Prisonomics
Page 16
16 APRIL
As we cleaned the dining room today, one female governor entered through the corridor landing and stood at the top of the stairs leading from the dining room to the main hallway. We have a number of governors: a No. 1 governor, a male, who we share with the nearby male prison Blantyre, and at least two if not three governors who haven’t tended to stay very long but who at least are there most of the time and know the workings of the prison well.
The governor pointed to dust on the banisters and called upon me. It was not the bit I was responsible for so as soon as my co-workers arrived I read them the riot act – they had to get up earlier and really pull their socks up. They all agreed they would. At lunch time the governor reappeared and called us over to her. Oh dear. I could sense an IEP coming (not that I was sure what the Incentives and Earned Privileges scheme really was; it is, I believe, basically points for or against you, usually the latter, though I had never come across them myself and doubt they ever applied in ESP). But no, she wanted to know how we thought we should prepare for the forthcoming inspection and meeting which would be part of the review of the women’s estate. We all wanted ESP to do well so we sat down with her for a good hour, looked at the terms of reference for the review and told her what we thought ESP’s unique selling point (USP) was. Cutting out the management consultancy speak, we said what we thought ESP excelled in and what it contributed that other establishments, apart from Askham Grange, the only other women’s open prison, could not provide. It was great to spend an hour thinking strategically, a bit like the old days at KPMG where I used to work – though this time I was alongside a drug importer who was serving fourteen years for bringing cocaine into the country in food drums in the back of her car; a girl who was a mule, bringing drugs from the Caribbean; and a young offender convicted for violent attack and robbery – all, apart from the Caribbean lady, proclaiming their innocence. And they did a great job, sensibly debating rather than arguing and clearly caring for their fellow residents but also for the survival of ESP, which they thought added a lot to rehabilitation despite some glaring faults.
17 APRIL
Today was Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. When the news of her death was announced, I was on the phone to one of my children (it must be obvious by now that I ended up with a huge phone bill). Everyone started talking about it even though many of my fellow residents were hardly alive when she was Prime Minister. There was so much in the news that one couldn’t avoid it. Over lunch and supper in the ensuing days there was a lot of debate about her funeral: Would it be a state funeral? What would it cost? Was it worth it? All the things that I suspect were being discussed around many tables throughout the land. The foreign girls were rather indifferent but amazingly no one thought Mrs Thatcher was a role model for women. There was no doubt that everyone liked the pomp and ceremony of such state occasions but the cynicism shone through. Of course, on the day, the funeral procession was watched by all, if not at the time it took place when many were working but during the endless repeats. But the most heated discussion in the end was on costs. Here we are, said the girls, our chances of getting legal support if we need it are under serious threat from the cuts in legal aid being introduced to save a few million pounds, in the process raising the feeling of helplessness and hurt at being singled out as non-deserving of support, and yet all this money is being spent on this funeral.
It’s easy to see what such comparisons of costs say to people in prison. After I was released it was reported on 5 June that more than 600 senior judges warned that cuts to legal aid would cause rioting in prisons, as prisoners, they said, would be left with no recourse other than ‘mutiny’.100 Indeed, in 2011, in Ford open prison a riot over prisoners and officers’ relations caused £5m worth of damage to buildings, in addition to staff overtime and all the follow-up costs involved. It turns out that the girls, however unsophisticated their economics, had a point. Justice Secretary Chris Grayling later stated that the changes would save just £4m a year in prisoners’ legal aid costs101 – in fact lawyers argue that this saving is likely in practice to be even less than that as cuts implemented already under the previous government had reduced the number of legal aid-supported cases for prisoners dramatically.
The Thatcher funeral was eventually estimated to have incurred direct costs of £1.2m and costs for staff who would have been used elsewhere of £2m.102 From a purely economic point, and despite being an admirer of Thatcher, it still seemed perverse that while support for people who needed legal aid was being cut by £4m the government could find more than £3m to give a dead Prime Minister a grandiose send off.
18 APRIL
The sandwich and coffee company Pret a Manger came and spoke to residents today, arranged by the recruitment charity Working Chance in association with Vision at ESP, about the opportunities it had for current and ex-offenders. Girls took a break from the kitchen still wearing white uniforms and caps on their hair to listen. I attended to learn what was on offer for the residents and watched a video of the company and its ethos and then the manager talked to a number of girls who were looking for positions. They all got rather excited about the opportunities on offer.
At the beginning, once the offenders are allowed to be in paid employment, Pret pays its apprentices a training salary and travel costs as well as a clothes allowance. The girls also receive an additional £1 an hour as a bonus (like all the other employees) if the shop they are working in passes a mystery shopper test. After the three-month training period, they receive a rise and Pret often gives out free food and arranges lots of events and prizes – the company promotional film even showed the chaos of Pret’s Christmas party in a nightclub.
So the girls were very enthusiastic about it all and there was a disorderly queue to talk to the HR manager and put in an application form. It was clear to me that the company would be doing well out of people to whom it would have to pay the bare minimum, but at least it provided opportunities and the company seemed to be genuinely positive about employing offenders.
I arranged an interview with the Pret representative afterwards and asked why the company was interested in offenders, apart, perhaps, because of the cheaper labour. She said that they were harder-working than the norm, punctual, and tended to stay on after their release except when they were released to locations where there were no Pret branches – a rare occurrence these days. As they stayed in the job longer, retention rates were improved and the costs of rehiring and retraining were reduced, making a real difference to the company. In my view, it should be widely publicised that companies such as Pret are making a real business case for hiring offenders and those who are still squeamish about employing people with convictions need not be. I am convinced that companies like Virgin, who put a policy of hiring offenders and ex-offenders in their corporate social responsibility policy documents for all to see, know what they are doing.
A lovely Indian girl of just twenty-two, who was convicted during her first job since finishing her studies for allegedly helping her boss profit from false insurance claims, has secured a position through the charity in the HR department of one such company, with help from Working Chance. At first she’ll be employed on a voluntary basis but then she’ll move to a paid job. To me she was the girl from the kitchens who gave me second helpings whenever she could, and I was very proud of her.
21 APRIL
Each evening while in ESP I used to don walking shoes, hat and gloves, and go for a brisk walk (I called it my power walk though it was anything but) just round the garden at the back of the building to get some fresh air, however cold, and a bit of exercise after an enormous supper. The walk always had to be completed before 8 p.m., which was when the back door to the garden was locked closed and one was no longer able to smoke out the back (I don’t smoke) but had to use the side exit into the courtyard by the kitchen. It was usually a bit of a rush to get out before the door shut as I used to spend the time after supper writing letters to catch the collection time of 9
p.m.; I’d often have to interrupt the letter writing for my evening walk. I would occasionally walk with another resident if Coronation Street did not intervene but more often than not I ventured out on my own just after 7.30 for half an hour. Everyone thought I was mad going out in that weather, which indeed was freezing for much of the time I was there. But it did me a lot of good; walking round and round, avoiding the out of bounds areas which were clearly though discreetly marked, but still having enough ground to cover and absorb the beauty of the Kent countryside rolling out in the valleys below.
That evening I started a bit earlier but still had to hurry as I wanted to spend some time as I always did on a Sunday in the library returning books and borrowing others. Even when no one is in charge, the library opens from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. over the weekend, which is great, and there is a system where one can record on a piece of paper books returned and those taken out. You can take out a maximum of eight books at any one time but the librarian is very lax about this as long as we record what we’ve borrowed. At times there are also ‘free books’ donated by authors and a book club which meets every few weeks to discuss a single book. The club also sets a ‘six book challenge’, which rewards residents who can demonstrate they have read six books over a given period with an award and free books for them to take home, often donated and signed by an author. If lucky, the library is also visited by a renowned writer, such as Martina Cole, who came to Holloway while I was there.
The resident librarian, who had some difficulty walking, had left a big notice asking that if anyone came in could they please take the pile of the main prison newspapers, which after being delivered had remained in the library, back into the big house and into the drawing room so that everyone could read them. So I did – it took me a few goes, running against the clock, as the witching hour of 8 p.m. approached. There are two main papers: Converse, edited by Mark Leech, and Inside Time. They are very well presented with many articles, comments and letters from inmates from prisons all around the country, and provide prisoners with a lot of the information they need about legal developments that might affect them, given the lack of internet access. I noticed that the issue they were majoring on was indeed the proposed cut in legal aid for prisoners, which had already become a major discussion point at ESP. Of course the legal aid budget may indeed be too big and needs rationalising but prisoners were singled out as the group likely to lose this ‘privilege’ of free advice from lawyers. With no one to explain what it all meant in practice within ESP, people had started using their precious phone money to ring their lawyers and try to understand its implications. Many expressed the view that it was already very hard to get any solicitor interested in helping them with legal aid and a number who spoke to me at length were concerned about the ability to pursue their appeals against sentences or lodge complaints against the prison service. Others worried about how to defend themselves in confiscation orders and also in residency hearings by their ex-partners, who they held responsible for being there in prison in the first place, and others.
Becky, a forty-year-old with a beautiful family that always came to visit, panicked about the implications of the cut in legal aid for her as she was instigating divorce proceedings against her husband. She blamed him for her being sent to prison in the first place and feared that with no proper representation she would lose her house, which was so important if she needed to find a job and look properly after her son, who was having serious difficulties coping with her being away and was being looked after by her father, who himself wasn’t well. She had not been allowed to visit her son as she wasn’t on her Facility Licence Eligibility Date yet for Release on Temporary Licence to kick in and couldn’t get a Childcare Resettlement Licence as her son was seventeen – just above the cut-off age of sixteen. So she tried and tried to get some leave to visit him; the boy was in a bad way and the school was writing to her to encourage her to visit. She was constantly refused leave by the governor and didn’t know who to turn to. The anxiety and concern caused was immense. I hadn’t seen her smile in ages and yet she had often in the past been the soul of the party. We had long discussions about what could be done and her misery was increasing with every rejection she received to make the visit. I wondered whether perhaps she just wasn’t expressing herself properly when making her case. And then I saw her chatting in the drawing room with a lady from the Independent Monitoring Board who then took up her case. Three weeks before I left, Becky was finally able to visit her son and she returned much happier. The visit had been so important for him. He then came to see his mother a week later on visitors’ day with some other members of the family – something he had refused to do before – and we all commented on how handsome and how well he looked, smiling and confident. It was extraordinary to see how important keeping the connection with the family was for all concerned and it confirmed all that the literature says about the therapeutic effect that keeping families in contact as much as possible has.
Once Becky got over that problem the worries about being able to prevent her husband from walking off with her assets continued as she was not at all clear whether she was allowed any legal aid. I couldn’t help her but the confusion and heartache it has created for people who feel that they have once again been singled out as villains who don’t deserve legal representation is incalculable. Since my release this portrayal of prisoners as undeserving of any representation has been reinforced by the fuss over the legal costs associated with the failed attempt of Ian Brady to be moved from a mental hospital to a normal prison. In a written parliamentary question the Ministry of Justice gave the figure of 43,780 inmates who used legal aid to the tune of £23m in 2011/12 to complain about sentences, disciplinary matters, their treatment and issues to do with the parole board.103 The tabloids used this as background to the Brady story and majored on the £250,000 cost to the taxpayer of his case being brought to court. Interestingly the Ian Brady costs are not part of what the government intends to cut as his legal aid was, as I understand it, part of anyone’s entitlement under the Mental Health Act, which allows a periodic review, paid for centrally, of whether people need to remain in mental institutions.
There have been comments from lawyers that in no other area are the basic human rights that allow people to complain about the way they are being treated taken away so easily without an outcry. For women, in particular, these types of complaints may result in better treatment, parole and early release or better access to their children, and can only help them to reintegrate with the community and their families. Without them, these women lose all self-confidence and the ability to have some control over their life because they cannot afford to hire someone to advise them. To me, this is a dangerous move. Mark Leech, ex-offender and now editor of Converse, one of the main prison newspapers, has been reported as saying that the government should stop focusing on vulnerable prisoners, who are a soft political target, and warned that if ‘you remove a prisoner’s right to challenge their treatment legitimately … you’ll have them parading complaints on prison roofs’.104 Lord Ramsbotham says that although men do protest and occasionally get results in this way if all else fails, women just get depressed. And one ex-prison governor said: ‘When did you ever hear or see pictures of women throwing tiles from prison rooftops? Never – they just internalise it and self-harm.’
In the media frenzy that accompanied the Ian Brady judgement, Chris Grayling said: ‘It’s unacceptable for taxpayers to fork out millions for prisoners to bring legal cases that just shouldn’t be going to court.’105 It is easy to attack a part of society that cannot easily defend itself. Robert Brown of solicitors Corker Binning says that most costs in cases like this are incurred when they do go to court as the solicitor advising a prisoner on legal aid will not want to spend a lot of time and effort on a worthless case. And he argues that there shouldn’t be a presumption by the CPS, which makes the ultimate decision, that those cases shouldn’t go to court even before the decision is made. The cost to the taxp
ayer of just giving advice on complaints is in fact very small, as Chris Grayling has himself acknowledged. Interestingly, The Observer on 28 July 2013 pointed out that some ‘1,210 crown court trials collapsed because of problems with court administration’ and that in 2012, ‘the CPS was forced to pay compensation for costs in nearly 400 criminal trials’. Whatever the rights or wrongs and the reasons for it, which The Observer attributed to the 27 per cent cuts in the CPS budget, the sad fact remains that the costs of wasted cases are substantial and the prisoners’ figure pales into insignificance by comparison. Providing yet another comparison, the same article, quoting figures provided from Freedom of Information requests carried out by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism for The Observer, suggested that between 2011 and 2013 the ministry spent some £230m on making people redundant.106