Authors: Vicky Pryce
And then it was family day. There had been such interest in this extra day of fun from women who had not reached their FLED yet and had to rely on their family coming to visit. There had been a rumour circulating the previous week that those going to the family day would be having it instead of a weekend visit and there were many worried faces around but the rumour proved, like many other things, to be unfounded. The girls who had been in before me talked of a brilliant Christmas family day arranged by Mrs Beck, a wonderful and very energetic senior officer who was also organising such days – in fact, because of popular demand they arranged two of them, on Monday the 8th and Tuesday the 9th. I went on day two so as not to miss the beginning of the IT course; given I only had a few weeks remaining until my HDC date I wouldn’t have had time to complete the course if I started a week later.
I finished breakfast dining room duties that
morning
in a hurry, arranged for my fellow workers to cover for me at lunchtime and got ready for a day starting at 11.30 and finishing at 3.30 – the longest I would have been with the children and
grandchildren
for a while. The excitement from all sides was palpable as the cars started arriving. On those
occasions
family can come and spend most of the day with the residents, kids play pass the parcel, draw pictures, and visit the farm and play with the piglets and lambs, see the horses and also the gardens and the flowers that the residents were growing and selling. My grandchildren loved it. We all felt like we were not in a prison at all but were able to wander around the entire estate like a normal family. One of my roommates, who was serving two years of a four-year sentence, helped the little ones feed the horses. And we all went to the shop. My other roommate, the lifer, served us. I wasn’t allowed to have any cash while in ESP but my daughter paid and took a joint of roast pork and some sausages home for me. And as it happens the pork loin and brilliant sausages that my fellow residents at ESP helped make spent a couple of months in my freezer and were eaten with my friends as celebration on the day my tag came off on 11 July. Incidentally, that was the same day that the main tag providers, Serco and G4S, were castigated in the press for
overcharging
the MoJ some £50m over a number of years, apparently still billing the taxpayer for tagging people who had already been released and even
ex-offenders
who had long since died!
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My friends admitted they had never eaten nicer pork in their entire lives and they were not exaggerating.
The family day had another perk attached to it.
It the only day that relatives could bring in a picnic for us, which was not allowed on any other normal visit. I had made my request in advance – prawns, smoked salmon, Parma ham, Gruyère cheese, all of which I ate with abandon. And then the pièce de résistance – strawberries and cream. Strawberries were not in season at the time and the imported fruit in the plastic container my children brought was a bit hard but no matter, I scoffed them down and then annoyed everyone back at ESP by frequent mentions of how delicious they were. And for me, not having tasted them for about a month, they were. The simple fact that I had had what I had wished for was enough and stopped me missing them at all for the rest of my stay. To this day I do not understand the policy that does not allow visitors to bring in treats. And I also do not understand why a commercial outfit like the farm shop does not capitalise on the influx of people coming to see their loved ones on Saturdays and Sundays by keeping the shop open. I know for a fact the residents would love to staff the shop themselves and would sell more produce this way. Oh well. At times I felt inclined to offer to write them a proper business plan but I knew my place.
I received an envelope containing the menu of an event I should have been at organised by my ex-KPMG colleagues. They all used to work for me but were now dispersed in all sorts of organisations. More than a decade ago we had formed something called the Bath Club, which got its name because the first event was, for some reason we have now all forgotten, held in the city of Bath; the club has since met annually
for supper at the Farmers Club in Whitehall Court, in Westminster.
The dinner was held on 13 March, just after I had entered Holloway. They all apparently drank my health and sent me the menu signed by all with
individual
messages, some absolutely hilarious, all very moving. If I believe the menu, which I read out loud to my roommates Sarah and Amy, they ate celeriac and tarragon soup followed by seared bass fillet with roast fennel, smoked tomato sauce and fresh seasonal vegetables and then almond and pear tart with
clotted
cream for pudding. The meal, accompanied by the club’s own wine, was finished with coffee and chocolate mints. Honestly, what did they think they were doing sending me this? We were salivating even though I know from experience that the menus in ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ often read better than they
actually
taste. My friends at KPMG determined that we would have a welcoming drink and indeed when I got out I sat with them on a hot balmy July evening on the terrace of the Farmers Club, and a lot of champagne was drunk – not by me who hates bubbles, but by my colleagues, pleased to have the group intact and together again. I will be forever grateful to them all.
T
here is a ghost in East Sutton Park. She is called Arabella, a little girl long dead but who keeps making appearances, apparently. According to a booklet in the visitors’ centre, Arabella lives – and has lived for a good few hundred years – under the stairs leading to a loft. Rumour has it that Arabella walks up and down the stairs on her way to and from the room in the loft which as far as I understand it, not being a believer in ghosts, is blocked off until the money is found to refurbish it as a room for the
governor
, as that side of the house has great views over the valley. But the women in ESP believe it is sealed off because no one wants to go into it, it being haunted. There are numerous tales of people having seen the little girl, dressed in white, walking up and down, and of hearing her making noises in the night but while I was there I never met anyone who had actually seen the ghost though many were prepared to swear that they knew of someone who had – but they had all left ESP already. New girls who heard about the little ghost as they arrived fully believed in its existence and it always caused a lot of hilarity for the non-believers among us. But then again, who knows?
A Tannoy ‘residents’ announcement just before lunch warned us all that our rooms would be inspected to see if there was any food left on the windowsills, which was not allowed, and that if found it would be confiscated. Panic stations. Everyone, including me, kept fruit, butter, milk, cheese and anything
perishable
as near the window as possible as contrary to what the newspapers may think there were no fridges in the rooms – the one communal fridge in the Butler’s Room had not worked properly for ages and was a health hazard. I was on dining room duty in and out of Butler’s when the workmen came and finally took that smelly fridge away – and didn’t replace it with another. As I was rushing to clear my belongings from the windowsill after the announcement I was told that in a previous inspection everything went, including the biscuits, which apparently you were not allowed to hoard. The logic of that defeated me: how was keeping biscuits for a rainy day a problem? And how could I continue swapping my custard creams for the digestives I preferred? I had stacks of them there including a few bars of chocolate which would melt if I put them anywhere else but I went to try and hide it all for a while.
Well, no one came to look at our room; it seems there was a culprit somewhere else. It turned out to be my friend Liz, whose window had no window sill on the inside, only on the outside. She, like many others with a similar window configuration, would regularly put everything outside overnight and at times not just on the sill but also in a hanging makeshift
contraption
they had devised. As her room was at the front of the house, the whole thing was visible to any casual
observer – and to make matters worse her large carton of milk bought on canteen had been toppled over by strong winds and had just missed, on its downward journey, the head of an officer walking past. It was all a warning to her and the occupants of her room. We were much more careful from then on to ensure that our curtains, even when opened, were strategically positioned in such a way that they hid the bananas, milk and chocolates that absolutely needed to stay by the window to remain fresh and edible. It became a bit more difficult to balance it all hiding against one corner of the windowsill when I started buying bulky grapefruit and lemons from canteen but they somehow managed to survive my stay there and the regular residents of my room didn’t have anything forcibly taken away.
Visitors’ day again – hurray! When I was arranging for this week’s visit, I rang one of the friends who was coming to see me to make sure I had all the right details for him in my ‘app’, such as his address. I caught him just as he was in a coffee shop in Kensington High Street and as we were talking he interrupted me to say that someone I knew well had just walked in – and he passed the phone to her. It was Patricia Hewitt, who, when a Cabinet minister in the early to mid-2000s, was the reason I entered the civil service. She had wanted someone completely different to the traditional civil servant to replace her departing chief economists in what was then the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). Although I had seen her since she left the
government
and since I rejoined the private sector, it was so great to reconnect, me on the prison payphone and her
in a sandwich bar. How weird life is. We made
arrangements
to meet as soon as I got out.
My colleagues duly came to visit, two of my
directors
in the company I used to work for, Alison Sprague and Mark Conaty, and my ex-PA, Ava Alleyne, all of them great friends. I cannot describe how happy I felt seeing them. They were like a breath of fresh air, breezing in and bringing me their stories from the outside, their optimism about my future, and pen and paper on which we proceeded over the next couple of hours to draw up my ‘recovery plan’. I don’t know what I would have done without their support and guidance. And funnily, our plan has worked according to the letter ever since, even down to expecting and preparing for the occasional knocks to come (though they have come from unexpected corners) and how to survive them and bounce back. Alison sent me both at ESP and at home PowerPoint-type slides, like a strategic review one might put together for a client – we weren’t management consultants for nothing. Every conversation we have had since includes a brief rundown on where exactly we are on the plan and a reminder of the next steps. There’s just one thing I haven’t done yet but am working on – hiring a proper PA again so that there is at least someone who can say no to the things I am asked to do.
Since my visitors came unusually on Saturday this week I had the whole of Sunday to myself, which gave me plenty of time to agonise and worry about the Chelsea 4 p.m. semi-final kick-off against Man City at Wembley, which was shown on ITV. As I was watching it in the dining room, I became the target for
friendly abuse mocking the image of Chelsea as the millionaire players’ club. Luckily there were two staff members who were keen Chelsea supporters
including
Nigel, whose daughter attends games regularly. At least I had someone to commiserate with after we lost 2–1 – undeservedly in my view.
We were all horrified to see on the news that a bomb had exploded during the Boston marathon, killing three people. Footage was shown again and again, and it looked horrific, the bomb exploding just in the coffee shops behind the runners and onlookers. I panicked as my niece, Melina Georgantas, lives and works in Boston and has run the marathon a number of times. It was difficult to find out whether she was hurt but frantic calls to my daughters finally
elicited
that she was fine. She had been sitting in a bar away from the main impact and when the incendiary devices blew up so powerful was the blast that her drink flew out of her hand and the glass was smashed. She was OK though it all left her rather shaken. I saw her later after my release and she described how she was just 100 yards from the finishing line and if the glass doors of the café had not been wide open to ensure a good view, the glass would have been blown into her face and body. She had had the presence of mind to march her fellow drinkers in the café down into the basement and through the back door to the street behind from where they quickly left for home.
As we cleaned the dining room today, one female governor entered through the corridor landing and
stood at the top of the stairs leading from the dining room to the main hallway. We have a number of governors: a No. 1 governor, a male, who we share with the nearby male prison Blantyre, and at least two if not three governors who haven’t tended to stay very long but who at least are there most of the time and know the workings of the prison well.
The governor pointed to dust on the banisters and called upon me. It was not the bit I was responsible for so as soon as my co-workers arrived I read them the riot act – they had to get up earlier and really pull their socks up. They all agreed they would. At lunch time the governor reappeared and called us over to her. Oh dear. I could sense an IEP coming (not that I was sure what the Incentives and Earned Privileges scheme really was; it is, I believe, basically points for or against you, usually the latter, though I had never come across them myself and doubt they ever applied in ESP). But no, she wanted to know how we thought we should prepare for the forthcoming inspection and meeting which would be part of the review of the women’s estate. We all wanted ESP to do well so we sat down with her for a good hour, looked at the terms of reference for the review and told her what we thought ESP’s unique selling point (USP) was. Cutting out the management consultancy speak, we said what we thought ESP excelled in and what it contributed that other establishments, apart from Askham Grange, the only other women’s open prison, could not provide. It was great to spend an hour thinking strategically, a bit like the old days at KPMG where I used to work – though this time I was alongside a drug importer who was serving fourteen years for bringing cocaine into the country in food
drums in the back of her car; a girl who was a mule, bringing drugs from the Caribbean; and a young offender convicted for violent attack and robbery – all, apart from the Caribbean lady, proclaiming their innocence. And they did a great job, sensibly debating rather than arguing and clearly caring for their fellow residents but also for the survival of ESP, which they thought added a lot to rehabilitation despite some glaring faults.
Today was Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. When the news of her death was announced, I was on the phone to one of my children (it must be obvious by now that I ended up with a huge phone bill). Everyone started talking about it even though many of my fellow residents were hardly alive when she was Prime Minister. There was so much in the news that one couldn’t avoid it. Over lunch and supper in the ensuing days there was a lot of debate about her funeral: Would it be a state funeral? What would it cost? Was it worth it? All the things that I suspect were being discussed around many tables throughout the land. The foreign girls were rather indifferent but amazingly no one thought Mrs Thatcher was a role model for women. There was no doubt that everyone liked the pomp and ceremony of such state occasions but the cynicism shone through. Of course, on the day, the funeral procession was watched by all, if not at the time it took place when many were working but during the endless repeats. But the most heated discussion in the end was on costs. Here we are, said the girls, our chances of getting legal support if we need it are under serious threat from the cuts in legal
aid being introduced to save a few million pounds, in the process raising the feeling of helplessness and hurt at being singled out as non-deserving of support, and yet all this money is being spent on this funeral.
It’s easy to see what such comparisons of costs say to people in prison. After I was released it was reported on 5 June that more than 600 senior judges warned that cuts to legal aid would cause rioting in prisons, as prisoners, they said, would be left with no recourse other than ‘mutiny’.
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Indeed, in 2011, in Ford open prison a riot over prisoners and officers’ relations caused £5m worth of damage to buildings, in addition to staff overtime and all the follow-up costs involved. It turns out that the girls, however unsophisticated their economics, had a point. Justice Secretary Chris Grayling later stated that the changes would save just £4m a year in prisoners’ legal aid costs
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– in fact lawyers argue that this saving is likely in practice to be even less than that as cuts implemented already under the previous government had reduced the number of legal aid-supported cases for prisoners dramatically.
The Thatcher funeral was eventually estimated to have incurred direct costs of £1.2m and costs for staff who would have been used elsewhere of £2m.
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From a purely economic point, and despite being an admirer of Thatcher, it still seemed perverse that while support for people who needed legal aid was being cut by £4m the government could find more than £3m to give a dead Prime Minister a grandiose send off.
The sandwich and coffee company Pret a Manger came and spoke to residents today, arranged by the
recruitment charity Working Chance in association with Vision at ESP, about the opportunities it had for current and ex-offenders. Girls took a break from the kitchen still wearing white uniforms and caps on their hair to listen. I attended to learn what was on offer for the residents and watched a video of the company and its ethos and then the manager talked to a number of girls who were looking for positions. They all got rather excited about the opportunities on offer.
At the beginning, once the offenders are allowed to be in paid employment, Pret pays its apprentices a training salary and travel costs as well as a clothes allowance. The girls also receive an additional £1 an hour as a bonus (like all the other employees) if the shop they are working in passes a mystery
shopper
test. After the three-month training period, they receive a rise and Pret often gives out free food and arranges lots of events and prizes – the company promotional film even showed the chaos of Pret’s Christmas party in a nightclub.
So the girls were very enthusiastic about it all and there was a disorderly queue to talk to the HR manager and put in an application form. It was clear to me that the company would be doing well out of people to whom it would have to pay the bare minimum, but at least it provided opportunities and the company seemed to be genuinely positive about employing offenders.
I arranged an interview with the Pret representative afterwards and asked why the company was interested in offenders, apart, perhaps, because of the cheaper labour. She said that they were harder-working than the norm, punctual, and tended to stay on after their release except when they were released to locations
where there were no Pret branches – a rare occurrence these days. As they stayed in the job longer, retention rates were improved and the costs of rehiring and retraining were reduced, making a real difference to the company. In my view, it should be widely
publicised
that companies such as Pret are making a real business case for hiring offenders and those who are still squeamish about employing people with
convictions
need not be. I am convinced that companies like Virgin, who put a policy of hiring offenders and ex-offenders in their corporate social
responsibility
policy documents for all to see, know what they are doing.