Inside Time, ‘the national newspaper for prisoners and detainees’, reports that ‘Smoking has been banned in open prisons in England and Wales, eight years after it was banned in closed prisons.’
Before the new rule came into effect on November 2 tobacco could ‘be purchased and smoked in open areas as a privilege in the open prison estate by prisoners, but only at designated times and in designated areas’.
I mention this because, just last week, I finished reading the late Jeffrey Archer’s trilogy of prison diaries which he wrote while serving a four-year sentence for perjury. Volume one covered the 21 days he spent at Belmarsh, an infamous category A prison in London; in volume two he was incarcerated for approximately ten weeks at HMP Wayland, a cat B prison in Norfolk; and the third and final volume mostly covers the eleven months he was at North Sea Camp, a cat D open prison in Lincolnshire.
The latter concludes with the three weeks he spent at HMP Lincoln (a category B prison) where he was sent after breaking prison rules by somewhat foolishly attending an unauthorised lunch party with Gillian Shepherd MP on one of his release days. In total he served two years – finishing his sentence at HMP Hollesley Bay – before being released on licence. However, those last nine months are not recorded in the diaries, which end somewhat abruptly after he moved from Lincoln prison to Hollesley Bay, another cat D open prison, where he spent the last nine months.
Why do I mention this? Well, not only was Archer a non-smoker, he doesn’t hide the fact that he disliked people smoking around him. This could have been a problem at a time when the majority of prisoners were smokers and tobacco was considered an important trading item or common currency for illegal drugs. However, even in those days (2001-2003) Archer makes reference to no smoking zones and prisoners had the right not to share a cell with a smoker.
My other reason for mentioning the open prison smoking ban is that, apart from Inside Time, it hasn’t been mentioned anywhere else (as far as I can tell), which is in contrast to the gradual introduction of smoking bans in closed prisons in England and Wales that took place from 2016 to 2018, quickly followed by Scotland.
After those policies were announced there was quite a bit of media interest in the issue and I remember being asked to comment on multiple occasions. If I remember (and I may be wrong), smoking had already been banned in communal areas in prisons, but the new policy extended the ban to all cells and even designated outdoor areas.
In June 2018 Rory Stewart, the then prisons minister, tweeted, ‘Delighted to confirm that we have just achieved one hundred per cent smoke free prisons’ which, if true, was a remarkable boast and in response I was quoted as saying, “Incidents of self-harm and assaults in prisons are at record levels and the use of illegal drugs is rife, yet the government insists on banning tobacco, a legal product.”
A few months later, on November 30, 2018, smoking was also banned in Scottish prisons, bringing the country into line with England and Wales. “No-one,” I was reported as saying, “has the right to smoke in jail but smoking is one of the few pleasures many prisoners have. At the very least inmates should be allowed to light up outside, in an exercise yard or designated smoking area.”
Today even that small exemption has been taken away from inmates in open prisons which are supposed to be significantly less restrictive as prisoners are prepared for permanent release. In the meantime the war on illegal drugs in British jails continues to be a losing battle, and is it any wonder when inmates are denied the opportunity to consume a legal product like tobacco, even in designated outdoor areas?
Then again, the use of illegal drugs like heroin was rife in UK jails even when smoking tobacco was allowed in prisons, including cells, so perhaps it’s wrong to link the too. In the third volume of his diaries, for example, Jeffrey Archer mentions a fellow inmate who smoked 60 cigarettes a day before a month-long course of acupuncture reduced his consumption to just three. But even Archer, an anti-smoker, conceded that ‘Other prisoners, who are suffering from stress, rely on it’ (the ‘it’ being tobacco). Without it, what do they rely on instead? It doesn’t take a genius to work that one out.
