Prisonomics

by Pryce, Vicky

  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.

  Others are forced to obtain a loan on entering prison, which they then have to repay slowly with their wages or on leaving the prison. Some have money on the outside that they can access when they go out on day visits or to see their families under licence or when they go to work. And then you can have money and stamps sent in, assuming you have people on the outside who can afford them and are willing to send them in for you – though one is warned that it is a dangerous thing to do as money tends to get ‘lost’.

  The result is that a gap easily develops between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ and those with money and stamps can end up exploiting those without. Rachel Halford of Women in Prison later told me that they were once specifically asked to stop sending stamps to a particular women’s prison as they realised that women were using the stamps for currency and were now identified as a ‘trading risk’. Inmates are not allowed to barter but I could see it happens all the time so couldn’t quite understand the reason why it should be prohibited – although clearly one would need to make sure it was not abused and prisoners didn’t end up owing a lot to others that they couldn’t repay. But a parallel currency in these circumstances is a natural development – indeed Radford wrote that the development of a market was ‘a response to immediate needs’ and that ‘the small scale of the transactions and the simple expression of comfort and wants in terms of cigarettes and jam, razor blades and writing paper, make the urgency of those needs difficult to appreciate, even by an ex-prisoner of some three months’ standing’.

  I would come to understand this perfectly in ESP, as excitement built for the weekly delivery of the ‘canteen’ goods. Sometimes the whole timing of supper had to be moved to accommodate either the earlier or later than scheduled arrival of the van with its parcels in white plastic labelled with the names of the women who had ordered them. Girls started queuing way before they started distributing the individual purchases. I noticed that the majority of my fellow residents were relying almost entirely on their earnings to buy stamps and it was only natural that if someone was prepared to pay for services in stamps that was fine, as long as their price did not become so exorbitant that it caused a lot of aggravation and pain and put those with stamps in a position of control. Surely it would make sense for the prison service to allow charities to supply stamps. Depriving girls of the ability to communicate with the external world, except through brief but very expensive phone calls, seemed to me to defy logic and to be cruel at the same time.

  Back in Holloway I was still oblivious to the value of stamps and continued giving them away if I could. And today it was a feast for them all as forty letters arrived. Like the day before around half were from perfect strangers giving support and half from friends and acquaintances, some from my very distant past, outraged, solicitous, sympathetic and urging optimism for the way ahead. The letters themselves would have been enough to occupy me for the rest of the night if Chelsea, the football team I support, hadn’t been playing in the Europa Cup quarter final against Steaua Bucharest that evening. The small portable TV in my cell worked well enough though the image was slightly blurred; there was one problem, however, and that was it blew its fuse each time I used the adjacent plug to boil some water for tea. Each time that happened I had to call a guard to fix it from the individual fuse unit outside each cell. By day three I had learned to use the plugs in the corridor to boil the kettle if I wanted to avoid that happening, so that evening I boiled the kettle outside just before lock-up and settled to watch the match. I had bought tickets and would have been watching it in my usual seats with a couple of my children in Stamford Bridge right then if I hadn’t ended up in jail. At least I had arranged to have the family use the tickets even if I wasn’t there. Chelsea started off very badly and I was soon groaning and occasionally shouting with frustration at the screen. The night guard heard me alright and came over all the way from his office down the corridor, not to tell me off but to find out how we were doing. We ended up watching some of the game together – me from my cell chair on the inside and him through the hatch he opened for the purpose. What luck to have a guard on duty that night who was a Chelsea fan. And in the end we won. And we also won the final against Benfica a couple of months later, by which time I was out and able to enjoy the game at home with friends.

  So far so good. I was pleased with how I was handling such an alien environment but it was only day three and as I was getting ready for bed I wondered how I was going to survive lock-up at 5 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I assumed the earlier time was because of a staff shortage on weekends. That in itself rankled and didn’t seem fair. On weekdays lock-up was around 7 p.m. and after supper one had free ‘association’ for a couple of hours with no set events. You were allowed to go to each other’s cells, chat, watch TV and smoke in the designated smoking cells if you wanted. I had found the practice a welcome diversion and it also got me talking to the other inmates. The idea of a lock-up for sixteen hours till 9 the following morning, three days in a row, was a bit strange to me, so used was I to having people around me. I have since heard that for many prisoners being able to have that time to themselves, watch TV, eat, read, write their letters and rest is a welcome thing. But I wasn’t sure how I would react. So for the first time, once the match was over and I managed to boil the kettle and have a cup of tea and a biscuit – even though it blew the TV off – I found myself pacing up and down the cell. I thought this was probably normal as it allowed me to think but fellow prisoners later told me that this is a reaction to the claustrophobia getting to you and a sure sign that you are beginning to go slightly mad as a result of being locked up in a cell. It doesn’t take long for people to start talking to themselves and have long conversations with the TV set as there isn’t anyone else to hear you. We did later wonder how the girls in the segregation unit could keep sane with no TV, no sink, no reading materi
al as far as I am aware – all as punishment. How is that still possible in this day and age? The girls in D0 who were next to the segregation unit talked of the terrible noise emanating from these cells at night and the inhumane nature of that type of punishment. In Nick Hardwick’s view these were mentally disturbed women and the segregation cells did not take account of their specific needs as most facilities in prison are designed with men in mind. Indeed, Lord Ramsbotham expressed his shock that healthcare instructions used in Holloway depicted human organs and the like only on the male body. Though this is astonishing, it’s worth remembering that slopping out, i.e. emptying the toilet bucket kept in one’s cell, was still the norm as recently as twenty years ago.

  15 MARCH

  What a funny day. I had for once spent a bit of the night before going to sleep planning my survival for the weekend ahead. Did I have enough books? Yes. As well as the eighteen books I had brought in myself I had received a few magazines, including the latest issue of Prospect sent to me kindly by the editor, Bronwen Maddox, with a very nice supporting note. I also had the four crime books from the library. That should keep me going through the weekend, I thought. And there were bound to be more letters, which in fact there were. But when the officers woke me they told I wouldn’t be going on ‘movement’ but I was in fact leaving for East Sutton Park open prison in Maidstone, Kent. I heaved a huge sigh of relief. I wasn’t allowed to ring the kids or my solicitor to give them the good news until I got there (the idea, I think, stems from the fear that your associates, if they know where you are travelling to and when, might try and ambush the car and free you) but I packed my things and started saying goodbye to the girls quickly as word spread that I was leaving. I left the girls on the landing a few books of stamps and any food and drinks I had not consumed, took names and prison numbers down and promised I would write to them from ESP, which I duly did and continued to do so throughout my stay there. I had very little time to pack my belongings but as a seasoned traveller it has always been my way to never unpack properly as you never know how quickly you need to leave particular locations. Leaving the room was easy except for the heaviness of my books but the female officer who came to get me helped me carry it all downstairs again and we were soon back at the reception area through which I had entered a few nights earlier.

  This time the process was simpler. I had to make sure that all the money I had left could travel with me and that my request for starting a telephone balance would not be lost with my transfer to ESP. My suitcase and handbag were added to my cell belongings. Everyone was very friendly, and there were numerous offers of tea and toast as I waited for my transportation – my main concern was to finish the library book I was reading so that I could leave it behind. I was allowed to take another of my own books with me in the van and a notebook and pen. I then realised that Liz, the very efficient ex-police officer who had handed me the employment application form in the library, was also coming to ESP with me. She had been told the news of her move only the night before and until then had been led to believe that she was going to spend her whole sentence in Holloway. It seemed that my planned move allowed her to leave Holloway without fuss and she insisted throughout our stay at ESP that she owed her move entirely to me.

  The transport was late so a couple of cups of tea and biscuits – and a finished Holloway library book – later we waved goodbye and were led into the awaiting van. Once in we were each given some sandwiches and water (it was by now 12 p.m.) and were locked into our respective cubicles. There were no seatbelts that I could see, which was extraordinary in itself. With our nice staff from the security firm Serco – a male driver, a female assistant – we set off for Maidstone, being thrown around the cubicles whenever the van accelerated too much. The sandwiches were inedible – bad even by the standards of Holloway – but looking outside at the streets of London and at life continuing regardless of one’s own plight was fun. Soon we were on the A20 and the M20 – and then all went kaput. The vehicle, which I believe costs some £1,000 per transfer, started to have problems accelerating and after about five minutes seemed to give up. Fortunately we manoeuvred out of the driving lanes and came to stop on what is probably the most dangerous place to park in the whole world – the hard shoulder of the M20! There were anxious calls from the driver to control to explain the problem and attempts to get someone to fix it were not getting them anywhere.

  I began to calculate our distance from Holloway – surely given that an hour and a bit had already passed we must be over halfway there – and hoped that they would not attempt a slow return back to Holloway, which I didn’t really relish. We stayed there for quite some time while the discussions were going on, which we could hear quite clearly. The female officer kept us informed although there wasn’t much to say, except that they had finally arranged for another vehicle to come to carry on with the journey. That took quite some time to happen and we waited there for another hour. Unbeknown to me at that stage (Liz told me later to great hilarity in the dining room of ESP) as a fully experienced police officer in traffic duties, Liz was looking out of the window facing the grass and calculating the chances of us surviving. The advice given is that if you need to stop on a motorway hard shoulder, you must always leave the vehicle and stay on the grass as one is at serious risk of being killed by another car crashing in to you from behind. She kept telling our guards that we should be allowed out, but that was flatly refused as they had no authority to let anyone out of the van – though neither of us, given our ages, were likely to attempt to do a runner either through the fields on our left or across a multi-lane motorway. She then asked repeatedly that they should at least call for a police car to come and shield us so that their presence and flashing lights would alert cars from behind that this was an emergency stop and they should be approaching with care. The crew finally agreed to ask headquarters to call the police – headquarters asked them to do it themselves and they duly did.

  In the meantime we remained in our cubicles with no seatbelts, and I continued happily reading my book, oblivious to the exchange between my fellow prisoner and the crew outside. Finally a police car arrived, flashing its lights, and parked behind us. Three hours after we had set off from Holloway, the replacement van arrived. But another crisis loomed. The substitute van only had male staff in it and that wasn’t right for transporting a female load. So what to do? Why don’t you, I suggested to the female guard in the original vehicle, transfer to the new van with us and that way the problem would be solved. Oh no, was the answer, that can’t be done. Fortunately, it could and that was exactly what happened, though it took a bit of time for them to negotiate it with head office. Overseen by lots of police, we were finally led out of our van onto a nice piece of grass and into the new van, a bit smaller and rougher than the one before, and we were off again.

  And then we got lost. The new discussions between the officers now centred on the uselessness of the satnav and the complete mystification about the address of the prison, which had no numbers, no real road and seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. We stopped at a petrol station for another half an hour while the crew investigated the route we should take, discussed the possibility of buying a map, went and asked the guys at the petrol station for directions, and fretted a bit more. When we finally set off again, we were forced to put up with the starting and stopping that jerked us around our little cubicles for a good further three quarters of an hour as we drove through some rather nice little villages and beautiful Kent countryside. At last we arrived. Four-and-a-half hours since we had set off we were finally at a beautiful Elizabethan house; there were no obvious prison signs, no wire, no fences and only a side entrance opened by a genial reception officer, Nigel. My companion was the first to walk in ahead of me and was greeted with a ‘Welcome, Mrs Pryce’. It was a fitting end to a Monty Pythonesque afternoon and the two of us would be confused for each other for the next two months.

  CHAPTER 3

  EAST SUTTON PARK

  So
there I was in East Sutton Park, a Grade II-listed Elizabethan mansion set in 84 acres of grounds which couldn’t be more different than Holloway, both architecturally and in terms of its regime. William the Conqueror had bequeathed the original estate to Bishop Odo after the Battle of Hastings and East Sutton Park is even mentioned in the Domesday Book. The building itself seems to have been added to over the centuries: there is evidence of an eleventh-century settlement on a moated site which was succeeded by a fourteenth-century building of Kentish rag. The main house where the women are housed is a mixture of Elizabethan and Victorian buildings with a farm attached to it. According to the induction booklet I received on arrival, until 1942 the estate was owned by Lord Filmer Wilson, whose son and heir to the estate was killed in the Second World War. The estate then went to the government, who used it for the remainder of the war as a headquarters for the Tank Regiment. In 1945 the house was opened as the only open borstal in existence before becoming the open female prison it is today. It now houses a hundred residents, comprising ninety women and ten young offenders.

  It was clear East Sutton Park set out a very different approach to prison life than I had experienced in my short period in Holloway. ‘East Sutton Park is an open prison – there are no “Lock-up” times’. But there were also notes in the induction booklet indicative of the problems the prison staff often face: an anti-bullying statement, a decency policy and a comment that love-bites are classified as self-inflicted injuries, while tattooing yourself or others is not allowed.