Authors: Vicky Pryce
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.
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, as 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.
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!
After lunch we had a session with the lady governor and we were invited to watch a video sent by head office in which Michael Spurr, the current director general for prisons in the MoJ, outlined the new plans for the prison estate and the strategy for the future. I saw his face in the video but didn’t recognise him from my time in government even though we were both at the same level. Maybe he became a DG after I left. I was very keen to see what he would say. Because the meeting was held at the exact same time that Chelsea were playing Man United in the FA Cup quarter final, we switched the big TV on in the dining room opposite the pool room and Miss Carruthers, a senior officer, and I had to take it in turn to rush from the pool room into the dining room across the
landing
that separated them to check the score and then rush back again.
The DG was doing his best to present what was a further cut in budgets by using the usual civil service mantra of ‘doing more with less’ – I must admit I still don’t understand exactly how but everyone seems to outwardly believe that by just saying it you can convince people that you can do ‘more with less’. Try saying that to someone who has to feed a family and suddenly has less money to do so. We all wondered whether in fact that might simply mean fewer staff
and more lock-up in prisons and less time therefore to be out doing other things. And the girls noted that the word ‘rehabilitation’ only made it once into his speech and women were not mentioned at all, and everyone worried what it all meant for open prisons as the video seemed to focus on closed prisons. But what impressed me was that the governor encouraged discussion which widened to include the culture in prisons, how to deal with bullying, the right attitude to staff if the girls felt put upon and many other areas. I felt that this attempt at inclusion was good. But there was still this uncertainty regarding the review that was coming up of the women’s estate and the governor was keen to ensure that we were all prepared for the review meeting that was coming up in May – later postponed to June.
By the end of the meeting Chelsea had won 1–0 and progressed to the semi-final. Blue is the colour – strangely I had brought not a single item of blue clothing with me to prison.
My South American friend had come to find me the night before with a message from Debbie, one of the residents who lived in the workers’ area down on the ground-floor corridor. I had noticed her
looking
smart just before the 8 p.m. roll call eating late supper in the dining room along with other workers who were returning too late for the regular evening meal. Talking to Debbie I discovered that, like others, she worked during the week for Working Chance, the charity whose main aim it is to act as a recruitment consultancy for current and ex-offenders. Her chief executive wanted to get in touch and see how I could
help. I, of course, agreed. So this morning I was called into the activities office to be told that they had an e-mail for me from Jocelyn Hillman from Working Chance explaining what they did and asking whether I wanted to be a patron of theirs and meet up as soon as I came out. The charity seemed to be very well known and in a few days’ time they were due to visit my old hunting grounds in Whitehall and were going, Debbie too, to the Treasury for a breakfast event with potential company supporters hosted by Nick Macpherson, the Treasury’s permanent secretary. I spent some time talking to the activities manager, who explained the links they had with Working Chance and the crucial role the company played in
rehabilitation
of offenders, and then tried to understand better from Debbie that evening what her work entailed.
It was obvious that getting women back to work was not an easy task. There is no doubt that
carrying
a conviction can have profoundly negative effects on someone’s ability to get a job on release. For women in particular who display the characteristics of low self-esteem and confidence and have a lot of educational gaps to fill, a daunting task in itself, it is a mammoth undertaking. As far as I can see, Working Chance is the only agency that focuses just on women offenders. Many of the permanent staff have come from other agencies and have strong views about the negative impact that imprisonment can have on women’s employment prospects.
I started talking to the ESP girls that afternoon about the issues facing women seeking employment while in prison and on their release. One rather bright lady in her forties, who had been a manager in a housing unit of a council before coming to prison
and was in for fraud, told me that she had intended to go to the business enterprise course, which was highly rated by everyone in ESP and ran over seven weeks. Having always had a passion for jewellery she was thinking of starting a jewellery design business on leaving prison. One could imagine her distress when at her risk-assessment board on arrival at ESP, she was apparently told by a senior officer chairing the board that there was no point in thinking about going down that route as no one would be prepared to fund her because of her offence. My fellow resident was devastated.
After I was released I visited Working Chance. When I arrived, the staff were trying to coach a lady who had gone to prison on a highly publicised case, though not for long, and who had been able to secure interviews in the City on her release but was not getting the jobs. Working Chance believed that she had lost all her confidence as she was told by officers in prison that she had no chance of getting a job of the sort she had left and needed to lower her sights because of her conviction.
And indeed in an interview workshop I attended later the greatest worry the women all had was how to approach the issue of conviction and what to say if they were asked. Most had written a disclosure letter while in prison which was usually perceived to be quite inadequate but fortunately Working Chance had usually already dealt with that issue with the prospective employer when arranging the interview so the likelihood was that it wouldn’t come up during it and the girls wouldn’t have the embarrassment of having to answer the question. Interestingly disclosure in many types of jobs was not in fact obligatory. But
Working Chance gave the example of an offender who had been tangentially involved in and then convicted of an armed robbery but after release didn’t tell her new employers because she wasn’t asked. She was a model employee but unfortunately for her there was an armed robbery in her place of work, the police were called and they checked on the backgrounds of all the employees who worked there and discovered her past. She was sacked on the spot on the grounds of gross misconduct even though she hadn’t been obliged to inform them of her conviction. Working Chance suggested therefore that the girls should not take any chances and always disclose their
convictions
in the future.
All this justifiably worries the girls. The Department for Work and Pensions estimates that in the year following release, about half the year is spent
claiming
Jobseeker’s Allowance, Incapacity Benefit or Employment Support Allowance. Overall, 49 per cent of ex-offenders were on benefits at the twelve-month point after release.
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What is particularly worrying is that this is in part related to a lack of good education and training programmes (which I discuss elsewhere), but more significantly related to the stigma attached to ex-offenders. In an investigation conducted by the
charity
Working Links, almost three quarters of employers said they would use a disclosed conviction to reject an applicant outright or would discriminate against them compared to an equally qualified candidate with no conviction. Only 20 per cent of employers (in their sample) have knowingly recruited an offender.
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The general belief that ex-offenders lack honesty and reliability is also unfounded, since the same
investigation
revealed that over 60 per cent of employers
of ex-offenders found that they worked as hard, if not harder, than those with no convictions. This is supported by the fact that 97 per cent of offenders say they want to stop offending, and 68 per cent say the biggest factor in helping them to do so would be having a job.
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For women prisoners, employment is an even more significant issue. Only 33 per cent of women were in employment before entering prison, compared to 54 per cent of men.
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This is very nearly half the national employment rate for women.
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What is more, it is unclear how many of the 51 per cent not claiming benefits at twelve months after release are in employment, and how many are reliant on partners or families.
The services provided by organisations like Working Chance, acting much like a recruitment agency but specifically for women released from prison, are vitally important. As well as training and mentoring, the charity liaises directly with
employers
, helping them develop appropriate policies, and deals with probation services to facilitate a transition into employment. They argue that this not only deals with financial problems experienced by
unemployment
, but helps instil a sense of pride and self-worth. This would concur with the arguments put forward by what is known as ‘Desistance Theory’, in which women are able to associate themselves with new and positive identities rather than the labels of ‘offender’ or ‘criminal’.
I looked at data provided for me by Working Chance. Of the women going through their programme into employment, 70 per cent are still in work six months after getting a paid job, with each earning an average of £17,425 per annum.
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Furthermore, there is only a
3 per cent reconviction rate for people using Working Chance services, and none of those crimes took place in the workplace.
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Although it could be argued that the people who ask to go through the charity to get jobs are a self-selecting group, committed to finding and keeping a job and therefore naturally less likely to want to reoffend, they are nevertheless disproving many of the myths about ex-offenders. It is
obvious
that having the right employability skills makes a big difference. Overall, the evidence suggests that in-prison education and vocational programmes bring a lifetime net saving to society of approximately £69,000 per offender (ranging somewhere between £10,500 at the low end, to a potential of £97,000 just for one person when victim’s costs are included). Even if such a measure were put in place for just half the women who enter prison in a year (approximately 6,500, who we can safely say will be released again within twelve months), this would generate a lifetime saving of £448.5m.
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