, something that continues to this day under the stewardship of the chaplains in each prison. It seemed rather sad when I discovered soon after my release that the Bank of England had announced plans to replace the image of Elizabeth Fry on the £5 note with one of Winston Churchill. It was worrying that the departing Bank of England governor, Sir Mervyn King, admirable in many other ways, should leave behind him on his retirement a monetary policy committee (MPC) and a financial policy committee consisting of only men and banknotes which, although all featuring the Queen, should have no other female in the long history of Britain worthy of mention on them. His successor, Mark Carney, later announced that the £10 note will now feature Jane Austen. That is good in itself but I can’t see why, just as the issue of women in prison has risen up on the agenda, we can’t have more than one woman on our banknotes – or a female on the MPC again.

  19 MARCH

  There is now proof beyond reasonable doubt that I have achieved universal name recognition, for better or worse. Denise, a mature lady convicted of trying to defraud her mother-in-law, showed me a long interview printed in the Telegraph with Nancy Dell’Olio, who mentioned my name casually during her interview without needing to explain who I was. For the uninitiated, Nancy is an accomplished Italian lawyer who came to fame in the UK as the girlfriend for a period of Sven-Göran Eriksson, once manager of the English football team. At the time of her interview she was in the process, I believe, of moving out of the £2.5m home belonging to Sven which she had refused to vacate all those years since their breakup. Fun to read. I like football and she is a feisty lady. Not the type my judge would like, said my fellow residents. Aanjay suggested I should get in touch with Nancy when I got out as she is probably a great woman. I fantasised for a while about us meeting up and going out to supper together one day. That would be sure to put the paparazzi in a real spin. But then again maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea after all. But fun, yes… So if Nancy is reading this and fancies a cup of coffee, by all means get in touch.

  The girls insisted that it was certain, now, that I would be asked to go on Celebrity Big Brother or I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! They fantasised about how we could all go as a team once they were out and they would come as my assistants. I ridiculed the idea that this would ever happen but how wrong can you be. After I left ESP and the invitation to appear on Celebrity Big Brother was sent to my publishers I realised how much more with it the girls in ESP were. I laughed, wrote to the girls to say they had indeed been correct in their expectations but that I had declined. Nevertheless one of them later wrote to me to say that the Daily Mirror in mid-August was still carrying a story saying that I was listed as a possible Celebrity Big Brother contestant… Oh well…

  My lawyer visited today with his assistant Sarah, who had helped me through the trial and with whom I had walked in front of the photographers every day. Robert had not brought her with her last time in Holloway but decided to do so in his first visit to ESP. And the meeting was great. We were allowed to use the so-called ‘quiet room’, also known as the ‘listening room’, a tiny little cubicle near my bedroom but with very comfortable armchairs with one of the officers taking orders for tea and coffee and then bringing it to us. Very civilised. More news from the outside, some instructions from me and then I escorted them to the door by noon, in time for my roll call and lunch at 12.15. I have to say that for such an experienced lawyer it was clear that he didn’t know what to expect. I suspect that Robert’s clients commit more dangerous crimes and I didn’t get the impression that he had ever had a female client before or that he had visited a women’s prison. I think the nearest he has come to representing someone in my position again was when he was hired to give advice during the marriage break up between Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson, which resulted in lots of articles in the press about the abuse of women and which ended with a caution for Saatchi and divorce for the two of them. I have never discovered which side Robert had been on.

  That afternoon we had more inductions and when the time came to visit the education department in the purpose-built building at the end of the garden we had a real emergency. The photographers, it seemed, were still there, having failed to take a picture the previous Sunday. They were now camping behind the trees on the wall that surrounded the lovely church of St Peter and St Paul, which dates back to the thirteenth century and which was just at the edge of the garden. You could walk by the side of it, as the girls did, admittedly the small number who took their exercise seriously and who went outside for reasons other than just to smoke and chat, which is what most others did – except sunbathing in the summer.

  At times there would be weddings or christenings and the bells that rang frequently to the annoyance of anyone trying to take a nap would ring even more joyfully. And that would seriously excite most of the residents, who would all come out and stand as close they could without being intrusive and look and admire the bridesmaids, groom and guests who were walking around the church in full view of us before the ceremony. Lovely bride, they would say, lovely beautiful bridesmaids – and their eyes would water.

  The church was so close that there was an ‘out of bounds’ sign serving as a warning that we were normally not allowed to go the extra 3 feet and through the little gate into the cemetery and then the church. These ‘out of bounds’ notices were, I understood, put up relatively recently after a resident had been told off for going ‘out’ and then successfully argued that as she hadn’t been there long enough she had not learned yet what was ‘in’ and what was ‘out’. For me those discreet signs were very useful as you had to be licensed or have permission normally to leave the area within the confined grounds of the prison – though some of the girls who were already past their FLED were allowed to go to church with the chaplain at Christmas and Easter. I wouldn’t reach my date until I was discharged on Home Detention Curfew (HDC) so I would have to make my own way independently if I wanted to visit it. I vouched I would. But in the meantime the lovely grey church was so close to us I could just about touch it with my arms outstretched.

  The officers assured me that they would try and get rid of the photographers but it was best that I not go out that way. We decided to stick with the inductions that were either in the house or those that could be accessed from the back door such as the health centre, the drugs rehabi
litation unit, probation and the governor’s office. Education would have to wait as it required walking across the pathway and up some stairs into the garden, which was perfectly visible from the church wall. I was concerned that I was creating extra work for everyone but most were hugely excited by all this attention. There was an announcement for the girls to be mindful of the fact that if they were in rooms on the side of the house overlooking the garden and the cemetery they should watch what they were doing and how they were dressed as they stood by their windows as the photographers were likely to have long lenses that they would use to take pictures. That caused huge hilarity and a lot of excitable discussions. They would often update me on the photographers’ status as they kept watch from their rooms. The officers behaved impeccably, their main interest being to protect me from unwanted publicity, which was my right, so I followed their advice and avoided that day’s induction. A number of the girls walked up to the photographers, asked them what they were waiting for and then told them that I wasn’t there at all but was instead in Askham Grange in York. Since they hadn’t seen me and there hadn’t been any confirmation of my transfer by the prison service some of them believed the girls and went off to check with their papers. But they soon returned. Given that we were enjoying one of the coldest winters in living memory I hoped that at least they were being paid enough to make hanging around a bitterly windy and sleety cemetery worthwhile and we fully expected that those poor chaps – it seems they were mainly male – would soon disappear in search of somewhere warmer to shelter.

  And indeed they did – there was no sign of them in the following few hours so we assumed they had gone for good. But it was then that I realised that the room I was put in when I arrived looked onto the internal courtyard. The windows were covered with that semi-white stuck-on covering, of the type people have in their houses when their front room is overlooking a busy street. This blocked anyone’s full view into the room even if they had managed to sneak in and trespass into the prison area. And it was also as far away from the church from which one could be seen as possible. Clearly the prison officers had enough experience of the system or had been warned by PR in headquarters, which they seemed to be in contact with constantly about me, that this made sense. It was also why it seemed right for me not to do any external jobs which were ‘out of bounds’ and where anyone could approach me. In the meantime I had to take my exercise either in the back courtyard or after 6 p.m. as it was assumed that in this Arctic weather no journalists would stay past their newspaper deadlines.

  20 MARCH

  It was agreed that I would today finally venture out and go to the education building to have my IT induction, which I was really looking forward to as I am useless at it and was determined to learn to touch-type and improve on my Outlook, Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint skills, which to my shame are non-existent except for sending basic e-mails. It was suggested that just in case there was still someone hanging around and wanting to photograph me, I should be shielded by staff who would walk with me there on the direct normal route to prevent a clear view for the camera and on the way back we would take the roundabout way back through ‘out of bounds’ terrain which would be well out of shot anyway. Well, there was someone still there. According to the girls who were threatening to go and shake him down, he was hiding in a tree! He managed to take a couple of pictures after all, which made it into all the national newspapers, me dressed warmly in my winter clothes clutching some books and looking studious. I thought I looked OK – not harassed, in my own clothes, doing something useful. My children complained to the Press Complaints Commission and all my friends were horrified at the intrusion. I read what they had written after I was released on tag and was really touched that they felt so strongly about it. I am a lucky mother. But I personally felt at the time that the journalists were just doing their job and that in many ways it was better to get it over and done with; once they had taken the first picture of me in open prison they would surely leave me alone. And so it proved; despite some false alarms they didn’t come back until near the end.

  Even so, so paranoid was everyone that we once chased a group of perfectly innocent, rather bewildered, Dutch tourists away – wonder what they thought of a prison governor coming to ask them what they were doing taking pictures of the house and gardens. Being a Grade II-listed Elizabethan house with a great history, tourists could often be seen stalking the grounds. But the staff seemed to worry about me more than I worried about myself. I made it clear that having been constantly followed around by journalists in the last few months I was unfazed by it although I worried about the inconvenience to everyone else, residents and staff. But they rose to the occasion with good humour. It is not every day they have to handle the press and they also had to take good care of the other prisoners who didn’t want their pictures to appear in the national press while they were in prison. Many of the women had been more traumatised by the lurid coverage of their cases in the press than the sentence itself and by the damning comments of the judge that had humiliated them and in their minds made a return to their community that much more difficult. In some cases their acquaintances had been told that they were simply away – studying, travelling or whatever. I came across this a lot. A lovely Indian lady never told her parents, who had moved back to India, that she had gone to prison and was calling them weekly from the ESP phone box keeping up the pretence that she and her husband – also in prison, like her, for benefit fraud – were just fine and leading a normal life. Having their pictures taken and then broadcast just wasn’t going to be something they would welcome.

  This was generally respected by the press so, apart from me, all other faces in the published pictures were obscured. Prison officers apparently often don’t tell others what they do for a living though the lady senior officer next to me was very pleased to be identified by her friends and acquaintances by her shoes. It became quite a topic of conversation in the centre office and she and I joked about it again on the day she retired a couple of weeks before I left East Sutton Park. To this day I am convinced no one in ESP held any of this against me and they were much more solicitous towards me than I should have expected.

  21 MARCH

  I met with the nurse today at the immaculate if small healthcare unit between the two medieval towers and next to the gym and the huge laundry room. She checked my weight (I’m losing some), took blood for tests and gave me a second hepatitis B injection. Again for someone who hates needles this was completely painless. I ordered my extra blood pressure pills and ‘Viscotears’ for dry eyes as well as headache pills and was told to collect them on the next delivery day, which was next Tuesday when the blood results would also be ready. I was treated like a real human being. I had wondered why many of the residents were popping in and out of healthcare all the time. It probably did a lot for them psychologically especially since I discovered that there was no longer a counsellor available to deal with mental issues and the girls had to be given special licences to go outside and get treatment if they needed it, a cumbersome task and occasionally one that seemed to sink beneath the weight of bureaucracy.

  I had been completing my inductions for three days already and the session that really made me think hard and reflect about the situation I was in was the ‘pathways’ induction with the head of education. What we did was discuss in quite a lot of helpful detail what we intended to do to respond to what had happened to us, what were our concerns and how we were going to address them between now and when we came out – and beyond. This would then form part of a plan that would be considered by the first risk-assessment board we would attend in the following few days.

  Two of us did it together and we had been assured that everything we talked about would all be kept confidential. We both seemed to care deeply about the impact our actions may have had on our family and our reputations, which is fairly typical for women. But we were both amazed to find out the trainers’ experience regarding the differences between men offenders and
women offenders doing their ‘pathways’ for the future. The administration of East Sutton Park, the only female open prison in the south of England, had been amalgamated with the nearby male open resettlement prison Blantyre in 2007. This allowed staff to make comparisons – albeit anecdotal ones – and patterns had emerged. Women were preoccupied first and foremost with the impact of their imprisonment on their families in general and their children in particular. Their concerns were heightened by a feeling of helplessness because they were away from them and an inability to exercise control over events. Making amends and re-engaging properly with family was priority number one for women. Men in general (and it is a generality but very much from the experience of these prison officers) took it for granted that their children would be looked after by the mother and so were less concerned about the impact on them and much more interested in finding ways to negotiate a reasonable path through prison and then making money once out. When offenders in both prisons were asked what had prevented them from achieving their potential in life the women’s answer was children and family and the men’s was a lack of money. It seemed to me that judging from the controlled experiment of that session as the other resident and I discussed our plans during prison and thereafter, our concerns and worries seemed to fit perfectly into the female pattern of behaviour and improved the statistical significance of the ‘survey’ results based on the two prisons by two.