Heaven

DAY 198 FRIDAY 1 FEBRUARY 2002

9.00 am

Among those on the paper chase today is a young man who has not yet celebrated his thirtieth birthday, but has been to jail eighteen times. He’s a small-time burglar, who has – and this is the important point – no fear of prison. For him it’s a temporary inconvenience in his chosen career. Because he has no record of violence or involvement with drugs, he’s rarely sentenced to more than six months. He spends a few days in an A-cat, before being transferred to a D-cat, open prison. NSC provides him with three meals a day, a room and the company of fellow professionals. When he leaves, he will go on stealing until he is caught again. He will then be arrested, sentenced and return to NSC, the nearest D-cat to his home in Boston. [20] He earns between fifty and a hundred thousand a year (no taxes), according to how many months he spends ‘on the out’ in any particular year.

Mr Hocking (head of security) tells me that this young man has a long way to go before he can beat Greville the cat burglar, who left NSC last year at the age of sixty-three, declaring he now had enough to retire on. During a full-time career of crime, Greville was sentenced on thirty-one occasions (not a record) and preferred NSC, where he was always appointed as reception orderly within days of checking back in. So professional was he at his chosen occupation that if there was a burglary in his area, with absolutely no trace of entry, fingerprints or any other clues, the local police immediately paid a visit to Greville’s home. Greville has since retired to a seaside bungalow to live off his profits, and tend his garden. And thereby hangs another tale, which Mr Hocking swears is true.

Greville was the prime suspect when some valuable coins went missing from a local museum. A few days later, the police received an anonymous tip-off reporting that Greville had been seen burying something in the garden. A team of police arrived within the hour and started digging; they were there for five days, but found nothing.

Greville later wrote and thanked the chief constable for the excellent job his men had done in turning over his soil, particularly for the way they’d left everything so neat and tidy.

2.30 pm

I have my hair cut by the excellent prison barber, Gary (half a phonecard). I want to look smart for my visitors on Sunday.

3.00 pm

Friday is kit change day for every inmate. The hospital has its own allocated time because we require twenty new towels, six sheets, twelve pillowcases and several different items of cleaning equipment every week. While the chief orderly, Mark (armed robbery, ten years), selects a better class of towel for the hospital, he tells me about an inmate who has just come in for his weekly change of clothes.

This particular prisoner works on the farm, and never takes his clothes off from one week to the next, not even when he goes to bed. He has a double room to himself because, surprise, surprise, no one is willing to share a pad with him. Mark wonders if he does it just to make sure he ends up with a single room. I find it hard to believe anyone would be willing to suffer that amount of discomfort just to ensure they were left alone.

Before you ask, because I did, the Prison Service cannot force him to wash or shave. It would violate his human rights.

DAY 199 SATURDAY 2 FEBRUARY 2002

9.24 am

Mr Berlyn drops by. He’s agreed to Linda’s suggestion that a drug specialist visit the prison to give me an insight into the problems currently faced by young children in schools. But Mr Berlyn goes one step further and tells me about an officer from Stocken Prison who regularly visits schools in East Anglia to tell schoolchildren why they wouldn’t want to end up in prison, and it may be possible for me, once I’ve passed my FLED, to accompany him and learn about drugs first-hand. If my sentence is cut, I would be allowed to visit schools immediately, rather than going through the whole learning process after my appeal.

11.00 am

Sister is just about to close surgery, when a very depressed-looking inmate hobbles in.

‘I’ve caught the crabs,’ he says, his hand cupped around the top of his trousers.

Sister unlocks the door to the surgery and lets him in. He looks anxious, and Linda appears concerned. He slowly unzips his jeans, in obvious pain, and places his hands inside. Linda and I stare as he slowly uncups his hands to reveal two small, live crabs, which he passes across to Linda. She recoils, while I burst out laughing, aware that we will be the butt of prison humour for some weeks to come.

‘Oh my God,’ says Linda, as she stares down at his unzipped jeans, ‘I don’t like the look of that. I think I’ll have to take a blood sample.’

The inmate rushes out of the door, his jeans falling around his knees. Honour restored, except that he has the last laugh, because it’s the hospital orderly (me) who ends up taking the two crabs back down to the sea.

2.00 pm

An inmate was caught in the visitors’ car park in possession of two grammes of heroin. On the outside, two grammes of heroin have a street value of ?80. Inside prison, each gramme will be converted into ten points, and each point will be made into three sales. Each sale will be one-third heroin and two-thirds crushed paracetamol, which can be picked up any day from the hospital by a prisoner simply claiming to have a headache. Each sale is worth ?5, so the dealer ends up with ?300 for two grammes, almost four times the market price.

Some dealers are happy to remain in prison because they can make more money inside than they do ‘on the out’. The inmate concerned claims a man who was visiting another prisoner handed him a packet in the car park. The head of security is aware who the visitor was, but can’t charge him because he wasn’t caught in the act. He also knows which prisoner the heroin was destined for, but he’s also in the clear because he never received it.

DAY 200 SUNDAY 3 FEBRUARY 2002

5.00 am

I rise early and write for two hours.

2.00 pm

My visitors today are my son Will and Chris Beetles. Will takes me through the preparations for my appeal on sentence, which are almost complete as both pieces of research on perjury and an attempt to pervert the course of justice show that eighteen months would historically be a high tariff for a first offender. Chris brings me up to date on everything that’s happening in the art world.

4.00 pm

At Club Hospital’s Sunday afternoon tea party, David (fraud, schoolmaster) reveals that Brian (ostrich farm fraud) and John (fraud) are both having trouble since being released. Brian is waking in the middle of the night, sweating because he’s frightened he won’t make it back in time for the 7 pm check-in and John is stressed because he hasn’t been able to find a job.

6.00 pm

Once the club members have left, I settle down to make myself some supper. In a large soup bowl (a gift from William), I place the contents of a tin of Princes ham, two packets of Walkers crisps and an Oxo cube; hot water is then poured on top. What a combination. I eat while reading Street Drugs by Andrew Tyler, which is my set text for the week.

The food is wonderful, the book harrowing.

DAY 201 MONDAY 4 FEBRUARY 2002