To the north east of Rutland Water, bounded by a triangle drawn between the market towns of Grantham, Stanford and Oakham, Stocken prison lies discreetly hidden from public gaze behind a razor-wire mesh fence. Opened in 1985, Stocken is a neo-Bauhausian conglomeration of flat roofs, varying heights, and vertical expanses of glass. As I write, the temperature outside is well below freezing.
Inside, where all is breeze block, corrugation and gloss, we're not much warmer-especially at night when the staff have all gone home. But I must not grumble. The cold makes me work harder. I'm at the tail end of a 13 year sentence, presently punishing myself with a tough schedule of academic and literary deadlines. Luckily, there is a diligent and imaginative education department here, even though it is fighting a losing battle against budget cuts. A 13 per cent cut in the overall annual prison spending budget of ?1.6 billion, to be implemented over the next three years, has sent a host of governors scurrying around the various departments of their penal fiefdoms, looking for the softest targets.
Education-to many people merely a means of producing more intelligent criminals-has been the first to feel the cutting edge. Ann Widdecombe, the Home Office minister in charge of prisons, can appear on Newsnight (as she did in January) to reassure those who are concerned with more than retribution that basic education, information technology, art courses and evening classes will be preserved. But here at Stocken this does not appear to be the case. We lost all our evening class options at the end of last term.
Throughout the history of incarceration, the prison schoolmaster has had a hard time. Established under Robert Peel's Parliamentary Gaol Act of 1823, education came under direct control of the prison chaplain for nearly a century. Religion and morality were about the only subjects on the penal curriculum in Victorian England; it was not uncommon for inmates to have learned by heart the whole of the Old and New Testaments. "As a privilege, they might when tired of reading, pick a little oakum-but this was quite optional," wrote Edmund du Cane in Punishment and Prevention of Crime in 1885.
It was left to Winston Churchill to exhort his fellow Englanders to have "unfailing faith that there is a treasure if you can find it, in the heart of every man." Churchill had been a prisoner himself, during the Boer War. Perhaps as a result, he became the only Home Secretary this century truly to understand the painful reality of imprisonment. He certainly sounds remarkably enlightened.
Even the liberal reformer Lord Justice Woolf, in his magisterial report on the Manchester Strangeways disturbances, was cautious enough to qualify belief in the infallibility of educational rehabilitation. Nevertheless, he maintained, whether one approaches the argument on control grounds within the prison or on rehabilitation grounds, "the argument in favour of extending educational opportunities as far as resources will allow is overwhelming."
Post-Woolf, resources do not allow. Following two highly embarrassing escapes by top security prisoners from Whitemoor and Parkhurst, the more authoritarian Woodcock and Learmont reviews led the "retired" Chief Inspector of Prisons, Judge Stephen Tumin, to write in The Times that he was "greatly saddened" that the interests of "humanity" had been so overwhelmed by the interests of "security."
Tumin recently described to author Brian Masters the most noticeable features of an "average" prisoner: "They are uneducated to a degree, many of them with long histories of truancy which have left a surprising number of them more or less illiterate. They have no family background of a secure kind, many having been in care. First, they should be educated, and taught how to use their facilities, their imaginations and their hands. Second, they need to know how to appreciate the feelings of their victims...Third, they need social education-how to budget, how to cope with people, how to look after themselves."
Every Wednesday morning, the inmate students of Stocken attend half hour group "tutorials," meetings held ostensibly to discuss timetable problems and other academic matters. Education staff are increasingly obliged to play the management intermediary by using this time to communicate gubernatorial edicts to the prisoners. Just before Christmas, Euan, our Aberdonian tutor, walked into the room looking more granite-faced than usual. "Change is in the air, gentlemen," he began, waving an internal memo at us. "I have here a document of some importance which the Governor requires me to read to you: Differential Regimes: Incentives and Earned Privileges." He cleared his throat. "I'm afraid it's hellishly complicated, so do bear with me."
There has always seemed to be something biblical about the prison service's corporate plan. (Learmont calls it "a recipe for total confusion.") Apart from the central "statement of purpose," the plan includes a revelatory "vision" of a service "...of which the public can be proud and which will be regarded as a standard of excellence around the world." Within this vision there are five moral "values," seven "strategic priorities," six "goals," and eight "key performance indicators." The vision was gradually unveiled by Euan. His textual prompts were not only Differential Regimes but also the less euphemistically entitled National Framework of Incentive for Good Behaviour and Hard Work (an internal Home Office document which, thanks to the resourcefulness of Prospect staff, arrived in Stocken for me but was confiscated by the authorities).
The vision provides that privileges are to be earned by prisoners through good behaviour; that they will be removed if acceptable standards are not maintained; that hard work and other constructive activity is to be encouraged; and a more disciplined, better controlled and safer environment for prisoners and staff created. Rightly so, most of us will say. All laudable sentiments.
But what constitutes a privilege? Visits? Home leaves? Telephone cards? Stamps? Radios? Tape decks? Articles of clothing? Television set? Woolf, for once, was unequivocal: "We suggest that... it is incorrect to describe these as privileges. They ought to be the normal expectation of all prisoners... not simply a matter of grace and favour." Five years on, with the acrid stench of burnt-out prisons now faded into penal history, Sir John Woodcock and General Sir John Learmont think it's the appropriate time to return to more basic prison fare. "The underlying premise should be that all allowances are privileges," Woodcock pronounced early last year. A year later, Learmont concurred.
Euan, our tutor, had finally arrived at the relevant nitty gritty; his grave, North Caledonian accent seemed only to add to the gloom which had descended on the room. "So basically what it'll amount to is..." "A right fuckin' stitch-up," someone interrupted. "Well, aye, no. Not exactly. Now listen. There are to be three different levels of privileges. Basic, standard and enhanced. Everybody, on arrival at Stocken, will be placed on standard. There will be an immediate reduction in the present rate of private cash spends, to ?10 a week. Two two-hour visits a month will be allowed. Electricity laid on to the cell. From this level, you will be able to apply for promotion to enhanced, but you also risk demotion to basic."
"Sounds more like one of them boot camps to me. What do you 'ave to do to get on En'anced?" a South Yorkshireman asked. The tutor flicked nervously through the bundle of papers. "Let me see. Aye, yes. Here we are." He began to read: "Enhanced regime will require a prisoner to have demonstrated over a sustained period an above average response to work/activity, a positive attitude, including a willingness to tackle his offending behaviour, commitment to sentence plan, and adherence to prison rules including voluntary and mandatory drug testing."
"Just like Borstal," said an inmate with a record stretching back a quarter of a century. "'Cept for the drug testin'. 'Course, there weren't no drug testing in them days. There were no drugs. So what's the carrot?" he asked. "Carrot?" Euan was nonplussed for a moment. "Well, aye... quite a bunch of them by the look of this. Two extra mid-week visits a month."
"My missus works all week so that's not much use to me." "Fifteen pounds a week cash spends." "Suppose you ain't got no private cash?" "Free electricity!" Euan tried to make it sound like a fortnight in the Maldives. ''It always was free before they started charging us 50 pence a week for it a year ago. Is that it?" the Old Borstalian complained. "How do you get put on basic?" Euan shifted uncomfortably in his seat before turning to the text again.
"Basic regime will be imposed if behaviour and performance give cause for concern. Failure to conform to accepted levels of cleanliness, work output, attitude, positive drug test (for which the inmate is also liable to lose 28 days remission), suspicion of strong arm tactics, bullying, extortion..."
"Are you sure that Michael 'Oward isn't talkin' about 'imself?" the Yorkshireman cut in, to everybody's amusement. Euan ignored the interruption. "Once on the basic regime, you can expect the following: mandatory visit entitlement (two half hours a month), ?2.50 private cash allowance, no work so no pay, all day lock up, no television, no personal cassette player, no musical instruments, no personal clothing, no electricity, an hour's exercise a day, and a small battery transistor radio which you may apply to buy from accumulated private cash spends." There was a collective gasp of horror from the group. The Howardites had struck their first blow. It took most people the rest of the day to recover from the shock.
Our present Home Secretary shares a surname with another great penal reformer. John Howard-inspiration of the Howard League for Penal Reform-is immortalised in bas-relief on a medallion set into the neo-romanesque gatehouse of Wormwood Scrubs. In 1777, the middle aged, middlebrow Bedfordshire sheriff published his State of the Prisons in England and Wales, an encyclopaedic volume based on widespread inspectorial travels. At the end of the 18th century, prisons were filthy, disordered, overcrowded, abuse-ridden, but (from the prisoners' point of view) rather easy-going places. There was no categorisation of prisoners: men, women, children, hardened criminals, pathetic debtors, the sane and the not so sane were all thrown together under the same roof, into what the reformers saw quite clearly as a melting pot of sin, vice, and depravity.
John Howard rode to prominence on an evangelical tide of reform theology. Unlike other reformers who worried about prisoners' souls, Howard looked rather more pragmatically at the fabric of the institutions that held them. The ethos of imprisonment was to be found in rationality, austerity, health and religious purpose: by removing the "petty pleasures" the prisoners enjoyed, and creating a labour intensive progressive class system in which prisoners could earn their redemption by good conduct, Howard hoped to stamp out the "audacious spirit of profaneness and wickedness." Now we're returning to more familiar ground. Howard, M, and Howard, J, no longer seem quite so diametrically opposed-whatever today's Howard League lobbyists in the Holloway Road may say. But it remains to be seen whether the incentives option proves any more successful today than it did 200 years ago. There are certainly going to be problems-arising from the unpredictability of human nature. As Lord Woolf pointed out: "A system of personal and minor incentives would be hard to administer fairly and without fear of prejudice. It would put an additional burden on prison officers in trying to form nice judgements about who could have what privileges, [and] would risk becoming a disincentive... to good behaviour."
Three requirements-security, control and justice-must be met if the 20th century prison is to remain on a stable footing. Michael Howard has always made it clear that the interests of security are paramount if the safety of the public is to be ensured. After six "exceptional risk category A" prisoners took off from the special secure unit (SSU) of Whitemoor on 9th September 1994, Sir John Woodcock was dispatched to the fenlands to find out how these men had managed to manufacture the escape equipment in the first place; how they had acquired firearms and explosives; and how so much forbidden material had remained hidden away from the prison officers and search teams. The reclaimed cache included 30 feet of rope ladder, 155 feet of hand-fashioned rope, four metal poles (total length 27 feet), bolt cutters, spanners, screwdrivers, Stanley knives, hooks, hacksaw blades, two guns, eight rounds of ammunition, a pound of Semtex, and ?474.20 in cash.
Sir John and the national press were horrified. His inquiry revealed that one of the worst obstacles to carrying out full search procedures had been the amount of property actually held in prisoners' cells. Things like loudspeakers, record players, clothing, bird cages, typewriters, tapestry kits, soft toys and many of the 135 items on the dispersal prisons' "facilities list" were bound to be bulky. They certainly made ideal hiding places for all manner of contraband.
It had previously been the policy of the prison service to allow "sufficient property in possession to lead as normal an existence as possible within the constraints of the prison environment." Matters had obviously got out of hand in Whitemoor; when two prisoners were repatriated from there to Maghaberry prison in Ulster, it came to Sir John Woodcock's attention that 82 boxes of property had made the journey across the Irish Sea with them. The ex-inspector of constabulary thundered in his report: "A volumetric control of all prisoners' possessions should be introduced forthwith. Prisoners should be allowed only that which fits into the authorised cupboard, wardrobe and shelf space of the cell, plus a maximum of two boxes, to be stored under the bed."
With the greatest respect for Sir John Woodcock's undoubted common sense on this matter, there are only five dispersal prisons in the country (of which only two operate SSUs). There are 129 other establishments, including 45 local prisons and remand centres, 27 young offenders institutions, ten category B training prisons, nine female prisons and 12 open camps. Stocken is one of 32 category C trainers, holding, in the prison service's own definition, "those who have neither the intention nor the resources to escape." How then do the quite justifiable worries about the safe functioning of the high security estate bear any relevance to what goes on here in Stocken? Apparently they do, as I found out.
Because of my literary work, I have many reference books in my cell. Imagine my consternation when, some weeks ago, I was summoned into the wing manager's office, handed three large boxes, and told to fill them with my "excess property." Were they worried that I'd be adding to the now infamous paper mountain, nearly a mile high, which our archipelago of prisoners generates every 83 days? Did they think I was going to pile up my library against the fence and clamber to freedom? I have been in prison over eight years now. I'm bound to have accumulated some personal effects. When I arrived here from Blundeston four months ago, I had ten boxes of property. Now they have been reduced to two. It's the sweeping generalisations that irritate most.
For those rash enough to follow in my footsteps there are other irritations. One of the most humanitarian recommendations of the Woolf inquiry's report concerned prisoners' correspondence. Up until that time, each man had been limited to one statutory and two "privileged" letters per week. "We propose that the prison service should encourage prisoners to write more letters... any limit on the number a prisoner is allowed to write should be removed." This was excellent news: thousands of prisoners have enjoyed being able to keep in far closer contact with the real world as a result. I say was excellent news. In among the dark minutiae of Stocken's Differential Regimes pamphlet is a total ban on loose incoming stamps. Nor are we any longer allowed to have stationary posted in, or newspapers, or even textbooks (without special Governor's permission).
At a time when prisons have no money to teach people to read, the estimated costs of implementing Learmont's 125 proposals will be around ?300m. Perhaps the item on Learmont's balance sheet most indicative of the mood of the whole report is the money earmarked "to clarify the service's 'statement of purpose.'" It reads: "Her Majesty's Prison Service serves the public by keeping in custody those committed by the courts. Our duty is to look after them with humanity and help them lead law-abiding lives in custody and on release."
Ambiguity surrounds the interpretation and balance of the two words "custody" and "humanity" (Tumin's "security" and "humanity"). Which should come first? Apparently, there has been "widespread confusion" among staff in different establishments. Learmont recommends a subtle alteration to the hundreds of "statement of purpose" signs prominently displayed in every prison. The new signs will read: "The primary purpose of Her Majesty's Prison Service is to serve the public by keeping in custody those committed by the courts. It is also our duty to look after them with humanity...[my italics]" I'm sure it will make things clearer to many. Our Home Secretary will certainly be reassured. Perhaps he might even be induced to come along to Stocken to unveil the first new plaque? Oh, yes. Before I forget. The bill for this enlightening lexiconic exercise in enhanced communications? A snip at ?37,000.
