Early summer and it's that time of my sentence again. Looking out of my cell window, I count the days to my release more cautiously this time around, hoping that I can do a little better than I did on my last, disastrous foray into the outside world.
Forty-two days I lasted then. My track record since the mid-1970s is not impressive. Twelve months in, two months out; twelve months in, six weeks out; three years in, three months out; four years in, 27 days out; ten years in... many readers will know the rest of my sorry story.
So what will be different when I get out this time? Have I, over the past 14 months, been cured of my recidivism-rehabilitated by New Labour's ground-breaking penal policies?
The New Oxford English Dictionary defines rehabilitation as "the restoration to normal life by training and therapy." The word derives from the Latin verb rehabilitare-to restore to former privileges. Most inmates of HM prisons haven't the foggiest idea of what privilege is. They come from the sewers of society; it is to them that most return.
"A prisoner leaving prison with no money, no home, no work, no acceptable clothes in which to go and seek a home or a job, is going to find it hard not to return to crime," declared Vivien Stern, former director of Nacro (National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders), now a fellow at the prestigious International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College, London.
Bearing in mind Nacro's raison d'?tre-they manage 400 bed spaces in more than 60 properties in 16 London boroughs-I wrote to them at the end of my last sentence in 1998. I was luckier than most prisoners, with promises of writing work, some decent (if dated) clothes, a little money saved up from intramural journalism, but no home to go to. They sent me a lengthy, probing questionnaire (20-odd pages) which I filled in, as directed, as frankly and honestly as I could, mentioning, inter alia, that although then presently "clean," I had during my prison sentence become addicted to heroin.
A month later I received their terse reply. Due to "problems" they had been having with drug-reliant ex-cons, they had to reject my application. Fair enough, I suppose. You can't be too careful in such politically sensitive times. But what sort of squeaky clean "clients" does an organisation like Nacro hope to attract? Next, on the advice of my probation officer in Greenwich, I wrote to a housing association. They, too, had a number of halfway houses for ex-long-term cons. I received an invitation to attend one of their assessment weekends. All I had to do was get "resettlement leave" from Lindholme prison for the requisite couple of days. But that permission was refused on the grounds that having escaped from prison eight years earlier, I posed too much of a security risk. I had three weeks left to my release, and the housing association had no alternative but to pass me over.
I decided to try Lambeth Council. I had been arrested in territory under their jurisdiction, so I thought I might be able to lay claim to some sort of connection. The trouble was that because I've been a member of les gens sans aver for nigh on 20 years, nobody wants to take pastoral responsibility for me. Unsurprisingly, Lambeth turned me down. My social leprosy had become apparent. A probation officer had begun to make enquiries at a hostel for alcoholic down-and-outs in Whitechapel, when into the breach rode Buster, an old prison buddy with an empty flat in one of the less salubrious parts of Peckham. That's where I ended up. The flat was dirty, damp, dingy and dilapidated. Not the ideal platform from which to launch an attempt at re-integration.
There is nothing new about the quandary society finds itself in with regard to former offenders. But cons and ex-cons had a fairer crack of the whip 80 years ago. At least in those days prison administrators (whose duty, according to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, is "the reformation and social rehabilitation of their prisoners") were given a licence to try.
Take a rather unlikely hero of mine, Sir Alexander Paterson (1884-1947). Aficionados of the troubled history of penal reform may recall Paterson as the prison commissioner who, in the 1920s, came up with the oft-quoted but little-acted-upon adage that "men come to prison as a punishment, not for punishment." The son of a solicitor, Paterson left Oxford with a third-class degree at about the same time as Winston Churchill, the then home secretary, created the Central Association for the Aid of Discharged Prisoners from the scattered remnants of philanthropic Victorian societies. He first came into contact with criminals at the Bermondsey club, a medical mission-cum-social club set up by John Stedwell Stansfield in the badlands of Southwark. Armed with a devout Christian belief in human redemption, Paterson spent 20 years visiting convicts, interviewing men ready for discharge, finding out how best they could be helped to make a new start.
The most urgent needs were knowledge and sympathy. "There can be no great change that is sage and useful before this understanding between man and man has been forged." Through a borstal system set up to catch fledgling criminals before it was too late, he used the ethos of public schools to foster rather than destroy lads' better qualities. He aspired to instil habits of restraint and self- control: areas of expertise sadly lacking during my last assault on the world.
Paterson said: "The business of prison officers is to keep a man in prison during his sentence and out of it for the rest of his life." But the idea of rehabilitation has long since been tarnished by extensive research findings which show most redemptive programmes have little effect on those they are supposed to redeem. Some are born criminal. Some achieve criminality. Some have criminality thrust upon them.
I spoke in a previous column of Jean Genet's "necessary vagabondage." I suppose today they'd call it the criminal gene-ineluctable recidivism. You can put criminals through as many rehabilitative programmes as you like, if a born burglar sees an open window, he'll climb through it as sure as the Lindholme ducks take to their water.
In the Jack Straw era, the "Inmate Development Pre-Release Programme" deals with the rehabilitation of prisoners coming to the end of their sentences. Here in HM prison Middle England (which I am not allowed to name), they call it the "job club." In 1998, prisons' chief inspector David Ramsbotham awarded the package a "superior" grading during an "audit" of the service.
My cellmate David has just completed the course, so I am able to provide first-hand, up-to-date information. Going through the "modules" in his folder (David is a meticulous book-keeper), I unearth a sad and pessimistic prognosis for life after bag-up. Travel warrants, discharge grants (a paltry ?40.70), benefits, community care grants, budget and crisis loans, letters to creditors, assertive behaviour (to be used on the officials behind protective screens at the dole office presumably), transmission of Hepatitis C and HIV, gambling and alcohol (how to avoid and cut back on), criminal record checks (what the police can and cannot disclose to potential employers), compiling a CV.
Credit must be given where it's due. As in so many other fields, Sainsbury's is in the vanguard (in this case) of those businesses prepared to offer employment to ex-prisoners. At the end of David's course, they sent along a recruitment officer-actually the manager of their Homebase distribution depot in Northants. Well done Sainsbury's, for persevering despite previous failures. On an earlier visit to the prison, this latter-day Alexander Paterson had offered employment to two likely lads. In less than a week, the first had quit from exhaustion; the second, after persuading the management to advance his first month's salary after only two working days, was never to be seen again. To date, one can conclude safely I think, that Sainsbury's-Homebase Hire-A-Con experiments have been less than a conspicuous success.
My own best chance of survival lies in immersing myself in purposeful activity. Once again (as I write) I have still to find a place to live, but this time I have an advance from my publishers to look forward to, payable in sensible monthly installments over the next two years. In less than a month, I'll be stepping out to wield the Siegfried sword. All I can hope for is that some life-threatening Hagan doesn't come close enough to puncture the mark of my linden leaf. I know my weaknesses.
When East End villain Arthur Harding was released from Wormwood Scrubs in 1903, he was given ten shillings, a ticket for a free breakfast, and the return of his stiff wool suit. "God bless you," said a lady with a bag full of tracts, handing him one from her bundle. Harding read the red-lettered text as he hurried down the Du Cane road. "I say unto you that he who is without sin, let him cast the first stone." Harding wrote a book about his experiences and never returned to prison.n
