Prison

Thursday

Peter Pomerantsev

Punks vs. Putin

What makes for meaningful political protest? In regimes where ideology was taken seriously (such as the Soviet Union or America during the Cold War), dissidents and dissenters could target rulers’ political ideas, whether communist or capitalist. But in regimes where ideology is used more to distract than indoctrinate (such as Putin’s Russia or Trump’s America), directly opposing the leaders’ ‘narrative’ (one which can change, depending on political expedience) risks playing right into their game.

Thursday

James Walton

Playing Stalin for laughs

Christopher Wilson’s new novel is much easier to enjoy than to categorise. And ‘enjoy’ is definitely the right word, even though The Zoo tackles subject matter that should, by rights, make for a punishingly bleak read. The narrator is 12-year-old Yuri, whose misfortunes start with the fact that he’s growing up in Moscow in 1953 — and that a road accident when he was six damaged his brain, leaving him with a curious set of symptoms that couldn’t be worse suited to life under Stalin: a total lack of guile, a tendency to ask awkward questions and a face so angelically trustworthy that everybody tells him their deepest secrets.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 1 June 2017

My latest bed partner is a seven-year-old lad. That first night we slept together in my double bed, I hardly got a wink. Vivid dreams made him lash out at me in his sleep with kicks and flailing arms. In the morning I opened my eyes and his clear blue eyes, three inches from mine, were studying me. ‘Did you have nightmares, Oscar?’ I said. The eyes considered. ‘Not nightmares,’ he said judiciously. ‘Dreams.’ ‘What about? You were kicking and punching me all night,’ I said. ‘I dreamt Dominic came to my school, and we didn’t do any work, we just played football all day.’ Dominic was Oscar’s best friend at his old school. Dominic is a gigantic boy and a Newcastle United supporter.

Saturday

Ian Acheson

The government machine can’t root out Islamism in prisons. Believe me, I know

In response to the Westminster attack, a 100-strong new counter-extremism taskforce has been announced to deal with the terrorist threat in prisons. I’m taking some credit for this badly needed focus. In the autumn of 2015, the then Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, asked me to lead an independent review of the threat posed by Islamist extremism in prisons, the probation service and the youth justice system. I used to be a prison governor in what was known until just a few days ago as the National Offender Management Service, so I agreed on the understanding that I reported only to him and that I had his full support to go where the evidence led me, without interference from bureaucrats. To his credit, he agreed immediately. Gathering information was a complex task for a small team.

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

Prisoners, phones and Amazon’s bottom line

On the Amazon page that sells the world’s smallest mobile phone, the reviews are mainly about putting it into your bottom. ‘What more can you ask for,’ writes a man called John Doe, ‘than this ergonomic phone that fits snugly in your rectum?’ Sean writes, ‘No anal problems!!! Didn’t hurt my bum at all!’ Pookey says it’s ‘easy to butt dial’, although may be talking about something else. For another customer, the big problem is that ‘you can barely feel the vibrate function when it is concealed’. Although don’t worry, because ‘Bluetooth reception is OK’. Why ever take it out? Many of these phones are advertised under the slogan ‘Beat The Boss!

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Only obeying orders | 12 January 2017

Spare a thought for the poor Gulag guard: the rifleman standing in the freezing wind on the outside of the wire, almost as much a captive of the Stalinist prison machine as the inmates he’s guarding. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg and Varlaam Shalamov have left the world a rich, searing portrait of the Gulag from the point of view of the prisoner. But the diary of Ivan Chistyakov is unique — a narrative of the brutal conditions in Stalin’s Gulag, told from the point of view of one of the captors. Chistyakov was a senior guard at the Baikal-Amur Corrective Labour Camp or BAMLag, and he wrote his personal diary in 1935–6, just as Stalin’s henchman Naftaliy Frenkel was putting his scheme for mobilising convict labour into high gear.

Thursday

George Mcbride

How to beat the prison drugs epidemic

Pity the prisons minister, Sam Gyimah, who last week found himself explaining the term ‘potting’ to MPs on the justice select committee. For those unacquainted with the depraved state of our jails, let me save you the trouble of reading the exchange on Hansard: ‘potting’ is to throw faeces and/or urine over a prison officer. He didn’t get round to discussing the meaning of ‘mambulance’. But every day – with alarming frequency – sirens blare as an ambulance races to a prison to deal with another cardiac arrest, violent assault or attempted suicide of a prisoner, high on one of many drugs referred to as ‘spice’ or ‘black mamba’ (hence 'mambalunce'). It has big knock-on effects.

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 1 December 2016

Autumn Budgets Philip Hammond announced that in future the Budget will be held in autumn rather than spring. This is not as revolutionary as some have made out. — In his 1992 Budget Norman Lamont announced that there would be two budgets in 1993, one in spring and one in autumn, and that from then on the date would switch to autumn for good. — The Budget was delivered every November from then until 1996. In 1997, Gordon Brown held his first Budget in July, before reverting to a spring date. — Denis Healey also delivered a November Budget in 1974, soon after the second general election of that year. Tickets please The Department for Transport says it will force train companies to make passengers aware if there is a cheaper ticket available for their journeys.

Wednesday

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Britain’s ‘dangerous’ prisons and Brexit ‘indecision’

The decision by prison staff to walkout yesterday before returning to their posts following a court ruling leads many of the newspaper editorials today. There is some sympathy for the difficult job being done by jail staff - but the papers say that officers leaving their posts isn’t the answer. Elsewhere, yesterday’s Brexit memo which suggested the government’s plan for leaving the EU is in a shambles is also a talking point in the newspapers. Here’s what the papers are saying today: The Sun says the action taken yesterday by prison staff to walkout was ‘shameful’.

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

In a Birmingham jail, I found the point of Michael Gove

I went to prison last week, in Birmingham. Early start, off on a train from Euston. It was my kids’ first day back at school, as well, so I called them just before I went through the gates. ‘Daddy’s in prison?’ said my seven-year-old, incredulously. ‘Listen,’ I said to my wife. ‘She’s not allowed to turn up in her classroom and tell everybody that her daddy’s in prison.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 26 May 2016

We cleared the kitchen table for a game of pick-up sticks. Remember them? Thirty long, thin bamboo sticks, their differing values painted on them in red, blue or yellow stripes? You bunch them in your fist and let them collapse in a heap on the table and then the players extract one at a time from the pile without disturbing any of the others? The game is still being sold in Oxfam shops for 99 pence a set under the rubric ‘Those Were the Days’. The kitchen table is circular. Four of us, representing four generations — me, my son, my grandson and my mother — are playing. I let the sticks fall. My grandson picks up a loose ten stick and does his silent maniacal rictus laugh. My boy reaches out and snaffles an easy two. Mum’s go.

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 19 May 2016

Home In the Queen’s Speech, the government made provision for bills against extremism and in favour of driverless cars, drones, commercial space travel and adoption. It proposed turning all prisons into academies or something similar and consolidating British rights while reducing the power of the House of Lords. The watchword was ‘life chances’. Boris Johnson MP said that the EU was an attempt to recover the continent’s lost ‘golden age’, under the Romans: ‘Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically.’ For his part, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that in the event of Britain leaving the EU, ‘Putin would be happy. I suspect al-Baghdadi [leader of the Islamic State] would be happy.

Gary Bell Qc

A QC’s guide to cocaine

As a defence silk, I come across some surprisingly intelligent drug dealers. Many of them are highly entrepreneurial and driven, and I’m often left wondering what they might have achieved if only they’d chosen a different career. Sharp operators are drawn to the narcotics trade because vast profits can be made in very little time. But then the consequences of failure, especially at the heavyweight end of the market, are rather worse than a tumbling share price. And we all make mistakes. I was recently involved in a case where a criminal mastermind had been jailed for 15 years for heroin importation, but had kept on running his empire from behind bars using a prison phone.

Friday

Fraser Nelson

The truth about black teenagers, prison and university

A few months ago, David Cameron made an incendiary claim that splashed the Sunday Times and set the news agenda for days: black boys, he said, were more likely to go to prison than university. It was a shocking statement, that quite rightly sparked much discussion. But there was one flaw: his claim was nonsense. I had to submit a Freedom of Information request to find the real story: black men are twice as likely to go to a top (i.e., Russell Group) university than to prison. Include women, and it’s five times as likely. Include all universities, and there’s no comparison – black teenagers have a higher university entry rate than white teenagers.

Wednesday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 23 March 2016

Apart from the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I’ve never known what my human rights are supposed to be. Presumably they include the right to go about my daily business without being attacked, insulted or otherwise abused. But there are many grey areas. Are sudden loud noises or disgusting smells violations of my human rights? And what about the deafening mirthless laughter that I have to endure in British pubs? Perhaps my human rights are changing with age. Am I, at 76, entitled to expect an offer of a seat on a crowded Tube train? Is it my right that somebody should help me with my suitcase when I am carrying it upstairs? I don’t know. Nor do I care. But some people care very much about the deprivation of rights that they believe to be theirs.

Lewis Jones

Disgusted of X-ville

Eileen is an accomplished, disturbing and creepily funny first novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, the latest darling of the Paris Review, which has published her stories and given her a prize. It recalls, half a century later, a week in the life of Eileen Dunlop, leading up to Christmas 1964. Her mother, whom she loathed, has died some years ago, and at the age of 24 Eileen is living in a dreary New England town she calls ‘X-ville’ with her father. He’s a demented, gin-sodden retired cop whom she also loathes, and whom she is supposedly looking after, though her care is limited to shouting at him, maintaining his gin supply and hiding his shoes to prevent him from terrorising X-ville in his pursuit of imaginary ‘hoodlums’.

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 17 March 2016

Home In the Budget, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, kept talking of the ‘next generation’. He outlined cuts of £3.5 billion in public spending by 2020, to be ‘on course’ to balance the books. Personal allowances edged up for lower taxpayers, with the higher-rate threshold rising to £45,000. A ‘lifetime Isa’ for under-40s would be introduced. Corporation tax would go down to 17 per cent by 2020. Small-business rate relief was raised: a ‘hairdresser in Leeds’ would pay none. Fuel, beer, cider and whisky duty would be frozen. To turn all state schools into academies (removing local authorities from education), he earmarked £1.5 billion.

Monday

Tom Goodenough

Are we really supposed to believe David Cameron cares about reforming prisons?

David Cameron has outlined his plans for prison reform today. But does he genuinely care about prisons or is he only concerned with shaping his own legacy? The Prime Minister labelled the number of prisoners reoffending as 'scandalous’. He also pledged to protect the £130m prison education budget. His motives may seem worthy but it’s arguable he is merely paying lip service to an issue which has been bubbling along under his watch for years. That much appeared to be the view of the Prison Reform Trust’s Juliet Lyon. Speaking on Today, Lyon criticised the PM for turning late to the issue. She said: ‘It is certainly true (that things have become a scandal). Certainly things have got particularly worse over the last two or three years.

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Terry’s all gold

For once, the superlatives that have greeted Terry Wogan’s death from cancer have been entirely in keeping with the man. He did truly touch the lives of millions, understanding that the essence of radio, what makes it so individual among technologies, is the way it connects us, person to person, in a single moment of time. Wogan had the knack of making us believe that we were having a private conversation with him in that moment. In his own way he was also an artist, of language, of the music of words, of radio itself, constantly surprised by the strangeness of strangers, the oddities of everyday life, the idiocy that lurks beneath most big organisations.

Thursday

Norman Fowler

Could I have prevented a Kray murder?

It was watching the latest film on the Krays (ludicrously called Legend) that brought it all back. I remembered not so much the deliberate and casual violence which underlay the swinging Sixties in Britain but something more personal. A recurrent question I have asked since those days is whether I personally could have prevented one of the Kray murders. Let me go back to 1966. I was a journalist on the Times commissioned to write two articles on British prisons. The Prison Department had directed me to the new secure prison of Albany on the Isle of Wight and to the psychiatric work being done at Grendon Underwood. But I wanted to contrast this with prison life in an older and more typical prison. What better place to go than Dartmoor?