Authors: Vicky Pryce
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 rehabilitation 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.
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.
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.
A very important day as I had my first meeting with my probation officer at ESP, Dee. They have these really sweet offices on top of one of the two towers that formed part of the medieval building and you have to take a spiral staircase that you enter from the courtyard to get there. As you sit talking about your issues, people wander in, assuming they are fit enough to come up the stairs, usually out of breath but asking for appointments to see the staff and for information on the progress of their cases with
external
probation, which is where a lot of the problems emerge. The girls complained of frequent changes of personnel in external probation and of slow and cumbersome processes. They found the concerns that external probation often raised over the suitability of the accommodation on the outside frustrating and at times petty and inconsistent (they would frequently make comments like: ‘my probation officer really hates me’). The general feeling about in-house
probation
, however, was positive but all the new girls worried hugely about the first meeting and some had a better experience with one officer rather than the other. I had heard a lot of that being discussed in the Butler’s Room as it was probation that often determined where and when the girls could go out,
which addresses on the outside the women were allowed to visit or stay at, and how quickly they progressed towards release. In the case of one girl I got to know well, there was an issue concerning whether she could visit her mother at her mother’s address on her day release and home visits once she started being entitled to them because her mother had also been convicted, for a short period, for her alleged small part in her daughter’s offence, for which the daughter had been sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. I saw what distress this caused her. She was very close to her mother and spoke to her a number of times a day on the phone. But the whole day’s mood would be ruined by yet another sign that her home visits that she was so looking forward to and her eventual return to normality might be in jeopardy. In addition the company she had worked for and defrauded wanted the money back that she had taken from them. In the end, while I was there, she was coming to the conclusion that given her lack of assets the best way forward was to hand her pension entitlement back to her former employer. It was a neat solution but not one that bodes well for her future security. And in that it resembled the case of a public servant who was in ESP with me and who not only had the ignominy of losing her job and the bad publicity that would make it difficult for her to return to any decent standard of living when she got out, but had to fight through lawyers the threat made by the public
institution
that had employed her to take her pension away because of the nature of her offence’. Whatever the rights or wrongs, such extra knocks reduce so hugely the chances of a smooth and fast
rehabilitation
that I wondered what, if any, protection there
is for prisoners who basically face being destitute on leaving prison.
Many of the negative by-products of having a conviction when one returns to outside life, however trivial, victimless or non-threatening the offence may have been, are not widely understood. They can make life rather more expensive as well as being a constant reminder of one’s ‘criminality’ in the eyes of others. When my friend Rachel, convicted of fraud, rang to tell her building insurance that covered her mortgage that she had a conviction, the chap at the other end of the phone apparently said something like ‘sorry, we are stopping insuring you as of this minute’ and hung up without any further explanation. She was rather shocked. It was a similar story with her car insurance. Fortunately she got help from Leanne, a fellow ESP resident working for a company called Unlock while finishing her sentence, who put her in touch with providers who don’t exclude offenders and ex-
offenders
and managed to get her cheaper insurance than before for both her house and her car. The Unlock charity, founded and run for a number of years by ex-offender and commentator Mark Leech, gives advice on its website to prisoners wanting insurance, but experiencing difficulties because of their
convictions
. There is even a chart to let prisoners know when their convictions are actually spent and no longer need to be mentioned and it also offers advice on when and how convictions have to be disclosed. But the point still is that seemingly small hurdles like these are in reality major obstacles to rebuilding a fully functioning life in society for prisoners and their families. It is a ‘brick wall’ moment when you realise your conviction could stop you being able to insure
your possessions, your car, your health or your home. Given the very large number of people with criminal convictions you wonder how many are keeping mum.