Prisonomics (3 page)

In 2012, the British Crime Survey reported 9.8 million crimes against adults and children in England and Wales.
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Yet there were only just under 700,000 convictions.
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That’s just 7.1 per cent of crimes
leading
to a conviction. And that presumes that all crime is captured by the British Crime Survey, which is generally acknowledged not to be so.

If one puts seriously violent cases aside, the division between being able to walk down the street and being put behind ‘bars’ can be down to a single moment – a wrong decision, a wrong turning, finding oneself in the wrong place at the wrong time, being associated with the wrong people, a momentary misjudgement – something that people do all the time but usually without disastrous consequence to them and their families. In fact, 24 per cent of women in prison have no previous convictions.
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And for those convicted a lot of it seems to be down to bad luck, often
disadvantaged
background and little education.

Luck seems to work both ways; it is generally accepted that only 3 out of 100 offences end up in court. That figure has been pretty constant for a while. There are a number of reasons behind this statistic: first, many crimes are not reported at all. Many sexual crimes, in particular, are only surfacing now that norms have changed, but change is slow. In addition many instances of corporate crime are dealt with internally and hushed up to avoid damaging a company’s reputation. Very few cases of corporate crime actually end up in court. Second, many crimes are not counted. In order to meet internal targets, police often classify crimes as non-crimes. They have to be convinced that the crime can be solved otherwise the rates of clearing crimes look low. Third, even if there are grounds for prosecuting the police may still just give a caution as it is easier and removes the risk of the CPS throwing the case out. And finally, the CPS might disagree with the police and throw the case out if they feel they don’t have enough evidence to secure a conviction. So what we are seeing is just the tip of the iceberg. It would be too much to say: ‘We are all criminals now’, but there is an astonishingly high level of crimes committed that go undetected or unpunished.

A few days after my release, I walked to a coffee shop with an ex-Home Office senior civil servant who had worked on crime reduction issues. As we covered the 300 yards from Clapham Common tube to Clapham Old Town, my friend remarked that on our way there we had probably passed at least half a dozen people who had committed an offence and had never been caught and a similar number who had been convicted of an offence other than
motoring and who may have been to prison. In his view, it was ironic that all the time that people were looking for retribution and punishment in
sentencing
decisions there seemed to be very little awareness in the media debate that the vast majority of people in prison will be released back into society at some point – and will be walking down the street, as I was doing, without others around them being aware of their past.

There also seems to be a worrying inconsistency in the treatment of individuals by the judicial system in this country. It gets you if it wants to or lets you go at the whim of a judge. There is evidence of a justice and sentencing ‘postcode lottery’ which defies logic and reason, and hence fairness and confidence in the justice system. In his book
Crime
, Nick Ross reminds us that life sentences more than doubled between 1994 and 2004 as a result of a toughening of sentencing rather than because more people
committed
particular crimes. So if caught during that period you would be likely to spend much longer in jail than before that date. But even then, data presented by the Howard League for Penal Reform to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Women in the Penal System at their annual general meeting in July 2013 showed the huge inconsistency in the sentencing of women offenders across magistrates’ courts throughout the country; Cumbria imposed almost four times more immediate custodial sentences for women in 2011 than Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Northumbria and Wiltshire.
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English justice is meant to be blind but it certainly knows the geography of England as these bizarre, inexplicable differences between sentencing in one county compared to another clearly indicate.
What is more, even within a county the town you are attending court in may matter hugely; one girl I met later told me of her frustration at being sentenced to imprisonment in one city in East Anglia for
possessing
and allegedly intending to sell drugs (which she strongly denies) when caught in possession of a very small amount of cannabis when in any other court in a town more used to this type of crime she felt she would have been given, at worst, a suspended sentence or a caution.

A more lenient sentence would have avoided the negative articles in the press, which seems to be
fascinated
by any crime, however small, committed by a woman. The problem is, judges, juries and the press often react even more negatively towards women offenders because, in their view, committing a crime, however trivial, goes against a woman’s very nature. Ann Lloyd explores this in her 1995 book
Doubly Deviant, Doubly Damned: Society’s Treatment of Violent Women
. Women with criminal convictions, she explains, have not only broken the law but also offended people’s ideas of womanhood. Yvonne Jewkes, Professor of Criminology at the University of Leicester, argues that ‘the media tap into, and magnify, deep-seated public fears about deviant women, while paying much less attention to equally serious male offenders’.
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Many of the women I later met in prison believed they were given custodial sentences for offences that a man may have been given a suspended sentence or a caution for instead. It is hard to prove this but the feeling resonated and was expressed not just by the women but also by many of the staff.

Inevitably as an economist and former joint head of the Government Economic Service I had spent a lot
of time looking at cost–benefit analysis of government interventions and had written peer reviews of many government departments’ analysis. But I was acutely aware that I had never looked at Home Office and Ministry of Justice policy appraisals with the care they deserved and though I was vaguely aware of some of the work done on the costs and benefits of
keeping
men in prison, I was pretty sure that the work on women lagged behind. In fact I recall thinking that a lot of the evidence relied on studies carried out in the US. Well, as the judge handed me an eight-month custodial sentence, I was about to find out a lot more.

Thoughts of economics gave way to thoughts of short-term survival as I was led down to the holding area in preparation for the transfer to Holloway soon after sentencing. Just before, during the break after the mitigation presentations by the two sides and before the judge passed down the sentences, I had rushed to the loo and on the way back noticed my friends Stephanie and Philip Maltman and their neighbour Kate sitting disconsolately on the benches outside the court. I can’t recall the exchanges now but they told me afterwards that after they asked how I was, I had answered, ‘Never mind that, how do I look?’ Yes, that was probably true. Looks are important as you cannot afford to look despondent and beaten in front of the photographers and the court artists, who exaggerate any negatives to make a point. I had taken good care every day to appear smart and coordinated and relaxed. Not easy. But at least now the cameras couldn’t follow me downstairs. Thinking that my bracelets would not be allowed with me I handed them to the legal assistant who the press, seeing me hugging her in the morning, immediately described in
the pictures that followed as one of my daughters – another to add to the three I have already!

The process of enumerating and cataloguing what I was taking with me so that it would all arrive safely in Holloway took a bit of time. I was taking a
suitcase
full of clothes and toiletries, many of which I suspected would not pass the test of acceptability once in Holloway, and a black handbag which had to be searched and bagged in a plastic carrier bag but with all the valuables in it enumerated. So started a rather long search through it to establish how much money I had on me and therefore what I was taking with me as a ‘float’, which might keep me going while inside. People from the outside as I discovered could easily add to this by sending cash in. But many girls I came across had no one – or their relatives were too poor to send money and they were relying entirely on the wages they received in prison for the work they did to survive. Most prison services such as cleaning, giving support to incoming prisoners, library assistance, cooking, laying and clearing tables, and other routine work are done by the inmates for usually a paltry sum of rarely more than £20 a week. The money is used to make phone calls to their loved ones and to buy things like tobacco from the ‘canteen’ – some ‘
mythical
place’ that brought in basic supplies and possibly a few treats like chocolate once a week, assuming you had any money to spend. So going in with enough money was important. I never knew that.

I had no idea what was in my bag. The past few weeks had been rather unusual. I had gone to the bank to get cash on a few occasions on the way to the crown court, mostly intending to leave it with the children to cover the cost of running the house if I
was sent away for any length of time. I also used it to buy various things – coffee every morning from Starbucks outside London Bridge station, which became my trademark as I was photographed
carrying
one cup with the name of the coffee franchise prominently displayed each morning (I hope they were grateful for the free product placement), and a vast number of unhealthy croissants and muffins from the crown court trolley. Obviously in those days I was not thinking particularly rationally. And although I thought I was in control that morning before heading to court, I had in fact forgotten that I had been
hoarding
cash and had written the kids cheques instead. So we started counting what was in the bag: tons and tons of coins which had been weighing me down for some time, nearly £100 worth, lodged at the bottom of the bag or inside various zipped compartments (there were many). To my complete embarrassment but the huge amusement of the security guard, there, in between diaries, packets of tissues, chequebooks, loose credit and store cards, letters, newspaper
clippings
(it was a big bag) and a red rose that had been given to me earlier as I was entering the court by some lovely gentleman who had come to my trial every day, we started collectively to bring out a tenner here, a £20 note there, even the odd £50 note, a few fivers I had been given as change. As we were transferring the bag’s contents slowly into a plastic bag for the journey we found more and more – and more. By the time we finished some half an hour later all the other officers on the ground floor next to the exit where the Serco van was waiting to take me to Holloway had come to watch and could not believe their eyes as we finally established that I was going
to prison with a total of £1,490 in cash. Instead of the cheques, this was cash I should have left at home that morning for my children. In the end I was grateful for my mistake. The very expensive phone calls alone during the entire period I was in prison cost around £400, much more than my prison earnings over that period. Perversely, counting out these notes and coins set the scene for what was to come as it actually allowed for a much more relaxed and
humorous
atmosphere to develop, which had a very calming effect on me and stood me in good stead for what would otherwise have developed into a horrendously tense evening. I had heard of people (particularly women) breaking into tears once they were in the cells downstairs after sentencing and I think that incident and the kindness and humanity of the guards proved to be a life saver for me.

It was this sort of kindness from both officers and fellow prisoners that made a huge difference to me throughout my time in prison. Professor Alison Liebling, a highly respected prison researcher based at the University of Cambridge, has written at length on how values such as trust, respect, fairness, order and well-being contribute to making prison life less distressing, less dangerous and more
survivable
.
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Nick Hardwick, the current Chief Inspector of Prisons, later told me that, from what he had seen, the officers’ understanding of what is important to you as an individual – even little things like getting a drink or having access to a hairdryer when you need it – goes some way to ‘make an unbearable situation a bit more bearable’.

I had a quick chat with my legal team who came down to see me and I was able to keep a book to
read, my notebook and a pen to make notes as I was whisked into what is known as a ‘black Maria’ (
actually
a white transport van) alongside a girl who was on remand being taken back to Holloway after her court appearance. We were put in separate cubicles in the van and started our journey. It was still daylight and as we exited the basement car park I was not prepared for the photographers who were banging their cameras onto the vehicle’s window to try and get a picture of me as I was leaving. As we stopped at some traffic, more of them did the same thing, much to the consternation of the girl I was travelling with and the guards, who thought it all appalling. There was a bit of calm as we drove through the streets of north London, past the Arsenal football stadium, which I knew reasonably well, but it quickly ended as we drove into Holloway, with more photographers waiting, more banging on the side of the car, more flash cameras pointing at my face through the window of my cubicle. Once we went through the prison gates, there was peace at last. And so began my nine weeks of prison life: four days in Holloway and then just over eight weeks in East Sutton Park open prison for women.

W
hen asked whether my experience arriving in Holloway was frightening, my answer was simple: no. Many people think that prison must be a terrifying place with lots of violent women locked behind bars. It isn’t. I must confess that my arrival at Holloway was smooth, humane and expertly carried out. Quick fingerprinting and BOSS chair (Body Orifice Security Scanner, essentially a metal
detector
). No strip search. The little information pamphlet handed out to me on arrival comprised a mere eight pages, with page 7 taken up by a crossword and page 8 by two sudoku puzzles. It was all very different from the environment that had greeted David (now Lord) Ramsbotham in December 1995 when he went to do his first unannounced review of Holloway as the then new independent Chief Inspector of Prisons. He was so shocked he stopped the visit the following day and didn’t resume it again for six months. A lot has happened since and after many starts and setbacks under numerous governors, prison director generals and secretaries of state in the Home Office and later the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), the place now seemed to be reasonably welcoming.

But there are rules. It was clear I had brought in far too many clothes. I was allowed to keep just twelve tops (shirts, T-shirts and jumpers) and six bottoms (trousers, tracksuit bottoms and pyjamas). No
toiletries
were allowed but I was given an emergency bag with prison issue and I bought a ‘welcome’ bag for £2.99, which would be subtracted from the cash I brought in with me. It contained a bottle of orange squash, biscuits, a bar of milk chocolate, deodorant, toothbrush and toothpaste, a comb and some tea bags and sugar. I had the choice of that or a smoker’s bag. But I could take in my books, all eighteen of them and many given to me by my children, as well as my writing pads and a couple of pens. The rest stayed in my suitcase and the handbag which had also
accompanied
me. I would retrieve everything again when I left for East Sutton Park (ESP) a few days later.

A reception officer took down my details and told me where I was going for the first night and that she was putting me down for a single room; a doctor took my blood pressure, which was dangerously high (no surprise after the last few months); and I was met by a welcoming group of prisoners, an innovation which I am told ex-governor Tony Hassall introduced, whose job it was to answer my questions and ensure I got something to eat (chilli con carne and some pudding). It was certainly not what I had expected.

Then the welcome group and prison guards helped me and some other new inmates move our personal belongings, which had now been transferred into
transparent
prison plastic bags, to landing A3, the reception landing, which ended up being my home for the next few days. The lovely girl who had secured the food for me told me on the way that she had two more years
to do but enjoyed doing the reception work because it kept her out of her cell until quite late in the evening.

Early 2013 was experiencing a very long winter (I had often walked to and from court in the snow) and that bitterly cold night I soon realised that the windows in Holloway cells do little to keep the chill out. At first I was shown a cell with no curtains and my helpers tried to fasten an orange blanket onto the railings, without much success. Fortunately there was another single cell available with curtains, this time near the guards’ office, but the TV was not working so there was another quick changeover. Then it was obvious that one thin orange blanket on the bed was not enough. Soon the girls were at my cell door with extra blankets even though that was apparently not normally allowed; within a few minutes I ended up with five and had to turn down the offer of a sixth. And then extra fruit and sandwiches that they must have had in their own cells started
arriving
and shampoo for the shower and extra toilet roll for the loo in my cell. I couldn’t believe the kindness of them all. When formalities were completed and I had spoken to the children and my lawyer using my free phone calls and my door was finally locked, the girls kept coming back and asking me through the hatch whether there was anything else I wanted. Many have commented about the solidarity in women’s prisons – yes, there is bitching and some bullying but there is also a lot more demonstrable empathy among the women prisoners than in a men’s prison.

They say that when that first lock-up happens and you are left alone in your room, reality finally takes its toll; when they finally lie in bed most new
prisoners
turn their heads towards the wall and start crying. Within the first seven days of prison, 20 per cent of
all prison suicides occur
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as well as a disproportionate amount of the overall levels of self-harm.
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I had had such an exhausting few weeks that none of this happened – not on the first nor any subsequent night. I watched the coverage of my case on TV and fell promptly asleep.

I was woken by the guard the next morning around 7 a.m. The cell door was unlocked at 8 a.m. (9 at the weekend). Breakfast was at 8.15 but let’s not get too carried away: the meal consisted of toast and butter (no jam) though later, at lunch, we were given an individual cereal portion, tea bags and a small carton of milk. I don’t normally have breakfast but I had been advised that whenever food is offered in prison I should take it; as such I started to eat breakfast and continued doing so in East Sutton Park, where at least jam was served with the toast. I also took the opportunity to smuggle a few slices of toast back to my room to see me through the morning.

Most women in closed prisons lose an incredible amount of weight either because they won’t eat the food (it tends to be ghastly) or because the portions are so small that they go constantly hungry – unless they are lucky enough to be able to supplement their meals with unhealthy biscuits bought at the canteen every week. Indeed, the best thing on the menu while I was in Holloway was in fact the toast. One of my roommates in ESP told me later how she had gone into Holloway a size twenty just ten months earlier and was now a size fourteen. She looked really good in her new size but I wondered how I would have fared having gone in as a size eight.

We all know how important healthy eating is but, interestingly, in his 2003 book
Prisongate
Lord Ramsbotham refers to evidence from clinical studies in many countries that proves that ‘correct nutrition is a cheap, humane and highly effective way of reducing anti-social behaviour’.
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He refers in particular to a study by Bernard Gesch of National Justice (a research charity investigating the causes of crime). Gesch and his colleagues conducted a trial that showed that a group of young offenders given healthy food supplements compared with a group that took a placebo saw a 37 per cent reduction in violent offences while in detention.
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The results were accepted but the recommendation to provide supplements across all prisons was never implemented even though it would have cost, according to Ramsbotham, just £3.5m a year from a prison budget of some £2.8bn. Indeed, nutritious food could be prepared without great cost. Chef Al Crisci trains prisoners at HMP High Down to work in a gourmet restaurant called ‘The Clink’, which he started in 2009 and is open to the public.

His call is one that echoes Jamie Oliver’s campaign to improve student behaviour by providing high-quality school meals.

After breakfast, I almost missed what is known
as the ‘movement’. Described in the induction notes, the ‘movement’ was essentially a twice-daily great exodus of women from their cells and a supervised walk through the prison to the various places of education, exercise, healthcare and so on. I had gone to the shower and on returning to my cell found a guard waiting to lock me back in. Over breakfast, the girls had told me there was a daily walk in the prison yard, and I managed to persuade the guard to allow me to run behind the trail of women with my wet hair so I wouldn’t miss out. Fortunately, the movement was quite slow that morning and I soon caught up. I discovered that as I followed the others I could step into the various offices that lined the twisting corridors (built like a hospital, each part of a prison corridor has a guard office so the guards are able to see and control the few cells in front of them). To my surprise, each office had a hairdryer (among other things) that prisoners could borrow on production of their prison card (I had been given mine at reception when I entered the previous night). Indeed, as Chief Inspector of Prisons Nick Hardwick told me, these are the little things that make life in prison bearable. Being able to borrow a hairdryer from an officer in this way also allows a woman the opportunity to chat about how she is worried about her kids or discuss other matters on her mind. According to Nick, anything that might jeopardise this general interaction is a worry.

By the time I went outside my hair was only slightly drier; thank goodness I had put my hat in my pocket when I left my cell. My daily exercise out in the yard from then on (unless it was raining) consisted of a very brisk walk for half an hour, going round and round with the only other woman bothering to walk.
Everyone else would stand against the walls smoking or chatting or generally being quite rambunctious with each other and with the guards.

It soon transpired that no one seemed to think I should have been in prison at all and throughout the next few days, wherever I went following the ‘
movement
’, girls would shake my hand and offer support. During the outdoor walk, as I tried to exercise my legs and breathe in some fresh and very cold air, the girls would tell me how surprised and pleased they were that I was not snubbing them but actually was prepared to mix with them all – and then told me their own stories, which got me thinking about how vulnerable so many of these girls and women were.

In fact, I was shocked at the number of cases where indeed the girls had done something wrong but usually for, with, or forced to by their husbands, boyfriends, brothers or fathers. These girls needed help, I thought, not incarceration. Indeed, according to people I spoke to later, senior officers have been known to say that out of some 460 women prisoners in Holloway no more than around sixty that pose a threat to
society
should remain in prison, and the rest shouldn’t be there at all. According to the Ministry of Justice, and not including courts and policing, each prisoner in 2011/12 cost on average some £37,648 a year in direct prison-related costs. That figure becomes higher still if one adds expenditure met by other government departments in areas such as health and education. One must also consider that women and longer-term prisoners cost a lot more. There could be significant savings from lowering prisoner numbers.
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No doubt costs would be incurred elsewhere, for many of the women in prison are vulnerable and need some sort
of help, but it is argued that Holloway and other prisons like it should not be performing the role of an amateur psychiatric unit, which should really be the job of other organs of the state and society and the community at large.

One particular concern, which people are
becoming
increasingly aware of, is the significant numbers of foreign females in British prisons who may actually themselves be the victims of human trafficking. Their traffickers may have forced them to commit crime, or they may be in custody because of offences related to their immigration status, such as deception, fraud or use of false documents. A 2012 study looked at the cases of 103 foreign nationals in prison for offences relating to immigration status and identified
forty-three
of the women as victims of human trafficking. Many will have suffered highly traumatic experiences such as repeated physical abuse, rape or being forced into the sex industry. Past experiences of corrupt
officials
and repeated abuse leave many too afraid to tell their full story.
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The difficulty foreign prisoners face cannot be overestimated. Serena, a highly educated woman I met when I visited the library in Holloway, told me of having been approached by a Brazilian girl who was sharing a cell with another Brazilian woman who had been in Holloway already for four months and who seemed to be at a loss as to why she was being kept in prison. She was in a high state of anxiety as she only spoke Portuguese and was lucky to have
eventually
found another Brazilian and was therefore able to explain her situation. With the other girl acting as interpreter, it emerged that the Brazilian lady had been arrested on charges of kidnapping at the airport where
she was trying to fly to Brazil with her daughter. The lady and the child’s father had been living in France but he had moved to the UK. After she let her
daughter
visit her father he had refused to let her return to her mother. After a time the Brazilian lady obtained a court order against the father for kidnapping, came to the UK, found her daughter and tried to leave the country with her. The child’s father contacted the police and the woman was apprehended.

Apparently it turned out that the Brazilian lady had not in fact committed the offence of kidnapping when she was arrested, as she hadn’t actually taken the child away for the requisite amount of time for an offence of ‘kidnapping’ to have been committed. After a long letter on the mother’s behalf was written to the CPS by Serena explaining the situation, the lady was released. As far as I understand it the Brazilian mother is reunited with her daughter and all is well. I could not believe the system allows such injustice to take place, but mistakes will always happen and frankly it is not surprising that with such large numbers going through the system and the chaos that seems to prevail there will be cases that slip through the net.