Heaven: A Prison Diary (37 page)

Devon is the
spur’s senior cleaner. He tells me with considerable pride that he is fortyone,
has five children by three different women and already has five grandchildren.
I tell him my needs. He smiles; the smile of a man who can deliver.

Within the
hour, I have a second pillow, a blanket, two bottles of water, a KitKat and a
copy of yesterday’s Times. By the way, like Del Boy, Devon is West Indian. As
Devon is on remand, he’s allowed far longer out of his cell than a convicted
prisoner. He’s been charged with attacking a rival drug dealer with a machete
(GBH). He cut off the man’s right arm, so he’s not all that optimistic about
the outcome of his forthcoming trial.

‘After all,’ he
says, flashing a smile, ‘they’ve still got his arm, haven’t
they.
’
He pauses. ‘I only wish it had been his head.’ I return to my cell, feeling
sick.

I find it
difficult to adjust to being banged up again for twenty-two hours a day, but
imagine my surprise when, during association – that forty-five-minute break
when you are allowed out of your cell I bump into Clive. Do you remember Clive?
He used to come to the hospital in the evening at North Sea Camp and play
backgammon with me, and he nearly always won. Well, he’s back on remand, this
time charged with money laundering. As we walk around the yard, he tells me
what’s been happening in his life since we last met.

It seems that
after being released from NSC, Clive formed a company that sold mobile phones
to the Arabs, who paid for them with cash. He then distributed the cash to
different banks right around the globe, while keeping 10 per cent for himself.

‘Why’s that
illegal?’ I ask.

‘There never
were any phones in the first place,’ he admits.

Clive seems
confident that they won’t be able to prove money laundering, but may get him
for failure to pay VAT.
38

During
association, I phone Mary. While she’s briefing me on Narey’s attempts on radio
and television to defend his decision to send me to Lincoln, another fight
breaks out.

I watch as two
more prisoners are dragged away. Mary goes on to tell me that Narey is
backtracking as fast as he can, and the Home Office is nowhere to be seen. The
commentators seem convinced that I will be transferred back to a D-cat fairly
quickly. It can’t be too soon, I tell her, this place is full of violent,
drug-addicted thugs. I can only admire the way the officers keep the lid on
such
a boiling cauldron.39

While I roam
around association with Jason, he points at three Lithuanians who are standing
alone in the far corner.

‘They’re on
remand awaiting trial for murder,’ he tells me. ‘Even the officers are fearful
of them.’ Devon joins us, and adds that they are hit men for the Russian mafia
and were sent to England to carry out an execution. They have been charged with
killing three of their countrymen, chopping them up into little pieces, putting
them through a mincer and then feeding them to dogs.

The cell door
is opened and an officer escorts me to the chapel: anything to get out of my cell.
After all, the chapel is the largest room in the prison. The service is Holy
Communion with the added pleasure of singing by choristers from Lincoln
Cathedral. They number seventeen, the congregation thirteen.

I sit next to a
man who has been on
A
block for the past ten weeks.
He’s fifty-three years old, serving a two-year sentence. It’s his first
offence, and he has no history of drugs or violence.

The Home
Secretary can have no idea of the damage he’s causing to such people by forcing
them to mix in vile conditions with murderers, thugs and drug addicts. Such men
should be sent to a D-cat the day they are sentenced.
40

I go to the
library and select three books, the maximum allowed. I spend the next twenty
hours in my cell, reading.

I end the day
with Alfred Hitchcock’s
Stories
To Be Read With The
Doors Locked
.
Somewhat
ironic.
,

Over the past
few days I have been writing furiously, but I have just had my work confiscated
by the deputy governor – so much for freedom of speech. He made it clear that
his orders to prevent me from sending out any written material came from the
Home Office direct. I rewrite my day, and have this copy smuggled out – not too
difficult with nearly a hundred prisoners on remand who leave the prison to
attend court every day.

After
breakfast, I’m confined to my cell and the company of Jason for the next eight
hours.

Mr Marsh, a
senior officer, who has a rare gift for keeping things under control, opens the
cell door and tells me I have a meeting with the area manager.
41
I am
escorted to a private room, and introduced to Mr Spurr and Ms Stamp. Mr Spurr
explains that he has been given the responsibility of investigating my case. As
I have received some 600 letters during the past four days (every one of them
retained), every one of them expressing outrage at the director-general’s
judgment, this doesn’t come as a great surprise.

Mr Spurr’s
intelligent questions lead me to believe that he is genuinely interested in
putting right an injustice. I tell him and Ms Stamp exactly what happened.

On Friday 27
September, the Prison Service announced that ‘further serious allegations’ had
been made against me. It turned out these related to a lunch I had attended on
Wednesday 25 September in Zucchini’s Restaurant, Lincoln (which is near the
Theatre Royal) with Mr Paul Hocking, then a Senior Security Officer at North
Sea Camp, and PC Karen Brooks of the Lincolnshire Constabulary.

I explained to
Mr Spurr that the sole purpose of the lunch as far as I was concerned was so
that I could describe what I had seen of the drug culture permeating British
prisons to PC Brooks, who had by then returned to work with the Lincolnshire
Police Drug Squad. After all, I’d had several meetings with Hocking and or
Brooks in the past on the subject of drugs. I did not know that prison officers
are not supposed to eat meals with prisoners, nor is there any reason I should
have known this. Moreover, when a senior officer asks a prisoner to attend a
meeting, even in a social context, a wise prisoner does not query the officer’s
right to do so.

As for SO
Hocking, I have been distressed to learn that he was summarily forced to resign
from the Prison Service on 27 September under the threat of losing his pension
if he did not do
so42.
PC Karen Brooks was more fortunate in her
employers. Her role was investigated comprehensively by Chief Inspector Gossage
and Sergeant Kent of the Lincolnshire Police, and she remains with the force.
Chief Inspector Gossage and Sergeant Kent interviewed me during their later
investigation of the same lunch, and made it very clear that they thought the
Prison Service had acted hastily and disproportionately in transferring me to
HMP Lincoln.

As Mr Spurr
leaves, he assures me that he will complete his report as quickly as possible,
although he still has several other people to interview. He repeats that he is
interested in seeing justice being done for any prisoner who has been unfairly
treated.

It was some
time later that the
Daily Mail
reported
that the Home Secretary had bullied Mr Narey into the decision to have me moved
to HMP Lincoln.

The
sequence of events, so far as I am able to establish them, are
as follows. The
Sun
newspaper
telephoned Martin Narey’s office on the evening of Wednesday 25 September and
the following day published a highly coloured account of the Gillian Shephard
lunch.

This provoked
the Home Secretary to send an extraordinary fax (see overleaf) to Martin Narey
demanding that the latter take ‘immediate and decisive disciplinary action’
against me. Narey, who had previously stood up against the press’s attempts to
portray my treatment as privileged, buckled and instructed Mr Beaumont to
transfer me forthwith to Lincoln. Narey also went on a number of TV and radio
programmes to criticize me in highly personal terms in what the
Independent on Sunday
described as ‘an
unprecedented attack on an individual prisoner’, especially in the light of
later pious assertions that the Prison Service is ‘unable to discuss individual
prisoners in detail with third parties’.

Mr Beaumont
found himself in even more difficulty: he had not asked me about the Zucchini
lunch, so he could hardly make that the basis of an order to transfer me. In
the event, the Notice of Transfer which he signed stated simply: ‘Following
serious allegations reported in the media and confirmed by yourself that on 15
September 2002, you attended a dinner party rather than spend the day on a
Community Visit in Cambridge with your wife, it is not appropriate for you to
remain at HMP North Sea Camp any longer.’

My licence did
not
restrict me to my home in
Grantchester while on release. But, an e-847/907 mail was circulated within the
Home Office which stated:
‘The prison
[HMP
North Sea Camp]
had granted JA home leave
but his licence conditions stipulated that he should not go anywhere else but
home. In light of this, he has breached his licence conditions, and will face
adjudication.’
At that time, the copy of my master passbook (a record
retained by the prison which records all a prisoner’s releases on temporary
licence) contained no such stipulation, nor did I ever face adjudication in
respect of any breach of such a stipulation.

Mr Spurr later
said in a letter he was ‘unable to locate’ my master passbook when he conducted
his investigation into my transfer, a fact which he acknowledged as
‘regrettable’. One has to wonder why and how this passbook disappeared.
However, Mr Narey told me to stop writing to him on the subject as the matter
was closed.

A frequent
complaint among prison officers and inmates – with which I have some sympathy –
is that paedophiles and sex offenders are treated more leniently, and live in
far more palatable surroundings, than the rest of us.

On arriving at
Lincoln you are immediately placed on
A
wing,
described quite rightly by the tabloids as a Victorian hellhole.

But if you are
a convicted sex offender, you go straight to E wing, a modern accommodation
block of smart, single cells, each with its own television. E wing also has
table tennis and pool tables and a bowling green.

During the past
few days, I have been subjected to segregation, transferred to Lincoln, placed
in A block with murderers, violent criminals and drug dealers, in a cell any
selfrespecting rat would desert, offered food I am unable to eat and I have to
share my cell with a man who thrashed someone to within an inch of their life.
All this for having lunch with the Rt Hon Gillian Shephard in the
company of my wife when on my way back to NSC from Grantchester.

Sex offenders
can survive in an open prison because the other inmates are on ‘trust’ and
don’t want to risk being sent back to a B... cat or have their sentences
extended.

However, these rules
do not apply in a closed prison. An officer recently reported to me the worst
case he had come across during his thirty years in the Prison Service. If you
are at all squeamish, turn to the next page, because I confess I found this
very difficult to write.

The prisoner
concerned was charged and convicted of having sex with his five-year-old
daughter. During the trial, it was revealed that not only did the defendant
rape her, but in order for penetration to take place he had to cut his
daughter’s vagina with a razor blade.

I know I
couldn’t have killed the man, but I suspect I would have turned a blind eye
while someone else did.

I have a visit
from a Portuguese prisoner called Juan. He warns me that some inmates were seen
in my cell during association while I was on the phone. It seems that they were
hoping to get their hands on some personal memento to sell to the press.

English is
Juan’s second language, and I have not come across a prisoner with a better
command of our native tongue; and I doubt if there is another inmate on
A
block who has a neater hand – myself included. He is,
incidentally, quietly spoken and well mannered. He wrote me a thank you letter
for giving him a glass of blackcurrant juice. I must try and find out why he is
in prison.

An officer (Mr
Brighten) unlocks my door and tells me that he needs a form filled in so that I
can work in the kitchen. To begin with, I assume it’s a joke, and then become
painfully aware that he’s serious. Surely the staff can’t have missed that I’ve
hardly eaten a thing since the day I arrived, and now they want to put me where
the food is prepared? I tell him politely, but firmly, that I have no desire to
work in the kitchen.