The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Behind closed doors
T he prison system is in crisis, with riots, drug abuse and violence running rife. But what is life really like for the 85,000 prisoners in our jails? Jessica Berens was writer-in-residence at HMP Dartmoor for three years and knows what goes on
As the writer-in-residence at HMP Dartmoor, Jessica Berens was given unique access to one of Britain’s most notorious prisons. She describes a penal system in crisis
When I accepted t he role of writer-inresidence at HMP Dartmoor, I wasn’t to know that my three-year tenure would coincide with a nationwide escalation in violence, drug-taking, self-harm, suicide and homicide in prisons, the effects of which culminated, last year, in riots in four of them.
In the words of Peter Clarke, the chief inspector of prisons, our jails have now become ‘unacceptably violent and dangerous places’. There was no riot in Dartmoor while I was there, but there was a suicide and a homicide that shocked every member of that secluded community, both prisoners and staff.
Oliver Pascoe, 22, hanged himself in his cell in March 2015, and another inmate, Alex Cusworth, 37, was murdered in the kitchen eight months later.
His assailant, William Tolcher, was serving a life sentence for bludgeoning his former girlfriend to death. Tolcher pleaded ‘not guilty’ thinking, perhaps, that he could get away with it because there was no CCTV in the kitchen. Budget cuts had meant there was no money to install it. He was convicted anyway.
There are 600 men in Dartmoor who, like the rest of the 85,000-strong prison population in the UK, spend more and more time ‘banged up’ (locked in their cells) because there are not enough officers to supervise ‘association’, as evening social activities are named. Exercise sessions in the gym or out in the yard are often curtailed for the same reason.
Basic security measures, such as the deployment of dogs to sniff out drugs, have been reduced to the point of uselessness. The consequence of this is a vast proliferation of narcotics on the wings.
During the years of my residency, the psychoactive drug ‘spice’ became available in prisons all over the country, and Dartmoor was no exception. Spice is an artificial cannabinoid on to which chemicals have been sprayed. These chemicals can be let hally poisonous, and notices went up to warn prisoners. This had little effect, and several young inmates were taken to hospital having smoked it.
Prisoners also made ‘hooch’ – illegal alcohol – on the wings. Usually a blend of Marmite and sugar, hooch was a disg usting fermentation which could also be poisonous. Prisoners who were caught with illicit substances risked being relegated to a ‘basic’ regime (in which their television was taken away and their visits could be reduced) and could have time added to their sentence.
Drugs, overcrowding, cuts to prison budgets and a huge reduction in staffing can be blamed for most of the latest problems in prisons, but at its age-old core, the current crisis has been summed up by Nick Davies, a journalist who has investigated prisons throughout his long career: ‘We have a system which relies on two g reat simplicities,’ he writes in the foreword to my book about my time in HMP Dartmoor, ‘that we can detect the crimes which are committed and that we can deter criminals by punishing them. These simplicities have all the intellectual insight of a drunkard in a dark alley.’
Dartmoor prison is Victorian and listed, so it has not changed much since the first granite stones were laid. You can see the barred windows and razor wire from the road; they are a bit of a tourist attraction for the Devon holiday makers whizzi ng over t he moor f rom Tavistock to Princetown.
The prison’s history is varied and violent. When it opened in 1809, it housed 6,000 French survivors from the Napoleonic wars who walked the 15 miles from the prison ships docked in Plymouth. Later, in the 1960s, there were gangland ‘faces’ such as Frank ‘t he Mad Axeman’ Mitchell, a legenda r y member of the Kray gang. The Krays organised Mitchell’s escape in 1966 and then murdered him.
Now there are 600 men living on six wings; they rarely have to share a cell so it is not as bad as some other prisons, where chronic overcrowding means that 20,000 people still share small cells. But they sleep and eat next to their toilets, and the cells are very close together so it really matters if the man next door is noisy. Loud thumping bass is an enduring problem of prison life, made more complex by the fact that prisoners with mental-health issues often tr y to escape the hell inside their heads by immersing themselves in the music. Take the beat away and you have inner noise: acting out, fighting, and self-harm.
The Dartmoor population broadly conforms to the research that describes prisoners as having backgrounds of poverty, abuse and mental illness but, as individuals, they brook no common description as they are all ages, come from all backgrounds, and have committed crimes from burglary to paedophilia. The latter characterises the latest spike in prison population numbers as thousands of ‘historical’ sex offenders, many in their 60s and 70s, were convicted in the af termath of the revelations about Jimmy Savile’s criminal assaults. (After the introduction of new guidelines in October 2013, child-abuse prosecutions from 2013-2014 rose from 440 to 7,998.)
Dartmoor has Category C status, which means, as defined by the Prison Ser vice Instruction, that it holds ‘prisoners who cannot be tr usted in open
Basic security measures, such as the deployment of dogs to snif f out drugs, have been reduced to the point of uselessness
conditions but who do not have the resources or will to make a determined escape attempt’.
The prison was Category B until 2000, and housed men who were considered to be more dangerous, so the regime was harsher. Some lifers remember digging the quarry on Dartmoor as part of a work party, while the long-term prisoners who have been serving time since the 1980s do not complain about the food because they remember when it really was bad.
Meals are a constant and morbid preoccupation, served to a budget of around £1.87 per person per day; breakfast is a pack with cereal and UHT milk, lunch (at around 11.30am) is soup and a baguette ser ved from chafer dishes on to plastic plates after the morning’s work and education sessions. Tea (around 5pm) is characterised by the white carbohydrates that typify low-budget institutional cooking. ‘Chip night’ is once a week and everyone looks forward to it; toast is a privilege on some wings; ice lollies are pudding; fruit and salad are part of the prison’s healthy eating remit. The dietetic requirements of religions are honoured, meaning that it is not unknown for prisoners to ‘convert’ to get what they consider to be better food. The Mormon Church did very well at one point, because
Meals are a constant and morbid preoccupation, served to a budget of around £1.87 per person per day
it gave away hot chocolate with its information pack.
Prisoners eat alone in their cells. Some inmates, known as ‘buddies’, collect the food on behalf of the increasing number of inmates who cannot ser ve themselves; those in wheelchairs for instance.
If they are earning the £8-10 weekly wage ( jobs include sewing prison-issue trousers, working in the garden, and cleaning), they can buy extra food from the canteen, which is delivered once a week. Everyone longs for meat. (Ask a prisoner who is going home what his first meal will be, and he will say a Big Mac or a steak, depending on his background.) Prisoners who work in the kitchens are sometimes accused of picking the meat out of the saucepans before they get to the wings, meaning that curries and stews become soups. Once an inmate working as a kitchen orderly removed the back of a fridge in order to steal raw bacon, which he then wrapped around his thighs and attempted to smuggle back to the wing.
Prison is tough for everyone, prisoners and staff, and I often asked myself why I was working there. I tended to conclude that I had been cursed by a vocation about which there was nothing I could do. From the prison’s point of view, the writer-in-resi-
dence programme (now largely defunct, due to Arts Council funding not being renewed) allowed the delivery of hours of ‘purposeful activity’ known to enhance the regime, and was a useful addition to the development of literacy, team-building, self-reflection and self-expression.
My brief was to support prisoners who wanted to pursue creative-writing projects. I began, simply enough, by holding writers’ ‘surgeries’ on F Wing with an ex-gang member who had learnt to read during his sentence and wanted to write stories for his young nephews and nieces. Others soon followed him, and there were lively discussions about everything from how to write a screenplay to whether Lewis Carroll took acid. Many were working on their autobiog raphies, often writing in pencil on scrap paper. Others did not want to write about the prison experience, saying it was too boring, and preferred to escape the daily routine by writing stories and poetry.
The men on F Wing were on an ‘enhanced’ regime, which meant that they had earned certain privileges (such as permission to own a PlayStation, which they bought themselves with the money they had earned) by conforming to the reg ime’s demand to show improvement by committing to schemes and jobs that helped other prisoners.
Menta l-hea lt h problems were profound a nd commonplace, and were often addressed with antipsychotic drugs (known as ‘serial killers’ by the prisoners) from the health team and common sense from officers, who were used to men talking to themselves, seeing things that weren’t there, anger, paranoia, lying and self-harm (using home-made implements, such as a sharpened plastic knife or a comb).
One individual who turned up to the creative writing sessions had been hit on the head with a pool cue. He insisted, quite aggressively, that he was Darth Vader and that he was imbued with an omniscience that made him lord of all he surveyed. He kept blinking in the belief that when his eyes were closed he was invisible to the present as he had transported to a parallel universe where he was lord.
Coping and defence mechanisms were as individual as the personality they were protecting, from t he constant t hreat, lack of personal space, and enforced inertia. The Prison Service is asked to provide a statutory requirement of one hour’s exercise a week, but sessions in the g ym or in the yard are sometimes tight because there are not enough staff on duty to supervise them.
After a discussion in a class session about how prison affects personality, a prisoner wrote an article for the prison magazine about how inmates treated each other. ‘In all my years of incarceration, I have found that the driving forces behind most inmates’ coping mechanisms are r umour, invent ion and character assassination. It seems to be important that while some prisoners build themselves up, some a re deter mined to prove t hat ot her people a re not what they seem or prove that staff have some personal agenda.’
The wings were usually clean due to the seriousness with which cleaning was taken, the time allowed for it, the job opportunity that it represented and the fact that qualifications offered by the BICSc (the British Institute of Cleaning Science) were part of the system.
On some wings they had fish tanks with strict instructions to ‘refrain from unplugging’. The fish in
one tank all died when a prisoner lobbed bleach into the water. On purpose. The small things were often the most unnerving.
In the second year of my residency, a classroom with computers became available and I developed the creative-writing sessions to produce the prison magazine Tor Views. This was a colour publication that came out quarterly and was printed using money raised by small charities.
We managed to make something out of nothing, thanks to the enthusiasm of the editorial team, who were often talented writers and graphic designers. Content included news about the Prison Council, information about courses supplied by the education department, as well as short stories and drawings.
The covers were colourful and funny, and once featured the prison ferret that had been seconded to combat the embarrassing rat population. Another cover featured a picture of the prison officers who had bravely dyed their moustaches pink to raise money for charity.
Meanwhile, far away, the London offices of politicians and inspectors were publishing statistics and reports that showed that half of all prisoners have the literacy levels of an 11-year-old, and an alarming hike in suicide and violence in prisons all over the country. Nick Hardwick, who was the chief prison inspector between 2010 and 2016, expressed horror at the state of the establishments he inspected and alerted politicians, civil servants and the public, to no avail.
The blame for the expensive problems prisons have now become can be laid on policymakers. Voters saw prisons as ‘hotels’ and politicians were wary of asking them to pay for the reform of lawbreakers over, for instance, the maintenance of the National Health Service. It was chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne who slashed Ministr y of Justice budgets by 34 per cent between 2010 and 2015; meanwhile the Ministry implemented a series of disastrous decisions made by ministers such as Chris Grayling, who did much to destroy the prisoners’ already low quality of life with measures such as (temporarily) prohibiting families and friends from sending books and newspapers to prisoners, on the g rounds that they could not be efficiently vetted for illicit drugs. The number of front-line officers fell by 28 per cent between 2010 and 2016, from 25,000 to 18,000.
There was a brief moment when Michael Gove ( justice secretary, May 2015 to July 2016) suggested some sensible reforms, such as giving the governors more autonomy, but he left the department before he was able to make any difference. Now, following the damage done by the prison riots of last year, Gove’s successor, Liz Truss, is making promises about more prison officers and investment.
I left Dartmoor last year, with regret. The work was interesting and it was not difficult to engage the prisoners, but there was only so much I could do with the limited resources available, and I found the uphill struggle debilitating and depressing. I was lucky to have a choice; I managed to break out before I contracted what Nick Hardwick has called ‘prison horror fatigue’.
The f ish in one tank all died when a prisoner lobbed bleach into the water. On purpose. The small things were of ten the most unner ving