Authors: Vicky Pryce
The difficulty in getting any ex-offender facing
prejudice
back into work is compounded by girls having lost their self-belief and many in fact end up for years in low-paid, low-quality jobs which often provide them with little training to allow them to progress. Of course I generalise and there are many exceptions and some great companies around who make it clear that people with convictions should have the same
opportunities
as anyone else.
What is often forgotten is that in many cases, particularly for residents in open prisons as I have already described, people work on licence often on a daily basis commuting to jobs outside the prison and when they come out on tag in many cases they are
encouraged to secure jobs as soon as they can. That way they cost the economy less and the offending and reoffending rates reduce markedly. And yet the negative perception remains. It would be useful here to bring the difficulties that these girls are facing into sharper focus by looking at the overall jobs market for women. Not only has the recession affected women more than men in terms of job losses, as women are disproportionately represented in the public sector workforce, which has been most affected by the cuts, but the difficulties faced in rejoining the labour force by women who leave for a while to start a family have recently been highlighted. In general they go back, if they do at all, to jobs that are well below their skills level and earn a lot less than before because they have lost their confidence and also because things have moved on – they are older, there is a new
generation
that makes decisions since they left and (with some small exceptions) they find it hard to get back to the senior positions they had before. Their confidence is shattered and even their language is affected – more baby talk rather than business talk. What is more, competition out there is intense. Imagine the extra difficulties when the interruption from the labour market is even longer. Advice given at a Mumsnet conference was apparently to go back to work
part-time
and take advantage of greater opportunities for working flexibility.
I agree with that – I had always advocated that there should be more part-time work at higher levels and more job sharing; though the public sector does offer the latter and it has been seen to work
effectively
in practice, it is still rare in businesses. The loss of women’s productive capacity as they are stuck in
low-skilled jobs is obvious to me. Until shortly after the coalition came to power in 2010 I was
director
general and chief economist at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (previously the DTI) and while Labour had been in power had been appointed as the unfortunate senior official
responsible
for attempting to convince departments across Whitehall to think in terms of what their policies would do to productivity in the UK economy before enacting them. The lost productivity of women has always been a problem as many exit the workforce or quit well-paid full-time jobs for lower-paid,
generally
lower-level, part-time employment when they hit what they perceive to be the ‘glass ceiling’ and their chances of promotion become more limited. Skills are then lost, earnings remain below what they should otherwise have been and the economy and society suffer. This will be even more pronounced if one has spent a lot of time in prison, receiving little in terms of useful education and training, losing social skills and the ability to successfully interact with others, and therefore becoming effectively unemployable or confined permanently to less rewarding and less challenging work, even for those with high skills who would otherwise have had the potential to contribute positively to society and to the upkeep of their family. Permanently earning less than one’s potential means more need for public sector support and very little to show in return for a period in jail in terms of any discernible benefit to the community except of course the satisfaction of having someone punished, which is transitory and serves very little purpose, particularly when there are children involved.
The United Nations Rules for the Treatment of
Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders (also known as the Bangkok Rules) and the Human Rights Act, which the Conservative Party have said they will abolish if they win the next election, both dictate that the courts should take dependent children into account when sentencing. The various pressure groups claim that this is rarely done and the evidence I collected while in ESP would seem to confirm that – I couldn’t check up what the girls were telling me, of course, so the
conclusion
from my sample may not be definitive but the only case I found where this was taken into account in halving the sentence of a female prisoner was because the mother was in the process of adopting a child from an unusual background and the social services which had worked so hard to get the child adopted feared that the whole thing would fall through. Sadly for the mother, who felt strongly that she was innocent of the charge that got her into prison, the adoption process also meant that thoughts of appealing against the sentence were abandoned as that would have prolonged or even scuppered the adoption process. It could also have led to hers and her husband’s first names, which was all the natural mother knew, being made public as the case re-emerged, increasing the chances of their identity being discovered and
preventing
the adoption from going through.
A lovely Caribbean girl, Abi, asked me to help her with a question, as part of her course, on how to take account of environmental damage when conferences are organised. She wants eventually to go into event organising and this is a good way of getting there. I
agreed to meet her in the morning but she didn’t show up. At lunchtime, since we were both working, we agreed to reschedule for 3 p.m. When she didn’t show up again I went looking for her and found her asleep in her room! We rescheduled and finally met in IT before they closed down at 8. Well, eventually she got through the course with a good mark and I hear she has been hired by some event organisers in London. Maybe if all else fails when I get out I will ask her for a job.
As it happens I spent the late afternoon with Lesley, who managed the Vision office in ESP (the link between the residents and the outside education and employment worlds), discussing employment issues and what options there were for women in general to prepare for work on the outside again. She thought that in my case and on account of my specialism there was no point in thinking of anything other than using my specialism to good effect, which was oddly
reassuring
in a way. We discussed teaching, too, and she gave me some brochures and further information.
During supper we sat with Kirsty, a twenty-year-old newly converted Muslim and vegetarian with a heart of gold, who was in prison for the fourth time. She insisted that this time around she’d done nothing wrong except protect her sister. They had been on a night out when two Pakistani men had tried, she said, to pull her sister into a car masquerading as a taxi. Both she and her sister, who had never before been in front of the courts, were charged and convicted with grievous bodily harm and attempted robbery. Kirsty claimed that they were only trying to protect
themselves but that her previous brushes with the law hadn’t helped.
The good thing is that this latest episode in prison seems to have taught her that she needs to stop getting into trouble. Due to be released in a couple of weeks, she has a job lined up with a supermarket at just over minimum wage, which she intends to keep. And in the meantime, despite her streetwise behaviour, she is known as the governor’s pet, who uses her openly to find out what girls think about various aspects of the prison regime – not a bad thing at all as it does her confidence a lot of good and she tells it straight. We all love her directness.
I told Kirsty and the others at the table how odd it was that a number of women I came across in Holloway and even in ESP seemed to think I was an MP before I went to prison and always ask me what it had been like. I am just an ex-MP’s ex-wife! ‘What’s an MP?’ asks Kirsty.
How do you have a shower without scalding yourself? You would think the answer is simple. Make sure the tap is not too hot. Not so simple if you have no control. The shower room in East Sutton Park was a revelation. It was a big white, light room overlooking the back courtyard down the stairs past reception and near the back door, where the girls often
congregated
just outside to have their first cigarette of the day. It was clean and airy, with six shower cubicles on each side shielded by curtains that were changed each Sunday during those famous 2p job sessions. These apparently were put in relatively recently after
persistent complaints that there was no privacy for the women who were obliged to expose themselves in unprotected cubicles. And in you went, all precious toiletries at the ready and hoping that there would be plenty of others there running showers. This wasn’t so much for the companionship but mainly to ensure that the temperature of the water was manageable if lots of you were running it. The problem was that you had no control. You pushed a button and the water came out for about 30 seconds, coldish for the first few seconds then piping hot if there was just you or even just a couple of you. So a ritual had to be had. If no one else was there, which was usual, or just a couple of you, one had to do two things. First, turn the hot tap on full in the one wash basin that existed so that some of the hot water was diverted there. Then you had to use a cubicle as close as possible to that tap so that you got the maximum effect of the hot water diversion. Then you went on this funny run. You had to start pushing buttons for the water to run in one shower, run out, then dash into the one next to it, run out again then go into yours and enjoy a few seconds of relatively tepid water while the other showers were on full blast. As soon as the water in your cubicle stopped running, as it was timed to do after a very short burst of water, you had to repeat the process, often five times, rushing from cubicle to cubicle like a madwoman pressing buttons if you wanted to complete the shower thoroughly washed but with your skin intact. Otherwise having a shower was impossible. Baths did not exist. One finished the washing process cleaner but absolutely exhausted, as if one had also completed a marathon run at the same time.
I have clearly settled into my weekend routine. Am I becoming institutionalised? Tomorrow, Sunday, is visitors’ day and I am expecting Sir Brian Bender, a previous permanent secretary at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and my boss while I was there. Wonderfully, he’s also going to bring some of my children with him.
Saturday, therefore, was relatively relaxed and I enjoyed the much-cherished long walk around the grounds. In the evening, while queuing for our ‘grab bags’, Liz was picked on (again) for coming down to supper with open-toed shoes and was sent back up to her room to change. Odd bureaucratic rule, I thought, why does it matter what shoes you are
wearing
? And what was the point of having a woman in her fifties with grown-up children, formerly in a position of power, sent up to her room for wearing the wrong shoes? I was later told that it was meant to avoid anything hot scalding your feet while you were being served dinner and then it being recorded as an injury inflicted upon you by the prison. I suspect though that the original rationale had long been forgotten and officers liked to apply rules wherever they could. Fortunately it never happened to me (I was too cold not to be wearing socks and proper shoes all the time I was in ESP).
The day I had been looking forward to: ICT day. I enlisted to do Microsoft NVQ 1, also PowerPoint and Excel. The IT course went well – a week later I managed to pass my NVQ for the basic Microsoft and discovered all these things I used to ask my PA
to do for me. I am determined to manage better in the future. I was really excited about learning to
touch-type
. Having been married to a journalist who had been taught to touch-type I had always marvelled at the ability to type almost as fast as you speak. The prison had available a program called ‘Maeve’s Friend’ which taught you how to do it online (on the prison intranet) and once logged on allowed you to practise as much as you wanted at all times of the day and get better each time through repetition. Or so it proves with most people. I was useless at it. Every now and then the program would say: ‘You are doing well. Let’s repeat the exercise.’ It used to bring my blood pressure up as it was clear my brain and fingers were simply not coordinating the way they should. So I conceded defeat. As I am typing this I use the same old techniques as always – bad typing and then long sessions with the spell check function.
I returned to the dorm to discover that the fourth bed in our little room, which was usually given over to just three of us because of its size, had a new person on it with bags of belongings strewn all round. Just arrived from a closed prison, Alison was in her early sixties, tall and thin and with a hairdo that reminded me a bit of Rod Stewart in terms of style, though she was much better looking. She had tight jeans, longish hair, a husky voice from smoking, and was really cool in a million ways. I had no idea what she was in for. I, having been there all of three weeks, was now an ‘old hand’ and started telling her about the place. I told her a bit about the IT course in ESP and how I was due to do Excel next week, which I hadn’t done for decades. She paused to think for a few seconds and then said: ‘Yes, Excel, good thing really, but when you
are running a dope factory you try not to put things in Excel but do all the figure work in your head.’ It left me speechless.
Sadly she eventually decided that our room was too claustrophobic with four of us in it and moved out some time later but her story fascinated me
throughout
my stay. I now look at police helicopters flying at night over the houses near Brixton in south London where I live and realise that they are not trying to track down people running away from robberies as I had always fondly thought but instead are using
thermal
imaging cameras to capture any glowing houses among the dark ones, which is a way of detecting those that hide cannabis factories in their lofts.