by Kerry Daynes
*
During the years I was at university – 1992 to 1995 – law and order had become a touchstone of the political agenda. In February 1993, two-year-old James Bulger was tortured and murdered by Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. The nation watched CCTV footage of Jamie being led away from the New Strand shopping centre, hand-in-hand with one of his killers, and was united in its horror and fury. As tabloid headlines went full throttle (there was no tolerance here, not even for ten-year-old killers, especially for ten-year-old killers), both main political parties saw their chance to win votes by demonstrating a hard line on crime.
Despite the hen’s-teeth rarity of primary school children who kill, shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair was quick to declare the case symbolic of the ‘sleeping’ moral conscience of the country under Tory rule, while simultaneously launching Labour’s ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ policy. Days after the arrest of James’s killers, John Major, then Prime Minister, reciprocated with a call for society ‘to condemn a little more and understand a little less’. It was the start of a mushrooming in prisoner numbers that would see them more than double throughout my career, from around 44,000 when I started my studies in 1992 to almost 87,000 in 2018.
Prison is the largest employer of forensic psychologists in the UK, so I knew early on I’d need to get some work experience inside inside. Prison psychologists run various offending-behaviour programmes that promise to transform the thinking of offenders and reduce their risk of reoffending upon release. This was part of the tough and supposedly effective stance on criminality the public had bought into – quite literally, as millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money had just begun to be poured into running these programmes. For me, prison wasn’t only a punishment or deterrent but a place to rehabilitate and reform; I was ready to roll my sleeves up and get stuck in. I’d already volunteered on a victim and offender mediation programme (mostly an exercise in stopping the two parties from coming to blows) and had trained as an appropriate adult, sitting in on police station interviews with vulnerable suspects – people who’ve ended up in trouble and are young, have learning difficulties or mental health problems. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I might have benefited from an appropriate adult myself.
HMP Manchester, rebranded from Strangeways after the riots, was the first prison I set foot in, albeit only briefly. I had just turned 20. I’d managed to arrange a quick careers talk from the prison psychologist, followed by a tour of E and F wings, a mixture of cells and education rooms. A prison officer, who made no effort to disguise the fact that he’d drawn the short straw in showing me the sights, rushed me around the ‘twos’ (the first-floor landing) of E wing, all shiny painted brickwork and blue metal doors and railings. HMP Manchester has very little natural light and had an aroma not unlike the student flats I lived in. I scuttled along behind my escort, smiling at the inmates as I passed by their cells – men in identikit grey sweatshirts, milling in and out of identikit magnolia spaces. When the entire place erupted in high shrieks of ‘Meow!’, echoing like a vocal Mexican wave around the Victorian vaults, I asked him why they were making cat noises. He just rolled his eyes. (In case you haven’t guessed, it was to alert fellow prisoners that some pussy had arrived.)
*
The atmosphere at HMP Wakefield was considerably less bouncy.
It was summer 1996, I was a year out of university, the Spice Girls were number one and I really wanted to be a forensic psychologist. I had written to all the prisons on the northern circuit, volunteering my services. Wakefield – known affectionately to its residents as the armpit of Yorkshire – was the only place that replied. They had a project for me. There was no pay, but I didn’t care. I was going to single-handedly reduce the crime rate, and here was an opportunity to put some real experience on my CV. Besides, I had £36 a week income support, and if I took the employment training course they were pushing at the Job Centre, I’d get an extra tenner on top of that. I bought myself a new suit from C&A and found a grotty flat-share above a Chinese takeaway – ladies and gentlemen, I had arrived.
The average prisoner at HMP Wakefield was older than the boisterous bunch at Strangeways and in for the long haul. They couldn’t be bothered to shout at you in here and largely wouldn’t have dared – the level of institutional control ran too deep. We’re talking category A and B prisoners, the ones you really don’t want to escape. (Category A prisoners require maximum security because their escape would be highly dangerous for the public or national security. B-listers are slightly less risky, but you still don’t want to make it easy for them to arrange their own release.) Sex offenders made up around 10 per cent of the UK’s overall prison population at that time, but still constituted the vast majority of Wakefield’s inmates, many of them the most high-profile and publicly despised offenders. It’s for this reason that journalists are obsessed with the place; it is still widely referred to in the media as Monster Mansion.
Monsters terrified me when I was a child. My dad let me stay up late one night to watch Creature from the Black Lagoon on television (I’m a child of the 1970s, all my cultural references are from television). My mum worked nights at a psychiatric hospital, so she wasn’t there to point out what a terrible idea it was. I don’t know why he thought I’d enjoy it, I’d already been taken out of ET during the first ten minutes of the screening because I was scared of a small waddling alien. I got through about three minutes of Black Lagoon before terror set in, the moment when a scaly webbed hand, attached to an unseen body, emerges from the water and then slowly slips back, trailing claw marks in the sand. Somehow it was more horrifying to me that you didn’t know what was attached to that claw, than to see the actual creature. Perhaps in those first few minutes of a 1950s horror movie I had begun to suspect that dangerous things aren’t always in plain sight.
*
There has been a prison at Wakefield since the 16th century, but most of the existing buildings are Victorian-era; long, multi-level galleries of cells leading off in different directions from a central hub, like a broken clock-face (they are doing time, after all). Prisons with radial designs like this were inspired by the ‘panopticon’ theories of the 18th-century English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. His thinking was that, in this fan-like layout, every cell could be easily seen by a single watchman in the centre. Inmates would feel the weight of constant potential surveillance, and so modify their behaviour accordingly. In practice, of course, everyone knows that it is impossible to watch everybody at all times, and if you want to get up to no good you just choose an opportune moment in your cell. When I was working there, it wasn’t unusual for the occasional dead pigeon to spiral down from the cell windows on the outside wall of A wing. Inmates fed them through holes that had been broken out over the years. Then – if they were so inclined – they broke their necks and sent the unfortunate birds plummeting, preferably just at the moment a member of staff was walking by underneath.
The psychology team at Wakefield wanted me to do the leg work on a research project, interviewing all of the prisoners who had both sexually assaulted and killed women. I was to find out how the assault had escalated and what might have turned a rapist into a murderer. My task was to collect information that could later be analysed under a number of motivational types for sex offenders: were they compensating for sexual inadequacy, angry, seeking a sense of power and control, sadistic or opportunistic? The information I collected would be used to develop guidelines for women to use during a sexual assault. The idea being that in the throes of being physically and mentally overpowered by a rapist, a woman could quickly identify her attacker’s motivational profile and somehow adjust her behaviour in order to avoid possibly being killed.
That this was considered a suitable project for a young female graduate with no training or experience is gobsmacking enough. But also that anyone thought it appropriate research in the first place, when it so clearly suggests responsibility for the severity of the attack lies with the
victim and not the criminal who is viciously attacking her. I can imagine the eventual leaflet, something you might pick up at the doctor’s surgery: ‘Ladies! Don’t let woeful ignorance get you murdered! We always recommend that you avoid getting yourself raped, but, if you do, just follow this handy cut-out-and-keep guide.’
During my first week, before my project began in earnest, I went through the standard induction given to all new non-uniformed staff joining the prison. It was a routine week of tours and talks, mostly mundane practicalities such as the location of the toilets, what to do in a fire drill and how to carry your keys (securely attached by a chain to your belt, preferably in a pouch, and with your palm obscuring the bit that slides into the lock if you are holding them within sight of an inmate). But throughout the week, whoever I was with and whatever I was being shown, I was told about the Wakefield Way. It was like a school motto, something everyone there seemed proud to stand by. But it wasn’t about valour or courage in the face of adversity, it was more about a shared adherence to one simple premise: it was, I was repeatedly informed, ‘them and us’.
What everyone seemed to agree on, and to actively perpetuate, was a state of pseudo-moral warfare. On one side the inmates: a force of evil to be reviled and subjugated. On the other, the prison officers: blessed and unquestionable. It was a setup that comfortingly reflected the simplistic notions of good guys and bad guys that I had grown up watching in the films with my gran. In reality it was by no means a peaceful arrangement, the opposite of what today is known as ‘dynamic’ or ‘relational security’, where everyone tries to get along. The bubbling tension between officers and prisoners was palpable and relationships were unpleasant. Just the week before I arrived a prison officer, going about his routine morning unlock, had been slashed by an inmate with a razor sellotaped to the end of a toothbrush.
To show enthusiasm for the rehabilitation of prisoners, or suggest they were anything other than irretrievable, a write-off, was to be entirely on the wrong side – a traitor. One prison officer earnestly warned me that the psychologists here were all deluded do-gooders. Oh, and lesbians.
Eager to embark on my career, I got to work on my project. I was given a list of surnames and prison numbers of the inmates whose convictions included not only the murder of a woman, but also rape or sexual assault of the victim. And I got a questionnaire, a list of pretty much every sexual and violent thing you can do to a woman. (Some of it, like eviscerating – pulling a person’s insides out – I’d never even heard of, never mind the associated sexual practices.) I had to go through the list asking if they had done this or that, and if I got an affirmative answer, I had to then ask them how their victim had responded and explore what other possible reactions might have led to.
It was a very long questionnaire, each interview took over an hour and a half, and asking men, any men, but particularly these convicted prisoners, explicit questions was embarrassing to say the least. I knew I was blushing as I went through the list but I tried my conscientious best to be a ‘psychologist first and a woman second’ (a vague and confusing nugget of advice I’d received from a supervisor).
Some interviews were more difficult than others to get through. One man told me he’d bitten off a woman’s nipple because he was enraged that she hadn’t tried to fight him off while he raped her. Proof, in his mind, that she was enjoying his assault and was therefore a ‘whore’. Research tells us that at least 70 per cent of rape victims freeze like this, and, were I to meet him in a professional capacity today, we’d have a full and frank discussion about his reasoning. But I didn’t know how to react to it then. I instinctively raised my hand to protectively cover my own breast but caught it in time, put it back down, wrote down his answer and went on to the next question. Others deliberately made it difficult, asking me to explain what the clinical language of the questionnaire meant in more detail (‘What does to digitally penetrate mean, miss?’). To those bored and sex-deprived inmates, my sessions must have seemed more like a free call to an adult chat line than serious research. I was being thrown in at the deep end and left to swim among the sharks.
At least I had a script with the inmates. Interactions with some of my colleagues weren’t turning out to be any easier. In the second week of interviews, I went to the central office and asked the officer behind the desk – a cantankerous bellyacher of a man – for a rape alarm (as opposed to just one of the plain old personal alarms that staff were issued with). He turned to the other officers in the busy room and said, ‘Aw, do you think you are going to get raped today? The little girl thinks she is going to get raped today lads.’ Then he demanded I hand over my shoes if I wanted an alarm, as my conservative mid-heels were clearly going to whip the inmates into a sexual frenzy. I walked away, without the alarm but still with my shoes, my eyes beginning to burn. As soon as I was far enough away from any judgemental eyes, I burst into tears.
One of the many things I would like to tell the 21-year-old me about my time at Wakefield is to notice the warning signs that were waving at me like giant ‘Golf Sale’ placards on a busy high street. But my eagerness to do a good job eclipsed any creeping doubts I had. I was excited to be starting my career. To have shown what I wrongly thought of as weakness, or, worse, to have complained, could have meant an end to my time there.
After my first few weeks, a kinder prison officer took me to one side and quietly pointed out that the security routine I was going through each morning on my way in – when a male officer would run his hands up and down my entire body, ostensibly to check I hadn’t brought my machete to work – wasn’t actually happening to any of the other female staff. Or in fact any staff, other than me.
The sound of cascading pennies clanged in my ears. Today we’d call it sexual harassment at best. But I wasn’t yet tuned in to the concept of misogyny, certainly not assertive enough to call it out. And this was Yorkshire in the 1990s, they still had strippers in the pub on Sunday afternoons. Hashtags hadn’t even been invented yet, never mind #metoo. The next time someone tried to give me my morning once-over I just gritted my teeth and laughed them off, instincts telling me that to reveal a loss of humour over this wouldn’t do me any favours.
Wakefield is home to the Prison Service College, a training centre separate from the prison, and for many the job was in the family, a kind of destiny that seemed to give some of them an enhanced sense of power and entitlement. When, in 2004, a report from Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons described HMP Wakefield as ‘over-controlled’ with some officers showing disrespect to inmates, I wasn’t surprised.
A few of the younger officers in particular seemed to regard themselves as princes – the prison was their castle, and they had all the keys. Many of them also had deep tans, acquired at the local sunbed salon, not in Wakefield’s sultry climate. They’d pop out for a quick blast on their lunch break, and come back a disconcerting two shades darker than when they left. All part of their preening rituals, trying to attract a mate on a night out. There were rumours that a group of them would go out drinking on the Golden Mile – Wakefield’s main party strip – and bring girls back to the prison car park to have sex with them under the peripheral security cameras, so their colleagues on night shift could be entertained. Again when I read about these ‘high times’ years later in press reports, I wasn’t surprised. In fact my only reaction was to question why, at the time, I never placed this on the same spectrum of dodgy behaviour as the prisoners I was interviewing.
*
Some of the officers started asking me out on dates. I would later learn there was a book running, taking bets on who would win the race to get me into bed. My arrival at this overwhelmingly male facility, where any kind of female had immediate novelty value, was causing a stir.
Co-favourite at 3:1, and the first to approach me, also happened to be the senior officer on C wing (there was a pecking order, even when it came to bedding the newbies): Prison Officer John Hall. He approached me while I was reading notes in the records
room, where information about the inmates was held. Press clippings, disciplinary charges and adjudications, complaints and prison correspondence with family members, and just about anything else deemed relevant, were kept in here. Some of the files even contained crime scene pictures – these gruesome elements of an inmate’s legal paperwork were confiscated from them if they were caught offering them to others as masturbation material or using them for bragging purposes.
This was before digitized records, so it was all kept in standard-issue manila folders, rows and rows of them along the entire far wall of this long thin room, each marked by hand with a prisoner’s surname and number. Thanks to Wakefield’s notorious alumni (Charles Bronson, IRA chief of staff Cathal Goulding, Jeremy Bamber, Michael Sams and Colin Ireland had all signed the visitors’ book) it was a cross between Who’s Who and the Chamber of Horrors.
John Hall came in as I was reading Ireland’s paperwork, reeling slightly at the nature of the file. Ireland had murdered five gay men and left their corpses in various macabre and undignified poses – a motif that was intended to send a message of contempt to the police and the media reporting the case. The file contained a clutch of letters from Ireland’s fans, the likes of which I had never seen. Extreme, far-right homophobes had written to congratulate Ireland on his work, and the letters had been intercepted and found their way to his file, complete with their hand-drawn swastikas. I was looking at the letters and pondering, What the hell is wrong with these people?
There was nothing special about the way he asked me out. He walked past the records room, did a U-turn after he saw me sitting there, and came in and sat down next to me. Hall was – probably still is – a big, tall lump of a man, so I couldn’t exactly pretend that I hadn’t noticed him. He asked how I was settling in, did I need any help or someone to show me Wakefield, and, eventually, did I want to go out for a drink with him? I didn’t. Politely, I said thank you but no. Then, because I felt I had to justify not wanting to go out on a date with this person, I said that someone else had already asked me out and I was considering it. They hadn’t and I wasn’t – but I’d said it out loud now.