Prison routine: do time, walk out, hit brick wall

Valerie Grove

Two celebrated ex-cons, Jonathans Aitken and King, understand how being inside can destroy a person’s hope

WITH A WEARY sigh I contemplate the Prime Minister’s proposal for a radical rebalancing of the criminal justice system: the latest blether in the interminable, cyclical churning out of too-familiar rhetoric. Considering the victim before the offender was David Blunkett’s promise, too, when he was Home Secretary. Much more apposite was Lord Adebowale’s comment last Friday: “Locking people up doesn’t work.”

Our prisons are full. We have 80,000 people banged up, and seven out of ten will be reconvicted within two years, costing us £11 billion a year. This appalling statistic hardly reflects toughness on the causes of crime. Rather, it suggests that a significant cause of crime may be the conspicuous failure to reform and re-educate offenders while they are in captivity.

Why not ask ex-convicts for their views? One afternoon last week in Committee Room 13 at the House of Commons, Inside Time, the national newspaper for prisoners, launched its latest inmate survey. They posed the questions — should we tolerate a prison system in which 70 per cent reoffend? And how might they be deterred from reoffending? — and invited ex-prisoners to discuss them.

On the panel were two articulate, high-profile ex-prisoners, Jonathan Aitken and Jonathan King, who had never met before despite their common youthful fame in the mid-1960s. Forty years on, the Old Etonian in the dark suit and the Old Carthusian in baseball cap and sneakers sat side by side. Both Jonathans had served time, in HMPs Belmarsh and Elmley. Each had spent long hours helping fellow prisoners who couldn’t read or write a letter, let alone cherish hope of finding a job afterwards. Each had listened as inmates voiced their anxieties about what would happen to them outside. One explanation for the high reoffending rate, Aitken said, is the lack of resettlement help. “The community couldn’t care less about prisoners coming out. Ex-servicemen, for instance, are eminently employable, but they have a bar sinister against them.”

Alongside King and Aitken last week sat another ex-prisoner, John Bowers, who edits the Inside Time letters pages. He had been sent to Maidstone prison at 16 and described how he felt on getting out. Like most prisoners writing to Inside Time, he wanted to make good and never go back: “If only you could bottle that moment of hope.”

All he needed was a bedsit, a job and a girlfriend, he’d thought. He had applied for jobs “a trained monkey could do” — and met the brick wall of employers’ reluctance. Reality kicked in. You have to disclose your ex- prisoner status. “Society almost expects you to go back to crime and back to prison. As I did.”

The audience included two former prison governors, parole board members, prison reformers: people who know how the system works. Only one MP, Ronnie Campbell (Labour, Blyth Valley), was present. No media showed up; as several participants pointed out, the media much prefer clamorous headlines to reasoned discussion by those with insider experience.

Prisoners’ problems are, for an astute politician such as Tony Blair, not crowd-pleasers. Sensitivity to victims’ woes is more of a vote-winner. And it is good to hear Lord Falconer of Thoroton recognising the “aching” pain of murder victims’ families, and promising to allow them to make statements in court about how their loss has affected them. Perhaps he has forgotten that he (and Mr Blair) belong to the profession that has always turned the knife in bereaved families’ wounds by mouthing murderers’ defences, traducing the characters of murder victims, while their families have listened helplessly.

“Lawyers open up your heart and then rip it out,” Sandra Sullivan told me when she founded Justice for Victims back in 1994. Her daughter was stabbed to death by a demented schizophrenic. Mrs Sullivan discovered how adamantly the legal profession opposed victims’ families being allowed to speak out in court. This was an “emotional” notion, they told her: in the court-room, families’ views would always be inadmissible.

Remedying this is laudable, but it does not address the cold fact of recidivism, and how to stop it. Chief Inspectors of Prisons have pointed out for years that the priority for prisons should be re-education and rehabilitation. But the majority of prisoners in the Inside Time survey (2,034 responses, from 100 prisons) said they had been given no offers of resettlement help and did not feel that prison had guided them towards a law-abiding and useful life. In the same week, the Howard League for Penal Reform published Out for Good, a report proving that for young men aged 18-20 the chief result of imprisonment was “to confirm their criminal identity”.

You cannot lump all prisoners together. Little links the petty shoplifter, the intelligent fraudster and the violent killer. Some will always remain unmanageable, uncooperative. Many more, as King and Aitken both testified, prove likeable people, with interesting stories to tell: the sort who might be propelled into a law-abiding future if they were not presented with insuperable obstacles on release.

In the pro-victim climate it will be even harder to suggest life-improving opportunities for ex-convicts, and directing their energies into positive projects. But we know that feral youths can be dramatically transformed by working with the disabled, for instance; it reminds them how lucky they are. And the voice of Christopher Morgan, of the Shannon Trust, was the most illuminating I heard last week. The Shannon Trust promotes Liberation through Reading, arranging for literate, skilled prisoners to teach and mentor fellow inmates.

“Prisons are full of people who truly want to do good,” Morgan said. “What really makes a lasting change in the personality of the prisoner is finding out what is good in themselves.”