Notebook
Until this week I had never been inside a Prison. For a few years! lived next door to one, the celebrated Regina Coeli prison in Rome which, I suppose, must be one of the most overcrowded and unhygienic in Europe. So until my visit this week to Wormwood Scrubs, my only contact with convicts had been the occasional sound of voices floating over the garden wall in Rome and, more poignantly, the anguished cries of prisoners' wives and mothers from the top of the Janiculum Hill from which, it was believed, every word uttered could be heard inside the prison by the Tiber below.
My visit to Wormwood Scrubs was at the invitation of the Home Office following something I wrote in another Spectator Notebook about the alleged ill-treatment of a Yugoslav during a week's detention in a London jail. Having denied the graver particulars of these allegations, they decided it might do me good to see inside one of London's prisons and I readily agreed. There is an understandable defensiveness in the prison service, the 'screw', who has never enjoyed high public regard, feeling perplexed and annoyed by the criticisms and activities of England's great army of do-gooders: hence, perhaps, a new eagerness to talk to journalists. A visitor seeking some fleeting popularity among prison staff can do no better than make a few jokes in poor taste about Lord Longford.
Wormwood Scrubs is an old-fashioned Victorian prison dominated by a preposterously large Church of England 'chapel' which is in fact of cathedral proportions. This and the four blocks of cells seem well maintained, but around them are memorials to the collapse of the British economy, derelict plots on which new buildings were meant to have risen, such as new workshops and a new operating theatre for the prison hospital (the theatre being used largely to improve the appearance of prisoners by removing their tattoos). The hospital also houses a number of psychopaths who should not be in prison at all but whom the mental hospitals refuse to accommodate. Within it too is the country's favourite monster, Ian Brady, safe from attacks by other prisoners on the lookout for a morally acceptable object of violence, and with nothing to fear except, perhaps, a visit from Lord Longford. His job is to keep his corridor clean.
The atmosphere of the prison, though undoubtedly grim, is less daunting than I feared, perhaps because I was at public school and found aspects of the place famil tar. The most depressing feature is the listlessness of the inmates, who shuffle almost silently about performing their routine tasks. They look defeated and profoundly bored, as I suppose many of them must be. There is none of the jollity of Porridge, which was a popular television programme with prison officers. Although the prison contains nearly two hundred 'lifers', many convicted of the most barbaric crimes, there appears to be no great difficulty about maintaining order. The lifers are segregated in their own block in which (when they are not out in the workshops) they can wander around freely all day, watched over by a handful of prison officers who, in general, are not physically very impressive. The prisoners, one is assured, are not drugged, but still placidity seems to be the order of the day. Lifers, unlike other prisoners, have cells to themselves, many of them papered with pornographic photographs (any publication sold by W. H. Smith is permitted). One or two cells are very untidy, others are lovingly embellished and maintained. The lifers include a few IRA terrorists who, although they tend to stick together, appear to cause no more trouble than anybody else. Mr Lynch's recent talk of amnesty, however, must have caused some concern in the prison service.
We spend about £200 million a year on the prison service, which seems to be very little and should be increased. This is one of those areas of public expenditure the necessity for which can hardly be -questioned, while hundreds of millions of pounds are wasted every year on far less worthwhile things. Still, it would be nice if the prisons could do something to pay for their own upkeep and it is distressing to read that prison industries made a net loss last year of nearly £500,000. Given that prisoners are paid less than a
pound a week for their work, one would have thought it possible to do better than this. But, of course, one of the main obstacles is the great British trade union movement, which has ensured that the prisons do not provide the British worker with any effective competition. The prisons are restricted in what they can manufacture and how they market it. At Wormwood Scrubs the most profitable line appears to be painting models of Donald Duck, though heaven knows why.
Are there many cases of brutality against prisoners? Apparently not, and there would seem on the surface to be little need for it. The prison officers I met were nicer than one might imagine and seemed sensible, decent men. Much of the Governor's time (and he is a very energetic man) is spent in sustaining their morale, which is clearly nowadays an important and difficult task. There is some regret among the staff that their association refused to take on any of the welfare work now performed by probation officers, and one can see why. The jolly young left-wing girls with bunches of keys on their belts who have the run of the prison may be .doing a good job, but they couldn't look more incompatible with the stolid uniformed warders. If a prisoner does suffer any ill-treatment he can complain through various channels: he can ask to see the Governor, the chaplain and so on, he can write to his MP or to the European Commission of Human Rights (ECHR). All this is explained by the Home Office in its recent book on the prison service, Prisons and the Prisoner. But the passage ends with the following curious statement: 'A letter or petition other than one to an MP or to the ECHR, containing grossly improper language or threats of violence may be stopped, or the prisoner asked to rewrite it.'
This licence freely to abuse MPs and European Commissioners must be comforting to the prisoner, but why they — and not the rest of us — should be allowed to threaten violence against such individuals is less than clear.
The European Court of Human Rights has meanwhile passed a relatively satisfactory judgment in the long and drawn-out affair of the alleged 'torture' of IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland. The Court decided that the interrogation techniques used were indeed inhuman and degrading, as they probably were, but it absolved the British authorities of all the other charges, including the particularly emotive one of torture. The Irish government behaved clumsily and distastefully by pressing these charges when the techniques complained of had already been abolished and when it should have been concentrating its efforts on the joint battle against terrorism. So one can be pleased that the Court's judgment has not given them any great cause for glee: Mr Lynch is being unhelpful enough as it is.
Alexander Chancellor
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