• Wormwood
GILES PLAYFAIR
Life Zeno (Macmillan 30s) If the men undergoing 'training and treatment' in 'D' Hall, Wormwood Scrubs, learned noth- ing else while George. Blake was in residence there, the more impressionable among them must have acquired a sympathetic understand- ing of communism and treachery. For there was evidently never a more popular prisoner than George Blake, and perhaps in the long, drab history of the Scrubs there was never a more jubilant occasion than the morning which brought news of his escape. Even the screws looked cheerful, according to Zeno, who was serving a life sentence for murder at the time.
Still, Zeno might logically have wondered whether they hadn't an additional reason to be happy. For they must have realised that the news would put a stop to the permissive policy in prison administration, and many of them, according to Zeno, had resented any and every relaxation of rules traditionally intended to maintain 'good order and discipline'—in other words, to give the inmates hell.
Zeno regards the Mountbatten clampdown as the irrational response of 'frightened poli- ticians.' Although in his experience progres- sively minded administrators had failed to transform the Scrubs into anything approach- ing a genuinely rehabilitative centre, the fault, he is convinced, lay not with them but with their field workers. Only a small minority of the screws he met had the mind or heart to be anything but turnkeys, and about half of them deliberately set out to undermine the permissive policy by being bloodier to their charges than usual. As a result, 'many prisoners have added up a simple sum and come to the same answer. Less security added to greater
aggravation equal opportunity and reason to escape.'
The way to remove aggravation (and hence reason to escape), Zeno concludes, is to attract men of intelligence and compassion to the prison service through making the job more socially rewarding; a policy which is clearly incompatible with floodlit walls, police dogs and Big Brotherism. This is a moral to be drawn from virtually every book that's been written by ex-prisoners about their prison ex- periences. It is a message which the Prison Officers Association itself delivered a few years ago. But, for as long as Home Secretaries con- tinue to ignore it, it may usefully be repeated, and since Zeno appears to be remarkably unembittered, he repeats it with unusual per- suasiveness.
None the less, one might have hoped for a more original contribution to penological thought from a man who has been imprisoned for murder. It's really not good enough to speak simply of a life sentence as the alternative to the death penalty, but until we acquire a better understanding of the psychology of individual murderers, we can't begin to develop anything more sensible or humane. In this respect Zeno's book is unenlightening. Though the writing comes perilously close to being affectedly introspective, Zeno reveals virtually nothing about himself. Though he tells us that his crime was premeditated and that he com- mitted it with the full expectation (hope?) of being hanged, he does not say who his victim was or give a hint of why he murdered him. So was it really necessary to lock this man up for nine years? Was it safe to release him in the end? Zeno leaves us with no idea.
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