A VIP inspection of one of Her Majesty's prisons resembles the royal progress of a Stuart king. I remember such a visitation made some years ago to Albany prison on the Isle of Wight (where I was serving a sentence) by the then Home Office minister, Lord Caithness. When our wing was selected to receive the belted earl, frenzied preparations got under way.
For a week prior to his arrival, prisoners were hectored into painting walls, burnishing pipes and chamois-leathering windows. The litter-and-shit-strewn inner quadrangle was picked clean of the accumulated detritus of the previous year. One enterprising principal officer managed to acquire a state of the art Flymo lawnmower to trim the bedraggled weeds and grasses sprouting between cracks in the concrete paving slabs.
Unfortunately (considering the work that had gone into the operation), Caithness couldn't stay long. Throughout, he was accompanied by a fawning governor, surrounded by departmental aides-de-camp, screened from the convicted mob by a phalanx of senior officers, keyholders and dog handlers with Alsatians straining at their leashes. Under such conditions, it would have been a miracle if the minister had seen anything.
At the end of April, General David Ramsbotham, the new Chief Inspector of Prisons, seemed to be receiving similar treatment during a visit to Full Sutton prison, a top security unit outside York. Most unusually, someone had arranged for the cameras to be there as the party emerged, to catch the peripatetic general's views on what he had seen.
"Were you satisfied with the way Full Sutton is operating?" a reporter asked. "Would you care to comment on the state of our prisons in the light of the recently announced budgetary cuts?" Ramsbotham, swathed in yards of bespoke tailoring and a military tie, stood rigidly to attention. Haileybury, Corpus Christi, Cambridge and the Rifle Brigade had prepared him for moments like this.
"Well, of course you must realise that these cuts have nothing to do with the Home Secretary, with whom I have frequent and useful conversations. I really do want to use my position to help him." There was a hint of a smile. "But before further cuts are made, there must be very careful thought. The situation inside our prisons is fragile, but I am extremely pleased to see that what resources are available have been spent on increased security."
In the seminal work on this aspect of penal procedure, General John Learmont made some astute observations. During his inquiry he noted the prevalence of bullying throughout the system. For the weaker prisoners (and there are many of them), time spent out of their cells was far more traumatic than time spent locked in them. Boredom breeds discontent, confrontation, physical assault and, sometimes, riot. An in-cell television set might act as an emollient in such circumstances, thought Learmont. If a convict is sitting in his cell watching Coronation Street (or The Brains Trust), he is neither bullying nor being bullied.
Images of overfed, underpunished bank robbers lying back on their prison cots flicking through the channels on remote control handsets do not accord with the currently fashionable idea of retributive imprisonment. But Learmont is no fool, and his report could hardly have been described as a Citizen-Convicts' Charter. After inspecting prisons on the continent and in the US, he came to the conclusion that more in-cell televisions ought to be phased in. First, the inmate would have to earn the right to electricity. He might then get limited access to educational programmes and have videos on drug abuse, Aids and offending behaviour beamed into his cell. Then, on a strictly regulated points-awarded-for-appropriate-behaviour-basis, he could finally expect to partake in the pleasures of The Girlie Show and other goodies.
Pilot schemes are already in place in about 20 prisons. I'm lucky, being, for the moment at least, one of the 4 per cent of inmates who already enjoy this luxury. Just before Christmas I bought a compact 14 incher for ?140. This was how I was able to catch Ramsbotham's performance the other night. But how much longer my new friend will remain by my side is another question; Michael Howard has summarily thrown Learmont's careful proposals into the dustbin.
"Howard Bans Jail Cell Television" said the front page headline in the Daily Mail last month. By lunchtime the same day, the article had been posted on the main prison noticeboards. Bands of inmates roamed the corridors spreading the news. The governors had retreated to their administrative bunkers, unavailable for comment. As usual, the uniformed staff bore the brunt of prisoners' dissatisfaction.
The official Howardian line, revealed in a leaked Home Office briefing paper, is that televisions are "incompatible with government policy that prison regimes should be decent but austere." The most ridiculous comment, made to the Daily Mail by a "senior prison insider," attempted to justify the decision on security grounds. There were serious implications, the source said. "Portable television sets can be used as currency to obtain guns or many other means of escape." Welcome to the old bazaar in Cairo.
