Prisonomics (5 page)

I had always thought that the main impact of being sent to prison was that it took away your liberty for a while. And that should be enough and allow you to pay back society for whatever you may or may not have done, or at least satisfy people that justice was being served. But soon after I went to prison, a number of girls told me that in fact their worst moments were during the trial, where things were said about them that they didn’t recognise. During the coverage of their trial they felt they had been singled out by the judge and the press for being a ‘bad’ female – a rare thing. And once in prison there is the added
frustration
of having little control over external events. With no mobile phone and no internet, there’s no
awareness
of what may be appearing in the press and little opportunity of putting forward a defence or
reassuring
beleaguered family and friends. Reputations may be shattered; some girls were so worried about what was being said about them in their local papers they had no idea how they could ever possibly return to their homes. But one just had to put up with it and trust that friends and relatives would rise above it all
and learn to cope. Worrying about how their children were coping in their absence was a major
preoccupation
of all the women with children I met in prison. At least mine were grown up and able, in general, to take care of themselves and make their own decisions. Many others were not in that position.

As I have mentioned earlier, 66 per cent of women prisoners have dependent children (of which 34 per cent have children under five years old
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), and for 85 per cent of women prisoners, their time in prison is their first prolonged period of separation from their
children
.
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Mothers in prison experience a high degree of emotional distress and trauma from the
separation
and their inability to care for their children. One mother reported, ‘If I ever received news from home about my son having problems, it drove me to despair. I would be really distraught at not being able to do anything for him.’
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The consequences of this trauma can be profound. A female prisoner interviewed by the Women’s Justice Taskforce said, ‘I went into prison as someone with no mental health issues. I became someone that began to self harm … the pain inside me from being separated from my daughter was so intense that the only way to stop that would be to bang my head on the wall and to cut to give myself physical pain to stop that in my tummy.’
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In 2007, Baroness Corston headed an inquiry into women in prisons after the deaths of six women at HMP Styal within the space of twelve months. Approximately 2,200 children of
imprisoned
mothers are taken into care each year
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and the evidence so clearly suggests that the short- and long-term impact on those children can be
devastating
. Children in care have a very high propensity to
become offenders themselves. Less than 1 per cent of children overall in England were in care in March 2011.
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And yet conservative estimates are that up to half of under-eighteens in young offender
institutions
have at some point been in care.
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Children with imprisoned parents may feel emotions of anger, distress at separation, low self-esteem, confusion and fear, all of which may translate into defiant,
destructive
and attention-seeking behaviour.
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A study of thirty-six children with imprisoned mothers in the US found that 75 per cent of the children exhibited
behavioural
symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. Imprisoning mothers for non-violent offences is estimated to cost the state £17m over ten years, with the biggest expense coming from increased numbers of young adults whose
mothers
have gone to prison becoming NEETs – ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training’ – drug users or involved with crime.
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Even after taking into account the effects of parental convictions and other
childhood
risk factors, children who are separated from a parent due to imprisonment are four times more likely to display a whole range of antisocial coping behaviours, including fighting, drinking heavily, taking illegal drugs, poor relationships with parents and partners, divorce, separation from their own children, being frequently unemployed, increased levels of delinquency, and an increased likelihood of being convicted themselves for criminal offences. What’s more, this behaviour is likely to persist as the children enter adulthood.
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In short, as Baroness Corston noted in her
investigation
into the problems of women’s imprisonment, the effects of unstable, uncertain care arrangements
in place for the children are ‘often nothing short of catastrophic’.
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Yvonne Roberts, writer for
The Observer
and commentator and trustee of the charity Women in Prison, says that many women are too scared to tell the system that they have children when they are arrested as they fear that they would lose them. This was reinforced in discussions with Jacquie Russell of Women’s Breakout, a charity representing
forty-seven
women-focused organisations around the country. I was astonished. I had not encountered such behaviour since the mid-1970s, when I became manager of the economics office at a Scottish bank. One of the women who worked for me, though some years older, confessed that she had successfully hidden from her employers for over a decade the fact that she had a fourteen-year-old daughter, fearing
discrimination
and quite possibly the sack if she came clean as the equal opportunities law did not exist when she first started working. Because she finally had a woman boss she felt she could tell me.

Though some women facing a custodial sentence make arrangements to have their children looked after by a family member, interestingly research suggests that a large percentage, possibly some 50 per cent of women, don’t expect to be sent to prison at all.
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I spoke to girls myself who had been assured by their solicitors that they would be spared prison and who also trusted that their pre-sentence probation report, which recommended alternatives to custody, would be taken seriously. The result, I am told, is that they often go to court to be sentenced having left their small children in the care of neighbours for the day, fully expecting to be back to pick them
up that evening. One woman I met, who had been a HR manager in a software company, told me how when she went to be sentenced for what she thought was a minor fraud charge she had been assured by those who wrote her pre-sentence report and by her solicitor, who she trusted, that there was no way she was going to be sent to prison. She remembers looking at other women who were turning up with bags with clothes and other personal items to take in with them and thinking how sad that must be. When the sentence of eighteen months was passed she was shocked. Not only had she not prepared her husband and children for it, she had nothing of use with her when she went in. All she had in her handbag was a deodorant and a makeup powder container with a mirror inside which the officers removed because it was dangerous and could be used for attack or
self-harm
. One can imagine the heartbreak, stress and agony these women feel when they are unexpectedly sent down as they have often made no arrangements for their family to survive while they are away and therefore the chances of the children being taken into care increase markedly.

It was clear to me in no time at all that female
prisoners
were troubled by the very things one expects women to worry about. Their children and their families were their first priority. Prison visitors and ex-governors I have since spoken to confirm that what they encounter in female prisons is completely different to what they observe in men’s prisons. Men are focused on getting through it – to quote a senior Home Office ex-civil servant: ‘men look down and don’t engage, women, once they become more
familiar
, which happens very quickly, start to chat and
gossip with you’. Ex-governors described women’s prisons as feeling much more like mental institutions, but with a lot of chatter and friendships, not violent like the men’s; on the whole, the most danger the women posed was to themselves. As one ex-governor said, ‘You could bring the walls down in a closed prison and the women just wouldn’t leave!’

Up at 7 a.m. again and the same routine as the day before. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom, however strange my new environment. It seemed to me that if one was determined there were lots of ways to survive it, at least for someone like me who was fortunate enough not to be coming to prison from the sorts of chaotic, dysfunctional backgrounds that many of the women had endured. Indeed there were also moments of fun in the chaos that seems to be Holloway.

It looked like I might miss the chance to get out of my cell and do my intended induction course for education and the gym this week because planned visits from my legal team and my children were coinciding with the few times that the induction sessions were available – and you weren’t allowed to start those courses until you had done the
inductions
. Nevertheless, with the help of some inmates and a kind guard, I somehow managed to get into the right queue and sneak my way into what looked like a very well-functioning library on the ground floor at the end of the ‘movement’. When I was recounting this later to Nick Hardwick he told me that it is these sorts of things, the help given to make life bearable behind bars, that measure how well a prison is
functioning
– not statistics.

I signed in at the library and picked a couple of books I thought I might borrow – they were crime thrillers, which seemed to be the main genre available there. And then, what luxury, I watched a movie for a couple of hours (the week’s showing – I was lucky to have chosen that day). I had already seen the film,
Nowhere
Boy
, but it was an unexpected pleasure to sit in a more or less normal setting, surrounded by books rather than my cell walls. The place was packed. But on closer inspection it wasn’t because people were keen to watch the movie; the real attraction of the library as far as I could see was that it served as a place for the inmates to spend a few unsupervised hours quietly snogging their girlfriends.

I watched the library staff handle all sorts of requests expertly and it only dawned on me two hours later that they were in fact all inmates. After the film ended and I approached the counter to have my chosen books signed out I was greeted with a ‘Hello Vicky’ from one library assistant, who turned out to be an ex-senior police officer convicted for talking to a journalist just a few weeks before my case came to court. It was the first time we actually met but many inmates had mentioned her name, Liz, and assumed that I would probably be moving to her landing in D0, which was for ‘enhanced’ or low-risk prisoners, if I stayed in Holloway. Not knowing what would happen to me and not counting on being moved quickly to an open prison, I enquired how I could get a job in the library. She gave me a form to complete, which I did on the spot and left it for the attention of the external librarian in charge. Soon the library was frantically getting ready for the afternoon event, which consisted of Martina Cole visiting to do a reading and
distribute books. The prize was a signed copy of one of her books. She apparently went down very well as the girls felt affinity with a writer who grew up in the East End, seemed like one of them, understood about crime, was streetwise and had done well for herself.

As I left the library women were queuing to attend the reading but only thirty could be accommodated and most were turned away. Liz told me later that given the huge interest, the event could have been staged in the church – in fact, two churches in Holloway were linked and therefore able to provide a large L-shaped meeting room as a result. Unfortunately, because of the way the ‘movement’ works, every diversion from routine puts an extra strain on security. The movement itself, other inmates told me, can be very intimidating. Processing through the corridors, the movement is stopped at each gate as the guard unlocks it, and the movement continues on through. I was told a story of expert locksmiths/burglars who could look at the keys from a distance and, from memory, draw them and get their mates from the outside to reproduce them. This led to a number of escapes so now the officers no longer walk in front of cells with the keys dangling from their belts but keep them safely hidden in pouches around their waist, and turn away from inmates before unlocking doors and gates. I don’t know whether this is true but I was told it on good authority. Anyway, the ‘movement’ swells as it moves from corridor to corridor with each woman
attempting
to get to a gym or a class or a health appointment. It is up to each inmate to spot their destination and if they miss the exit they aren’t allowed to go back; the movement just keeps going forward. One friend I made had the added problem of trying to avoid an
inmate who, for some unknown reason, had singled her out and would heckle her in the most
disturbing
manner as she passed through her corridor. The result was that this rather experienced and strong person in every other way managed to miss her health appointment twice as she spent most of her time on ‘movement’ trying to avoid the woman. She finally got to her appointment on her third try.

I luckily had no such problem that day and after lunch made it through the movement to ‘visitors’ without incident to meet my lawyer, Robert. We spent a couple of hours discussing various matters and Wednesday afternoon was taken care of. Again, it was better than spending it locked up in one’s cell. Incidentally, ‘time out of cells’ is seen as a high
priority
as far as HM Inspectorate of Prisons is concerned. Their expectation is that prisoners should spend at least ten hours out of their cells each weekday in order to carry out important rehabilitative work and other purposeful activity, although the system as a whole rarely manages this. Particularly bad are local prisons, where 27 per cent of prisoners spend less than two hours per weekday out of their cell. Even resettlement or open prisons only achieve the target just over half of the time.
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