“Capturing Public Opinion: Prisons, Media and the Public”

This is the speech that I gave at the ICCCR Conference at the Open University in Milton Keynes.

“Capturing Public Opinion: Prisons, Media and the Public”

Introduction.

11th of September 2001 was a historical day. After 22 years of a life sentence spent in closed prison conditions, I was transferred to Sudbury open prison in Derbyshire. It felt strange arriving in the squashed, closed, uncomfortable cubicle in a Group 4 van and getting out at the Reception Area. I stood outside and had a fag and looked at the wide open space for as far as I could see without a prison bar, wall or fence in sight.

In my room, not a cell, I turned on the TV and the news was on about an event 3,000 miles away, across the Atlantic. Two planes had crashed into two towers. It was awesome. It was immediate. Some stories in today’s newspaper become tomorrow’s chip wrapper. And others, like 9/11, Madeliene McCann, and Paris Hilton go on and on and on.

The Prisoners voice

According to a transcript from an Out-Law Radio broadcast on 9th of November 2006, “Hirst suffers from a form of autism called Aspergers Syndrome and has lived an extraordinary life. Convicted of manslaughter in 1979 he was a violent prisoner when, in 1989, he asked to be put on an educational pilot scheme in prison. He learned about prisoners' rights and used those, rather than violence, to fight for proper treatment in jail.
He later used the Human Rights Act to mount a successful challenge to the Government's ban on prisoners talking to the media, and founded the first prisoners' rights group, the Association of Prisoners”.

Generally speaking, prisoners do not get a very good press from the media. And, the Prison Service, generally speaking, does not take kindly to prisoners who speak to the media, and like Tony B Liar sees the media as being some kind of feral beast. In response to my talking to the media, the Prison Service sent me to Coventry…or as near as damn it, HM Prison Rye Hill in Warwickshire. The idea being that this prison operated a pin number phone system, as opposed to phone cards, and that I would be prevented from telephoning the media. The Daily Telegraph phone number I was informed by the operator was not on my approved list of phone numbers that I was permitted to call. I had submitted Matt Born’s direct line and this was allowed even though he was a journalist on the Daily Telegraph.

This reminds me of the time in 1991, when I was in Gartree Prison, and the Guardian wanted to do a piece on me in relation to my role as the Special Adviser to BBC 2’s 4 part prison drama called Underbelly. The prison authorities refused them permission to visit me. So, I sent out two Visiting Orders in the names of A Hack and A Snapshotter and the prison authorities let them visit me. By the time they realised that they had been fooled the interview was over, and when the prison authorities presented the journalists with a form to sign giving an undertaking not to publish what they had learnt from me, I told them that it had no legal status and that they should refuse to sign it and publish and be damned.

I have a blog, its address is http://prisonersvoice.blogspot.com.

Case-law shows that prisoners are members of the public, albeit not at large. And as such, this section of the public hold opinions. One of the first I recall hearing is that All Coppers Are Bastards. Sometimes prisoners can be quite vociferous, for example, on April Fools Day 1990, shouting from the rooftop of riot-torn Strangeways Prison in Manchester. Basically, the system failed to provide prisoners with an effective complaints channel to air their grievances. The subsequent Woolf Report concluded that there was a lack of justice in prisons.

My prisonersvoice was inspired by “The publication of Rijksen’s Prisoners Speak Out in 1958 was clearly an event of major importance in the history of Dutch post-war criminal justice”. The book was a collection of letters written by prisoners and “covered their experiences of the administration of criminal justice. Most contained considerable criticism of judges and public prosecutors, but also of lawyers and probation workers. The result was a storm of public indignation: the different functionaries were, for the first time, confronted with the implications of their own actions and, for awhile, their self-confidence seemed to be shaken. What had been achieved in any case, was the first piercing of the hermetically closed prison situation. For the first time, prisoners could let their voices be heard from captivity. The Ministry of Justice first tried to suppress the book, thus perhaps guaranteeing an even greater impact. Even 20 years after its publication in a fresh edition in 1961, judges and prosecutors named this more than any other book as a source of their belief that too long a sentence of imprisonment would embitter and damage prisoners, both socially and psychologically”.

Following the Strangeways Prison riot I was given a copy of the Prison Reform Trust book entitled “Prison Rules: A Working Guide”. I was particularly struck by this quote: “In the prison world in particular, it seems that information is power”. I decided to empower myself with as much information as possible because: “Even where prisoners rights and entitlements are clearly established by regulation or even case-law, these rights and entitlements can be constructively withheld by depriving prisoners of the information necessary to ‘ask the right question’. Unnecessarily restrictive access to information is a pervasive element of the institutional atmosphere…”.

I typed “Prisoners and the media” into Google and one of the about 3, 190,000 entries was entitled “Silencing Prisoners Is a Crime Against Journalism” and is published by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). According to Wikipedia, FAIR defines its mission as working to "invigorate the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity in the press and by scrutinizing media practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints". The first line of the piece reads “Few people are talked about more – and heard from less – than prisoners”. The article continues “Rarely do we turn on a television or pick up a newspaper and learn what prisoners have to say. Without direct communication, they don’t seem very real to us as human beings. As a result, it’s much easier for us to demand ever-harsher prison terms”.

In prison I was restricted to the mainstream media of newspapers, television and radio. Outside prison, I have discovered the blogosphere. In some respects, it has caused the MSM to quake in its boots. And, politicians have discovered the power of the blogosphere. I think it is time that prisoners had access to the internet in their cells.

I have already referred to Silencing Prisoners Is a Crime Against Journalism.
Then there is California Bans Media Interviews with Prisoners.
And, US Media Kills Story that Iraqi PM Executed 6 Prisoners.
And, Hard Evidence of US Torturing Prisoners to Death Ignored by Corporate Media.

On the other hand we have American cable news has been fixated on the jailing of socialite Paris Hilton for the past week, on grounds that she twice violated the probation sentence she earlier received for drunk driving. They interrupted coverage of world leaders at the G8. (They briefly spliced in Gates's decision not to reappoint Peter Pace as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.) A new frenzy broke out with every tiny twist . She was brave, she was weeping, she was mentally fragile. She was released, she was rejailed, she shouted it was unfair and cried, she was undergoing psychiatric evaluation.

Just for a little perspective, we could consider the news from Iraq on Saturday. Incoming mortar fire from guerrillas hit Bucca prison, killing 6 inmates and wounding 50.

I hope all, or at least some, of that makes some kind of sense to you.

Thanks for listening.