The prisoner

Further to last week’s post about Jeffrey Archer, I have been reading the late peer’s prison diaries which he wrote while in jail for perjury.

They’re rather good and reaffirm my long-held belief that few things could be worse than being sent to jail, especially a Category A prison such as Belmarsh in London.

If I take anything from Archer’s three volume prison diaries it’s the old cliche, “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime”. On the other hand, if you’re unfortunate enough to end up behind bars, do what Archer did and write, write, write because, if nothing else, it fills the time, much of which is spent locked up in a tiny cell. According to Archer (I’m currently on volume 2), he wrote for six hours every day, in three two-hour blocks, the first beginning at 6.00am.

Anyway, I thought you might be interested to know that I once interviewed a prisoner in a Category D open prison. It was in 1993 and my interviewee had already been in prison for 16 years for murdering a complete stranger. I know his name – and published it at the time– but I’m not going to mention it now because it’s a long time ago and I don’t think it would be fair. I shall simply refer to him as B.

I can’t remember how the interview came about – I think he wrote to me because he had joined Mensa the previous year and I was editing the monthly Mensa Magazine – but I had to write to the prison governor to request permission to interview him so it took several weeks to organise and there were various conditions.

I don’t remember much about the HMP Leyhill but it was a far cry from the austere, Victorian era prisons we hear so much about. Nevertheless, it was still a slightly surreal experience, which I wrote about here …

Credit: iStock / henfaes

THE PRISONER

I admit it. I was nervous. After all, it’s not every day you visit a man serving a life sentence for murder. What would he look like? What would he sound like? Would the prison be dank and depressing? Would the keys rattle in their locks and the gates clang shut, a la Porridge? What if …?

I needn’t have worried. HMP Leyhill, near Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire, is far removed from Slade Prison (or indeed Wormwood Scrubs). A Category D open prison, it’s not unlike a student hall of residence except that the inmates are much nicer! As for the man I had come to see, a more normal (if slightly intense) fellow you couldn’t wish to meet.

A plain-speaking Mancunian, B was 27 when he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Sixteen years into that sentence he recalls, “What happened was that I grew up bottling things up inside. Then came the day when I couldn’t do it anymore and I lost control. I got into a situation where my temper went and I just took off like a rocket. Unfortunately, all the feelings that had been bottled up over the years focused on the person who was in front of me at the time – totally innocent and in no way deserving of what happened.”

Although he accepts full responsibility for his offence, psychologists have suggested there could be a link between his intelligence and the frustrations that ultimately engulfed him. “I’ve got a high IQ but only average scholastic abilities because the education system failed to recognise and stimulate it. If my IQ had been identified as a youngster then perhaps my life might have gone in a different direction. As it was I wandered through school, failed my eleven plus, went to a secondary modern school and got a secondary modern education.”

Of his childhood, he says, “Psychologists tell me that children with an unusually high IQ fall into two general categories, both of which have communication difficulties. They either talk over the heads of their peers or they tend not to talk at all, and I was one of those who tended not to talk much. I could get along with people but I didn’t need to ask as many questions and therefore failed to become part of the group.”

[Note: There may be something in this but I’m a bit sceptical because one of the things I found – as a non-member working for Mensa – is that IQ alone does not necessarily measure intelligence (it’s merely one of several factors) and I found that some members were a bit too quick to use their high IQ as an excuse for failure, socially or career wise, because they claimed their ‘intelligence’ made them ‘different’. But I’ll save that debate for another day.]

Leaving school at 15 without qualifications, B spent two years at technical college (“I was amazed that I’d passed the entry test because I’d never passed an exam before”) before getting a job as a TV service engineer. Although the money was useful it was a period of intense frustration. “I enjoy technical things but I was having to work too hard just to mark time and keep up with developments. The next step would have. been management and I would have been much happier in that role. In fact I would have been happy to get out of the trade altogether if I hadn’t had a wife and two children and bills to pay.”

The shock of his offence still haunts him. “I was devastated by having killed somebody. It was totally out of character. I am not inherently a violent person and the shock of having done it left me an emotional wreck for quite a while.”

As for prison, “It took me three or four years to come to terms with it. I used to wake up at nights and it would break into my thoughts during the day.” Most disturbing of all was the fact that, “In prison you’re up against the fact that the majority are dishonest, therefore the staff have the attitude that everybody’s dishonest. You’re not capable of telling the truth unless there’s an officer by your side verifying what you say. That irritated me no end and I’ve thumped a governor’s desk more than once. It takes a lot of getting used to and I still haven’t, to a degree. I’ve just become more tolerant of it.”

For a potential loner, prison has added dangers. In fact, he says, “It’s not possible to be a loner in prison. You live in each other’s pockets 24 hours a day. You can be reserved, to a degree, but you’ve got to get along with people. In fact, it would be dangerous not to get along with people in a maximum security prison.”

In Britain maximum security prisons are classified as Category A. High security, local inner-city prisons are Category B. Category C are training prisons, and Category D are open prisons where inmates are prepared for their eventual release. HMP Leyhill is Category D.

Ironically, although it must have been a relief when he was moved to Leyhill (no walls, the ‘freedom’ to work in the community, unescorted home leave etc etc), the weirdest sensation, he says, was moving from Category B to Category C. “In maximum security it’s all gates and escorts everywhere. You walk so far and wait for someone to open a door. When I got to my first Category C prison I was in the workshop one day and someone said, ‘The cashier wants to see you in admin, off you go.’ It seemed very strange walking around on my own.”

This of course raises one of the problems of long-term imprisonment – the inherent danger that inmates will become institutionalised and unable to revert to the ‘real’ world when, eventually, they are released. B is conscious of the problem but is confident he will avoid that particular fate. “I’m too strong-willed.” He nevertheless admits that after placing an ad for pen-friends through the Open University five years ago, “I had to relearn how to talk to people who weren’t associated with prison. Although I was up on current events, through newspapers and radio, my horizons stopped at the wall. To speak to people outside I had to relearn social communication skills.” The questions they asked prompted him to take an educational course and look at prison and his part in it.

Unfortunately, 16 years after he entered prison and 18 months after he was moved to Leyhill, he still doesn’t know when he will be released. “My barrister thought I’d do about eight years. The judge declined to make a recommendation so I inferred from that that it was up to me to behave and get out when I could. It wasn’t an offence in pursuit of a crime – I wasn’t committing a robbery – so there was no reason at that time why it shouldn’t be an average sentence and the average at that time was about nine years.”

Scheduled for Home Office review in 1985 [eight years before I interviewed him] he accuses the then Home Secretary Leon Brittan of changing the rules and moving the goalposts as the political climate changed in favour of longer life sentences. “It was devastating. I went from an average sentence of eight or nine years to a minimum of 15.”

The problem, it seems, is that lifers are released only at the discretion of the Home Secretary. “Under the present system, three years before you are eligible for parole you have your first interview. If it’s positive you spend the intervening couple of years being prepared [for release] through places like Leyhill.”

In B’s case he was turned down twice, once in 1989 and again in 1991. After the second review he admits that, “I hit the roof. Fourteen years into my sentence they were talking about personality disorders, so I referred them to a psychiatric report from 1985 which said I was sane, normal, and not a danger to the public, that it was a one-off offence and unlikely to recur. A copy of the report was found and suddenly all the areas of concern that were expressed in 1990/91 vanished.”

Bemused by the subsequent lack of progress, B has since sought a judicial revue. “Last year the Appeal Court ruled that where the tariff (ie minimum sentence) set by the Home Office exceeds that recommended by the trial judge, you should be entitled to a judicial review. In my case the trial judge declined to make a public recommendation so I don’t know what tariff he recommended. The Home Office, therefore, is the only source of this information but they refuse to disclose it so I don’t even know whether I’m entitled to a judicial review.”

Although refused legal aid to take the matter further, the good news for B is that it no longer matters because the Law Lords decreed as recently as the end of June [1993] that while the Home Secretary still has discretionary powers to refuse lifers parole, he must in future state the reason for that refusal.

The bad news is that even if he gets parole at the third time of asking, B still faces a further three years inside. The issue, he says, comes back to the Home Office and the civil servants who ultimately make the decision to release lifers back into the community. “They review what they call the ‘risk factor’, which is fair enough, but risk should be determined by those who supervise your behaviour, not on the political climate at the time, which is what it amounts to.”

When he is finally freed he knows there will be problems – credit references, other people’s prejudices, coping with the pace of life, and so on. However, the image of lifers re-entering a world that has moved on in their absence is, he says, wrong. “We know what’s going on. We get newspapers and we listen to the radio. Having said that, when I came into prison there were no such things as home computers, the microwave hadn’t been invented, and the Koreans weren’t making cars. There have been a lot of changes but there’s a lot that stays the same as well. The mechanics of life don’t change.”

Whatever difficulties lie ahead, freedom can’t come quickly enough. Joining Mensa in 1992, while he was in prison, gave B the confidence to start talking about taking a degree at Bristol University. “I applied last year. The university took it seriously and were very, very helpful. Unfortunately, the prison blocked it so I’m applying again this year.”

The aim, he says, is to get involved in penal reform and prisoner after care. “The injustices I’ve seen over the years have always made me angry. I’ve seen it from the inside, now I want to study it from the outside and help those who find themselves in a similar position to me.”

Education – which he admits he used as a means of occupying his mind and “escaping” from prison – is the principal area he would like to see encouraged in prison. The issue, he reports, is that at Leyhill, for example, inmates can earn up to £9.25 a week in a workshop but only £5 if they spend their time improving their education. “Motivation is the key factor so my answer is to create an environment which gives inmates an incentive to further their education. If that’s seen by some as a soft option it’s the fault of staff for not supervising their work properly.”

That apart, B believes that the major problem with the British prison system is the absence of any strong guidelines. “Prison governors are tinpot kings in tinpot castles. They have a lot of discretionary powers. If a governor is into rehabilitation you’ll find lots of education programmes. Others favour public relations. They want full workshops and activities in the community. Education is a poor relation.”

As for long-term imprisonment, “It’s terrible at first but eventually you get used to it, so at what stage does it cease to have any value as a deterrent for the person that’s inside? A professional criminal regards prison as an occupational hazard; prison is not going to change that. They will grow out of it and retire as and when they’re ready. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put them in prison, but I don’t see the value of long-term imprisonment.”

There may be good reasons why, 16 years after he began his sentence, B is still in prison. What does seem unjust, cruel even, is the apparent refusal of anyone in authority to tell him why he has not yet been offered parole. For this particular prisoner, the Law Lords’ recent intervention was long overdue.

Nothing can excuse the original crime. But B has served his sentence. Isn’t it about time he was allowed to get on with his life? Otherwise there may be reason to agree with him when he says, “If my barrister thought I’d do eight years, and I’m actually going to do nearer 18, there must be something wrong somewhere.”

Postscript: I never discovered why B wasn’t released earlier, and I think he remained in prison for several more years, albeit in an open prison where prisoners are allowed to work in the community and enjoy unsupervised home visits.

Sometimes, however, this can go awry. For example, in volume one of his prison diaries, Jeffrey Archer was on friendly terms with an educated white collar inmate who, after six years of a 12-year sentence, had been sent to an open prison where he was allowed to spend time in the community. Eventually, growing bored of the local area, he travelled to Paris and then the south of France where, if I remember, he lived for two years.

He then moved to Spain where he was caught and arrested before spending 18 months in a Spanish jail awaiting extradition to the UK. Back ‘home’ he then had to fulfil the rest of his sentence (without parole) not in an open prison but in Belmarsh, the Category A prison where he met Archer during the latter’s first few weeks in jail.

As for B, I can’t tell you when he was released because I can’t find any reference to him online, which is probably for the best. He served his sentence and, assuming he didn’t reoffend, I wish him well.

See also: Jeffrey Archer’s prison years — and his many lucky escapes (The Times).