Prisonomics (6 page)

It was my first meeting with Robert after my sentencing and I think he was pleased to find me calm and composed. He actually arrived late! But the guards gave us extra time, which was really good, and we had a very respectable small private cubicle to ourselves. I have since learned, however, that access to legal advice can vary dramatically from prison to prison. Some prisons only allow legal visits to be arranged on one or two days per week. One has
no room for legal visits, thus preventing confidential interviews. According to a recent survey, only 43 per cent of prisoners say they can easily contact their lawyers and a similar number said confidential legal mail had been opened without them being present.
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And yet legal mail is supposed to be exempt from the usual checks, under measures brought in to protect prisoners against the misuse of authority by
prisons
. My rather small survey of two prisons showed compliance with that spirit – letters from my solicitor were given to me sealed and then were opened by me in front of the officers, not for them to be read but only to ensure there was nothing forbidden hidden in the envelope among the legal documents. I would then take them away and read them in private. There were also big notices by the phones saying that although all private conversations were being recorded those to approved lawyer numbers were not. I assume they kept to what they promised.

Robert relayed to me the news from the outside, particularly his contact with my family. Obviously there was a lot to discuss – what the press was saying, should we appeal or not – but I was more concerned that he should talk to the kids and ensure that
everyone
knew that I was OK and accepting my situation calmly. Very importantly he also gave me a list of my contacts, which he’d printed out from my mobile. It wasn’t complete but it proved a godsend. On the immediate practical level we agreed that he would urgently post me some stamps and envelopes that very evening.

I showed Robert the note that the guards on my landing had given me detailing my Home Detention Curfew (HDC) date, which was 12 May, and my
unconditional release date, which was 11 July. At the time I had no idea whether HDC was granted
automatically
but soon discovered that it was unless there was a problem with the address you were going to. That was good news and at last gave us something to work towards. We also dwelt on what would happen next and where I might be transferred to. I was until then not fully aware of the various levels of prisons that existed. Places like Holloway for women and Pentonville for men are ‘holding’ prisons where remand prisoners are held and where sentenced offenders are usually sent until they are classified in terms of their risk of reoffending. They are then sent to specialist ‘training prisons’, some of them being ‘working prisons’, around the country to carry out their longer-term sentences. When they near the end of their sentences, men are sent to ‘resettlement’
prisons
, of which there are two: Blantyre House near to East Sutton Park in Kent and Kirklevington Grange in Yarm, near Stockton-on-Tees. If they are perceived as a low risk then they are sent to open prisons. In both cases, they can start to do voluntary and then paid work outside the prison. In the case of women, because of their lower numbers there are no
resettlement
prisons but only open prisons where most people, including lifers, go to progress towards the end of their sentence. Open prisons for both men and women also house short-sentence prisoners who need not be kept in expensive closed conditions. My lawyer was pleased when I told him that I had been classified as a category D prisoner, low risk, and therefore was in line to move to East Sutton Park, one of two open prisons for women in the country. Robert warned me, however, that in his experience much depended on
whether there was space available in the open prisons and more crucially whether they could get the
transport
to transfer me there – and that could take a few weeks. Lord Taylor, who communicated with me after my release and who had himself recently spent time in prison on the grounds of false accounting, told me that in his view there is very little reason why
offenders
cannot be classified immediately in terms of risk just as the sentence is passed to avoid the extra cost of closed prisons including that for transferring
prisoners
and starting many things all over again. I could see the point as it certainly would reduce the
overcrowding
at Holloway at a stroke.

In the morning a female guard from a different floor, who had come to see how I was on behalf of the
governor
two days previously, told me that there had been discussion for me to move to D0, the enhanced wing on the ground floor, but that it probably made no sense if I was going to be moving to an open prison at some stage. I told her I was happy to stay where I was for the time being. Frankly, I had already become friendly with the girls on my landing and had no wish to move and then move again. And I had learned quite a lot of things from them. How to put a pin on the latch door and pull it shut, or almost shut, from the inside if someone had left the hatch open and the lights on in the
corridor
through the night – and also to cut out noise. It strangely gave you a feeling of being in control, which was welcome. At the same time they showed me what to do if an overzealous guard had locked the hatch door and there was no one there to unlock it – the back of the plastic spoon worked very well as a key.

Girls in different prisons learn different things. Rachel, who had been at Peterborough before
transferring
to ESP, told me how they used the freely provided tampons to block draughts on the grills of the windows or used a piece of paper, like an
envelope
, to stop the cold air coming through the vents in the middle of the ceiling. Ways to survive in prison.

I joined the ‘movement’ again and went to healthcare, which, what with the wait, took the entire morning, just as I had hoped. My luck was in again: the waiting room was showing a movie. This time it was the Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman film
The Bucket List
. We were locked in from the outside when one particular officer was in charge and the door was only unlocked to let in a new arrival wanting to see the nurse or doctor or to let one of us out for our appointment. When the officer went for a coffee break, however, strangely the door was left open and a young male assistant slid in and gave me a copy of a tabloid paper which had a story about me going to Holloway with the pictures they had taken of me in the transport van. The room was comfortable with chairs arranged in theatre style and the wait was long but most welcome. I had missed a bit of the beginning of the film but the other girls filled me in. I was able to see the tear-jerking end and noticed that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

For me another morning spent outside my cell, given the horror stories of very long lock-ups endured by many prisoners, was a relief. When I finally saw the lovely nurse instant friendship developed. She filled in my personal medical history details, checked my blood pressure (which had gone down sharply after a couple of nights in Holloway – I arrived with a blood
pressure of 175/100 on the Monday night and by Thursday lunchtime it had gone down to 124/80) and then suggested I should have a hepatitis B injection. I was mystified as to why I would need it and at first refused as I don’t much like needles but she explained it was for my protection in case an inmate were to bite me. She pointed out that it made sense given that there are a lot of drug addicts in prison who may be
carrying
the virus from infected needles. (I was later told by other inmates that it is also to prevent people getting hepatitis B from snogging or through other ways of passing bodily fluids.) After her explanation, I did not hesitate for an instant. And she did it so well and painlessly (other injections, equally painless, followed in ESP to complete the course as my medical records moved efficiently with me when I left Holloway). As I was considered low risk she let me keep aspirin and blood pressure tablets in my cell locker.

And then my children came that Thursday
afternoon
for an hour. It was a tightly supervised setting, but it was brilliant. We had to sit opposite each other after we kissed and I reassured them that I was OK. There were strict rules about moving around so we had to stay in our seats except for them (I wasn’t allowed to do it myself) to get me a much-needed cup of coffee – it was the first I’d had since I went into Holloway, quite a treat for a coffee addict… As we were chatting, suddenly a lovely lady visiting another inmate across the room came over to my chair and gave me a hug – the guards had no time to stop her but soon took the lady back to her place and very firmly told her such behaviour was not allowed. But it was done in good spirit and only to show her
solidarity
and support.

Actually, support was quite forthcoming. A lady from the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB), which is made up of independent unpaid volunteers from the local area and features in every prison and
immigration
centre, came to my cell and spoke to me through the open hatch to check I was OK. What do you say? I am fine, really, thank you. And someone from the Christian chaplain’s office gave me a Christian diary, which in fact proved to be very useful throughout my stay in prison as mobiles and electronic diaries were not allowed. I am still using it. And then the letters started arriving. On Wednesday I received some twenty letters, causing the officer in charge to profess that in all his time at Holloway he had never seen anyone receive so much post in one day. The girls all came to my cell to marvel at the number of letters on my bed – and also to see whether there were any unfranked stamps that they could peel off and reuse. They were all experts and I soon learned how to do it too. It’s amazing, actually, how many letters do arrive even at my home unfranked. I had never noticed this before I went to prison and met those girls. If they noticed any, the prison authorities would draw a line across the unfranked stamps so they would be
worthless
to the inmates but I found that rather cruel. For many girls stamps were the most precious property they could acquire to keep in touch with the outside, which was so important.

I soon realised that stamps, at least in women’s prisons, had become the new parallel currency, functioning like cigarettes used to. There is a lot of interest in parallel currencies at present and how they may work – witness the development of an
internet
‘virtual’ currency called ‘Bitcoin’. Tim Harford,
the economist and journalist who writes the ‘
Undercover
Economist’ column for the
Financial
Times
, recently quoted Robert A. Radford, an economist himself who had studied at Cambridge in the 1930s and who spent half of the war in a POW camp in Germany. Radford had published a paper he wrote in the summer of 1945 in the journal
Economica
entitled
the ‘Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp’ on the development of market institutions in that environment. He observed that everyone at the camp started in roughly the same way, i.e. with nothing, and depended on receiving the same-sized rations from the Germans and Red Cross parcels. Given that needs and likes and dislikes differed, a market then developed and trading became rife. Bartering began to take place. Say, for example, I wanted my hair cut in exchange for some coffee or chocolates. I would first need to find the person who combines the
characteristics
of liking coffee, being short in it and also knowing how to cut hair well. Even if I am able to source the right person, I don’t quite know what price I may have to pay for the haircut: how much coffee do they want? A few spoonfuls, half a pack, the whole pack?

What is needed is a currency with as homogenous characteristics as possible – and that is what was developed in the POW camp. Cigarettes fit the bill, as Radford explains: ‘Between individuals there was active trading in all consumer goods and in some services. Most trading was for food against cigarettes or other foodstuffs, but cigarettes rose from the status of a normal commodity to that of currency … they performed all the functions of a metallic currency as a unit of account, as a measure of value and as a store of value, and shared most of its characteristics.
They were homogeneous, reasonably durable, and of convenient size for the smallest or, in packets, for the largest transactions.’

For the women in prison, cigarettes still mattered but obtaining stamps for their letters to family and friends was clearly just as important. And stamps are now expensive. In East Sutton Park, one would have to work for one-and-a-half hours to afford one first-class stamp and a lot more for an overseas stamp. So stamps have developed as a separate currency in women’s prisons though the parallel with cigarettes is not so clear cut. Women prisoners, unlike the POWs, do not all start equal. Some come in with lots of money (as I was lucky to have done) and can move some of that to a ‘balance’, for phone calls and such, to which they can add, depending on what category
prisoner
they are, an extra £25 a week from their initial cash flow. Some only manage initially on wages from their prison jobs, which is rarely more than £1.25 per morning or afternoon session – in other words, a total of £17.50 a week if you work twice a day every day without a break. At ESP, the same amount is also paid to those who attend accredited courses though
prisoners
are only allowed a maximum of five sessions a week and most end up doing a lot less. The money earned is then used to buy things from the ‘canteen’ and/or phone calls (though these were still prohibitive despite BT’s reduction of charges that had taken place at the beginning of the year, a notice near the phone informed me). Volunteering or completing training outside the prison earned some women slightly higher prison ‘wages’ of £20–£30 a week, and while finishing their sentences proper paid employment could see a few women receiving the minimum wage.