So much for the POA claiming prison is too soft

So much for the POA claiming prison is too soft

Women stuck in foetid cells close to open lavatories in sweltering heat... oh yes, prison is so much fun

By Michele Hanson

Worrying claims were made last week by the Prison Officers' Association that men were having a fun time in prisons, with drugs and prostitutes, personal in-room telly, mobile phones, breakfast in bed available, and cowed, amenable staff - if that's what you call fun. But there's no need to panic. A new TV reality show, Banged Up, is planned for the summer, set in an ex-prison in Scarborough, starring David Blunkett as a parole officer, selected old lags, an ex-prison officer and 10 youths "on the cusp of a life of crime". It will show them and us just how horrid prison really is and keep everyone on the straight and narrow.

I am not au fait with what goes on in men's prisons - hopefully no assaults or bullying or adding nasty substances to the dinners or anything else too vile to show on telly, but as I live round the corner from the country's biggest women's correctional facility, in which my friend Rosemary worked for eight years, I am pretty sure that hardly anyone's having fun in there.

Week after week, on her way home from work, Rosemary would come blubbing in with terrible stories of your average day in the women's slammer. Here is one of the stories she came across. She met a woman who had been used as a child drug mule in Ireland during the Troubles. This woman had been banged up for 16 years, since her teens, and had no teeth. The prison hadn't bothered to send her to the dentist. She and Rosemary bonded over their missing gnashers - their chewing difficulties, the distressing visual effects - but at least Rosemary had replacements. When this woman was about to be released, and had promised to attend rehab, Rosemary begged the prison dentist to give her an appointment, so that she could at least re-enter the world looking presentable. "We can't possibly start fitting her with dentures now," said he. "She's due to be released."

The woman was sent off, by herself, a toothless hag, in search of a normal life, to find the rehab in Devon. But she didn't even know where Paddington Station was. She never reached rehab, and who knew what happened to her? Who cared? In prison, she and many others had a beastly time, often bullied, burdened with horrendous memories of family tragedies, or with their children left outside - and with nothing much else to do, their thoughts went round and round, sometimes driving them slowly raving mad.

I trailed round the prison one day with Rosemary and it didn't look much fun to me. It was baking hot, and as it was the officers' training day, all inmates were locked up sweltering in their cells, the air growing increasingly foetid, what with the sweat and the open lavatories. In their despair, inmates would crap into plastic bags and hurl them out of the windows. Who wants to live through summer stuck next to a filled lavatory? Outside rats gambolled among the piles of muck thrown from the windows: leftover dinners and all sorts of nastiness. Meanwhile, in the six-bed dormitories, inmates would divert and distress each other by playing with the Ouija board. "Imagine the hysteria in the under-21s wing," said Rosemary.

Of course there are classes in this and that, and talks and library, and gym and swimming pool and large grounds and gardening potential, but the big problem is getting the officers to escort you there. There are rarely enough even if it isn't training day, and anyway, loads of them are busy escorting prisoners to court and back or dispersing them elsewhere. Or taking them to hospital in chains. Rosemary spotted one last week having a fag on the steps of University College Hospital chained to an officer, and one poor woman prisoner in Stirling, seven months pregnant and on crutches, has been chained to male and female officers while showering, going to the lavatory and having a clinical examination.

It's difficult to forget about incarcerated women round here, with the slammer being so close. Pop into the library or walk to the shops in the sun, and there is the ghastly hulk of a building with all those women stuck inside wasting their lives.

Rosemary always hoped, while she worked there, that one day there might be a point to it all - that the staggeringly high percentage of women who were on drugs would get off them, that the women who couldn't read would learn how, and that the ones who couldn't cope with their misery would be helped. That better therapy than a cheapo short course of anger management might be provided. None of this seems to be happening yet. She also wished that alternatives to prison could be found for women on short sentences for weedier crimes. That would free up more prison places for men, seeing as they enjoy it so much. But Rosemary is still hoping. Rather hopelessly.