yesterday’s test somewhat redundant.
I later learn that one of the Bs came up positive, and he had to call his wife to let her know that he won’t be allowed out on a town visit this weekend. As it was a voluntary test, I can’t work out why he agreed to be tested.
10.00 am
Surgery is always slow at the weekend because the majority of inmates who appear with various complaints during the week in the hope that they will get off work remain in bed, while all those who are fit never visit us in the first place.
11.00 am
Carl and an inmate called Jason who is only with us for two weeks (motoring offence) turn up at the hospital. Together we remove all the beds from the ward and push them into the corridor, before giving the hospital a spring clean.
Jason tells me that ‘on the out’ he’s a painter and decorator, and could repaint the ward during his two-week incarceration. I shall speak to the governor on Monday, because at ?8.20 a week this would be quite a bargain. You may well ask why Carl and Jason helped me with the spring clean. Boredom. The spring clean killed a morning for all of us.
2.00 pm
I watch the prison football team lose 7:2, and witness two more pieces of unbelievable stupidity by fellow inmates. Our goalkeeper, who was sent off by the same referee the last time we played, shouts obscenities at him again, and is surprised when he’s booked. I fear he will be back in prison within months of being released. But worse, our centre forward is a prisoner who’s just come out of the Pilgrim Hospital after a groin injury, and has been told to rest for six weeks. He will undoubtedly appear at surgery on Monday expecting sympathy. It’s no wonder the NHS is in such crisis if patients behave so irresponsibly after being given expert advice.
DAY 214 SUNDAY 17 FEBRUARY 2002
6.01 am
If I had been given the same sentence as Jonathan Aitken, I would have been released today. Jonathan was sentenced to eighteen months, and because he was a model prisoner, only had to serve seven (half minus two months on tag). Tomorrow I will not be returning home to my wife and family because Mr Justice Potts sentenced me to four years. Instead I will be meeting Mark Le Sage, an officer from Stocken Prison who visits schools in Lincolnshire, warning children of the consequences of taking drugs.
I will remain at NSC until I know the result of my appeal, but for the first time in seven months (since my mother’s funeral) I will be able to leave the prison and return to the outside world.
DAY 215 MONDAY 18 FEBRUARY 2002
10.00 am
Mr Le Sage does not turn up for our meeting.
The governor of HMP Stocken has decided that they should not have to bear the cost of my accompanying Mr Le Sage on any school visit, as it would no longer be a voluntary activity that Mr Le Sage would normally pursue in his off-duty time.
As so often is the case in prisons, someone will look for a reason for
11.30 am
Alan Purser, the prison drugs counsellor, comes across to the hospital to give me a copy of
4.00 pm
Mr Vessey has charged Chris (lifer, murder) and David (lifer, murder) with being on the farm in possession of four potatoes and a cabbage. In normal circumstances this would have caused little interest, even in our self- contained world. However, this will be the new governor’s first adjudication, which we all await with bated breath.
DAY 216 TUESDAY 19 FEBRUARY 2002
10.00 am
Mr Beaumont dismissed the charges against Chris and David as a farm worker came forward to say he’d given them permission to take the potatoes and the cabbage.
2.07 pm
As part of my preparation for talking to children about the dangers and consequences of drugs, I have a visit from a police officer attached to the Lincolnshire drug squad. Her name is Karen Brooks. She’s an attractive, thirty- five-year-old blonde, and single mother of two. I mention this only to show that she is normal. Karen has currently served two and a half years of a four-year assignment attached to the drug squad, having been a member of the force for the past fourteen years: hardly the TV image of your everyday drug officer.
She gives me a tutorial lasting just over an hour, and perhaps her most frightening reply to my endless questions – and she is brutally honest – is that she has asked to be transferred to other duties as she can no longer take the day-to-day strain of working with drug addicts.
Karen admits that although she enjoys her job, she wishes she’d never volunteered for the drugs unit in the first place, because the mental scars will remain with her for the rest of her life.
Her son, aged twelve, is a pupil at one of the most successful schools in Lincolnshire, and has already been offered drugs by a fourteen-year-old. This is not a deprived school in the East End of London, but a first-class school in Lincolnshire.
Karen then tells a story that brings her almost to tears. She once arrested a twelve-year-old girl from a middle-class, professional family for shoplifting a pair of socks from Woolworth’s. The girl’s parents were horrified and assured Karen it wouldn’t happen again. Two years later the girl was arrested for stealing from a lingerie shop, and was put on probation. When they next met, the girl was seventeen, going on forty. Three years of experimentation with marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy and heroin, and a relationship with a twenty-year-old drug dealer, had taken their toll. The girl died last month at the age of eighteen. The dealer is still alive – and still dealing.
As Karen gets ready to leave, I ask her how many officers are attached to the drug squad.
‘Five,’ she replies, ‘which means that only about 10 per cent of our time is proactive, while the other 90 per cent is reactive.’ She says that she’ll visit me again in two weeks’ time.
DAY 228 SUNDAY 3 MARCH 2002
6.30 am
Yesterday I read Celia Grummitt’s pamphlet on the misuse of drugs in prisons and the following facts bear
