Heaven: A Prison Diary (32 page)

Every morning
he would break away from his sweeping and open car doors for members of the
female staff. He would then engage them in long conversations. Harmless enough,
you may say, but several of the younger girls felt harassed and didn’t complain
for fear it might harm Peter’s parole prospects. Unfortunately, these episodes
continued, despite several warnings from officers. Governor Berlyn, who is in
charge of the lifers, was left with little choice but to take action to allay
the staff’s fears.

He took Peter
off his job as a road sweeper and asked him to be a reception orderly.

Peter made the
tea and helped officers with minor tasks. It was beyond him. He lasted a
fortnight. They next moved Peter to the officers’ mess, to assist with cleaning
and occasional serving. He lasted ten days before being transferred to the farm
as a shepherd, where he survived less than a week before being sent to the kitchen.
This was no more successful, and he has ended up in segregation prior to being
moved back to the B-cat.

Peter is in his
sixties, and has no hope of returning to a D-cat in under five years, if ever.
This case highlights a bigger issue.

Don’t we have
some duty to a human being other than to lock him up for the rest of his life?
Peter failed to come to terms with the system, so the system has failed him.

When I am
eventually released, I am going to be asked so many questions to which I do not
know the answer.

I listen to an
announcement over the tannoy.

‘Anyone wanting
to assist with the special needs group trip to Skegness, please report to the
bus at the front gate.’ The word ‘please’ should have given it away. Prison officers
rarely, if ever, say please. However, two inmates still report to the gate in
the hope of boarding the non-existent bus to Skegness.

The April
Fool
prank played on me took a different form. Mr Hewitt,
the head of the works department, purchased a jigsaw puzzle of the House of
Lords at a car-boot sale, and told me he expected me to finish it by the end of
the week as part of my anger management programme.

It took me two
hours just to finish the border. I intend to draft in all the members of Club
Hospital to assist me with this 1,000-piece monster.

Dr Susan
Edwards, Reader of Law at Buckingham University, has completed her independent
study showing the harshness of my four-year sentence.
28

Jeffrey Archer,
former deputy chairman of the Conservative party and best-selling author, was
convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice arising from a libel
action over whether he spent a particular night with a Monica Coghlan, for
which, following a ‘not guilty’ plea, he received a prison sentence of four
years. As Jeffrey Archer’s prison sentence is the longest passed in any case of
civil perjury and the sentence length is comparable to prison sentences passed
in the gravest cases of criminal perjury including murder and police corruption
it requires some rather more detailed consideration.

Gilbert Gray QC
has already warned Mary that he’ll be able to predict the outcome of my appeal
as soon as he knows the make-up of the three-judge panel. What a dreadful
condemnation of British justice – that my future will not be decided on whether
I’m innocent or guilty, but on who judges me.

NSC, like most
prisons in Britain, is badly understaffed. We have over 200 inmates, and only
27 full-time officers, meaning that there are never more than 12 officers on
duty at any one time. The following advertisement appears in several local
papers
every week
, and elicits few
replies. (See overleaf.)

I’m told it’s
no different for any of the other 137 prisons in Britain. It’s hardly an
appealing career, other than for the truly dedicated believers in justice – or
someone not quite tall enough to get into the police force.

Dr Walling
arrives a few minutes late. When Stephen Sherbourne (Margaret Thatcher’s former
political secretary) visited me, I told him that if you reported sick between
7.30 and 8 am any morning, Monday to Friday, you were guaranteed to see a
doctor at nine o’clock the same day.

Stephen asked
if I could think of a crime for which he would be sentenced to two weeks, so he
could get all his medical problems sorted out.

MURDERER

WEDS

PRISON

PSYCHIATRIST is
the sort of headline one might expect to read in the
Sun
.

Today Andy, a lifer
who has served twelve years, has been granted a week’s leave. He has been a
model prisoner and expects to be released some time next year. While he was in
his previous prison, Ashwell, part of his rehabilitation course included
regular meetings with the prison psychiatrist, and as the months passed, they
struck up a relationship. I think it right to point out at this stage that Andy
is thirty-five, six foot one, with the dark swarthy looks of an Italian film
star.

When he was
transferred to NSC, the psychiatrist visited him regularly. A report of her
visit was passed back to her own prison, and she subsequently had to resign
from the service. She found a new job in Loughborough and her relationship with
Andy continued to blossom. Today they were married at a ceremony in Boston
attended by five officers and nine prisoners.

NSC currently
has twenty-three resident murderers, and I think I’ve met every one of them.
Three of them, including Andy, are among the gentlest people I have ever come
across.

One of the
inmates is refusing to take an MDT. It’s well known that he’s a heroin addict,
and has found yet another way to beat the system. If he refuses to take the
test, the governor can only add twenty-eight days to his sentence, whereas if
he agrees to take it and then proves positive for heroin, he could be sentenced
to fifty-six extra days and even be shipped out to a B-cat. However, Mr Vessey
points out that should he refuse a second time, they can ship him out the same
day.

The new chapel
orderly committed an unusual crime. ‘On the out’ he was an accounts executive
for a well-known furniture company. He became head of the complaints
department, whose responsibility it was to ensure that when customers returned
goods they received a refund and the article was returned to the store’s
seconds
department.

One Christmas,
the chapel orderly purchased a sofa for his mother, but she didn’t like it. He
returned the sofa and applied for a refund, giving his own name and address.

The money was
refunded quite legally. It was then that the man realized that only he and the
computer were aware of the transaction.

Using a false
name but his own address, he authorized and presented a bogus claim and the
computer happily credited his account.

By changing the
name every time, he could make a claim once a week, and during the following
year, he supplemented his income by over £200,000. The chapel orderly and his
girlfriend (she unwittingly) lived in comfort, as he became more and more confident,
upping the sums on a weekly basis, and even giving himself a bonus over the
Christmas rush.

So how was he
caught? A secretary mistakenly opened a random file on her computer, and was
surprised by what she found – how could 127 people living at the same address
all require a refund for 127 different pieces of furniture they’d ordered over
the past year?

The accounts
executive pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years. He is now the chapel
orderly at NSC.

As part of his
rehabilitation into society, one of the lifers (Malcolm, armed robbery) has
just started an outside job as a cleaner at Haven High School.

The first day
turned out to be a bit of a culture shock when he discovered how mature and
self-confident modern young women have become. He repeated a conversation he’d
had this morning with a fourteen-yearold who approached him in the corridor.

‘Are you a
convict?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘What are you
in for?’

‘Armed robbery.’

‘How many years
have you served?’

‘Fourteen.’

‘Fourteen years
without sex?’ the girl said in mock disbelief.

‘Yes,’ he
repeated, to which the girl lifted up her skirt, and said, ‘Well you must be up
for it.’

Malcolm ran out
of the building. Had she reported him for even talking about sex, he probably
would have been transferred back to a B-cat the same day.

Strange goings-on in the camp today.
Tony, a well-known drug
dealer, has collapsed after taking
an overdose only hours
before he’s due to be released. What kind of problems can he have on the
outside, that he considers suicide a better way out than the front gate?

Tony has been a
regular at the hospital over the past few weeks, so there’s no way of knowing
if he’s been storing up pills, and how many he swallowed today. Rather than
wait for an ambulance, Tony’s been rushed into the Pilgrim Hospital in the
prison minibus, accompanied by two officers. I’ll know more tonight.

Tony has just
returned to the camp to spend his final night in jail. They pumped out his
stomach, so he’ll still leave us at 8 am tomorrow. But how long will he survive
on the outside?

I have just
returned from an hour’s walk around the playing field with the intention of
watching Hendry vs. Doherty in the quarterfinal of the World Championship
snooker,
29
when there’s a knock on my door.

It’s Tony
clutching a letter that he wants me to hand to sister, but he asks me to read
it first. It’s a two-sided handwritten missive, apologizing for his behaviour
over the past few weeks, and thanking sister for her kindness and
understanding. I promise to give it to her tomorrow morning. Tony is just about
to leave when I ask him if he’d be willing to answer a few questions about
drugs. I quite expect him to tell me what I can do with myself, using the usual
prison vernacular, but to my surprise he takes a seat in the waiting room and
says, ‘Ask me anything you want, Jeff. I don’t give a
fuck,
I’m out of here first thing in the morning.’

During the next
hour, I ask him question after question, all of which he answers with a brutal
frankness.

‘Did you try to
commit suicide?’

‘No, I just
OD’d.’

‘How often do
you take heroin?’

‘While I’ve
been here, usually four times a day. When I wake in the morning, just after
dinner, then again after tea and just before I go to bed.’

‘Do you inject
it, sniff it or smoke it?’

‘Smoke it,’
Tony replies. ‘Only fuckin’ morons inject it. I’ve seen too many crack-heads
get HIV or hepatitis B by injecting themselves with someone else’s needle.
While I’ve been in jail, I’ve seen needles used by a hundred different inmates.
Don’t forget, Jeff, 235,000 people in Britain are regular heroin users, and if
you consider their families, over a million people must be involved. Heroin
costs the NHS three billion a year.’

‘How do you get
the heroin into prison?’

‘There are
several ways, but the most common is to pick it up from a dealer when you’re
out on a weekend leave, and then pack a couple of ounces in a condom and stuff
it up your rectum. No officer enjoys checking up there.’

‘A couple of ounces?’

‘That was all I
could afford this time. My record “on the out” was coming back from Holland
with seven ounces of marijuana.’

‘How much would
that be worth?’

‘If it’s pure,
the best, you could be talking around a hundred grand.’

‘So when you
bring the drugs back into the prison, are they just for you?’

‘No, no, no, I
have to pay my supplier “on the out”. I’m only a dealer. Dealers are either
kings or pawns. I’m a pawn. A king rarely takes drugs, just brings them in from
abroad and distributes them among his pawns, most of whom only deal so they can
satisfy their own craving.’

‘So how many of
the two hundred inmates at NSC are on heroin?’

He pauses to
consider the question.

‘Thirty-nine
that I’m aware of,’ he says.

‘But that’s
around twenty-five per cent.’

‘Yeah,’ he
replies, matter-of-factly.

‘How do you pay
back the king dealer while you’re on the inside?’

‘Easy,’ says Tony.
‘I only sell to those inmates who have someone on the outside who will hand
over cash direct to my dealer. I never supply until the money has been
received.’