Customer Reviews

Prison Diary 3: Heaven: Volume three

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In the Open Prison at North Sea Camp, Archer fell on his feet straightaway. One of the prisoners who had helped him so much in Wayland had referred him to similarly helpful prisoner at NSC. This prisoner had the best job at NSC - as hospital orderly. Archer will often stand in for him, but right at the start he had got the second-best job, that of orderly in the Sentence Management Unit, which involved helping the officers with office work (ordering supplies, for example) and seeing the prisoners when they are called to the officers, whether in the course of induction (for instance telling them what work options are available to them) or preparatory to them being called in for some offence. This enabled him to be helpful both to the officers (the first thing he did was to reorganizing drawers, cupboards and notice-boards more efficiently) and to the prisoners; so once again he becomes popular and respected by both sides. The one prisoner who threatens him is seen off by three heavies whom Archer does not even know well. He writes (can we believe it?) that hardly any prisoner would swear in front of him (though a woman officer has no such inhibitions), and when refereeing a football-match, he actually penalized one of the players for swearing and got away with it. Though it is an open prison, it still has a contingent of murderers and of drug users. On the one occasion when an inmate promised to beat Archer up, the offender was visited by three heavies (whom Archer did not even know that well) who made him change his mind and apologize.

The question of drugs obsesses Archer. He records every aspect and what the prisoners don't tell him, he reads up. There are frequent random Mandatory Drugs Tests (MDTs), and the more resourceful prisoners told him of the many ingenious ways in which they can fool the testing procedure. Even so, many of them do test positive, for which the penalty can be anything from an extra 28 days being added to their sentence to being shipped out straightaway to the closed prisons at Lincoln or Nottingham. Archer understood the difficulties of someone hooked on drugs; but he was amazed at the sheer stupidity of so many prisoners who commit other offences or unsuccessfully abscond, sometimes only weeks or days before they were due for release, which led to similar punishments.

So it is of course ironical that he himself, after a blameless 435 days, is sent to the notorious prison in Lincoln. Archer was unaware that he had broken any restrictions in his license, and it turned out that his license did not actually include the restriction he was accused of having broken. It appears that David Blunkett, then Home Secretary, had been enraged by yet another press report showing that Archer was receiving preferential treatment, and had ordered the Director- General of the Prison Service to take "immediate and decisive disciplinary action". The whole story is one incident among several he recounts of the miscarriages, if not of justice, certainly of equity and common sense, in many of the sentences that are handed down by the courts. Comparing sentences both within in and outside of prison for similar offences shows how arbitrary the process often is.

One of the most disgusting pictures that emerges from these pages is that of our gutter press. Archer did have a relatively easy time in prison, but the press had an agenda to exaggerate this quite unconscionably. An open prison makes it easy for so-called reporters to gain access to prisoners and even officers who do not scruple, for a consideration, to give the press what they want. The reporters smuggled cameras into the prison so that prisoners could take pictures of Archer or of his cell. They even found a look-alike of Archer whom they filmed on the premises "trying to escape". The man in charge of the film crew claimed to be working for the BBC, but that will surely be just one of the lies that such scum will tell and print without the slightest scruples.

Archer spent 23 days "back in Hell" at Lincoln, before the authorities were sufficiently embarrassed to send him to another open prison (Hollelsley) where he spent the remaining 268 days before his release - just over a third of his total time in prison. He chose not to publish a fourth volume of the diaries he presumably kept during that time: if he had, I would have read it straight after the 1,000 plus rivetting pages of the other three volumes. (See also my review of Vols. I and II)

Riveting is a review with which I agree. It is a complete diagram of the lack of common sense used by humans even at the highest levels of civilized bureaucracy and misuse of power at every level.