Prisonomics (21 page)

Aanjay and others are determined to pluck my eyebrows, paint my nails and dye my hair pink. I keep refusing but with everyone else agreeing to makeovers, I’m running out of excuses. I almost had nightmares of being forcibly picked up by Antoinette, gagged and manacled to a chair in the Butler’s Room, and Aanjay being let loose to turn me into her ideal woman. I have had to tell everyone I intend to effect a complete transformation just before I am released – red hair, red fingernails, and I’ll take up smoking with a long holder so when I come out to face the throng of the waiting photographers I can pass them incognito. It caught on – they all fantasised about how I might look and as it isn’t meant to happen until the very end of my stay in ESP they have left me well alone.

Finally came the day of resident Meera’s release. She was a smiley lady in her late forties, still quietly pretty and very quiet. She and I had chatted when we found ourselves outside, her for a smoke and me for my usual attempt at ‘power walking’ to keep down the impact of too much custard. Half Pakistani and half English of origin, with a grown-up daughter, she volunteered during the day at a coffee shop run by a charity and was out of the prison a lot of the time. Meera didn’t associate with many people but she was always smiling.

It was difficult to make sense of her situation though and she didn’t seem to be sure why she was in prison. After some time she told me how she had met another Pakistani in the park. They started going out together but he soon wanted to introduce her to
some others for sex. She had said no. There was then apparently a burglary in his house and he accused her of letting burglars in and stealing his TV and other possessions. What other things, I don’t know. What happened to him? Nothing. Did you take his TV? No, she said, she only went to his house twice. Of course I had no way of knowing whether her story was true but her lack of self-esteem and confidence were very evident. She was also having a bit of a hard time. Her HDC date had passed but she was homeless and had nowhere to go. Finally a hostel place was found in Milton Keynes where she would have to stay for a while but that was miles away from her daughter and also from her work. How will you cope, Meera? ‘I don’t know’ was the by now usual answer.

Soon to great excitement a date was set for her release at the early part of the week. She wanted some time off work for the last few days to get her clothes and possessions together and prepare for her release but the prison insisted she should work at the charity shop practically until the last minute. She was too weak to resist and although she told a few of us of her frustration she duly went, smiling a little submissive smile. Her release day came round and it transpired that another new boyfriend, who she had met on one of her days off and who used to pick her up on her day visits in a car, drive her around and bring her back, would be picking her up again. Alarm bells went off in my head; would she fall foul to the same problems as before?

As I was completing my tray-disinfecting duties and placing them neatly on the windowsill in the narrow corridor opposite the hatch for kitchen service, there was Meera, looking really smart, running past me to
reception to have her possessions checked and crossed off. But then disaster! She couldn’t find her laundry bag to return it to the central office. Then worse luck. Her laundry number, by which the girls in the laundry knew whose clothes they were washing and what day they had been handed in, was missing. By that time poor Meera was crying. The senior officer on duty was not letting her leave until the laminated card with her laundry number on it was found. An hour later, with it not found but with one brave resident complaining to someone else about the harsh
treatment
of this girl who had already waited so long to be allowed to leave, Meera was finally released. I’m not sure to this day whether that little card, so easy to replace, was ever found. I made sure from then on that I didn’t mislay the one I was given but when I left no one checked whether I still had it.

When I was in ESP, I marvelled at the fact that rather than absconding the women all came back every day from their work outside where there was no supervision of what they were doing except by their employer. If they were so reliable and only came back to ESP mainly to eat and sleep, what was the point of them being there rather than closer to their families? The girls all made it clear that they wanted to be as clean and as blameless as possible so they would pass probation and their eventual HDC or release board. But apparently while all goes well for a long time, the riskiest period for absconding was the one nearest to release, which is perverse. This just demonstrates the tension that develops. Women seemed to be able to spend years in prisons, sometimes over a decade behind bars for a life sentence or an IPPS (serving an indeterminate public protection sentence, which,
following a European Court of Justice ruling, will be illegal in future). When they finally pass the parole board and are sent to open prison with a real date of release looming, they apparently become
increasingly
tense and emotional. And then if something goes slightly wrong they flip and can take it no longer. To any logical person this might seem madness but it’s really not surprising seeing how long they have spent in prison and how much they must yearn for a return to normality.

A lifer who had already spent twenty-one years in prison for the murder of a lady she had been carer of – something she apparently denied at her trial and during her whole period in prison – absconded on the day I got to ESP, according to fellow residents, because something went wrong with her parole and she was not going to get an answer for a few more months. She was found a few days later trying to board a plane and was sent back to a closed prison with more time added to her sentence. After I got out I heard that the very same thing happened to another lifer I had been with in ESP, who absconded in June with just seven months to parole. Maybe it also happens to men but women are particularly sensitive and emotional and I can’t fail to think that surely what they need is extra attention during those very tricky periods when the light at the end of the tunnel seems so near and yet so far.

It makes me think of a short story by Kafka, who wrote vividly about trials and prisons, called
The Tunnel
. In it a group of people board a train to go from A to B and at some stage during their journey they enter a tunnel. They carry on doing what one normally does, discussing this and that, drinking, talking, reading, thinking and waiting, in full anticipation, to exit
the tunnel at some stage. But it remains dark outside and as they are getting deeper and deeper into it they eventually realise that they are never going to get out of it. This is the stuff that nightmares are made of.

Many of us attended a jobs fair today, organised by Vision. We met at 10.15 inside the front gate and then all walked together to the visitors’ room at the end of the garden. Everyone looked very smart. Liz wore her new suit and blouse, and looked very professional. The organisations that came were pretty widespread. Some were public sector – notably Kent County Council – and some were private – such as Timpson, which employs a large number of current and ex-offenders; in fact, the proportion is near 10 per cent if you include its training academies inside or attached to various prisons. Timpson doesn’t really advertise its work with the prisons and I have since been telling my friends that the next time they have their shoes fixed or keys cut or dry cleaning done, it could well be that the manager or the person that serves them is a current or ex-offender – or, in the parlance of the tabloid press, a criminal.

After my interview with Pret a Manger the previous week, I found that the other companies and
organisations
represented at the fair that day had only positive things to say about employing offenders. In fact the Unlock representative, the Clean Break
representative
and one of the three representing Timpson were ex-offenders currently working for those groups and now in senior positions. Clean Break is a very
interesting
charity that puts on theatrical productions in prisons using a mix of trained offenders and external
actors. Clean Break strongly advocates the benefits of this type of activity for prisoners as they improved their self-worth, became proud of their achievements and learned to work in teams. Some had become actors once on the outside. There is a lot of evidence of the therapeutic but also professional development benefits of acting and other artistic endeavours for prisoners and such things can transform their lives. Sadly these types of activities are just the ones that seem to always be in danger of being cut to satisfy occasional conservative-with-a-small-c indignation if the prisoners are seen to be having fun – and in the process ignoring the benefits to the community as a whole in both the short and the long term.

Timpson was well represented though it was already well known in the prison with a number of girls working at the academy Timpson had set up at the nearby Blantyre prison. James Timpson, with whom I met after my release, explained that having had many foster brothers and sisters who his parents took care of as he was growing up he had found himself at times helping some of them with scrapes with the law and even visiting some of them in prison if they got into trouble. He quoted statistics that show that among offenders some 31 per cent of women and 24 per cent of men had been taken into care as a child, a huge percentage when compared with just 2 per cent for the general population.
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He recounted how on one visit to one of his foster siblings, who had received a custodial sentence, he had met an offender whose personality he liked and he hired him on the quiet after his release. He went on to employ more ex-offenders without telling his colleagues. He eventually owned up and found to his astonishment
that a number of his colleagues confessed to being ‘offenders’ themselves – not just guilty of motoring offences but things they had done when young that may have resulted, and in a number of cases had resulted, in a suspended sentence, community service or a caution or fine. And that is a point he now
reiterates
: many of the people who serve us in a number of well-known establishments are in fact offenders. Most supermarket chains are probably, in his view, the largest employers of ex-offenders than any other organisation but don’t know it because they don’t ask that question on recruitment – and offenders do not have to volunteer it unless it is specified in the company recruitment policy. Even if it is specified, companies don’t necessarily check up on it or let it affect the recruitment process. And what is more people do come out of jail and need employment; if they don’t achieve it they become a burden on the economy and often reoffend so employment is a main contributor to low offending and reoffending rates.

James chairs the Employers’ Forum for Reducing Reoffending, which shows how significant it is for companies to employ offenders as the cost of
reoffending
to society is somewhere between £9.5bn and £11bn a year.
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For James, it makes sense to recruit offenders and train them. It is true that during the early training stages in the academies and in some of the so-called ‘prison industries’ run by One3one Solutions on behalf of the government, such as the Timpson shoe repair factory in Forest Bank prison in Salford, the company only pays the prisoners enhanced wages of just £20–£30 a week, but it offers opportunities for a trial in one of its shops on release. Timpson points out that it makes a big investment in providing the equipment,
supervision and training, and that the prisoners end up with a skill they can use on the outside. I would guess that with the increase in unpaid internships at present, where thousands of well-qualified graduates work in companies for nothing, often for long periods of time as they move from one unpaid internship to another, the Timpson approach may in fact be paradoxically preferable and more equitable.

Timpson’s figures backed up what other companies had told me about why it made business sense to hire offenders and ex-offenders: James Timpson told me that in his company’s case some 80 per cent of ex-offenders employed lasted for more than twelve months, which is very good going. Apparently, many of the ex-offenders were also better at their work than the ones they recruited from the outside, though stories were recalled of ex-offenders flipping out in spectacular fashion, being aggressive and causing damage to property. But James insists that on the whole they are great to have on board and if you pick a good one he or she tends to be way above the
average
; indeed, some have become managers. Timpson’s recent acquisition of the photo chain Snappy Snaps may well result in more opportunities for offenders. And indeed one of the girls in ESP with senior executive experience has just been recruited by James to assist, as I understand it, with this acquisition.

The most important characteristic looked for by the employers I talked to at the jobs fair was an engaging personality, as the jobs on offer often include a lot of customer interaction. But Timpson’s recruitment is selective as the company deliberately excludes sex offenders and prisoners with health problems as they are too difficult to handle. Timpson does fire those
that don’t fit or cause trouble or disrupt the normal flow of business; one of the ESP girls had lost her job and when I enquired what had happened I discovered that current offenders working either as volunteers while training or as paid employees have no
employment
rights. This does cause distress to the employee, who often does not receive a full explanation for why they are no longer employed, but for the employer the ability to cut their losses without threat of retribution or tribunals reduces the risk of employing people who may not adapt well to the working environment.

Timpson is not the only company to link academies to prisons. Another example is the Clink charity. Founded in 2009, the Clink is sponsored by a group of philanthropists, including Edwina Grosvenor, and a number of trusts and foundations. Edwina
volunteered
in prisons abroad when still a teenager and her interest in these issues was enhanced by her degree in criminology and sociology, which led to a spell working in Styal, a women’s prison in Cheshire. The main aim of the charity is to achieve a permanent reduction in reoffending by training serving prisoners in catering skills, helping them to find work in the catering industry and then providing support for ex-offenders for six months upon their release. The Clink manages training restaurants open to members of the public, who can enjoy meals cooked and served by prison inmates. For the moment there are just two
restaurants
, one just outside High Down prison and one inside Cardiff prison. Wherever possible, they use high-quality food and local produce.