Day 4 - April 23rd 2007

If you’ve been sent to Durham, either from another prison or a fateful courtroom, your first port of call is E wing. Three stories high, around 25 rooms per story. If you’ve seen prison on TV before you’re not far off having a good mental picture. Narrow balconies stream from the central stairway, with wire netting filling the empty middle on the higher floors, just in case you were to ‘fall’. The ground floor is the place for our hour long association periods. Three pool tables, a table tennis table, some phones and a shower room complete the available activities. There’s also a laundry room manned by wing cleaners (other inmates) who’ll wash and dry your clothes ready for the following day. Then there’s the main staff wing office, dominated by a large, wall mounted, slatted board with cards inserted for each prisoner showing their status and location, it looks very much like a car showroom sales office. But without cars.

Staff on E wing seem friendly and very easy going, whether or not this approach is unique to the wing I don’t know (though I doubt it, to be honest), but it’s a welcome surprise. Some of the inmates here are first timers like me, some are career prisoners on return visits. Either way there seems to be little trouble in here, I suppose respect breeds respect. This morning my induction is supposed to begin. Most of the administrative side of the prison re-awakes on a Monday morning after the weekend off, which is why today’s the first day I can be put into the ‘system’, meeting Probation and the Benefits Agency. Around 9.30am 12 of us are taken from our cells and escorted over to I-wing, a small building where part of the induction takes place. It’s also a small building where a certain M. Hindley once resided when the prison also housed women, so I’m told. After two full days settling in, I’m hoping today can provide some answers, the most burning being “when the fuck do I get out of here!?”.

Typically when you’re sent to prison, you’ll serve half your time before being released on licence back into the community, meaning my 12 months becomes 6. Once released I’ll only go back if I fail to keep in touch with probation or commit another offence. Not likely. In these days of full prisons and trying to rehabilitate people in the community, something called HDC was invented: Home Detention Curfew. This scheme allows low risk prisoners to be released from prison up to 4 ½ months before the half way stage of a sentence, if they’re serving between 12 months and 4 years. To participate you’re tagged, a box is fitted in your home which is linked to the telephone network and you have to live under a curfew, usually around 7pm to 7am.I’m hoping that somewhere along the induction someone will be able to discuss HDC with me, I might be able to get out of here in 3 months and get back to work. Some people spend their whole lives avoiding work, I just wish I could jump straight back into it. Talking about capital equipment, leasing, revenues, negotiating deals, making appointments, it all seems a million miles away from this boarding school for bad adults.

I’m called away from a group sat watching a looping introduction DVD (which makes me smile, as it’s being played using a Playstation, very high tech!), into a small room with a woman who introduces herself as a probation officer. We talk briefly, she fills in her questionnaire. It’s a Groundhog Day of questions I’ve already answered for at least 5 forms in the past 3 days. As with the other quiz masters at HMP Durham, she seems taken aback by someone who’s admitting guilt and providing a lucid and coherent conversation. Spending your days listening to people diverting guilt and spinning lies is the norm for prison officials and political editors alike. The subject of HDC comes up, vague answers seem to be the speciality here. Despite being the interface between the justice system and us criminals, she doesn’t know the guidelines 100%, although she still knows more than the others I’ve asked before. She won’t commit to a definitive answer, but she seems to think I should be out on a tag within 3 or 4 months. At last some positive news and something to tell Jilly when we speak later.

It’s the best thing I’ve heard in 3 days. I’m assured that in a few days I’ll be given a proper sentence calculation which should give the earliest dates for release, and that the process of applying for HDC is automatic. For what seems like the 947th time since I arrived, she’s yet another person to explain that the prison system is at breaking point and that delays can occur. Great, I hope bloody not. Back out to the looping DVD and I’ve just got the guy from the benefits office to see, just to make sure I’m not still claiming anything. Should be a short meeting. Chatting to one of the guards, an old guy who’s seen it all yet treats even the biggest tossers with respect, we talk about my circumstances and why I’m here. Guess what! I’m famous! After years of obscurity I’ve made BBC News North teletext. Well bugger me, a story about Cumbria has made it at last. Usually Sellafield would have to vaporise everything west of the Pennines before a Cumbrian story gets a mention.

Writing a diary in prison and making it interesting is quite difficult, as your day is regimented into routine after routine.

The whole place is run to keep the prisoners just occupied enough to stop them going mental and as cheaply as possible. As such you’re often doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same way as you did the day before. Which, dare I say it, is exactly the way the guards like it.

The Prison Canteen (not as in where you eat). In Prison, you don’t carry or use cash (no guesses as to why…), instead you have ‘private cash’- a prison bank account from which you can spend money on your canteen- When you arrive in prison, any money you have on you is put in your own private prison account, in my case, £80. Every week, depending on your privilege status (more on that later), an amount of money from your private account is made available for you to spend, cunningly titled your ‘spends account’. How do they think up these names? Prisoners on the standard regime, like me, are allowed £12.50 per week. Prison provides you with the basics to live, such as toothpaste, soap (don’t go dropping it, though…), razors and shaving gel- which Mark tells me can also work as hair gel. I’ll take his word for it. If you want or need anything extra, and have the funds in your spends account, you can use the canteen to order goods.

These items are typically things like stamps, phone credit, confectionary, stationary, batteries and toiletries. It works a bit like an incarcerated version of Argos. Each item on the list has a 4 digit code, which you enter onto an A4 printed sheet along with the quantity required and description for each item. On a Sunday evening you hand in your sheet and your goods arrive on the Monday evening. Maybe it’s a bit quicker than some branches of Argos? It was yesterday when I submitted my canteen sheet, so I was hoping my supplies would arrive today as planned; 2 Biros, 1 pad of A4 writing paper, 20 envelopes, a couple of stamps, some shower gel (no more soap on a rope) and phone credit. Being on remand, Mark isn’t limited to what he can spend every week, so he takes the opportunity to buy enough sweets and biscuits to bribe an entire nursery. Christ on a bike, the cell now looks like a tuck shop. Sadly today my canteen goods didn’t arrive, not sure why, but it seems to happen from time to time. I’m told goods that don’t make it on Monday usually arrive on Thursday, so for the 321st time this month, my fingers are once again crossed. If not, I’m going to ring Trading Standards on the cunts. Well, maybe not. To finish things off for the day, I prepare a load of Applications to submit tomorrow morning. I’ll explain more later…