Prisonomics

by Pryce, Vicky

  For what it’s worth, in France judges can add a penalty of suspension of civic rights to a prison sentence, which seems to keep the ECHR happy. As the debate heats up over a possible Brexit (Britain leaving the EU), it is interesting that Switzerland has given voting rights to prisoners for decades without any outcry from the public.

  4 MAY

  It is my daughter’s birthday today. When I rang her she confirmed that she had received the two cards I sent – one made by me using cut-outs from discarded cards and stickers provided by the wonderful officer Mrs Beck. The card caused a lot of amusement as I am not at all artistic and the card turned out looking pretty weird, but she loved it, or so she said. Maybe it is true what they say, that it is the thought that counts, but I had been really pleased with myself. The other was a very nice, more conventional birthday card very sweetly brought back from the outside for me by one of my fellow residents during her day out. Anyone who has not been to prison can simply not imagine how important these types of communication were for us. We absolutely depended on letters getting there on time and birthdays are so important, we had to get it right. Using two stamps to send two cards as insurance, hoping that at least one would get there was, we all felt, worth it. They both in the event made it. Happy mummy, happy daughter, thank you Post Office.

  Tricia, who also works for Working Chance during the week, asked me to endorse a proposal she was putting together to raise some £25,000 to fund a project for going into Holloway and teaching young offenders employability skills. I spent the weekend reading the terms of reference, loved it and wrote a note of support. I typed it in the IT room and printed it twice, and Tricia took it with her the following day. She had already made it to a shortlist of three after presenting to a group of possible investors who are part of what is known as the ‘Funding Network’. They had to then put a few more things together and go and present again to see if they would get the final funding. After my release I found out from Jocelyn Hillman, the head of Working Chance, that they did. Jocelyn had taken two of ESP’s young residents, May and Sam, to the final presentation. Both of them had received an indeterminate public protection sentence when they were just sixteen and they did a splendid job presenting the case. Real heroes. I hope they do well now that they have been released. When I had left, Sam was finishing an Access course for which she was getting external study leave, and was trying to decide where she should do her degree in psychology; like any other sixth-former she was finishing her exams and waiting anxiously for her results and final confirmation of offers.

  5 MAY

  In the afternoon I was visited by my great friends Philip and Stephanie Maltman, and my daughter and grandson. Philip, a painter, has been painting me a new card every week and I now have a marvellous collection which I intend to frame in a big tableau, naming it ‘The Prison Cards’. I noticed that his colours were becoming richer and more rousing as the date of my release neared – although I may have just imagined it. Philip also manages the Dulwich independent bookshop, which seems to be getting all sorts of prizes, and I have benefited greatly from his choice of books, which have been coming to ESP on a very regular basis. Today, however, it’s my turn to give him books: I have packed most of my papers and books to send home early and ease the pressure on my last day. The officers who look after the visitors helped me pack them and have them neatly labelled and put aside for my friends to collect at the end of the visit. It looked really funny seeing them cart five black prison rubbish bags through the visitors’ car park home with them. (These bags still surround me in my study, mostly unopened. They have acquired sentimental value.)

  As it is Greek Easter I had service with the chaplain after my visitors had left and then after dinner I settled down to watch the football. We beat Man United 1–0. Man U had many chances but Chelsea played better and should have been given a penalty, too. It was good to see Lampard playing throughout. Now, of course, Mourinho is sure to come back.

  6 MAY

  I rather got on with Leyla, a blonde, fair girl of Turkish-Cypriot origin. She had become an expert hairdresser and had offered a number of times to cut and colour my hair but we could never find the right time. When I walked into Butler’s this afternoon carrying food trays, she asked me a favour and I quickly obliged. She wanted her boyfriend to come and see her but was worried about how she would persuade him. It turned out he was Greek. She wanted to tell him straight, come to see me, but in perfect Greek. So I took her through the words ‘come to see me’ in Greek. I didn’t think it was that hard. In fact, it is really easy: ‘ella na me this’. And yet it took an hour and a half of practising, me saying the four words again and again, with everyone joining in to get it right. In the end it worked and he did come the following weekend.

  7 MAY

  I met with the HDC board today including the same lady I had met at my risk-assessment when I had first arrived. This was a less officious affair with Dee, my probation officer, Mo, from education, senior officer Mr Brown and my personal officer, Miss Callaghan, in attendance. Everything seemed to be going well though we are still awaiting the checks on the property from the local authority. They don’t envisage any problems, however, and we’re all set for a Monday release date after the governor has signed the application and the arrangements for my curfew have been agreed. The usual times are 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. but they can be changed if there is a good reason, such as work hours that can’t be accommodated within that time-frame. The shortest a curfew can be is nine hours.

  Conditions for the curfew vary depending on the service provider, the instructions of probation and the governor who signs the HDC licence. The security company providers come to fix the tag on day one of the HDC date (any time between 3 p.m. and midnight). Some people get use of the garden, others are just allowed from the front door to the back door, even if they smoke – one of the residents was apparently told that despite the fact they had children in the house they should just open the back door, stand just on the inside smoking and blow out. One of my friends, who was leaving after me, heard that this is what she was also going to get, which for her was tough as she had to run a farm with her husband. She described to me how she would have to stand with one foot in and the rest of her body leaning out for hours at a time trying to scare preying birds and foxes away from their chickens until her husband came home. She asked if she could complain about this just before she was due to leave ESP and was told that yes, she could, but that she would have to stay in prison beyond her HDC date while the complaint was being investigated. Not surprisingly she chose to let it go.

  I said I was very pleased with the help I had received and that my stay in ESP had taught me a lot. They all wished me luck for the future.

  8 MAY

  I collected my licence today and discussed the final curfew restrictions, which seem reasonable. I agreed that I would ring if I encountered any problems. As it happens I never did; everything worked well and efficiently though I have heard from other ex-offenders that they were contacted by the security firm on a number of occasions as their monitor was showing them not to be there. In the case of one woman I know, her monitor continued to play up and after a few such mishaps she complained and they came and changed it. The bad news was they turned up just before midnight to replace it, waking everyone up. On another occasion I was told by a politician who had gone to prison for a few months that while on tag the security company accused them of having run away when they were in fact at that time with their probation officer. I am sure there are lots of examples when things go wrong and ESP was sensible to warn us in advance and offer help if it were needed.

  9 MAY

  Spoke today to a lovely new girl in the Butler’s Room, twenty-five years old, quiet, intelligent-looking, who had been working in the kitchens since arriving from a closed prison a few weeks earlier. She told me how she had gone to a club and had been searched. She had a few grams of cocaine on her – she says she had no intention of selling them but said to the police t
hat she intended it for her use and that of her friends. And that did it for her.

  She was on bail for a whole year and when it came to put in a plea she was again advised to plead guilty on the grounds that she would get a suspended sentence – well, she didn’t and the judge said she had to go to prison because drugs are such a bad thing. She is convinced that if her case had been heard in a court other than the one in the sleepy town where the court hearing and sentencing took place she would have been let off. And for an evening’s outing that went wrong her career has been ruined. Clearly she shouldn’t have been carrying any drugs. But she felt she had learned nothing in prison; she was already well educated and when she got out she would have to start all over again.

  Another girl with her, also twenty-five, was in for a similar reason but for slightly longer. In her case, although it was a similar story, she had a few more grams of cocaine on her but pleaded not guilty as the charge was for possession and supplying. The second part of the charge was not true, she claimed, so she pleaded not guilty but in her view it was difficult for the jury to say anything other than guilty as she certainly was of the first part of the charge. She felt true anger at the system as she insists she had no intention of sharing or selling. In both cases they had made a silly mistake but you wonder how many other girls do a similar thing every night and just don’t get caught.

  10 MAY

  My last healthcare check and my third and last hepatitis B injection. I had a nice chat with the nurse. My weight has stayed down, amazingly; I will leave prison 4 pounds lighter than when I entered. It must be the lack of alcohol; since I am getting the taste for puddings there may be something to be said for selling a diet book that is very simple and easy to follow. I might call it the prison diet: keep off booze and eat as much as you can get your hands on, three meals a day, nothing in between (throw those biscuits away) and as much pudding as you can stomach. Crucially you must remain active through the day and avoid slumping in front of the TV watching mindless soaps. That should guarantee staying skinny forever.

  11 MAY

  With a break in the weather, I had one last lovely long walk round the lake and the estate before an intense chat with Liz and Craig, the gym instructor, about life and the future. Then half an hour of rowing, a frantic rush to have a shower without burning myself before brunch and then extra helpings of scrambled eggs (put on my plate while the chef wasn’t watching or pretended not to), before I tackled my belongings.

  Nigel, the officer at the reception desk, and I spent about an hour putting most of what I was taking home in a huge rucksack my son had brought in and sorting out the bags I would be sending home via my visitors (more books) that afternoon. Then I had the pleasure of my last visit in prison, this time from David and Lisa Buchan and Baroness Stedman-Scott of the charity Tomorrow’s People, for whom, while senior managing director at FTI Consulting, I had provided one of the first free economic evaluations under the auspices of Pro Bono Economics, a charity of which I am a patron, of Tomorrow’s People’s programme to get difficult 16–18-year-olds jobs. At the end of my very last visit, David and Lisa kindly took five of my bags away and dropped them at my house; my daughter put them in the study where they mostly still remain, alongside the previous lot.

  We celebrated my final evening of bingo and then enjoyed a cheese feast in my room, with presents given out to everyone. It was stuff I had bought from the canteen – cheese for Sarah, tobacco for Amy, Cadbury sticks for Judy, coffee for Sue, more Kit Kats for Liz, cereal for Charlotte. I also gave out food I had hoarded from our ‘grab bags’ which I didn’t like, mainly biscuits and health cereal bars, and, of course, stamps; I included lots of stamps in little thank you cards I had somehow managed to obtain or had made myself. There were lots of kisses to people I would not see in the morning and also little thank you notes left for the staff.

  The process felt quite businesslike at times, especially as I sorted out my accounts. Whatever was left in my balance, plus the £46 that everyone gets on release, would be transferred to my external bank account. I kept some money for last-minute phone calls but in the end, despite ringing everyone I could think of, I was still left with £14 of unspent phone money, which you cannot get back or transfer to anyone else who may need it.

  Was I emotional? Maybe, but I didn’t let it show. I was desperate to get back to my children and friends, so they could see that I was OK and stop worrying about me as they had done since I’d first entered prison. But I also knew that I would miss my fellow residents and maybe, strangely, also the simple routine of prison, knowing full well that life on the outside would not be easy. I knew I had to face photographers and the media, both of whom would follow my every move and document every success or failure. There would be many challenges as I tried to return to some form of ‘normality’. My experience, however, was eye-opening and I knew it would stay with me forever; it would shape how I thought of the world and how I behaved in it. And I would never forget it – or my fellow residents.

  12 MAY

  My last full day. Aanjay and Alison lovingly squeezed me some orange juice and I had three pieces of toast and jam before completing my dining room duties.

  At my last church session I discovered I wasn’t the only one leaving: the chaplain, Tony, announced to a stunned congregation that he was leaving for Ford open prison at the end of the month. We agreed to stay in touch and I have since heard that Sally, a lady with whom I spent a lot of time, has taken over the post temporarily, which is so well deserved and I am sure she will look after the girls really well.

  CHAPTER 6

  BACK HOME

  13 MAY

  D-day. I should have been released on HDC on the twelfth but the way the system works, you cannot leave on a weekend or a bank holiday but have to wait until the first working day after it. So, I was allowed to leave on Monday 13 May. I can still to this day not understand why this is so. It used to be that if the date fell on a weekend you could be released on the Friday but that had been stopped relatively recently – again I don’t understand why, unless it was the result of yet another law and order campaign.

  Still, as the big day approached the girls had been constantly asking how much longer I had and how I felt. Of course, I was thrilled but I had to keep calm. Come each departure, however, the excitement among the girls is palpable. Why? First of all, you leave via the front door, the only time you are allowed to do that during the entire stay there, and not from the back, which is how you arrived. I hardly cared but for the other residents that seemed to matter a lot. The superstition was that once they left, they were not to look back as that would mean they would be returning at some stage.

  More importantly, the departure was finally proof that you could really leave the place for good. For the residents each departure brought their own closer so although there were many tears as friends parted there was also hope. In my case I had very few of their problems – I had a home of my own, loving children, I had not benefited from my crime so there was nothing to pay back financially, I did not owe anything except my court case costs, whatever they ended up being, and I had had huge support from people on the outside. Obviously I had to rebuild my career but I felt that my experience could also be put to good use for my fellow residents and others in the system.

  I was able to focus on the real immediate issue causing a lot of excitement among residents and staff: the photographers had gathered outside once more. Amazingly, some of them had been there since the previous weekend thinking I was being released then and were ‘casing the joint’ to find the best position from which to take their pictures.

  But we had a cunning plan. I had already taken advantage of the previous two visits from relatives and friends in the preceding weekends to give back ten big prison rubbish bags of books and papers, writing pads and diaries, and some clothes so I would be left with the bare minimum on the day. That was helpful since I had accumulated a lot of stuff. Aside from the very many books – generous friends
clearly thought I would be bored stiff without anything to read – what took up a lot of space were letters. After the huge postbag I had been given following my sentencing, I had been receiving an average of fifteen letters, e-mails or postcards a day during my entire stay at ESP. Many I had replied to but so many others I intended to reply to on my return home.

  Receiving so many letters had its pitfalls. Many of my women friends wrote to me daily, sometimes twice daily, scribbling on cards while on the bus, on the tube, on airplanes to visit their ailing mother in Cork, from London and then from Italy and back from London, with the result that I became utterly confused about the sequence of events in their lives, with letters arriving at different times depending on where they were posted from.

  My great friend Boni would send me little summery cards with flowers on while other people kept me informed of life on the outside. Michael Littlechild, godfather to one of my sons, came to visit me early on but then went off on his travels. As chief executive of GoodOperation, a company that I helped set up and that advises others around the globe on corporate social responsibility, Michael is almost never at home and postcards started arriving from exotic locations, which fascinated my fellow residents. I had his name on my list of allowed numbers and at the various times I tried to get hold of him he was picking up his mobile while having dinner in Poland, Kazakhstan, Cambodia, Uganda, you name it. The postcards from him were incredibly colourful and very funny. My friends seemed to have rediscovered writing, which they had forgotten to do in the era of e-mails, and were relishing it. In fact a number have continued to write since. But what fascinated me is the fact that writing a proper letter brought forward the need for people to open up; despite having warned them that staff read everything that comes in, a couple of male friends started using me as an agony aunt and over five pages of tightly knit handwriting would divulge all their problems. I would respond with an equally long letter – although I knew full well that staff wouldn’t be able to read my difficult handwriting, I was optimistic that my friends would have more time and inclination to decipher it. Hopefully they did and my advice was heeded – but maybe not. It seems that months of using a pen had actually reduced my ability to write legibly and in desperation my friends Jane and Mike Cooke teamed up with everyone and, on behalf of my friends, sent me a book called Improve Your Handwriting. Not very subtle! It had no effect and I left it to the library when I exited ESP.