Heaven (A Prison Diary 3)

MONDAY 30 SEPTEMBER 2002

6.00 am

Over the past few days I have been writing furiously, but I have just had my work confiscated by the deputy governor – so much for freedom of speech. He made it clear that his orders to prevent me from sending out any written material came from the Home Office direct. I rewrite my day, and have this copy smuggled out – not too difficult with nearly a hundred prisoners on remand who leave the prison to attend court every day.

8.00 am

After breakfast, I’m confined to my cell and the company of Jason for the next eight hours.

6.00 pm

Mr Marsh, a senior officer, who has a rare gift for keeping things under control, opens the cell door and tells me I have a meeting with the area manager.41 I am escorted to a private room, and introduced to Mr Spurr and Ms Stamp. Mr Spurr explains that he has been given the responsibility of investigating my case. As I have received some 600 letters during the past four days (every one of them retained), every one of them expressing outrage at the director-general’s judgment, thi

s doesn’t come as a great surprise.

Mr Spurr’s intelligent questions lead me to believe that he is genuinely interested in putting right an injustice. I tell him and Ms Stamp exactly what happened.

On Friday 27 September, the Prison Service announced that ‘further serious allegations’ had been made against me. It turned out these related to a lunch I had attended on Wednesday 25 September in Zucchini’s Restaurant, Lincoln (which is near the Theatre Royal) with Mr Paul Hocking, then a Senior Security Officer at North Sea Camp, and PC Karen Brooks of the Lincolnshire Constabulary.

I explained to Mr Spurr that the sole purpose of the lunch as far as I was concerned was so that I could describe what I had seen of the drug culture permeating British prisons to PC Brooks, who had by then returned to work with the Lincolnshire Police Drug Squad. After all, I’d had several meetings with Hocking and or Brooks in the past on the subject of drugs. I did not know that prison officers are not supposed to eat meals with prisoners, nor is there any reason I should have known this. Moreover, when a senior officer asks a prisoner to attend a meeting, even in a social context, a wise prisoner does not query the officer’s right to do so.

As for SO Hocking, I have been distressed to learn that he was summarily forced to resign from the Prison Service on 27 September under the threat of losing his pension if he did not do so42. PC Karen Brooks was more fortunate in her employers. Her role was investigated comprehensively by Chief Inspector Gossage and Sergeant Kent of the Lincolnshire Police, and she remains with the force. Chief Inspector Gossage and Sergeant Kent interviewed me during their later investigation of the same lunch, and made it very clear that they thought the Prison Service had acted hastily and disproportionately in transferring me to HMP Lincoln.

As Mr Spurr leaves, he assures me that he will complete his report as quickly as possible, although he still has several other people to interview. He repeats that he is interested in seeing justice being done for any prisoner who has been unfairly treated.

It was some time later that the Daily Mail reported that the Home Secretary had bullied Mr Narey into the decision to have me moved to HMP Lincoln.

The sequence of events, so far as I am able to establish them, are as follows. The Sun newspaper telephoned Martin Narey’s office on the evening of Wednesday 25 September and the following day published a highly coloured account of the Gillian Shephard lunch. This provoked the Home Secretary to send an extraordinary fax (see overleaf) to Martin Narey demanding that the latter take ‘immediate and decisive disciplinary action’ against me. Narey, who had previously stood up against the press’s attempts to portray my treatment as privileged, buckled and instructed Mr Beaumont to transfer me forthwith to Lincoln. Narey also went on a number of TV and radio programmes to criticize me in highly personal terms in what the Independent on Sunday described as ‘an unprecedented attack on an individual prisoner’, especially in the light of later pious assertions that the Prison Service is ‘unable to discuss individual prisoners in detail with third parties’.

Mr Beaumont found himself in even more difficulty: he had not asked me about the Zucchini lunch, so he could hardly make that the basis of an order to transfer me. In the event, the Notice of Transfer which he signed stated simply: ‘Following serious allegations reported in the media and confirmed by yourself that on 15 September 2002, you attended a dinner party rather than spend the day on a Community Visit in Cambridge with your wife, it is not appropriate for you to remain at HMP North Sea Camp any longer.’

My licence did not restrict me to my home in Grantchester while on release. But, an e-mail was circulated within the Home Office which stated: ‘The prison [HMP North Sea Camp] had granted JA home leave but his licence conditions stipulated that he should not go anywhere else but home. In light of this, he has breached his licence conditions, and will face adjudication.’ At that time, the copy of my master passbook (a record retained by the prison which records all a prisoner’s releases on temporary licence) contained no such stipulation, nor did I ever face adjudication in respect of any breach of such a stipulation.

Mr Spurr later said in a letter he was ‘unable to locate’ my master passbook when he conducted his investigation into my transfer, a fact which he acknowledged as ‘regrettable’. One has to wonder why and how this passbook disappeared. However, Mr Narey told me to stop writing to him on the subject as the matter was closed.

DAY 440

TUESDAY 1 OCTOBER 2002

6.00 am

A frequent complaint among prison officers and inmates – with which I have some sympathy – is that paedophiles and sex offenders are treated more leniently, and live in far more palatable surroundings, than the rest of us.

On arriving at Lincoln you are immediately placed on A wing, described quite rightly by the tabloids as a Victorian hellhole. But if you are a convicted sex offender, you go straight to E wing, a modern accommodation block of smart, single cells, each with its own television. E wing also has table tennis and pool tables and a bowling green.

During the past few days, I have been subjected to segregation, transferred to Lincoln, placed in A block with murderers, violent criminals and drug dealers, in a cell any self-respecting rat would desert, offered food I am unable to eat and I have to share my cell with a man who thrashed someone to within an inch of their life. All this for having lunch with the Rt Hon Gillian Shephard in the company of my wife when on my way back to NSC from Grantchester.

Sex offenders can survive in an open prison because the other inmates are on ‘trust’ and don’t want to risk being sent back to a B-cat or have their sentences extended. However, these rules do not apply in a closed prison. An officer recently reported to me the worst case he had come across during his thirty years in the Prison Service. If you are at all squeamish, turn to the next page, because I confess I found this very difficult to write.

The prisoner concerned was charged and convicted of having sex with his five-year-old daughter. During the trial, it was revealed that not only did the defendant rape her, but in order for penetration to take place he had to cut his daughter’s vagina with a razor blade.

I know I couldn’t have killed the man, but I suspect I would have turned a blind eye while someone else did.

10.34 am

I have a visit from a Portuguese prisoner called Juan. He warns me that some inmates were seen in my cell during association while I was on the phone. It seems that they were hoping to get their hands on some personal memento to sell to the press.

English is Juan’s second language, and I have not come across a prisoner with a better command of our native tongue; and I doubt if there is another inmate on A block who has a neater hand – myself included. He is, incidentally, quietly spoken and well mannered. He wrote me a thank you letter for giving him a glass of blackcurrant juice. I must try and find out why he is in prison.