Prisonomics

by Pryce, Vicky

  The farm breeds pigs, keeps sheep and lambs in season and has a livery for twenty-one retired horses for which it charges just £170 a month, which is a reasonable fee. Not surprisingly therefore there is always a long waiting list from local farmers who want their horses to be looked after. So there was demand, limited supply and yet all the time I was there people were talking about how to increase revenue by ‘sweating the assets’ but doing very little about it as the investment for more capacity was not forthcoming.

  According to the girls working there the farm shop and meat shop were run excellently by Mr and Mrs C, as they were known. I still to this day have no idea what Mr and Mrs C’s full names are and I suspect this was the case with quite a lot of the people working there. Even the staff referred to them that way. The IMB report duly praises the existence of the farm and farm shop and the gardens and how they are run. It believes that for many women working with animals or in the gardens is therapeutic as it gives them the chance to experience rural life for the first time in their lives and allows them time to reflect outdoors, which can be beneficial. Working in the farm shop serving customers and handling cash also brings back a bit of normality to their lives and allows for many, particularly lifers, their first interaction with the community for years. And as working in the shop is classified as ‘volunteering’ it also gives lifers and those on indeterminate sentences incentive to do it well as this could count positively towards their hoped-for parole. But it goes further than that. All the girls who work outdoors or in the shop seemed to have a much more positive attitude to the job they are doing to the point of driving the rest of us mad. The number of times I had to hear all the details of the births of the latest little lambs or piglets; the sick mothers who were abandoning their little ones which then had to be bottle fed by my roommates; the latest horse that escaped and ran through the fields because someone had AGAIN not closed its stable door; similarly with sows – enormous things that were difficult to catch and carry back. For my sins I was sharing a room with girls who worked in the farm and the shop and they cared deeply for their animals, and, though the work was tiring, never complained about having to get up even at the weekends at the crack of dawn to let the animals out into the field.

  So doing these tasks had a major impact on everyone involved – a sure sign of developing individual responsibility, getting up on time entirely by themselves, caring about the outcomes of their work and the professionalism they displayed, moaning about laggards and generally behaving as team members, helping each other and working together and keeping Mr and Mrs C happy. Perfect preparation, it seemed to me, for employability in the outside world. I must admit that although I love looking at animals and used to ride horses I am not one to want to actively look after them if I can avoid it and my kitchen job, especially in the Arctic conditions we were experiencing at the time, suited me fine. So I moaned a bit at the thought of early morning wake-ups but they were so solicitous not to wake me that they got up in the dark and left half dressed, putting on the rest of their clothes outside the room once they went through the door.

  A Home Office civil servant in charge of the prison farms some twenty years ago told me that farms, apart from providing fresh and healthy food to prisons at low cost, were also tremendously valuable at getting people to overcome many of their problems as they cared for animals, worked as teams and took responsibility for growing plants, looked after horses, delivered new lambs and worked in the meat shops. The interesting thing is that as a result of the farms in existence the prison service used to be self-sufficient in pork, bacon, potatoes and some other vegetables, but this is no longer the case as most of those farms have been dispensed with – either sold for development, taken over for expansion of other prison facilities or abandoned as the cost of extra supervision of prisoners during their time out was prohibitive. The Royal Society of Arts project Transitions in Wells prison is aimed to try to reverse this. But for the moment the general lack of fresh produce, with some notable exceptions, was easily evident to me as I worked in the kitchen.

  Given those constraints, trying to keep the residents in ESP happy was an unenviable task. The poor girls who cooked there were always anxious to find out what people thought. Many had never worked in kitchens before but after a while became interested in becoming chefs themselves. There used to be an NVQ you could get in catering while in ESP but that didn’t seem to be offered anymore, though the girls still learned a lot. In fact, they were experimenting with puddings, fatal for those trying to avoid putting on weight as they ended up often being the best thing on the menu. There were shrieks of enthusiasm when one chef who was retiring came back to ESP for a few days just before the end of his term with the prison service to cook for three days – he was apparently the best pudding maker ESP had ever seen. I watched him make a series of cakes that he was then leaving behind to be served on different nights – he proudly took me round and showed me what he was making and then we went together to each of the ovens where trays full of chocolate sponge, raspberry cheesecake and apricot tarts were proudly displayed. He explained that he had been a chef for the prison service for a long time, and had also experienced big prisons where it was impossible to keep anything warm when you mass-produced food as by the time the food was delivered to and served in the different units around the prison it had inevitably already gone cold and lost a lot of its taste. Cooking for ESP was bliss for him especially as the girls seemed to appreciate it. Reaching retirement age some time ago, he had finally hung up his apron after years of working part-time.

  As a result of his skills the enthusiasm for puddings had caught on. I recall being followed around by one of the girls, Helen, who on a number of occasions wanted me to taste the mixture for the apple crumble or the cream that she was intending to use for the cheesecake, which in fact got better and better during the period I was there. Indeed, by the time I was leaving, the apple cake and the apricot sponge served with a huge dollop of packet custard were in my view near perfect. But the girls moaned – as girls do – and they filled in the comments book with negative comments. The poor trainee cooks would pore over them at night – true, sometimes they forgot to add sugar or used the wrong kind of flour, which made a pudding inedible, but I suppose that happens everywhere. They needed encouragement though and one day, looking through the book of comments myself, I found an entry allegedly from me which I had never written. It said: ‘Soup was yummy – Vicky Pryce’! That, at least, was true – in fact, most days the lunchtime soup was freshly made with vegetables left over from the garden and whatever bits of chicken may have been left from the supper the day before. I’m sure I must have said something like that because I genuinely enjoyed it – of course it always helps to have the alternative in mind i.e. Holloway, the new ‘Bowani test’ for me in terms of food. Compared with that everything else was a big improvement. Happiness, I think, is being able to adjust your expectations (a long way) downwards and to be prepared to be pleasantly surprised. From then onwards I was always given extra helpings when I arrived at the food counter…

  The positive feedback had its drawbacks, however. A week later I had been lovingly given a larger than normal portion of brown, slightly unappetising-looking, soup with a dumpling at the bottom by a rather fierce girl, Hannah, who worked in the kitchens and whose wrong side you had learned to generally avoid. On arriving at my designated place in the dining room I discovered that my table companions had already ditched it saying it was inedible so I gave it up too before I even started. Once you’ve finished lunch or supper you take your tray into the Butler’s Room and empty everything you haven’t eaten or any rubbish into one of the three bins that are there before washing plates, cutlery and tray, which of course I then disinfected. So we entered the Butler’s with trays still full of soup. The first person we encountered was Hannah. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘did you not eat your soup after all?’ Before I was able to say I was a bit full actually, so couldn’t finish it, Liz, my straight-talking ex
-police officer friend, butted in: ‘It was rubbish really, truly awful soup. Who made it?’ ‘I did,’ was the reply. I hid from Hannah for days thereafter.

  26 MARCH

  A number of girls told me that my name was on a notice board outside centre office, with an appointment for my risk-assessment today at 10.30. I had a talk with Miss Callaghan, the prison officer assigned to me as my personal officer, who told me it should all be fine but she couldn’t be there herself as she was doing something for charity outside the prison that day. I went in for my appointment just after Liz, who came out of it looking OK, I thought. I walked in carrying my pathway papers – according to Mo, the education lady, I was the only one to ever do so even though all the girls are asked to bring them to the board. I confirmed that I was intending to do as much education and mentoring of girls as possible and work in the kitchens, which I had already started to do. They seemed to think that my intentions to look at various studies on release was a ‘good thing’ and were pleased that I was having regular family visits, which to them was a positive sign.

  I was assessed as very low risk – the probability of reoffending was estimated at 2 per cent for the first year after release and the probability in the second year was strangely put at 4 per cent following some statistical average. Puzzling, as I don’t think I intend to allow anyone to pass their points onto my driving licence in the future, but who was I to argue? I was told that my HDC date when I could leave prison and go home to serve the rest of my time at home on a ‘tag’ was confirmed for 13 May but that it still depended on the governor signing my release on tag, though it rarely gets refused. I was also apparently now able to go unescorted for an emergency visit to a doctor or dentist or optician, probably in Maidstone. I thought that might be fun but in the event I couldn’t think of a reason to pay any of those people a visit. I began to wonder how I could possibly leave without having visited Maidstone while in ESP, the destination of choice for those girls going out on day visits at the weekend. I suspect they spent most of their time out eating. I asked one girl one Saturday evening when she returned whether she had had a nice day and she described how she had first been at a curry house where you can eat as much as you want for a fixed price, then a couple of hours later had a McDonald’s and then feasted on Nando’s at 5 p.m. before coming back – she was recounting this while complaining with a straight face of a belly ache as if the actions of the day had nothing to do with that. I thought I should go and repeat just that culinary trip on my last day, 11 May, as that was my FLED, i.e. when I could go out on visits and also have employment. Alas, there is a (I think unwritten) rule that says that before release you must spend the previous twenty-four hours in ESP and I wasn’t going to jeopardise my departure. So no Maidstone for me.

  27 MARCH

  Time for my manual handling course – yes, you haven’t misread it. Three of us, Liz, Anya and I, went to the visitors’ centre (out of bounds, by permission) to have a course with Craig on how to lift a parcel without hurting ourselves. I would say it was the most relaxed two hours spent in ESP. The course is there, I guess, to ensure that one is not injured if one can avoid it doing the work around the prison but more importantly, if the cynic in me can be allowed occasionally to surface, to ensure that there are no claims against the prison for any injuries suffered while working. It is true that I did meet a number of girls who had managed to do serious damage to themselves by lifting heavy pans around the kitchen several hours a day and some whose work on the farm or the meat shop had left them with pain in their arms and back. Some of them had to have healthcare sign them off these tiring jobs and switch to other, less physically demanding, activities but the process wasn’t easy and relied on an ESP labour board providing approval. But in general they loved to do their jobs and took pride in what they did. I was lucky in a way – my dining room duties were not back-breaking, though I can’t explain how it was possible that out of four of us doing dining room and Butler’s Room duties and tray cleaning and, my favourite pastime, disinfecting everything, I was the only one who seemed not to have a bad back. It was me and me only who went on my hands and knees twice a day and cleaned the floor with a dustpan and brush. I must admit I still can’t decide whether those ladies were having me on.

  We were taught what was good for our bodies: apparently sleeping on your back was the best in terms of putting as little pressure as you can on your body and staying healthy and free of back problems for longer; on your side a bit worse; and sleeping on your front with face down against pillow was by far the worst. I had no idea. Hilarity soon stemmed from two things. First, Craig demonstrated all of this with the use of a plastic male skeleton called Eric – an odd name to use and for some of us who knew an ‘Eric’ doubly hilarious to see the skeleton practise all sorts of movements that, if done in real life, would be back-destroying. We also wondered why it had to be a male or why, since we probably wouldn’t have noticed, not call it Erica. And second, causing many laughs were our attempts to lift the packet we were practising on without in real life injuring our backs or tripping or falling. In the end we were just women having fun; the best therapy for three grown-up women finding themselves in prison. Finally we were all presented with A4-size certificates to say we had completed the manual handling course – mine is now framed and proudly displayed on the hallway wall outside my study.

  28 MARCH

  Today the professional hairdresser came to cut and colour hair. It was a real scramble to book a place and though Liz and I managed to both get one, the visit ended up coinciding with the gym for me and a knitting class for Liz, so we gave our places away. We had had to pay out of our wages to get the appointments: £1.50 for a cut, £2.50 for a colour. It must be the cheapest place in the UK to have your hair done. One of our appointments went to Anya, who had just arrived and who had not had her hair cut since she had gone to closed prison many weeks before. She insisted on giving Liz, whose appointment she took over, a Kit Kat after she managed to make her first purchase on canteen a few weeks later. Liz later told me that in Holloway, despite having a hairdressing salon, haircuts were impossible while she was there. There was at times only one hairdresser for 500 women and she was often apparently sick. Sharp objects were not allowed in Holloway so no scissors were available for the inmates to cut each other’s hair and many prisoners had unkempt hair as a result.

  30 MARCH

  The girls mentioned an article in the Mail on Sunday by a lawyer who had herself been an ESP resident a few years earlier when she was convicted of fraud. It was only then I realised that the girls were scouring the papers every day and tearing out any pieces they thought might upset me. We agreed they would stop doing so even though I was grateful for their protective solicitude. This lawyer, called Kate Johns, had apparently argued that ‘for an educated, middle-class woman such as Pryce the regime at an open prison – where the walls are psychological, the competitive atmosphere suffocating and the rules petty and patronising – may prove unbearable’. She also argued in her piece that I would be challenged by ‘humiliating menial roles’ such as taking rubbish out and cleaning toilets and that I would be asked to do ‘back-breaking’ manual tasks that would be hard for a woman like me who is apparently used to ‘firing off e-mails’. Talking of her experience there she wrote: ‘For the first time in my sentence I became conscious of being scrutinised, to an extent that felt obsessively intrusive. Staff listened to my telephone calls and discipline was dished out for the pettiest reasons.’

  We read the piece together in the old drawing room and we did not recognise the description that she gave of East Sutton Park or how I would be able to cope. Things may have changed since she was there and she may have been justified in her description of the conditions I should expect based on her time there. But again it all seemed far removed from what I was experiencing in ESP at the time. And my fellow residents agreed. And frankly, as a mother of five children I find nothing humiliating in cleaning toilets or taking out rubbish; in fact, a
s at home, I felt good having contributed to keeping the place clean and hygienic for all. And I felt very little intrusion from staff. Kate Johns’s conclusion that I would be ‘longing for the monotony of Holloway’ could not be further from my mind. I became a real fan of open prisons and I vowed to defend them as best I could.

  31 MARCH

  Easter Sunday service was followed that afternoon by a visit from George, my brother, over from Greece, accompanied by some of my children. It took a bit of time for him to cheer up at all despite the glorious surroundings. After all, according to him what I was convicted for does not seem to constitute an offence at all in Greece (i.e. doing something for your husband as a wife) and he was still coming to terms with his sister being in jail. So I spent a lot of the time when he came trying to cheer him up by showing him the house and the beautiful countryside, introducing him to the nice residents – including my grandchildren’s new best pal, my roommate’s nephew. In fact, the young boy quite fell in love with my granddaughter and they spent one Sunday afternoon, both all of three years, walking around holding hands and kissing each other. After long, serious chats with my brother I felt exhausted after he left but I was told that he was much more cheerful about it all during the return journey. Because it was Easter Sunday and there was a bank holiday on Easter Monday there was another bingo night – and I won my Flake!