Authors: Vicky Pryce
But the importance of prisoners being able to communicate is key, particularly if they are foreign. With this horror story in my mind I later suggested to Helen, who I met in East Sutton Park and who had managed to transfer from what she described as a ‘dreadful’ and ‘dangerous’ Brazilian prison, where she was serving time for drugs, to Holloway and then to open prison, that she should brush up on the Portuguese she learned while there and offer her services in prisons or at the court as translator and mentor once she got out given the large number of
Brazilians in the UK at present. I wonder, though, whether current rules would allow an ex-offender like Helen to be employed by the prison system – in my view they should make sure that experiences such as Helen’s are put to good use for the benefit of society as a whole, otherwise what is the point of sending people to prison?
After the morning walk, I shared a table for lunch in the ‘dining’ space of A3. This was a grim unfriendly room with a few basic old but functioning armchairs, and a hatch from which the food was served to you by other inmates, led by a lovely if troubled Welsh girl who was in for grievous bodily harm after one incident when out drinking. You had to form an orderly queue, your name was called and your choice of food served (vegetarian or otherwise – I had not had a chance to make a choice so ate what I was given). Water was available from a drinking tap and you could sit and eat on one of a handful of white plastic tables and chairs, which were rarely used as most inmates took their food into their rooms in time for evening lock-up. Recognising me, however, a number of the girls, mostly quite young, came and sat with me and chatted – and the chats were
extraordinary
. They told me of some women who were in for low-level drug trafficking, and who clearly were on drugs themselves, and how they were having a very difficult time adjusting to prison. They would wander around mumbling to themselves and girls who slept in cells adjacent to those women could not sleep at night either because of their moans, cries or in one case loud singing every night.
According to recent data 15.6 per cent of women in prison are there for drugs offences
29
with many
more sentenced for property-related offences to fund their drug habits. Drug dependence in the year before entering prison is as high as 54 per cent for remand prisoners and 41 per cent for sentenced prisoners.
30
I have been told in fact that in some prisons access to drugs is easier than on the outside. A survey by the Prison Reform Trust in 2012 backs up previous academic research in finding that 19 per cent of
prisoners
who had ever used heroin reported first trying it in prison.
31
I discovered that a number of the girls on A3 were apparently on remand and there was a general sigh of relief from the other girls for the few quiet hours everyone was able to have when these troubled girls were taken to court. And the girls didn’t often come back; those on remand didn’t always end up
receiving
a custodial sentence. In addition to higher rates of substance misuse, remand prisoners have been shown to suffer more from a range of emotional and mental health problems, though whether this is due to the uncertainty about their future, or the reason for their being denied bail, is unclear. The Ministry of Justice found that nearly twice as many remand prisoners by comparison to convicted prisoners rated highly for various symptoms of neurosis, including sleep problems, worry, fatigue, depression and irritability. Phobias, panic and obsessive behaviour were also significantly more common among remand prisoners. When asked, some 23 per cent of female remand
prisoners
reported having considered suicide within the previous week, while just over a quarter had attempted suicide within the past year. In addition, roughly twice as many remand prisoners are prescribed
antipsychotics
or anti-anxiety medication.
32
Others on my landing included Irish ‘travellers’ who had somehow got into trouble together with their boyfriends, who were also arrested and in prison; a couple of girls in for hurting someone after they got too drunk one night out and who were serving a few months each; and a girl who had an accountancy qualification, had gone out one evening along with her boyfriend and some of his friends and found herself the object of attention by a different gang of boys. Scuffles broke out, she threw a bottle of Ribena at someone but in the scuffle a boy from her group knifed someone from the other group. The girl and one other didn’t run away and were sentenced to a number of years in jail on the charge of ‘joint enterprise’. This is an old charge but one used
increasingly
, so it seemed, to deal with gangs that committed crimes in groups. It makes sense as a concept but in the way I saw it exercised – if I were to believe what I was being told – it seemed that this joint enterprise or ‘association’ was now so widely used and caused so much hardship for many young girls that all
proportionality
was removed during sentencing.
I resolved to investigate that further while I was in prison and after I came out. It was obvious to me straight away that my position was different to most people there. Some of them were likely to be
spending
many years in prison or were serial offenders and serving successive short-term sentences. The proportion of women leaving prison who are reconvicted within twelve months is a staggering 54 per cent, rising to 90 per cent for those who have served ten or more previous custodial sentences.
33
Reconviction does not automatically mean a custodial sentence, of course, but there is something wrong with a prison
system that perpetuates itself and is unable to help the women who pass through it. Imagine the outcry if half the women treated by the NHS were soon back in hospital. We would replace doctors, ministers and executives. I felt I could begin to make sense of it all by talking to fellow prisoners and looking at all the evidence that others working in the area had
gathered
. This was clearly a very weird environment for anyone to find oneself in and such a waste of time, public money and misdirected effort as it seemed to have little impact on reoffending. I knew already that the past twenty years or so had seen a momentous increase in the prison population (people can’t have suddenly become that much worse behaved, surely); indeed, the number of women in prison increased by 85 per cent between 1996 and 2011.
34
Between 2000 and 2010 alone the population of women in prison had increased by 27 per cent. Despite the election of so many women as MPs, many of whom became ministers after 1997, and the commission of Baroness Corston to complete the first review of women in prison, we still sadly saw the biggest increase in the incarceration of women in British prison history. Did none of their colleagues at the Treasury ever ask if spending all that taxpayers’ money locking up women (and many men) was efficient public expenditure?
Many of the girls I spoke to had young babies and children, and more often than not seemed to be in prison due to or because they were fleeing from an abusive relationship. Data suggests that the number of women in prison who have been physically, emotionally or sexually abused as children is as high as 53 per cent.
35
And Karen Elgar, governor of HMP Send, a closed women’s prison in Surrey, wrote in a
report on fashion education in prisons that ‘often … women become involved in criminal activity through unhealthy, violent or dependent relationships with men – and consequently have very poor levels of self-esteem and no self-confidence’. Not surprisingly, a highly publicised study by the Prison Reform Trust published during my two months in East Sutton Park drew attention to the fact that although women represent only 5 per cent of the entire prison population they account for a third of all the incidents of self-harm.
36
Indeed this has been a problem that prisons such as Holloway have been struggling with for some time. Angela Devlin, in her seminal book
Invisible Women: What’s Wrong with Women’s Prisons?
,
37
points out the difficulty of caring properly for women in a building originally meant to be a hospital, with its twisting corridors built for pushing patient trolleys along. It makes supervision and control rather
difficult
and obliges the prison to have offices for prison staff in practically each corner to allow a proper view of what is going on. Lord Ramsbotham says that Holloway bears all the marks of a prison designed by a committee. And Nick Hardwick describes Holloway as ‘horrible and too big’. In his view, if the prison works it is only because of its location – people prefer to stay there rather than being relocated to, say, Reading prison or Bronzefield women’s prison in Kent because it keeps them close to their families. At least in Holloway there are lots of staff around who are visible for the prisoners to approach and discuss various matters. Nick Hardwick explained that in a number of the new private prisons, although you have a nice cell, a lot of gadgetry to order your food, a good canteen and anything else you might need
including being able to make appointments for many prison services and education courses, the key element missing is human contact. This reduces the need for staff and also takes away the necessary interaction with other inmates and staff. In consequence nobody really knows you or understands your despairs and no one is able to correctly assess the risk you are in and the real help you need, and therefore care for you. Interpersonal relationships are reduced to a minimum in the quest for greater efficiency and lower running costs.
Liz Padmore is one of the best-known public sector non-executive directors. When still a partner at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) she took part in a scheme some years ago facilitated by Business in the Community, which encouraged big companies like Andersen Consulting, British Airways, Centrica and also the
Guardian
newspaper to ‘adopt’ prisons. Liz picked Holloway and she was one of the people who spent a lot of time with the then governor Tony Hassall, sharing knowledge and focusing mainly on how to manage the prison better and reduce the
incidence
of self-harm and female suicides. She certainly came away with the impression during her mentoring period that women were in jail for having committed much smaller crimes than men and that the impact on families and society of removing those women was, in her words, ‘draconian’ in relation to their crimes. The vast percentage of the female prison population she encountered and of which she heard of during her mentoring either had a drugs problem, which they were often introduced to by their ‘boyfriends’ or at times their pimps, or they were made to steal or push drugs for money to feed their and their boyfriends’
drug habits, or they had been in an abusive relationship with boyfriends who coerced them into being ‘drug mules’. She came across cases of Colombian ‘mules’ who had been caught importing drugs and who were probably coerced to do so by threats to their families if they did not comply. And many other women were in for pretty short sentences during which they learned nothing to help them survive life on the outside, and instead gained a distrust of authority and bleak prospects for future employment. Indeed a report for the National Offender Management Service in 2012 suggested that only 8.4 per cent of women go straight into employment after short sentences of less than a year compared to 27.3 per cent of men.
38
During her period of mentoring Liz explained that she supported Tony Hassall’s decision to close the rather large officers’ gym and have the officers share the inmates’ gym. The officers’ gym was then converted to a hairdressing salon – and they are now prevalent in all educational annexes of most prisons, allowing inmates to train and take NVQs while in prison and therefore offering some hope of
employment
after release. I later met girls who had been in Peterborough prison, for example, who also reported that the beauty therapy course there was extremely popular and a good preparation for the outside world. When I later moved to open prison, I found that there was indeed a lot of interest in beauty therapy and girls combined the classes with a business enterprise course, with many of them intending to run their own business in this area after they left prison. I had the chance to look at a number of the business plans the girls were using to raise external funding for their business and to pay for extra qualifications while they
were still inside. And many had succeeded in finding potential funders. In the case of East Sutton Park, this was done with the help of the highly rated ‘Vision’ office, which acts as an interface for the residents and the outside education and employment worlds. Working Chance, a charity run by Jocelyn Hillman, is the main employment agency for women offenders and ex-offenders, and helps run a three-day course on employment skills: the girls apply for a dummy job, then someone comes in from the outside to ‘interview’ them and they then receive feedback on their
performance
and tips on how to improve. Working Chance operates inside prisons but also runs courses in its offices in Islington, which are very popular.
The girls on my landing were generally very friendly. Not only did they take care of me but they chatted non-stop whenever we were together. It would often be the case that as I was passing the two phone boxes in our landing girls would shout greetings from their mothers. That is, of course, the way that information sneaks out, unless it comes from the officers
themselves
. There was huge interest in the press in how I was coping and the story in the papers the following day was that I was fine and spending time
socialising
with other girls in their cells. It amazed me that anyone should be interested in that. I realised why a few days later once I got access to newspapers following my transfer to ESP. The expectation was that because of the high publicity of the case I would have a hard time in Holloway. In an article for the
Telegraph
a few days after my conviction, the crime writer Lynda La Plante wrote that given that my face was now as ‘familiar as a movie star’s’ what awaited me was likely to be quite sinister, ‘a frightening and alien
environment’, with cat-calls and abuse ‘yelled over and over again’.
39
She may indeed have witnessed that sort of behaviour when she was visiting Holloway and spending time talking with and observing inmates and staff, but in truth my own experience could not have been more different. It is true that there wouldn’t be many (if any) other women like me in Holloway but I encountered no animosity, sniping, bitching or negative treatment from anyone, either among my fellow inmates or from the officers. Instead there was huge sympathy from all and a general desire, it seemed to me, to make me feel better about being there.