Heaven: A Prison Diary (8 page)

Mr Hocking, the
security officer, drops in for a cup of tea. He tells me that Braithwaite, who
was found to have a camera in his room, is now on his way back to Lincoln. The
newspaper involved was the
Mail on
Sunday.
All the relevant papers have been sent to the local police, as an
offence of aiding and abetting a prisoner may have been committed.

I call Alison.
Mary has been invited to Margaret and Denis Thatcher’s golden wedding
anniversary on 13 December. James will be making the long journey to visit me
on Saturday.

Doug tells me
that his contact in the administration office at Spring Hill isn’t sure if
they’ll have me. I’ll bet that Doug finds out my fate long before any of the
officers at NSC.

A fight breaks
out on spur six. It involves a tragic young man, who has been a heroin addict
since the age of fourteen. He is due to be released tomorrow morning. Leaving
ceremonies are common enough in
prison,
and an
inmate’s popularity can be gauged by his fellow prisoners’ farewells on the
night before he departs. This particular prisoner had a bucket of shit poured
over his head, and his release papers burned in front of him.

There’s a
lookout posted at the end of the spur, and the nearest officer is in the unit
office at the far end of the corridor, reading a paper, so you can be sure the
humiliation will continue until he begins his right rounds.

When I return
to the hospital, I tell Doug the name of the prisoner involved. He expresses no
surprise, and simply adds, ‘That boy won’t see the other side of forty.’

Returning to my
room, I pass Alan (selling stolen goods) in the corridor. He asks if he can
leave a small wooden rocking horse in my room, as his is a little overcrowded
with two inmates. He paid £20 for the toy (a postal order sent by someone on
the outside to the wife of the prisoner who made it). It’s a gift for his
fourteen month old grandson.

As I write this
diary, in front of me are several cards from well-wishers, a pottery model of
the Old Vicarage, a photo of Mary and the boys and now a rocking horse.

Alan is due to
be released in two weeks’ time, and when he leaves, no excrement will be poured
over his head. The prisoners will line up to shake hands with this thoroughly
decent man.

Absconding is a
D-cat phenomenon. It’s almost impossible to escape from an A- or B... cat
prison, and extremely difficult to do so even from a C-cat (Wayland, for
example). In order for a prisoner to become eligible for D... cat status, he or
she must be judged likely to complete their sentence without attempting to
abscond. In practice, prisons are so overcrowded that C-cat establishments,
which are desperate to empty their cells, often clear out prisoners who quite
simply should not be sent to an open prison.

One intake of
eleven such prisoners arrived from Lincoln last year and was down to seven
before the final roll-call that night. I discovered today that because of the
chronic shortage of staff, there are only five officers on duty at night, and
two of them are on overtime, so absconding isn’t too difficult.

Prisoners
abscond for a hundred and one different reasons, but mainly because of outside
family pressures: a wife who is having an affair, a partner who takes the
children away or a death in the family that doesn’t fulfil the criteria for
compassionate leave. The true irony is that these prisoners are the ones mostly
likely to be apprehended, because the first place they turn up at is the family
abode and there waiting for them on the doorstep are a couple of local bobbies
who then return them to closed conditions and a longer sentence.

Before I was
sent to prison I would have said, ‘Quite right, too, it’s no more than they
deserve.’ However, after 106 days of an intense learning curve I now realize
that each individual has to be judged on his own merits. I accept that they
have to be punished, but it rarely falls neatly into black or white territory.

Then there’s a
completely different category of absconders – foreigners. They simply wish to
get back to their country, aware that the British police have neither the time
nor the resources to go looking for them.

For every
Ronnie Biggs there are a hundred Ronnie Smalls.

Mr New tells me
about two absconders who are part of North Sea Camp folklore.

Some years ago
Boston held a marathon in aid of a local cancer charity, and the selected route
took the competitors across a public footpath running along the east side of
the prison. One prisoner slipped out of the gym in his running kit, joined the
passing athletes and has never been seen since.

The second
story concerns a prisoner who had to make a court appearance on a second
charge, while serving a six-year sentence for a previous conviction. When the
jury returned to deliver their verdict, his guards were waiting for him
downstairs in the cells.

The jury
delivered a verdict of not guilty on the second charge. The judge pronounced,
‘You are free to leave the court.’ And that’s exactly what he did.

The reason I
raise this subject is because Potts, who’s had a bad week, absconded yesterday
following his suicide attempt. It turns out that the final straw concerned the
custody of his children – the subject he was going to raise with his solicitor.

After the
frantic rush of events following the arrival of fifteen new prisoners
yesterday, today is comparatively quiet.

Allen
(cannabis, six years) drops in to tell me that his weekend leave forms still haven’t
been processed, and it’s this weekend. The duty officer Mr Hayes deals with it.
Thomas (in charge of a gun that discharged) says his town visit form has not
been authorized and asks how much longer he will have to wait to find out if he
will be allowed out. Mr Hayes deals with it. Merry (embezzlement) arrives with
still no word as to when Group 4 will be transporting him to Sudbury so that he
can be nearer his family. Mr Hayes deals with it.

Mr Hayes is an
unusual officer. He’s not frightened of making decisions and standing by them.
He also makes his own tea. When I asked him why, he simply replied, ‘You’re not
here to serve me, but to complete your sentence. I don’t need to be waited on.’

Mr Hocking and
I agree it would be better for the press to take a photograph and then go away,
leaving his little band of security officers to get on with their job.

I walk out of
the SMU building and deliberately stop to chat to Peter (lifer, arson), who is
sweeping leaves from the path. He keeps his back to the cameras. Three minutes
later I return to the building and, true to form, the photographers all
disappear.

Major Willis
comes to SMU to hand back his red induction folder. He tells me that he’s sixty-four,
first offence, GBH, sentence one year, and that he’ll be released in March. He
was a major in the army, and after retiring, fell in love with a young Nigerian
girl (a prostitute), whom he later married. She soon began to bully him, and to
spend what little money he had. One day he could take no more, blew his top and
stuck a kitchen knife in her. She reported him to the police. He will end up
doing ten months (if he gets his tag), six of them at NSC.

He’s puzzled as
to why I got four years.

A quiet afternoon.
A fleeting visit from Mr Berlyn to check
that I’m wearing a prison shirt as the press keep reporting that mine isn’t
regulation issue. He checks the blue and white HMP label, and leaves,
satisfied.

Fall asleep in
front of the TV. Doug says I snore. I’m writing five hours a day, on top of a
thirty-four-hour week, and I’m not even going to the gym.

I’ve written
several times about the boredom of weekends, but something takes place today
that turns the normal torpor into frantic activity.

The
photographers have returned. They either missed getting a good shot yesterday,
or work for the Sundays who want a ‘today pic’. I agree with the deputy
governor, Mr Berlyn, to do another walk on, walk off, in order to get rid of
them once and for all. He seems grateful.

I’m expecting a
visit from my son James.

When I enter
the visitors’ room I can’t see him, but then spot someone waving at me. It
turns out to be my son. He’s grown a beard. I hate it, and tell him so, which
is a bit rough, as he’s just travelled 120 miles to see me.

James tells me
that my legal
team are
concentrating their efforts on
my appeal. Mr and Mrs Barker have confirmed that they heard the judge discussing
me at a dinner party over a year before I was arrested. This could change my
appeal.

Doug and I are
having tea in the hospital when Clive strolls in to announce that he’s moving
to another room
..

‘Why?’ I
ask,
when he has the largest space in the prison.

‘Because they’re fitting electrics into all the other rooms.’
I can’t believe he’d give up his large abode in exchange for a TV. ‘If you want
to move in, Jeffrey, you’d better come over to the south block now.’ We all go
off in search of the duty officer, who approves the move. I spend the next two
hours, assisted by Alan (selling stolen goods), transferring all my possessions
from the north block to the south, while Clive moves into a little single room
at the other end of the corridor.

I am now lodged
in a room twenty-one by sixteen feet. Most prisoners assume I’ve paid Clive
some vast sum of money to move out and make way for me, whereas the truth is
that Clive wanted out. There is only one disadvantage. There always has to be a
disadvantage. My new abode is next to the TV room, but as that’s turned off at
eleven each night, and I rarely leave Doug in the hospital before 10.30 pm, I
don’t think it will be a real problem.

I now have an
interesting job, a better room, edible food and £8.50 a week. What more could a
man ask for?

Write for two
hours before I join Doug at the hospital. We watch David Frost, whose guests
include Northern Ireland’s Chief Constable of the Police Service Sir Ronnie
Flanagan. While discussing the morning papers, Sir Ronnie says that it’s an
infringement of my privacy that the tabloid
press are
taking pictures of me while I’m in jail. The pictures are fine, but the
articles border on the farcical.

A security officer later points
out that two tabloids have
by-lines attributed to women, and there hasn’t been a female journalist or
photographer seen by anyone at NSC during the past three weeks.

Over lunch I
sit opposite an inmate called Andy, who is a rare phenomenon in any jail as he
previously served ten years – as a prison officer. He is now doing a seven-year
sentence, having pleaded guilty to smuggling drugs into prison for an inmate.
Andy tells me that the only reason he did so was because the inmate in question
was threatening to have his daughter beaten up. She was married to an
ex-prisoner.

‘Did you fall
for that one, Jeffrey?’ I hear you ask. Yes, I did.

The police
presented irrefutable evidence to the jury showing that Andy’s daughter had
been threatened, and asked the judge to take this into consideration when he
passed sentence. Although Andy claims he didn’t know what was in the packages,
the final one he smuggled in, a box of Cadbury’s Quality Street, contained four
grams of pure heroin.

Had it been
cannabis, he might have been sentenced to a year or eighteen months. If he
hadn’t confessed, he might have got away with a suspension. He tells me that he
knew he would eventually be caught, and once he was called in for questioning,
he wanted to get the whole thing off his chest.

Andy was
initially sent to HMP Gartree (B... cat), with a new identity and a different
offence on his charge sheet. He had to be moved the moment he was recognized by
an old lag. From there he went to Swalesdale, where he lasted twenty-four
hours. He was then moved on to Elmsley, a sex offenders’ prison, where he lived
on the same landing as Roy Whiting, who was convicted of the murder of Sarah
Payne. Once he’d earned his D-cat, Andy came to NSC, where he’ll complete his
sentence.

The only other
comment he makes, which I’ve heard repeated again and again and therefore
consider worthy of mention, is, ‘sex offenders live in far better conditions
than any other prisoners.’

When I was an
MP I often heard the sentiment expressed that life should mean life. I am
reminded of this because we have a lifers’ board meeting at SMU today.

There are nine
lifers at NSC and you can be fairly confident that if they’ve reached a D-cat,
they won’t consider absconding. In truth, they’re all fairly harmless. Two of
them go out each day to work in an old people’s home, one in a library in
Boston and another for the local Oxfam shop.

Linda, their
probation officer, joins us for coffee during the morning break. She adds to
the research I’ve pieced together over the past three months. I began my prison
life at Belmarsh on a spur with twenty-three murderers. Lifers range from
cold-blooded killers like Denis Nielsen, who pleaded guilty to murdering
thirteen victims, down to Chris, who killed his wife in a fit of rage after
finding her in bed with another man; he’s already spent fourteen years
regretting his loss of temper. Nielsen began his sentence, and will end it, in
the highest security A-category facility. He is currently locked up in a SSU (a
special security unit), a sort of prison within a prison. When he moves
anywhere within the prison, he is always accompanied by at least two officers
and a dog, and he is searched every time he leaves his cell or returns to it.
At night, he places all his clothes outside the cell door, and an officer hands
them back to him the following morning.