Prisonomics

by Pryce, Vicky

  My handwriting did cause extra problems for the staff, who were supposed to read some 5 per cent of what goes in and out, but in fact seemed to me to be reading everything. I once entered the centre office with a letter I wanted to make sure caught the 9 p.m. post deadline. I had made it, they said, but they had just been talking about my very difficult handwriting. Indeed, I could see one of the officers leaning over the desk reading one of the letters I was sending out who turned and laughed and said: ‘Actually, the only words I can read in this letter are Ann Widdecombe!’ I had mentioned her to a friend as she had just written a positive little piece in her column in the Daily Express defending me against some attack and I was really grateful. It was only then I realised how difficult their job of reading my mail must be. Even more troublesome must have been the letters I was sending out in Greek and French which I can only assume they just classified as even worse handwriting rather than something in a foreign language, given that no one questioned me about them.

  Not that I was the only one with bad handwriting – many an hour was taken up deciphering people’s addresses. Street names were particularly bad so we resigned ourselves by common agreement on a number of occasions in my room that I had no choice but to ring my office and ask Ava, my long-suffering ex-secretary, to see what street was associated with the postcode, which was just about discernible. Often we turned it into a game, passing the letter around and guessing and outguessing each other. You have to keep going in whatever small way.

  Back to our cunning plan. It was very simple: get up early, straight after the 5.30 room check by the officers, have breakfast if there was time, bring my remaining stuff down to ensure a final check against my inventory of clothing and books (each day something arrived it had to be recorded by hand and itemised in an ever-expanding form and then countersigned by me – and then the same process was carried out the other way so they could cross out each item one by one as I was leaving) and then we’d make a quick dash into the car of my solicitor, who had been warned to come early and park at the back.

  While managing a quick breakfast (my friend Aanjay had the wonderful squeezed orange juice ready for me) the TV in the dining room was already showing the photographers outside. Well, we missed them all. My solicitor arrived just before 7 a.m. and the wonderful officers who had made the plan guided us through the back and down an alleyway that eventually led to a main road at the back of ESP, which we took, and we left the grounds almost immediately.

  In the rush I forgot various things, in particular a threadbare green towel that I had taken with me from home when I packed for Holloway, which both my sons used at different times while they were boarders for a while in prep school (I was a great one for recycling everything, which you have to do when you have five children). I wanted it with me for sentimental and nostalgic value as there were labels on it with both their names. With every wash in ESP more of the towel would come off by the day but it was just still usable by the time I was leaving – and unfortunately it was left still hanging drying on the radiator below the window next to my bed. It was found later in the laundry room by one of the girls who was due to leave shortly after me. She very kindly returned it all washed and cleaned and neatly folded. What a relief to be reunited with it. I will never be able to throw that towel away.

  We left unnoticed except for one lone photographer who seemed to have stationed himself by the crossroads at the back – the only one to have thought of it. Leaving before the usual hour of 9 a.m. we came as quite a surprise to him; he got up from his sitting position (maybe he had in fact been lying down as he probably slept the night there) and tried to focus on us and took a couple of pictures through the car windows. I suspect they were of bad quality and he was not able to sell them. But he must have warned the others and soon after, as we were driving through the beautiful Kent country roads, calls started coming through to my solicitor asking gently for confirmation of whether I was still in the building or had left – of course we had – and they all legged it to Clapham to join the growing throng of photographers already stationed outside my door.

  But the thought that went through my head, as we were driving home and getting stuck in the usual early morning rush hour traffic on the A20, was that despite the constant attention and the difficulties that would still completely prevent me returning to normality, I still in reality had it easy by comparison to so many I had met. It is so obvious to me that for women, much more than for men, prison is only a small part of what they have to suffer. The punishment is not over when their sentence ends; consider the children taken away, the loss of home, loss of prospects, the shame and family breakdowns, all of which make any sentence they have to serve disproportionate to the offence itself. Women on the whole, again much more than men, are as much victims as perpetrators of crimes. Most of their crimes are non-violent and women offenders usually pose no threat to society.113 I determined to write about what I’d learned and become involved in the exposing of the illogicality of keeping women in prison and the immense direct and indirect costs of separating women from society when alternative ways of dealing with them, such as through community service orders, seem to be used very sparingly.

  I arrived home to be greeted by a large number of photographers and journalists. My solicitor read out my statement saying how glad I was to be home, that I wanted to thank my family and friends but also the prison staff and my fellow residents who I got to know well in East Sutton Park and that I now intended to resume my career as an economist.

  Into my home at last and there were lots of hugs with the kids and close friends. Two Serco employees turned up at 4.30 p.m. and the tag was fitted easily. That evening the whole family came for supper and it was glorious – I had been asked what I fancied and they all prepared food for me that was just amazing. As I looked around the table at all my children, their partners and my grandchildren, I considered my future. Even with reasonable skills and a good track record, convictions and popular perceptions do matter. In the weeks that followed I would have knocks, privileges and other distinctions taken away as people followed rules, and my confidence and image would be greatly affected. I knew, however, that I would receive so much more in terms of support and extra chances. Possibilities would open up that would go some way towards restoring my faith in human nature. I hope my fellow residents get similar support when they come out.

  14 MAY

  My daughter’s theatre company had been using my house for the past two weeks, rehearsing for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They were all so brilliant but there were lots of young people around and the noise they were making was incredible. When they were going through the sword-fighting scene in the living room upstairs I feared the ceiling would fall on my head as I was sitting in the kitchen right underneath it. In many ways it was perfect to have them around as it really helped me readjust to life outside. They were incredibly sweet. No one asked anything – not that I would have minded.

  That night, more food was prepared for me in what would become a pattern for the following two months while my tag was in operation. People would visit practically every night for eight weeks laden with food, puddings, drinks, flowers and the like – the house was continuously full of flowers after I returned home. Even the postman said it was good to have me back when he delivered the morning’s mail.

  15 MAY

  It was the Europa League final. In any other year Chelsea fans would have sneered at that competition but we actually took it seriously as it ended up being the only trophy we were likely to get, having exited the FA Cup in the semi-final when we lost to Man City. We joked in ESP that since the game would be a few days after I got out I might just be able to make it to Amsterdam and back before the curfew. I knew it couldn’t happen but my fellow residents took it seriously and made anxious questions to their relatives on their daily phone calls to see what time the game was scheduled for and therefore whether it was at all feasible for me to get to the match. Well, kick-off was not
until 7.45 p.m. so they realised that even with the best will in the world and if planes were on time, I wouldn’t be able to make it. There were lots of jokes made about how I would be ringing Serco from the air blaming it all on air traffic control. They knew by then how keen I was on Chelsea and we made a pact that if I watched The Voice from home they would in return watch the final, so at least we would be close in spirit. I hope they kept their side of the bargain. I kept mine.

  16 MAY

  A full dress rehearsal for A Midsummer Night’s Dream was held in the private crescent at the front of the house. All the neighbours came, bringing their own chairs and umbrellas as it rained a bit at times, but it was brilliant. I could hear my daughter’s voice loud and clear while sitting by the front steps of my house which was as far as I was allowed on my curfew days after 7 p.m. The neighbours loved it and the company took the play and As You Like It round the country. I caught it in a matinee at Russell Square Gardens two weeks later with lots of other friends, getting back home just in time for curfew that night.

  18 MAY

  A difficult decision to make: would I have enough time to get to Oxford and back to watch my son, who is studying there, act in the Jez Butterworth play The Winterling? Given I had to consider the tag, the only chance to see it was on the Saturday matinee on the last day of the show. I agonised about the logistics: should I leave at the interval? After Act 3? How hard would it be to escape unnoticed without interrupting the play? We discussed it all week long and my son was petrified that I might get stuck in traffic on the M40 and miss my curfew time. In the end I chickened out on the grounds that the last thing I wanted to do was have a son possibly worrying more about me than his performance. To make up for my absence, I sent lots of family members instead, including my brother who had come especially from Greece.

  19 MAY

  This afternoon my son and I went to watch Chelsea in their last game of the season. The game started at 4 p.m.; we beat Everton and finished safely in third place, so Champions League again next season. There were lots of handshakes from the other fans, the odd kiss and I got a warm welcome back – and we forgot all about timing. We got stuck in a terrible traffic jam trying to cross Albert Bridge and got home with one-and-a-half minutes to spare before curfew.

  29 MAY

  Back to business and my first public speaking engagement was arranged to take place at the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF), a financial sector think tank, at the Armourers’ Hall in the City of London. I was to be the respondent to the Croatian central bank governor, who was to explain his country’s thinking in advance of them joining the EU on 1 July, the first new country to join since Bulgaria and Romania in 2007. There was much frantic brushing up on recent developments, based on little idea of what the governor was likely to say. The talk was so very important for my reputation and I was keen to go back to what I was doing before prison as quickly as possible. I survived it (just) and without incident; it was great to work on familiar ground again and everyone was so very kind and supportive.

  13 JUNE

  Kristiina Reed, who was helping me with my research, and I met with Gill Arupke, the CEO of Penrose, a charity which runs a number of projects which rehabilitate and reintegrate ex-offenders, drug users and people with mental health issues back into the community and help them to stop reoffending. I was keen to discover what charities in general were doing to help offenders and more specifically to see whether there were any lessons to be learned from Penrose’s experience in Lewisham, where the charity is paid by results for keeping offenders (many of whom are also arrested and charged by the police for illegal drug offences) out of prison for more than twelve months. In particular, I wondered how evaluation actually worked in this field.

  It turns out that the first problem the charity faced was that the full number of offenders with a drug-related problem was not known; unless they were already in treatment there was no data shared by the various agencies involved in helping offenders. The police are also reluctant to share the information they have with partner agencies as they see it as strictly confidential. This, Penrose argues, makes it very difficult for any agency to map out the required staff structure needed to meet whatever demand there may be for the service.

  Penrose runs a number of residential units varying from the pretty open to the quite restrictive depending on the court orders the residents have received. In their first evaluation Penrose found that the reoffending rate of those helped by the charity was some 5 per cent – and this was without the charity doing what I feared, which is creaming off the easiest cases and ignoring the rest. So this is encouraging.

  Whether you would achieve similar success rates if rehabilitating services for offenders were contracted out to private companies or charities (operating within a pay-by-results scheme), as proposed by Chris Grayling in his Transforming Rehabilitation agenda,114 depends on a number of things which may just not be available.

  First, you need baseline data so you can actually measure the improvement you are effecting, which in itself faces the aforementioned problems. Second, you need to be able to calculate proper attribution; in other words you need to have an agreed concept of ‘additionality’, an economic term that calculates the actual extra impact of the intervention that has achieved the result. Yet if the economy improves at country or local level and offenders are now able to get jobs, which wasn’t the case before, the chances of reoffending tend to reduce and the problem becomes one of identifying the extra impact of the intervention in improving reoffending rates outside the effect of the general improvement in economic prosperity. Third and most important, there is the issue of who can in fact provide the service. Payment by results requires charities to have a large cash flow so, as they can’t borrow much from the banks, except on mortgage, they need to have large reserves if they are to play a significant role in looking after offenders on behalf of the government if probation services are cut.

  The fear is that it will only be the large private firms that can raise cash easily while the smaller specialist firms, often with the most innovative ideas and greatest effectiveness, may not be able to compete to take on this job. The trick would be to negotiate, if possible, with the government, an upfront payment to cover costs of providing the service while the payment by results based on reduced reoffending rates becomes a ‘bonus’, or alternatively to try to imitate the experience of St Giles Trust, a similar outfit to Penrose, through the issuing of a social impact bond. This is a social fund for which returns are based on results, in the case of St Giles, for example, by reducing reoffending in Peterborough.

  There is a lot of excitement about the potential availability of finance for this purpose and on 26 June, nearly a fortnight after my meeting with Penrose, I chaired a big conference on social finance organised by employment charity Tomorrow’s People. The discussion at the conference, however, reinforced my view that charities, especially small ones, will struggle to raise enough funds to compete with the bigger private firms in looking after large numbers of offenders and ex-offenders. And they will also need to improve their own competences if they are to manage large projects of the sort envisaged by the government, something organisations have been trying to help with. City livery companies like the Worshipful Company of Management Consultants and others who work closely with the Centre for Charitable Effectiveness at the Cass Business School provide pro-bono assistance to charities in various areas of their operations. Pro Bono Economics, a charity of which I am a patron, was set up to provide expert economic evaluation support to other charities and provides them with free economic input by drawing resources both from private organisations and from the Government Economic Service.

  One Whitehall charity that has been reaching out to help the prison community is the Whitehall & Industry Group (WIG), run by my ex-colleague Mark Gibson from the BIS. WIG offers a range of opportunities to bring business, government and the not-for-profit sector closer together. The idea is to sh
are expertise, broaden networks and develop talent. WIG tells me that it has recently placed civil service fast-streamers with charities such as RAPt, Revolving Doors, Catch22 and the Irene Taylor Trust, all of whom provide rehabilitation support to offenders and ex-offenders. These are all very interesting charities. The Irene Taylor Trust, for example, has been delivering its music-in-prisons programme since 1995 whereby music is used to inspire change in individuals. In the past eighteen months it has extended its work to include ‘through-the-gate’ support to ex-prisoners and delivers projects with young people at risk of offending in the community. Interestingly WIG has recently been working with the trust to appoint a business development manager to look at the income stream from its music-in-prisons programme.