Prisonomics (2 page)

T
he enormity of what was about to happen hit
everyone
around me on the morning of the sentencing as I found myself saying goodbye to the children and calmly packing a suitcase with clothes to last me for a few months. Still in disbelief, people came in and out of the house to hug me, all in full view of the large number of photographers stationed outside my front door.

I had assured everyone who worried about me that in fact I was very institutionalised and could survive anything. And the good thing is that I believed it. In the late 1980s, I spent an inordinate amount of time in the Overseas Development Administration
providing
an economic recovery plan and then an economic recovery implementation plan for Zanzibar, which, because of a collapse in the price of cloves in the face of increasing competition from Mauritius and Madagascar, was being forced to move from being a Marxist region redistributing revenues from cloves to a more open one based on a functioning market
economy
with proper price signals and some policies to encourage badly needed inward investment. The old
Arab stone town was beautiful but in dreadful
condition
. The main old hotel, which had splendid views of the ocean and the dhows still making the traditional journeys to Oman, the sultanate which they once belonged to, was in complete disrepair and so full of interesting rodents moving between your feet that you couldn’t stay there. There was only one serious
alternative
: the Hotel Bowani. This splendid establishment was within walking distance (thankfully) of the stone city but had two problems: first, it was built next to a swamp so you had to dodge the malaria-carrying mosquitoes on the one side. The second was that after it was built, so the locals told us, representatives of the government had a fit when they realised the one hotel that could attract international visitors was built with no balconies. So they were added on – or rather, sort of glued on from the outside. We were told that unsuspecting visitors would open their French windows and step outside onto their balconies which would then collapse and fall to the ground with or without the guests still on them. Walking back to the hotel in the evening in the pitch dark (there were almost nightly power cuts) and trying to avoid
walking
too close to the swamp and malaria on the right and falling balconies on the narrow road on the left led to the creation of the ‘Bowani test’.

As privatisation and economic reform work spread to other countries in Africa, eastern Europe (which was only just emerging from Communism), the Middle East, India and Bangladesh, and later China, my team and I would always compare the shabby hotels we stayed in to the Bowani, which soon became the bar below which it proved difficult for any establishment, however bad, to fall. So, went my theory, Holloway
could not possibly be worse than the Bowani. If I had survived very difficult environments – sometimes threatening ones in so many countries around the world – I could survive a UK prison.

It was clear to me that the sentencing would be a custodial one. I was convinced by the attitude of the judge during my first trial and then the retrial that the judge was intent on passing a custodial sentence and that the judiciary did not like my marital
coercion
defence at all. The CPS argued that it could apply to a lorry driver’s wife but not to someone ‘rich and powerful’ (if only) like me. I knew that the moment the guilty verdict was announced, to the gasps of the people at court, I would be sent to prison for a while. But I also knew that whatever the sentence, in most cases people only served half except in exceptional circumstances. In addition some of it was spent ‘on tag’ on Home Detention Curfew (HDC). The chances were that I wouldn’t be away from home for long.

Nevertheless, I decided to prepare for the
worst-case
scenario and on the Monday morning, while the photographers were waiting outside the house (I wondered whether they had camped overnight after following me and taking pictures and I presume
bribing
the supermarket cashiers to tell them what I had bought, including bin liners, apparently), I was busy making all the arrangements for being away for a while. I left cheques for the pest control man, the
milkman
and generally for ensuring that the house and my children who lived there would survive my absence, at least financially. So it was with that complete peace of mind that I approached the day: it can’t be worse than the Bowani. And if my time away was less than I had
provided for then that would also be a great plus and the children, who feared the worst, would be relieved.

I was, of course, lucky insofar as I was able to make these provisions. Some 15 per cent of prisoners report that they are homeless before entering prison.
1
For those women who aren’t, many face the possibility of eviction while inside due to rent arrears, as well as losing their personal property. Indeed one in three (32 per cent) of prisoners lose their homes while in prison
2
and there is no help available to pay for the storage of their belongings. Many children end up in local authority care while their mothers are in prison, with the remainder being looked after by an
assortment
of family, friends and acquaintances. Only one in twenty (5 per cent) children are able to stay in their own home when their mother is in prison.
3
They rarely have to move when their father goes to prison.

The array of judges with high salaries,
investment
savings from their time as QCs, and handsome pensions plus high social status only have the mother in front of them to send to prison. As many
campaigners
have observed, those actually punished are the children left behind. What is more, many initial care arrangements are likely to break down as a prison sentence progresses, leading to unstable and
uncertain
care for the child. Grandparents may be too old, ill or disabled. Sibling carers may be too young and emotionally immature to cope. Other family members may be put under financial pressure with another mouth to feed.

Prisoners in general are statistically more likely to be from backgrounds of social exclusion and poverty and an unexpected additional child may tip the balance and aggravate the hardship to crisis point.
There is not enough information about how many of the initial kinship care arrangements break down, resulting in the child entering the care system further down the line. A small but shocking minority of women in prison have no knowledge or information at all regarding care arrangements for their children while they are in custody. The Revolving Doors Agency based in Holloway prison found in a survey of 1,400 women serving their first sentence that
forty-two
women (3 per cent) had no idea who was looking after their children. Within this cohort it was reported that nineteen children under the age of sixteen years were looking after themselves.
4
Baroness Corston reflected that ‘quite apart from the dreadful possibility that these children might not be in a safe
environment
, this must cause mothers great distress and have deleterious consequences for their mental health’.
5

In my case, after many extra hearings and two trials, I received a custodial sentence of eight months for accepting my ex-husband’s penalty points onto my driving licence some ten years earlier. This book will not dwell on the case or what went before it but will focus on the things I then learned about prisons, the prison system and the cost to society of sending people, particularly women, to jail who are no real threat to society.

And throughout it all I actually surprised myself. I told everyone that I was flexible and could cope with everything. Though I believed it, my friends and colleagues didn’t. One of the first letters I received in prison was from a friend who reminded me that I had just two nights earlier at our local Pizza Express sent my water back because it had lemon in it, sent the wine back because it was too warm and complained
that the egg on my pizza wasn’t soft enough. This tale apparently caused a lot of hilarity among our friends who were trying to reconcile that incident with my assertion that I was ‘flexible’. Point taken! I think he may have made up the bit about the egg but the rest is probably true. But what I had meant by flexibility was being able to change expectations and adapt to new environments, regardless of what was thrown at me. And adapt I had to in many more ways than I might have imagined.

Again, I was lucky; I have generally had few health concerns of any sort in my life. Many other women entering custody bring with them an array of emotional and mental health problems, as well as traumatic experiences. Some 37 per cent of women sentenced to prison say they have attempted suicide at some point in their lives
6
and 40 per cent have received treatment for a mental health problem in the year before coming to prison.
7
Nearly all (97 per cent) have experienced at least one traumatic life event, while just over half (54 per cent) of female remand prisoners were addicted to drugs in the year before entering prison.
8
Just under half of women
prisoners
have been victims of domestic violence and one in three has experienced sexual abuse.
9
There are countless other statistics I could share to show that the women entering prison often come from chaotic or troubled backgrounds, severely reducing their
ability
to cope in functional ways with the pressures of imprisonment.

A week before the verdict I had gone to a ‘chattering classes’ dinner in Islington. No one there – including one distinguished QC and judge – thought I would be found guilty. And if the unlikely event occurred,
surely a sixty-year-old grandmother with a spotless record would not be sent to prison. They confessed that they knew no one who had gone to prison and they couldn’t imagine what serving time might be like, though it turned out one friend present had been briefly imprisoned in Communist Poland for running money to the underground network of the banned Polish union, Solidarity. He had been caught and the police and judicial authorities explained they were simply doing their duty and upholding Polish law as it was at the time. But vivid as this experience remained in his memory, the story of sleeping twelve to a room on straw mattresses and toilets without loo paper was – I hoped – not relevant to British prisons. All I had to go by was a publication on the net by an ex-offender, giving useful advice on what prison was like, what to take in and how to cope.

My very good friends Nick Butler and Rosaleen Hughes expressed similar feelings as they offered a safe haven from photographers in a house not far from mine the Sunday night before sentencing. With the thought that I might not have a square meal again for a while, they cooked up apple crumble and cream, my favourite pudding. They also gave me books (to pass the time) and a radio so I could listen to the
Today
programme – they did not think it was possible for me to survive without enjoying John Humphrys flaying some shifty interviewee each morning. When I left my friends I could see that they were perplexed about this new category I was going to join: a ‘
criminal
’ and possibly about to spend some time in prison.

It is understandable that they should have felt that way. But now that I have experienced it myself I must admit that I am astounded at the misconceptions out
there – not only about what makes a criminal but also about how one is treated. What I discovered in very simple terms is that first of all ‘criminals’ are very much like us and the people we meet in the street. In fact, as a result of a Freedom of Information request by the Press Association in early 2012 it was reported that at the time some 900 police officers and community support officers were serving with criminal records. Though most were for motoring offences, other crimes included burglary, supplying drugs and causing death by dangerous driving. Indeed there are 9.2 million people in the UK who have a criminal record and one in four of the UK’s
working-age
population has a criminal record.
10
One in three males under the age of twenty-five is known to have a criminal conviction other than for a motoring offence. Even the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, revealed that when young and drunk, he was given community service in Germany for setting fire to a collection of rare cacti.
11

The number of people committing offences each year is huge. According to Ministry of Justice statistics more than 1.8 million people were either taken to court or given a reprimand or penalty notice for disorder in 2012. This enormous figure coincides with a reduction in the number of crimes committed.
12

But the real figures for people who have
committed
offences will be even higher. In the ongoing, highly respected Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, it was found that 41 per cent of a sample of males born in a deprived area of south London in 1953, today aged sixty, had at least one
criminal
conviction by the age of fifty and an average of five convictions each. More astonishingly, when asked,
93 per cent of the men admitted to having committed at least one of the following crimes: burglary, theft of vehicles, theft from vehicles, shoplifting, theft from machines, theft from work, fraud, assault, drug use and vandalism.
13
This suggests that the real number of people who have committed at least one crime may be more than twice the reported figure. All of this is nothing new, of course. Back in the 1940s, a study in New York found that 99 per cent of adults admitted to having committed at least one offence. Even church ministers admitted an average of eight offences each.
14
Other studies have shown that there is no
relationship
between socio-economic status and self-reported delinquency: middle-class kids break the law as much as poorer kids.
15